ACTIONBUTTONNET
text by Alex Felix
★★☆☆
“TETHERED TO THE WALL OVER YOUR TOILET.”
I have played Bejeweled maybe twice, ever, in my history as somebody who plays videogames. I would have played it more than just the two times, except it didn’t really hold my attention, insofar as I’m not the kind of person who needs colored gems or whatever else to fiddle around with while I’m doing other very important things with a computer. It demands too much of my attention; it asks too little. To this end, certainly, I am not a “casual gamer.†I very well may be the opposite of that, although I’d have no way of knowing, because any and all monikers thus far ascribed to people who occupy such a status are horrifically embarrassing and you can’t very well be “hardcore†on your own terms, now, can you?
“Videogames are serious business,†is how the joke goes, I believe.
Puzzle Quest – a game which received no press whatsoever up until the day of its release presumably due to nobody caring and/or its having a development time of about three months – “is like Bejeweled, only as an RPG.†Any major gaming news outlet will tell you this in approximately six seconds, and then you’re in luck, because there is nothing else to be said about Puzzle Quest.
And yet this game is scoring eights and nines all over the place.
Puzzle Quest, you see, lets you level up. Funnily enough, the actual up-leveling here is probably the least interesting since Final Fantasy IV, wherein the player was told “Cecil gained a level!†and was then supplied with a bunch of numbers to evidence this; you weren’t really meant to pay attention to these numbers beyond the fact that they were going up, mind you – that’s an innovation we’re blessed with only in modern times. In Puzzle Quest, by comparison, you’re asked to personally select which numbers you’d like to go up, and then, in an act of appalling mockery, the game helpfully shows you the tiny, tiny fractions by which this will cause the other, actually “important†numbers to increase in kind.
(An example: say you choose to invest one point in “Fire Mastery†rather than “Air Mastery†or “Cunning†– this will in turn boost your “Fire Resistance†by a quarter of a percent, and give you an additional two percent chance of getting a free turn when you match “Fire Gems.†Numbers go up, but only barely.)
Yet I cannot stop playing Puzzle Quest. It is, objectively, a pretty good videogame. It takes an apathetic but not awful role-playing game framework and gives you Bejeweled in lieu of random battles. Bejeweled, for those not in the know, is a more or less traditional “puzzle†game whose gameplay centers around matching similar gems out of seven or eight distinct types in a crossword-puzzle grid. In Puzzle Quest, certain gems boost corresponding mana stockpiles, and other gems damage your opponent, and if you have enough of a given type of mana (blue, red, yellow, or green), you can choose to forego the gem-matching process entirely for one turn and cast a spell, instead.
It turned out better than it had to. Taking into account that the puzzle pieces fall Connect-Four style when those below them are matched and therefore removed from play, and the fact that your opponent gets a crack at the board for each time you do, you end up having to think pretty far in advance. I get the feeling that the developers had no idea just how workable of a game they were making, at times: it happens occasionally that there’s only one move you could make on your turn, and that’s going to set the evil Skeleton guy up for something huge on his turn, but – wait! You’ve got enough mana to cast the “Cure Poison†spell, and even though nobody’s poisoned, that’ll save you from having to make a move at all, and – when it works, it works.
The depressing thing about all of this, as should be abundantly clear by now, is that the game had to give me incentive to play it. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m not the sort of guy who carries around Bejeweled in his DS (“Zoo Keeper,†actually, is the name of the DS iteration, for who knows what reason, although damned if it doesn’t have little animal faces in lieu of colored gems). I play and enjoy Puzzle Quest instead because it gives me that wonderful false sense of accomplishment when I make progress in the game and purchase new weapons with fake money that will be waiting for me the next time I turn the game on. I earned that fake money by doing the exact same thing during the first ten minutes I spent playing Puzzle Quest as I will do during the last ten minutes I spend playing Puzzle Quest. It is a gloriously transparent RPG, replete with a storyline that goes on too long and isn’t interesting to anybody.
(To be fair: when you get into a random battle with a monster whom you have already fought a certain number of times, you are given the option to “capture†it instead, which results in a sort of brain teaser-type puzzle rather than the ordinary “battle†setup, and these are more often than not a treat – “Look!” it begs you; designed rather than generated content; Eastern rather than Western game design – what are the implications?! The implications, apparently, are that your character ends up riding the rat you “captured” – because they do that in Warcraft, and rest assured that’d be mortifying enough if not for the stat boost)
Puzzle Quest should be tethered to the wall over your toilet. As a DS game, it will no doubt keep your brain sharp, and that’s hardly an aspect of your life where you want spontaneity, besides.
★★☆☆
“TETHERED TO THE WALL OVER YOUR TOILET.”
I have played Bejeweled maybe twice, ever, in my history as somebody who plays videogames. I would have played it more than just the two times, except it didn’t really hold my attention, insofar as I’m not the kind of person who needs colored gems or whatever else to fiddle around with while I’m doing other very important things with a computer. It demands too much of my attention; it asks too little. To this end, certainly, I am not a “casual gamer.†I very well may be the opposite of that, although I’d have no way of knowing, because any and all monikers thus far ascribed to people who occupy such a status are horrifically embarrassing and you can’t very well be “hardcore†on your own terms, now, can you?
“Videogames are serious business,†is how the joke goes, I believe.
Puzzle Quest – a game which received no press whatsoever up until the day of its release presumably due to nobody caring and/or its having a development time of about three months – “is like Bejeweled, only as an RPG.†Any major gaming news outlet will tell you this in approximately six seconds, and then you’re in luck, because there is nothing else to be said about Puzzle Quest.
And yet this game is scoring eights and nines all over the place.
Puzzle Quest, you see, lets you level up. Funnily enough, the actual up-leveling here is probably the least interesting since Final Fantasy IV, wherein the player was told “Cecil gained a level!†and was then supplied with a bunch of numbers to evidence this; you weren’t really meant to pay attention to these numbers beyond the fact that they were going up, mind you – that’s an innovation we’re blessed with only in modern times. In Puzzle Quest, by comparison, you’re asked to personally select which numbers you’d like to go up, and then, in an act of appalling mockery, the game helpfully shows you the tiny, tiny fractions by which this will cause the other, actually “important†numbers to increase in kind.
(An example: say you choose to invest one point in “Fire Mastery†rather than “Air Mastery†or “Cunning†– this will in turn boost your “Fire Resistance†by a quarter of a percent, and give you an additional two percent chance of getting a free turn when you match “Fire Gems.†Numbers go up, but only barely.)
Yet I cannot stop playing Puzzle Quest. It is, objectively, a pretty good videogame. It takes an apathetic but not awful role-playing game framework and gives you Bejeweled in lieu of random battles. Bejeweled, for those not in the know, is a more or less traditional “puzzle†game whose gameplay centers around matching similar gems out of seven or eight distinct types in a crossword-puzzle grid. In Puzzle Quest, certain gems boost corresponding mana stockpiles, and other gems damage your opponent, and if you have enough of a given type of mana (blue, red, yellow, or green), you can choose to forego the gem-matching process entirely for one turn and cast a spell, instead.
It turned out better than it had to. Taking into account that the puzzle pieces fall Connect-Four style when those below them are matched and therefore removed from play, and the fact that your opponent gets a crack at the board for each time you do, you end up having to think pretty far in advance. I get the feeling that the developers had no idea just how workable of a game they were making, at times: it happens occasionally that there’s only one move you could make on your turn, and that’s going to set the evil Skeleton guy up for something huge on his turn, but – wait! You’ve got enough mana to cast the “Cure Poison†spell, and even though nobody’s poisoned, that’ll save you from having to make a move at all, and – when it works, it works.
The depressing thing about all of this, as should be abundantly clear by now, is that the game had to give me incentive to play it. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m not the sort of guy who carries around Bejeweled in his DS (“Zoo Keeper,†actually, is the name of the DS iteration, for who knows what reason, although damned if it doesn’t have little animal faces in lieu of colored gems). I play and enjoy Puzzle Quest instead because it gives me that wonderful false sense of accomplishment when I make progress in the game and purchase new weapons with fake money that will be waiting for me the next time I turn the game on. I earned that fake money by doing the exact same thing during the first ten minutes I spent playing Puzzle Quest as I will do during the last ten minutes I spend playing Puzzle Quest. It is a gloriously transparent RPG, replete with a storyline that goes on too long and isn’t interesting to anybody.
(To be fair: when you get into a random battle with a monster whom you have already fought a certain number of times, you are given the option to “capture†it instead, which results in a sort of brain teaser-type puzzle rather than the ordinary “battle†setup, and these are more often than not a treat – “Look!” it begs you; designed rather than generated content; Eastern rather than Western game design – what are the implications?! The implications, apparently, are that your character ends up riding the rat you “captured” – because they do that in Warcraft, and rest assured that’d be mortifying enough if not for the stat boost)
Puzzle Quest should be tethered to the wall over your toilet. As a DS game, it will no doubt keep your brain sharp, and that’s hardly an aspect of your life where you want spontaneity, besides.
text by Ario Barzan
★★★☆
“BLACK AND WHITE AND SORT OF GREAT ALL OVER.”
We’ve seen it before: someone is checking out of the supermarket, and the conveyor belt is chaotically loaded with Pop Tarts, Frosted Flakes, everything. Look a little farther, and notice a plastic bar is placed behind it all, allowing a little room for a person in back of them. And there is a person who has taken advantage of that bit as best as they can, neatly organized the stuff from their basket into the compact space according to how that box fits next to that package.
Handhelds sometimes have a way of doing this to developers – of making them squeeze as much tight, consistently flowing set-pieces into each space as possible. The result: better craftsmanship than a lot of products freed from sticky-note sized screens. It’s kind of a funny situation when reflected upon: these are things being made for easy consumption, for “on the go†entertainment, and yet they’re dancing around their brethren fluff.
Link’s Awakening does this. Where A Link to the Past’s overworld was good, but not great, LA is simply more of a videogame. It feels more architectural, more purposeful and crunchy. Subjectively, yes, I prefer ALttP, mostly due to atmospheric reasons and its lack of &^#$#ed dialogue, but ask me objectively which is the better man in terms of gameplay, and I’ll poke LA’s suit (jerkin?), say, “He’s the gentleman you’re looking for.†Mind you, this isn’t the fault of ALttP’s designers. It just came out earlier, was the thing that got the ball rolling by designating a return to the original setup.
And, so, we come to Belmont’s Revenge, a humble blip that beats the tar out of the oft-mentioned Dracula’s Curse, a stretched-out big bang running on the fumes of our frothing reactions when we thought “tubular†was an awesome word. You are Christopher Belmont, underappreciated member of a cursed bloodline, and protagonist of prequel Castlevania Adventure. Knowing this, comparisons are inevitable. And…Adventure was not so hot. Line the two up, though, and you start to see Belmont’s Revenge ironing out its parent’s niggling smudges.
There’s just a crisper reaction to Christopher’s movements, how he attacks with the Vampire Killer whip with proper judicious vengeance, how there’s no dumb stutter after landing from a jump. If you want to descend a rope – the replacement from stairs, in case you didn’t know – inching your way down it isn’t the only option. Simply hold the D-pad down and the A button, and he’ll slide like a fireman on a pole. And, hey, the dude’s grown a big enough pair to whip while climbing. There are these improved, and greatly needed, nuances all over.
Viewed in relative terms, the game is really one of the few Castlevanias to hold itself to the first’s flow of clever setpieces: the action that quickly satisfied and had you going on because, hey, there was more where that came from, right? Instead of providing meandering size, Belmont’s Revenge‘s situations are in the moment: rooms click into one another with a crisp progression, and the action feels hands-on and husky. It’s especially impressive, considering how few enemy types there are. All that stupidly pixel-perfect platforming hassling its ancestor has been toned the hell down, too. With each tick of the clock, you feel active. In a good way. During one stage, huge, rolling eyeballs are coming at you on a bridge. Do you attack and make them explode, leaving holes in the bridge? Do you risk a hit and leap over them? In another, spiders descend from a ceiling. You must kill them, and then use their strings of silk to jump across gaps.
By the time Castlevania is breached (four elemental castles need to be cleared before it rises – whatever that means), environments have turned bitchingly challenging. Take heart: it’s not Dracula X, which was the equivalent of hitting your head against a steel wall. And it’s not Castlevania 3, whose levels were so long, staircases so tortuously populated, all endurance was drained. The rooms and learning process are short, and sharp. You learn a way to do things, a peculiar rhythm, and it all fall into place like Tetris. Graciously, that horrid icon password system has been shortened, making going on all the more accessible.
Like most things on this planet, bumps emerge here and there. One involves a couple rooms which lighten and darken. Your only clue as to where you’re going in the utter blackness is paying attention to where these luminescent worms are. Neat in concept, sure, but the light-to-dark switcheroo’s arbitrariness can lead to deaths that have you flinging a hand out demandingly. A couple bosses are oddities, too – the Rock Castle’s can be taken down to half its health without hitting you once, yet its second form can kill Mr. Belmont in a matter of seconds. Walking and jumping are still oddly stunted, like Adventure. Now, the game does work in light of the heavier atmosphere (outside of the occasional goddamn crow), and Christopher is a bit faster, though you have to wonder: was this necessary? It’s…kind of transparent – the whole “SLOWER MOTION for LONGER PLAYTIME!!” reasoning. Unfortunately, all of us sharp, gorgeous, self-respecting people want our action completely honest and fitting.
I’ve gone this far without mentioning the aesthetics. They are rather lovely. Visually, everything is laid out in a frozen state, sometimes flickering like a classic movie. The designers didn’t pound away until the presentation was detailed but dead. Rather, they took that sort of block-by-block simplicity of the NES trilogy and transferred it over to the Gameboy, lending it an appealing, modern sheen. And, of course, the music, which is dreamy, and kind of jagged, and kind of really good. Think one-hit wonder Soshiro Hokkai’s work for Harmony of Dissonance, though…more spacious and melodic. Hearing a tiny thing bursting with such power is startling. There’s even a crazy rendition of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue for the fight with Christopher’s possessed son, Soleiyu.
Speaking of battles, the last ones are…well. I can clear Devil May Cry 3 on Dante Must Die, and it’s impossible for me to defeat Soleiyu without using an emulator and save states. I still haven’t killed Dracula. Heaven’s grace shines upon you, spirited adventurers, who have found a way.
The journey is challenging – too challenging at the very end, I’m afraid – but eminently playable. Yes, the the control department needs more confidence; really, just the first installment’s physics. Yes, it can be a screw-up. Still, behind this, behind the unassuming status, something works pretty darn well, and it comes down to definition in design. The series itself is an oddity in various ways, and one of them is how the treasures tend to be obscured by the coins. As Rondo of Blood is cornered by devotees who are drooling a bit too much, I’m holding a conversation with its monochrome relative. Pop the cartridge in, and see how it conducts you along with bright, interconnected constructs; how if there is a moment of nothing, you can probably whip a chunk of stone off to reveal a 1UP or meat. How one inch picture frames form a stimulating canvas. Experience the quaint air of mystery from its artistic side. Yeah, there is something here, and it has a heart beat.
★★★☆
“BLACK AND WHITE AND SORT OF GREAT ALL OVER.”
We’ve seen it before: someone is checking out of the supermarket, and the conveyor belt is chaotically loaded with Pop Tarts, Frosted Flakes, everything. Look a little farther, and notice a plastic bar is placed behind it all, allowing a little room for a person in back of them. And there is a person who has taken advantage of that bit as best as they can, neatly organized the stuff from their basket into the compact space according to how that box fits next to that package.
Handhelds sometimes have a way of doing this to developers – of making them squeeze as much tight, consistently flowing set-pieces into each space as possible. The result: better craftsmanship than a lot of products freed from sticky-note sized screens. It’s kind of a funny situation when reflected upon: these are things being made for easy consumption, for “on the go†entertainment, and yet they’re dancing around their brethren fluff.
Link’s Awakening does this. Where A Link to the Past’s overworld was good, but not great, LA is simply more of a videogame. It feels more architectural, more purposeful and crunchy. Subjectively, yes, I prefer ALttP, mostly due to atmospheric reasons and its lack of &^#$#ed dialogue, but ask me objectively which is the better man in terms of gameplay, and I’ll poke LA’s suit (jerkin?), say, “He’s the gentleman you’re looking for.†Mind you, this isn’t the fault of ALttP’s designers. It just came out earlier, was the thing that got the ball rolling by designating a return to the original setup.
And, so, we come to Belmont’s Revenge, a humble blip that beats the tar out of the oft-mentioned Dracula’s Curse, a stretched-out big bang running on the fumes of our frothing reactions when we thought “tubular†was an awesome word. You are Christopher Belmont, underappreciated member of a cursed bloodline, and protagonist of prequel Castlevania Adventure. Knowing this, comparisons are inevitable. And…Adventure was not so hot. Line the two up, though, and you start to see Belmont’s Revenge ironing out its parent’s niggling smudges.
There’s just a crisper reaction to Christopher’s movements, how he attacks with the Vampire Killer whip with proper judicious vengeance, how there’s no dumb stutter after landing from a jump. If you want to descend a rope – the replacement from stairs, in case you didn’t know – inching your way down it isn’t the only option. Simply hold the D-pad down and the A button, and he’ll slide like a fireman on a pole. And, hey, the dude’s grown a big enough pair to whip while climbing. There are these improved, and greatly needed, nuances all over.
Viewed in relative terms, the game is really one of the few Castlevanias to hold itself to the first’s flow of clever setpieces: the action that quickly satisfied and had you going on because, hey, there was more where that came from, right? Instead of providing meandering size, Belmont’s Revenge‘s situations are in the moment: rooms click into one another with a crisp progression, and the action feels hands-on and husky. It’s especially impressive, considering how few enemy types there are. All that stupidly pixel-perfect platforming hassling its ancestor has been toned the hell down, too. With each tick of the clock, you feel active. In a good way. During one stage, huge, rolling eyeballs are coming at you on a bridge. Do you attack and make them explode, leaving holes in the bridge? Do you risk a hit and leap over them? In another, spiders descend from a ceiling. You must kill them, and then use their strings of silk to jump across gaps.
By the time Castlevania is breached (four elemental castles need to be cleared before it rises – whatever that means), environments have turned bitchingly challenging. Take heart: it’s not Dracula X, which was the equivalent of hitting your head against a steel wall. And it’s not Castlevania 3, whose levels were so long, staircases so tortuously populated, all endurance was drained. The rooms and learning process are short, and sharp. You learn a way to do things, a peculiar rhythm, and it all fall into place like Tetris. Graciously, that horrid icon password system has been shortened, making going on all the more accessible.
Like most things on this planet, bumps emerge here and there. One involves a couple rooms which lighten and darken. Your only clue as to where you’re going in the utter blackness is paying attention to where these luminescent worms are. Neat in concept, sure, but the light-to-dark switcheroo’s arbitrariness can lead to deaths that have you flinging a hand out demandingly. A couple bosses are oddities, too – the Rock Castle’s can be taken down to half its health without hitting you once, yet its second form can kill Mr. Belmont in a matter of seconds. Walking and jumping are still oddly stunted, like Adventure. Now, the game does work in light of the heavier atmosphere (outside of the occasional goddamn crow), and Christopher is a bit faster, though you have to wonder: was this necessary? It’s…kind of transparent – the whole “SLOWER MOTION for LONGER PLAYTIME!!” reasoning. Unfortunately, all of us sharp, gorgeous, self-respecting people want our action completely honest and fitting.
I’ve gone this far without mentioning the aesthetics. They are rather lovely. Visually, everything is laid out in a frozen state, sometimes flickering like a classic movie. The designers didn’t pound away until the presentation was detailed but dead. Rather, they took that sort of block-by-block simplicity of the NES trilogy and transferred it over to the Gameboy, lending it an appealing, modern sheen. And, of course, the music, which is dreamy, and kind of jagged, and kind of really good. Think one-hit wonder Soshiro Hokkai’s work for Harmony of Dissonance, though…more spacious and melodic. Hearing a tiny thing bursting with such power is startling. There’s even a crazy rendition of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue for the fight with Christopher’s possessed son, Soleiyu.
Speaking of battles, the last ones are…well. I can clear Devil May Cry 3 on Dante Must Die, and it’s impossible for me to defeat Soleiyu without using an emulator and save states. I still haven’t killed Dracula. Heaven’s grace shines upon you, spirited adventurers, who have found a way.
The journey is challenging – too challenging at the very end, I’m afraid – but eminently playable. Yes, the the control department needs more confidence; really, just the first installment’s physics. Yes, it can be a screw-up. Still, behind this, behind the unassuming status, something works pretty darn well, and it comes down to definition in design. The series itself is an oddity in various ways, and one of them is how the treasures tend to be obscured by the coins. As Rondo of Blood is cornered by devotees who are drooling a bit too much, I’m holding a conversation with its monochrome relative. Pop the cartridge in, and see how it conducts you along with bright, interconnected constructs; how if there is a moment of nothing, you can probably whip a chunk of stone off to reveal a 1UP or meat. How one inch picture frames form a stimulating canvas. Experience the quaint air of mystery from its artistic side. Yeah, there is something here, and it has a heart beat.
2007
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“DESTINED FOR THE BARGAIN BIN IN SIX MONTHS' TIME”
I really, really wanted to love this game. I wanted to champion it as my own, a game I could love and not have to compete with anyone for that love — a game like cavia’s Ghost in the Shell or Drag-on Dragoon 2. It has all the hallmarks I look for — forget playability or graphics or what have you, I want names, and this game had them: Yoshiki “Street Fighter II” Okamoto, Kozy “Shin Megami Tensei” Okada, and even Hirohiko “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” Araki.
Well, that last name is kind of a long story — Araki actually had nothing to do with the creation of the game. Why is his name on the box, then? I have no idea. It’s there, though. It’s even better than being on the box — it’s on a sticker stuck to the shrink-wrap. I have a friend who works in the Japanese videogame box art trade. My friend says a sticker on the box is never a last-minute idea — there are hour-long presentations about meetings about these sorts of things. Quoth Araki, on the sticker (fairy-like, limp-wristed, foppish grammatical lisp added by yours truly), “Might this game have been inspired by my manga’s ‘Stand’ attacks? Oh my, I do believe it might have been!” Araki’s signature is a beauty to behold, scripted like a master calligrapher who’s experimented with either drugs or rock and roll. The sticker shines dully, half gold, half purple, like two colors plucked off a vintage JoJo manga volume cover on which a man poses like a wall-painting in an Egyptian tomb, dodging intercontinental ballistic missiles. I see it, and recall my youth, dangling beneath weapons of mass destruction with a machinegun in my beefy arms — or maybe that was Contra. Et cetera.
Why was Araki’s name shoehorned onto this game? A hundred reasons, and all of them are bubble-like flashes on one hot pan. The key ingredient is that the developers had no names left. Who the hell knows Yoshiki Okamoto, in this age of Brain Training and games appealing to the casual market? There are those (like me) who revere the man as something of a demigod who enters boardrooms and bathrooms alike with the sound of a bitching, asbestos-shattering overdriven power chord. We recall his faux-hawked visage every time we scream “SHORYUKEN” as we ejaculate beneath our girlfriends. Likewise, every time I see a hopped-up family restaurant waitress with razor cuts running down her arms, I think of Kozy Okada’s games, and how they most certainly didn’t make her that way. Two men — one capable of bringing the action, the other capable of bringing the atmosphere. There’s no way a collaboration could go wrong. And it didn’t, kind of. It just didn’t go right.
Originally, this game was planned as Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms. This was to semantically link it to Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner, a beyond-sweet PSP monster-catching game with brooding teenagers as the main character (think Pokemon for pop-punk-rockers); though seeing as Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner was kind of a flop, they figured they could rename the pseudo-sequel whatever they wanted and not stuff off too many cosplayers. Besides, what better way to differentiate Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms from Monster Hunter, Monster Rancher, and Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom?
What had started as something of a friendly bet between Okada and Okamoto, two rivals with different dreams, two men whose names both begin with the name kanji, two men who had both fled the companies they had helped put on the map, has now graduated into a matter of life and death. This was supposed to be Okamoto’s game; well, now it’s both of theirs. Okamoto had his chance to regain his former splendor with Genji on the PlayStation 2; likewise, Okada had had Monster Kingdom on the PSP. These two runaway game designers must have figured that, by now, they’d be back on top, and ready to release hot, original creations. Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms was to be the first such creation for Okamoto.
I looked forward to it with turgid excitement. After all, Monster Kingdom on PSP had had an excellent soundtrack, filled with contributions from the almighty Yasunori Mitsuda, the saintly Hitoshi Sakimoto, the lordlike Kenji Eno, and the occasionally amusing Yoko Shimomura, among other people with Japanese names. The resulting soundtrack was amazing; the two or three tracks submitted by each composer highlighted all the best aspects of their respective composing styles. To hear Mr. Okada explain it, he’d selected multiple composers because that would be the best way to ensure maximum quality. He picked them all to do tracks that he personally felt they would excel at. Yasunori Mitsuda got the opening movie, for example. I liked the way Okada described it. It made me interested in his little Monster Kingdom project. It seemed like a series of gamers’ games. The PSP outing was, already, something like Pokemon to be played by kids who might have already started smoking.
Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms ended up retitled Folkssoul, which is probably the worst name a videogame has ever had (the English title will be Folklore, which is better, if super-bland), though all the fancy word combinations in the world can’t hide the fact that it’s just another action game.
There were hopes that it’d be something of the Romancing SaGa of action games. These hopes were mostly mine. I fantasized semi-sexually about the game for something like six months. I’d played it at Tokyo Game Show, where, at Sony’s booth, the demo stations were equipped with the same television that I have at home, and I thought, hey, this game isn’t bad . . . maybe! Well! It’s definitely not terrible! It had some smooth crunch to it. A quick glance at a brochure and I knew enough to make me want this game, hard: you play as Keats, a long-coat-wearing, bespectacled, long-haired, stubble-faced columnist for a “third-rate occult magazine” (yes!) called “Unknown Realms“. (Or as a mostly bland girl named Elena, a proverbial Pokemon trainer out to catch her own dead mother.) One day, as research for a story, you go to the town of Lemrick, Ireland, where it’s rumored that average people can be reunited with the souls of their dead loved ones. Following a few spooky events, you’re allowed entrance into the Netherworld, home of over a hundred collectible monsters.
As you fight and defeat monsters, you can choose to suck their soul out of their bodies. When you do this, you can then use the monster to fight other monsters. “Just like Pokemon!” you might say. And you’d be half-wrong. Because Folkssoul is an action game. Press the L2 button to open a quick menu that displays all your monsters. You can sort them by category (defensive, magical, blunt, slashing, smashing, et cetera) or by which region of the world you found them in. Highlight a monster and press one of the four face buttons to set that monster to that button. Now, press the L2 button again to resume the game. If you’ve set a little slashing goblin to the square button, pressing the square button will result in your main character slashing with his arm, while a lifelike (hologram-like?) shadow of the slashing goblin appears a few inches in front of his body. Different monsters have different attack speeds and ranges, and some monsters have attacks that lead directly into other monsters’ attacks, which means that, yes, you can build your own multi-tiered combos. FIght enough with a monster to level it the hell up, resulting in increased strength, more combo hits, et cetera.
So yeah, this game sounds like plenty of fun for the RPG crowd and the spastic, frame-counting Devil May Cry meatheads alike, yeah? Well, kind of “yes”, kind of “no”. Folkssoul‘s ultimate problem is that it doesn’t contain enough of either of its genres for any of its influences to feel worthwhile. As an RPG, the customization is thin and weird — the only way to level up your monsters is to continue sucking the soul of that monster type. This makes sense, I guess, as long as you don’t think of this game as wanting to be exactly like Pokemon and not succeeding. I suppose the game designers didn’t want the player thinking, “Oh, I already have this monster; I can just avoid them, then, and continue through the stage.” Besides, when you already have a Geodude, it’s awesome to use your Squirtle to take down Geodudes in one hit, right?
Except, as an action game, this kind of doesn’t work. Action game players don’t want to be able to equip one weapon that can kill a certain type of enemy in one hit. They don’t want to reconfigure all four of their attacks every time the fight music starts up. They don’t want to even have the option to decimate a certain type of enemy with a certain type of attack, because this will only make them, as super players with super skills, need to use the correct attacks, or else feel inefficient. Forcing the player to be correct or incorrect about what button he uses to kill the bad guys is to shed an eerie, existentially damning light on videogames as a medium: in videogames, you’re either killing an enemy with as few hits as possible, or as many hits as possible. In other words, you’re either getting the enemy out of your sight, or you’re keeping the enemy in your sight for long enough to be considered stylish. Isn’t it pointless, either way? Think about it in this way, and games that focus on enemies who take a “modest” number of hits to kill seem like they might be covering something up.
Oh, well.
And then there’s the blue-balling. If you’ve played Devil May Cry 3, you may remember the experience of entering the tower stage for the first time. After some bitching-awesome battles, you’re forced to wander around aimlessly looking for some key that’ll open a door. Man, what a blue-baller! I got pretty mad at that part, let me tell you. Well, Folkssoul, halfway frightened at a different half of its audience at any given time, has shoehorned a sometimes-infuriating blue-balling structure into each stage, to draw them out to the maximum length. I wouldn’t have a problem with this — I like fighting! I like pressing buttons! I don’t mind backtracking through a stage if it means I get to do more fighting and/or pressing buttons! — so long as the game has a good, quick explanation for why I’m doing what I’m doing.
The game’s explanation, then, is kind of &^#$#ed. In each stage, you’re given a picture book. You have to find the five pages of the picture book. They’re scattered across the stage, usually contained inside — of course — hovering magic stones. As you find the pages, you can read the picture book from your item menu. Each page shows a different monster from the area, as well as a semi-abstract representation of one of the attacks that the boss is going to use. Once all five pages are assembled, you’ll have a step-by-step representation of which monsters you’ll have to use to beat the boss.
If that sounds kind of cool to you, that’s probably only because I’m not done explaining it: you need the picture book, or you can’t fight the boss. Without the picture book, you are not allowed near the boss. And not even by some citizen of the fantasy world, who deems it too difficult — no, there’s no one standing there with arms akimbo, shaking his head, telling you its impossible. There’s usually some barrier. In the first stage, it’s glowing thorns, for example. You can run your character against the thorns, watch him sprinting in place a bit. No dialogue window pops up and says “Get the picture book pages”, probably because the level designers feared that would expose how stupid it is that possessing a book would make magic thorns cease to exist.
If it doesn’t sound terrible yet, that’s probably only because I’m not done explaining it: in order to get all of the pages for the picture book, you need to run back and forth through the stage, searching for the floating magic stones that you can’t destroy with your basic attacks. When you can’t destroy a magic stone with all your current attacks, that means you need a new attack, which means you have to defeat and capture a different kind of monster in order to destroy that stone. Sometimes you’ll poke yourself into an unexplored corner of the map, and see a monster you don’t have yet, only you won’t be able to get to him, because of — yep — a floating row of magic stones of a color you can’t destroy yet. So, being hypothetical, let’s say that you find a yellow magic stone you can’t destroy, and then you see a row of red indestructible magic stones, behind which you can see a monster you don’t own yet. Eventually, you find a monster you haven’t soul-sucked yet; you suck his soul, and try using it against the yellow magic stone. That doesn’t work, so you use it against the red stones blocking the other new monster — it works! You soul-suck the new monster, and use his power to successfully break the yellow stone, and score a picture book page that shows the monster you used to destroy the yellow stone, dodging, say, a flame attack.
It’s kind of ridiculous. Then again, what videogame isn’t? That’s not the question — for all its scattered, hackneyed moments, Devil May Cry 3 manages to remain tightly focused on action. That you’re able to pause the game and change your weapon in Devil May Cry 3 is a fact, not a strategy. At the end of the day, Devil May Cry 3‘s designers chose to make a hardcore action game with multi-layered boss fights and a twitch-tastic parry system. They did this because they had confidence in the essence of their game’s action. Folkssoul‘s producers were obviously just overcompensating, and repeatedly, for what they perceived as a deficit in either of the contributing genres. The story is pretty stuffty in Folkssoul, though they force you to play through these sometimes hour-long actionless segments because they’re convinced that someone out there has to be enjoying it. There you are, wandering around the town, talking to residents, finding photographs in people’s houses, chatting with the bartender, combing the sand on the beach. And for what? So that you can open the portal to the next stage, with more picture book pages, more collectible monsters, more floating magic stones.
Maybe it could have worked as a straight action game. It already has one of those early-1990s Japanese arcade-game plots, and an aesthetic stolen from all the best pop-culture — part Tim Burton (the battle music is very Danny Elfman-inspired), part vintage “Doctor Who” (why else is there an old blue phone box in town square?), part JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (an invisible dandy-man wearing a Phantom of the Opera mask serves as your guide through the Nether-realms) — it could have worked, if only the designers were able to come up with better excuses for why the characters are fighting so much. Or maybe if they’d added some Zelda-like ingenuity or flow to the stages. Or some bosses that you beat by learning their patterns and then improvising grandly, instead of bosses that you beat by tinkering around with your monster menu.
Perhaps the most telling trait of Folkssoul is that, if summarized, on paper, in the fewest of words, it doesn’t seem like a bad game at all. Even the motion sensor controls — yank the controller to pull the souls out of monsters; yank hard for stronger monsters; yank harder, with the correct rhythm, for even stronger monsters — sound like they deserve to exist. Yet there’s a weird, gloppy sheen all over this game’s design document. It screams of the Nintendo Gamecube era, where Nintendo was forcing developers to utilize Gameboy Advance connectivity in some way, any way, and we ended up with mostly-useless remote controlled bombs in Splinter Cell or some stuff.
There are plenty of other things I could pick on — like how every time your character gets hit by an enemy, it cancels your camera lock-on with that enemy (very frustrating), or how moronic it is that every time you press the R1 button to begin sucking an enemy’s soul, a big, ugly dialogue pops up on the bottom of the screen: “PRESS THE R3 BUTTON NOW FOR A TUTORIAL!!” I mean, seriously, I think the casual gamers walked away when they saw “FROM YOSHIKI OKAMOTO AND KOZY OKADA” in huge font on the back of the box.
Instead, I’ll try to be nice about the game: I like the voices. They’re pretty bad, yeah, though they transcend typical videogame bad voices by being 1.) Entirely in English, 2.) Entirely in Irish-accented English. And we’re not just talking any Irish accent — it’s like, alien Irish. I’ve been waiting this whole review to put “Aliens from the planet Ireland” into a sentence where it would fit, and I just couldn’t quite get it.
Another plus is the way the screen freezes for the tiniest instant every time your score a hit. The effect is most awesome when you use a multiple-hit attack, like the one big rolling armadillo attack. The screen pauses so you can savor the sparks of impact, and it gets to feeling kind of groovy. I guess that’s the best developers can do, when the controller doesn’t vibrate.
And lastly, the colors: this game’s colors worked overtime to earn 1.79 of the two stars this game was finally awarded. Since the Super Famicom era we’ve been hearing about how many colors a game system can display. (The Super Famicom reported could display any of 32,768 colors, though never all at the same time.) It’s only now that the promises of our childhoods are coming true. This game shines, blooms, radiates, et cetera. This entire game is made up of that one scene in Dragon Quest VIII with the purple carpets, that scene you could show anyone and have them say “Wow, that looks great.” And it has a hell of an amazing box art, as well. If only such things sufficed for a solid game, for well-executed atmosphere.
I liked Game Republic’s first game, Genji, for PS2. I would have liked it more were it not for the abundance of health-recovery items, and the option to use those items at any time in the game. The presence of these items threw off the balance of boss battles, ruining what could have been a snappy, arcade-like experience. Furthermore, the existence of a twitch-fueled one-hit-kill system, while rewarding for pro-level players, was essentially useless for the casuals the game was catering to with all those healing items. Game Republic had chosen the story of Japanese folk hero Yostuffsune because they thought it would get them big recognition, fast, though they also seemingly went out of their way to bastardize the story as postmodernly as possible — the princess, for example, is kidnapped because of her ability to fuse priceless magical gems. I saw Genji as a confused effort, and generously thought that, in the future, Game Republic could go places, if only they kept all of their testicles in the right place, and made games for a specific audience. If they would just think, “What would Devil May Cry do?” they could make a game that earns the respect of the players. Their PSP RPG Brave Story is a focused, deliberate masterpiece. Their third game, Folkssoul (they did not “make” Every Party for Xbox 360, or Genji 2 for PlayStation 3 so much as they rented out their name), is their second effort on a home console, and in it, the stains of their first game seem to have seeped deeper. It’s trying to please everyone at the same time, and you know what they say about pleasing everyone at the same time: you can’t do it. It’s not possible.
Game Republic: get your act together. This game right here will be sitting in the bargain bins in three to six months’ time, and in ten years, I expect to see it on used shelves for five dollars, and I expect to shudder and remember those days early in the PS3’s life, when we would have bought anything. Whether or not I come to regard those days as having ended or not — I suppose that’s all in your hands. For now, though, consider yourselves on academic probation.
★★☆☆
“DESTINED FOR THE BARGAIN BIN IN SIX MONTHS' TIME”
I really, really wanted to love this game. I wanted to champion it as my own, a game I could love and not have to compete with anyone for that love — a game like cavia’s Ghost in the Shell or Drag-on Dragoon 2. It has all the hallmarks I look for — forget playability or graphics or what have you, I want names, and this game had them: Yoshiki “Street Fighter II” Okamoto, Kozy “Shin Megami Tensei” Okada, and even Hirohiko “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” Araki.
Well, that last name is kind of a long story — Araki actually had nothing to do with the creation of the game. Why is his name on the box, then? I have no idea. It’s there, though. It’s even better than being on the box — it’s on a sticker stuck to the shrink-wrap. I have a friend who works in the Japanese videogame box art trade. My friend says a sticker on the box is never a last-minute idea — there are hour-long presentations about meetings about these sorts of things. Quoth Araki, on the sticker (fairy-like, limp-wristed, foppish grammatical lisp added by yours truly), “Might this game have been inspired by my manga’s ‘Stand’ attacks? Oh my, I do believe it might have been!” Araki’s signature is a beauty to behold, scripted like a master calligrapher who’s experimented with either drugs or rock and roll. The sticker shines dully, half gold, half purple, like two colors plucked off a vintage JoJo manga volume cover on which a man poses like a wall-painting in an Egyptian tomb, dodging intercontinental ballistic missiles. I see it, and recall my youth, dangling beneath weapons of mass destruction with a machinegun in my beefy arms — or maybe that was Contra. Et cetera.
Why was Araki’s name shoehorned onto this game? A hundred reasons, and all of them are bubble-like flashes on one hot pan. The key ingredient is that the developers had no names left. Who the hell knows Yoshiki Okamoto, in this age of Brain Training and games appealing to the casual market? There are those (like me) who revere the man as something of a demigod who enters boardrooms and bathrooms alike with the sound of a bitching, asbestos-shattering overdriven power chord. We recall his faux-hawked visage every time we scream “SHORYUKEN” as we ejaculate beneath our girlfriends. Likewise, every time I see a hopped-up family restaurant waitress with razor cuts running down her arms, I think of Kozy Okada’s games, and how they most certainly didn’t make her that way. Two men — one capable of bringing the action, the other capable of bringing the atmosphere. There’s no way a collaboration could go wrong. And it didn’t, kind of. It just didn’t go right.
Originally, this game was planned as Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms. This was to semantically link it to Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner, a beyond-sweet PSP monster-catching game with brooding teenagers as the main character (think Pokemon for pop-punk-rockers); though seeing as Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner was kind of a flop, they figured they could rename the pseudo-sequel whatever they wanted and not stuff off too many cosplayers. Besides, what better way to differentiate Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms from Monster Hunter, Monster Rancher, and Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom?
What had started as something of a friendly bet between Okada and Okamoto, two rivals with different dreams, two men whose names both begin with the name kanji, two men who had both fled the companies they had helped put on the map, has now graduated into a matter of life and death. This was supposed to be Okamoto’s game; well, now it’s both of theirs. Okamoto had his chance to regain his former splendor with Genji on the PlayStation 2; likewise, Okada had had Monster Kingdom on the PSP. These two runaway game designers must have figured that, by now, they’d be back on top, and ready to release hot, original creations. Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms was to be the first such creation for Okamoto.
I looked forward to it with turgid excitement. After all, Monster Kingdom on PSP had had an excellent soundtrack, filled with contributions from the almighty Yasunori Mitsuda, the saintly Hitoshi Sakimoto, the lordlike Kenji Eno, and the occasionally amusing Yoko Shimomura, among other people with Japanese names. The resulting soundtrack was amazing; the two or three tracks submitted by each composer highlighted all the best aspects of their respective composing styles. To hear Mr. Okada explain it, he’d selected multiple composers because that would be the best way to ensure maximum quality. He picked them all to do tracks that he personally felt they would excel at. Yasunori Mitsuda got the opening movie, for example. I liked the way Okada described it. It made me interested in his little Monster Kingdom project. It seemed like a series of gamers’ games. The PSP outing was, already, something like Pokemon to be played by kids who might have already started smoking.
Monster Kingdom: Unknown Realms ended up retitled Folkssoul, which is probably the worst name a videogame has ever had (the English title will be Folklore, which is better, if super-bland), though all the fancy word combinations in the world can’t hide the fact that it’s just another action game.
There were hopes that it’d be something of the Romancing SaGa of action games. These hopes were mostly mine. I fantasized semi-sexually about the game for something like six months. I’d played it at Tokyo Game Show, where, at Sony’s booth, the demo stations were equipped with the same television that I have at home, and I thought, hey, this game isn’t bad . . . maybe! Well! It’s definitely not terrible! It had some smooth crunch to it. A quick glance at a brochure and I knew enough to make me want this game, hard: you play as Keats, a long-coat-wearing, bespectacled, long-haired, stubble-faced columnist for a “third-rate occult magazine” (yes!) called “Unknown Realms“. (Or as a mostly bland girl named Elena, a proverbial Pokemon trainer out to catch her own dead mother.) One day, as research for a story, you go to the town of Lemrick, Ireland, where it’s rumored that average people can be reunited with the souls of their dead loved ones. Following a few spooky events, you’re allowed entrance into the Netherworld, home of over a hundred collectible monsters.
As you fight and defeat monsters, you can choose to suck their soul out of their bodies. When you do this, you can then use the monster to fight other monsters. “Just like Pokemon!” you might say. And you’d be half-wrong. Because Folkssoul is an action game. Press the L2 button to open a quick menu that displays all your monsters. You can sort them by category (defensive, magical, blunt, slashing, smashing, et cetera) or by which region of the world you found them in. Highlight a monster and press one of the four face buttons to set that monster to that button. Now, press the L2 button again to resume the game. If you’ve set a little slashing goblin to the square button, pressing the square button will result in your main character slashing with his arm, while a lifelike (hologram-like?) shadow of the slashing goblin appears a few inches in front of his body. Different monsters have different attack speeds and ranges, and some monsters have attacks that lead directly into other monsters’ attacks, which means that, yes, you can build your own multi-tiered combos. FIght enough with a monster to level it the hell up, resulting in increased strength, more combo hits, et cetera.
So yeah, this game sounds like plenty of fun for the RPG crowd and the spastic, frame-counting Devil May Cry meatheads alike, yeah? Well, kind of “yes”, kind of “no”. Folkssoul‘s ultimate problem is that it doesn’t contain enough of either of its genres for any of its influences to feel worthwhile. As an RPG, the customization is thin and weird — the only way to level up your monsters is to continue sucking the soul of that monster type. This makes sense, I guess, as long as you don’t think of this game as wanting to be exactly like Pokemon and not succeeding. I suppose the game designers didn’t want the player thinking, “Oh, I already have this monster; I can just avoid them, then, and continue through the stage.” Besides, when you already have a Geodude, it’s awesome to use your Squirtle to take down Geodudes in one hit, right?
Except, as an action game, this kind of doesn’t work. Action game players don’t want to be able to equip one weapon that can kill a certain type of enemy in one hit. They don’t want to reconfigure all four of their attacks every time the fight music starts up. They don’t want to even have the option to decimate a certain type of enemy with a certain type of attack, because this will only make them, as super players with super skills, need to use the correct attacks, or else feel inefficient. Forcing the player to be correct or incorrect about what button he uses to kill the bad guys is to shed an eerie, existentially damning light on videogames as a medium: in videogames, you’re either killing an enemy with as few hits as possible, or as many hits as possible. In other words, you’re either getting the enemy out of your sight, or you’re keeping the enemy in your sight for long enough to be considered stylish. Isn’t it pointless, either way? Think about it in this way, and games that focus on enemies who take a “modest” number of hits to kill seem like they might be covering something up.
Oh, well.
And then there’s the blue-balling. If you’ve played Devil May Cry 3, you may remember the experience of entering the tower stage for the first time. After some bitching-awesome battles, you’re forced to wander around aimlessly looking for some key that’ll open a door. Man, what a blue-baller! I got pretty mad at that part, let me tell you. Well, Folkssoul, halfway frightened at a different half of its audience at any given time, has shoehorned a sometimes-infuriating blue-balling structure into each stage, to draw them out to the maximum length. I wouldn’t have a problem with this — I like fighting! I like pressing buttons! I don’t mind backtracking through a stage if it means I get to do more fighting and/or pressing buttons! — so long as the game has a good, quick explanation for why I’m doing what I’m doing.
The game’s explanation, then, is kind of &^#$#ed. In each stage, you’re given a picture book. You have to find the five pages of the picture book. They’re scattered across the stage, usually contained inside — of course — hovering magic stones. As you find the pages, you can read the picture book from your item menu. Each page shows a different monster from the area, as well as a semi-abstract representation of one of the attacks that the boss is going to use. Once all five pages are assembled, you’ll have a step-by-step representation of which monsters you’ll have to use to beat the boss.
If that sounds kind of cool to you, that’s probably only because I’m not done explaining it: you need the picture book, or you can’t fight the boss. Without the picture book, you are not allowed near the boss. And not even by some citizen of the fantasy world, who deems it too difficult — no, there’s no one standing there with arms akimbo, shaking his head, telling you its impossible. There’s usually some barrier. In the first stage, it’s glowing thorns, for example. You can run your character against the thorns, watch him sprinting in place a bit. No dialogue window pops up and says “Get the picture book pages”, probably because the level designers feared that would expose how stupid it is that possessing a book would make magic thorns cease to exist.
If it doesn’t sound terrible yet, that’s probably only because I’m not done explaining it: in order to get all of the pages for the picture book, you need to run back and forth through the stage, searching for the floating magic stones that you can’t destroy with your basic attacks. When you can’t destroy a magic stone with all your current attacks, that means you need a new attack, which means you have to defeat and capture a different kind of monster in order to destroy that stone. Sometimes you’ll poke yourself into an unexplored corner of the map, and see a monster you don’t have yet, only you won’t be able to get to him, because of — yep — a floating row of magic stones of a color you can’t destroy yet. So, being hypothetical, let’s say that you find a yellow magic stone you can’t destroy, and then you see a row of red indestructible magic stones, behind which you can see a monster you don’t own yet. Eventually, you find a monster you haven’t soul-sucked yet; you suck his soul, and try using it against the yellow magic stone. That doesn’t work, so you use it against the red stones blocking the other new monster — it works! You soul-suck the new monster, and use his power to successfully break the yellow stone, and score a picture book page that shows the monster you used to destroy the yellow stone, dodging, say, a flame attack.
It’s kind of ridiculous. Then again, what videogame isn’t? That’s not the question — for all its scattered, hackneyed moments, Devil May Cry 3 manages to remain tightly focused on action. That you’re able to pause the game and change your weapon in Devil May Cry 3 is a fact, not a strategy. At the end of the day, Devil May Cry 3‘s designers chose to make a hardcore action game with multi-layered boss fights and a twitch-tastic parry system. They did this because they had confidence in the essence of their game’s action. Folkssoul‘s producers were obviously just overcompensating, and repeatedly, for what they perceived as a deficit in either of the contributing genres. The story is pretty stuffty in Folkssoul, though they force you to play through these sometimes hour-long actionless segments because they’re convinced that someone out there has to be enjoying it. There you are, wandering around the town, talking to residents, finding photographs in people’s houses, chatting with the bartender, combing the sand on the beach. And for what? So that you can open the portal to the next stage, with more picture book pages, more collectible monsters, more floating magic stones.
Maybe it could have worked as a straight action game. It already has one of those early-1990s Japanese arcade-game plots, and an aesthetic stolen from all the best pop-culture — part Tim Burton (the battle music is very Danny Elfman-inspired), part vintage “Doctor Who” (why else is there an old blue phone box in town square?), part JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (an invisible dandy-man wearing a Phantom of the Opera mask serves as your guide through the Nether-realms) — it could have worked, if only the designers were able to come up with better excuses for why the characters are fighting so much. Or maybe if they’d added some Zelda-like ingenuity or flow to the stages. Or some bosses that you beat by learning their patterns and then improvising grandly, instead of bosses that you beat by tinkering around with your monster menu.
Perhaps the most telling trait of Folkssoul is that, if summarized, on paper, in the fewest of words, it doesn’t seem like a bad game at all. Even the motion sensor controls — yank the controller to pull the souls out of monsters; yank hard for stronger monsters; yank harder, with the correct rhythm, for even stronger monsters — sound like they deserve to exist. Yet there’s a weird, gloppy sheen all over this game’s design document. It screams of the Nintendo Gamecube era, where Nintendo was forcing developers to utilize Gameboy Advance connectivity in some way, any way, and we ended up with mostly-useless remote controlled bombs in Splinter Cell or some stuff.
There are plenty of other things I could pick on — like how every time your character gets hit by an enemy, it cancels your camera lock-on with that enemy (very frustrating), or how moronic it is that every time you press the R1 button to begin sucking an enemy’s soul, a big, ugly dialogue pops up on the bottom of the screen: “PRESS THE R3 BUTTON NOW FOR A TUTORIAL!!” I mean, seriously, I think the casual gamers walked away when they saw “FROM YOSHIKI OKAMOTO AND KOZY OKADA” in huge font on the back of the box.
Instead, I’ll try to be nice about the game: I like the voices. They’re pretty bad, yeah, though they transcend typical videogame bad voices by being 1.) Entirely in English, 2.) Entirely in Irish-accented English. And we’re not just talking any Irish accent — it’s like, alien Irish. I’ve been waiting this whole review to put “Aliens from the planet Ireland” into a sentence where it would fit, and I just couldn’t quite get it.
Another plus is the way the screen freezes for the tiniest instant every time your score a hit. The effect is most awesome when you use a multiple-hit attack, like the one big rolling armadillo attack. The screen pauses so you can savor the sparks of impact, and it gets to feeling kind of groovy. I guess that’s the best developers can do, when the controller doesn’t vibrate.
And lastly, the colors: this game’s colors worked overtime to earn 1.79 of the two stars this game was finally awarded. Since the Super Famicom era we’ve been hearing about how many colors a game system can display. (The Super Famicom reported could display any of 32,768 colors, though never all at the same time.) It’s only now that the promises of our childhoods are coming true. This game shines, blooms, radiates, et cetera. This entire game is made up of that one scene in Dragon Quest VIII with the purple carpets, that scene you could show anyone and have them say “Wow, that looks great.” And it has a hell of an amazing box art, as well. If only such things sufficed for a solid game, for well-executed atmosphere.
I liked Game Republic’s first game, Genji, for PS2. I would have liked it more were it not for the abundance of health-recovery items, and the option to use those items at any time in the game. The presence of these items threw off the balance of boss battles, ruining what could have been a snappy, arcade-like experience. Furthermore, the existence of a twitch-fueled one-hit-kill system, while rewarding for pro-level players, was essentially useless for the casuals the game was catering to with all those healing items. Game Republic had chosen the story of Japanese folk hero Yostuffsune because they thought it would get them big recognition, fast, though they also seemingly went out of their way to bastardize the story as postmodernly as possible — the princess, for example, is kidnapped because of her ability to fuse priceless magical gems. I saw Genji as a confused effort, and generously thought that, in the future, Game Republic could go places, if only they kept all of their testicles in the right place, and made games for a specific audience. If they would just think, “What would Devil May Cry do?” they could make a game that earns the respect of the players. Their PSP RPG Brave Story is a focused, deliberate masterpiece. Their third game, Folkssoul (they did not “make” Every Party for Xbox 360, or Genji 2 for PlayStation 3 so much as they rented out their name), is their second effort on a home console, and in it, the stains of their first game seem to have seeped deeper. It’s trying to please everyone at the same time, and you know what they say about pleasing everyone at the same time: you can’t do it. It’s not possible.
Game Republic: get your act together. This game right here will be sitting in the bargain bins in three to six months’ time, and in ten years, I expect to see it on used shelves for five dollars, and I expect to shudder and remember those days early in the PS3’s life, when we would have bought anything. Whether or not I come to regard those days as having ended or not — I suppose that’s all in your hands. For now, though, consider yourselves on academic probation.
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“THE MOST ENTERTAINING -- AND AFFORDABLE -- PSYCHOLOGY TEXTBOOK YOU CAN FIND AT A VIDEOGAME SHOP.”
Global A Entertainment’s first game of any importance, and one of the best Japanese games of 2006, Chronicles of Dungeon Maker (Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground in its American release) is the chief reason I wish I didn’t loathe the Sony PlayStation Portable. It’s crisp, elegant, crunchy, meaty, deep, and a multitude of other food-like adjectives, wrapped in a tasty videogame shell, piping hot and fresh full of classy, bubbly music that recalls Taito’s illustrious history of making games that refuse to attempt to appeal to everyone at the same time.
Back in 1986, when everyone was entranced with plumbers eating mushrooms, growing to twice their height, stomping turtles, and rescuing princesses, there was Taito, making a splash with a game about soap-bubble-blowing dinosaurs who made a living by killing little wind-up toy-gadgets to get to the next screen, which may or may not have been just “too weird” for some people. Taito’s one-offishness has manifested itself at many points in their history, usually to their inconvenience. They’ve repeatedly made games — like the excellent RPG Estopolis (Lufia) II — which might have been the top of their genre if someone somewhere had just thrown a little extra effort or money at them. At other times, they go and make these games that kind of fit into existing genres, and kind of don’t. They’re a hardcore gamer’s game-maker, and they also sadly prove the obvious: sometimes, being open-minded and risky is not the best way to make a lot of money.
When the Sony PSP came out, most developers took a look at the specification sheet and then called a board meeting to brainstorm a single idea: that is, how to shoehorn a PlayStation 2 game onto that greasy brick, with its ghosty screen and its painful buttons and its low headphone volume and its awful loading times. Taito took a different route, and tried to make a game that took into account certain faults of the PSP — like how most people with hands larger than those of infants can’t touch the shoulder buttons without experiencing Awesome Searing Tendon Pain. Their risky project was called Exit — it was a miraculous little thing that was simultaneously frantic and slow-paced, like watching a high-speed car chase on “COPS” while lightly stoned and blessed with delicious pizza. The game wasn’t, precisely, much of a success, though Square-Enix top-brass producer Akitoshi Kawazu (Action Button Dot Net‘s official pick for “Best Dressed Man in Gaming”) was quoted as telling a meeting room “This is what portable gaming should be. This is the kind of thing I want you to make.”
Eventually, Square-Enix released Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II as “Anniversary Editions” for the PSP, and after that, they broke major ground in the field of originality by releasing a remake of their nine-year old classic Final Fantasy Tactics. Well, hey. Let’s put it this way: if Square-Enix were in the habit of listening to Akitoshi Kawazu — the mastermind of SaGa — the numbers would overtake the graphics in their RPGs, while experience levels ceased to mean anything.
Or: eventually, Square-Enix bought Taito.
Moving right along, after a sequel to Exit (smartly called “Thinking Exit” in Japan, so as to better communicate the game’s simple, common-sense appeal by way of more words), Taito introduced and subsequently plopped out Chronicle of Dungeon Maker, a game that apparently had anime characters’ faces in the dialogue windows (a big “+” for the anime fans out there) and also dealt somehow with dungeon questing, shown in a third-person Zelda-like perspective (a big “-” to those hoping it would be more or less exactly like Wizardry VII Gaiden 2). It fell off the map before it landed on the map. Then Weekly Famitsu, Japan’s most blindly trusted videogame publication (they’re blindly trusted because they get scoops and exclusive screenshots, and are kind of enough to run them in exchange for protection money from game developers) broke some serious convention by having four reviews about it that more or less disagreed. You’ve got to love the non-paid-for Famitsu reviews. It’s so easy to spot them.
Chronicle of Dungeon Maker received a straight flush: 7, 8, 9, 10. On Famitsu‘s “everybody gets out alive” grading scale, that’s like a 1, 2, 3, 4. That’s dynamic stuff. I read the ground-pounding, earth-shattering sixteen-word reviews with shaking curiosity. They all said: the game is fun. Holy lord! I needed to buy this game right away. I let my misty eyes (always tearing up when I’m looking at Famitsu, so engorged is my soul with the thrill of the realization that I LIVE IN JAPAN where they SELL FAMITSU AT THE 7-ELEVEN which totally proves that MY MOM WAS WRONG) drift over to the “10” review, and let them slip into soft focus, like I was looking at one of those magic eye puzzles. The words popped out: if you have an enthusiastic friend, this game will last forever, and you shall never tire of it.
Thanks to my job at a Large Japanese Videogame Corporation, I was able to walk over to the secretary and say something that sounded urgent: I need a copy of this game on my desk before lunch tomorrow. Investigating a potential problem, is all. PR stuff. “Yes, sir!” (She didn’t actually say that.)
What glory the game ended up being. I’ve played it more or less an hour a week for nine months. It has never gotten old.
The story goes like this: there’s a town in a fantasy world. It’s being overrun with monsters. You are an apprentice dungeon-maker (yeah, like that‘s a real job!) who shows up in town with a plan: build a dungeon for all the monsters to go and play in. This will, of course, keep the monsters away from the town. The dungeon-maker must have some kind of weird little sympathy for the monsters, you might think — he realizes that all they want is a place of their own to cavort, something with homey decorations, chairs, and such. Well, when you actually play the game, and you discover that the dungeon-maker goes into the dungeon and mercilessly slaughters the monsters, it starts to make more sense. Kill the monsters, take their treasures, use the money to buy provisions in town, repeat, repeat. Buy building supplies at the construction shop, buy weapons and armor at the warrior shop, sell your miscellaneous monster droppings at the market in town square. Not in that order — preferably, you’ll sell the monster droppings (jewels and the like) first, and then spend your money. Go to the food market to buy food supplies, go home, make yourself dinner, and go to bed. The new day in the dungeon begins.
When you head back into the dungeon the next day, your character is stronger — each meal you prepare (from a list of recipes) will increase one or more of your statistics — and is carrying more building materials. Build hallways or rooms, plant a fountain or a luxurious bedroom set to attract bigger monsters the next day. Save up enough money, and you can plant a treasure chest room. When you go into the dungeon the next day, the treasure chest room door will be locked. One of the monsters in the dungeon has the key. Find him and kill him to gain access to the treasure chest room and empty the treasure chests. Sell the treasure in town a couple of days in a row, and the chest room has paid for itself. Build enough of a dungeon to earn the right to buy a boss room; place it wherever you like. Beat the boss to earn the elevator key to the next floor. Now, build the next floor.
You can build up to twenty floors, though just because you’ve moved on to floor two doesn’t mean you’re done with floor one. Not by a long shot — you can always buy new wood kits to spruce up the hallways — change those bare wood frames into luxurious mansion walls if you’re willing to spend enough hours — which ends up attracting higher-level monsters. Break down walls and add swerving, confusing paths away from the central dungeon elevator; put a treasure room as far from the boss room as possible, so as to drive any hypothetical intruders mad: they’ll see the treasure room door, and they’ll need the treasure enough to trudge around looking for the key until their health is chipped so low they can’t in their right mind challenge the boss.
If you’re playing the game all alone, this is compelling as few games ever can be. You might start to forget where things are in your own dungeon, after you’ve built five rounded-out floors or so. Things might start to surprise you. This game, then, presents a rare opportunity to the average Jotaro Tanaka: learn how Bill Gates feels when he takes a wrong turn and, “Hey, I didn’t know there was a jacuzzi in here.”
This game is ingenious as a single-player brass-polishing exercise, to be sure, and it does for the collectathon-itis of recent game design (Castlevania of late, et al) what Edward Norton’s performance as a fake &^#$# / master thief in “The Score” did for Hollywood’s Academy-Award-nominated &^#$#s: that is to say, it exposes the painful simplicity in the most poetic fashion. Why are you collecting things in Dungeon Maker, some out-of-the-loop someone might ask. And you’ll answer, “To make the dungeon bigger”. That’s one thing Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow can’t provide — nothing you do can make the game bigger; nothing you do can make you own Dracula’s castle.
Ideally, though, you’re not going to be playing alone. In most excellent fashion, this game includes a dungeon-trading feature. Once your friend (or foe) trades dungeons with you, his (or her) dungeon appears outside your town map. It’s marked as “Ancient Ruins”, most cleverly. Ah-ha. You can explore your friend’s dungeon as deeply as you’ve built your own dungeon. If your dungeon is ten floors, and your friend’s is twelve, you can only progress to floor ten. Progress to floor twelve of your own dungeon, and you can progress to floor twelve of your friend’s. Keep in touch with your friend, via your preferred method of voice or text communication (cellular phone, for example), to let him know how you’re enjoying his dungeon. He’ll tell you he’s smoothed out some spots, and even added another floor, and you’ll say, hey, I should download that from you sometime.
For the singleplayer mode, thrilling and fulfilling on its on, is only focus-testing for the miles-apart multiplayer experience. In each day of the game’s internal timer, you are entering and penetrating a dungeon of your design. If you get into a tight spot, you’ll also have to make it out alive. If you can’t make it out of your own dungeon alive, you’re playing the game wrong. No — you’re playing the game impossibly. Because see, for whatever it’s worth, of all the things that are possible in this game, it’s impossible to make your dungeon impossible. Dungeon Maker is the current trend of “user-generated content”, it is the future, where you don’t have to be part of some hidden, shady internet chat community in order to have access to some hilarious user-created first-person shooter maps. It’s a complete package, captured in one UMD.
And when your friend tells you he decided to kind of stop seeing that one girl he was thinking of going out with, and you ask him why, and he says because she introduced him to this guy, at a party, who she used to “kind of go out” with, and he says, “I never knew I was that kind of guy, you know, to just, kind of, flake out like that”, you can nod, and recall how he put all of the treasure chests on floor one of his dungeon as far from the elevator as possible, which only tricks you the first time you try to explore the whole floor, and you can just say, “It kind of makes sense to me, man.”
As something to do on a bus or a train, this game is worth its weight in gold, minus a hundred dollars for every ten seconds of loading time. As an exercise in amateur psychology, it’s priceless. As an answer to our suspicions that there was something almost therapeutic lurking just beyond the shadow of the mouse-bashing in Diablo II, that there was some great possibility embedded in the half-assed casinos and mini-games of classic RPGs, that the “Hidden Base” mini-game of Pokemon really does deserve to be explored in its own game, Dungeon Maker is something of a godsend. Up alongside recent releases like Microsoft’s Shadowrun, which feels so hollow and lonely without a singleplayer mode, Dungeon Maker proves that it can be a good idea for developers to focus a game on one brilliant knife-point, so long as they follow through with vigor.
It may or may not have a couple of tiny control issues, though hey! So did Elevator Action Returns: that stuff was floaty, and that’s why we loved it. Yes. I am saying, right here, that Dungeon Maker is up there with Elevator Action Returns: it is rife with charismatic, glory-full floatiness in the swings and hacks of its swords and axes, in the castings of its fire-breathing magic spells. It grips that floatiness like floatiness was the Olympic torch.
The American version of this game, called Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground, was released on June 19th, 2007 — hey, that’s yesterday! — by X-SEED Games, which is a silly name for a games publisher, though hey, at least the letters make a nice shape. Many critics will gloss over this game with extreme prejudice, so we here at Action Button Dot Net make a conscientious decision to break one of our own unwritten rules (that being the one that states we refuse to rate any PSP game higher than three stars because the PSP blows) and give it four stars for emphasis.
Dungeon Maker is the second of X-SEED Games’ 2007 releases to score four stars from Action Button Dot Net (the first was Wild Arms V) — and it will not be the last (stay tuned for the next one). Lest the reader assume we here have some kind of agreement with X-SEED Games, I will now say some bad things about them: they ruined the box art, which was some of the best box art I’ve ever seen on a Japanese game, and I’m not even kidding (see the official site for a huge picture). Second, the URL for their official site is too long. And third, some of the writing on said official site is pretty hokey: “While it’s important to keep expanding your dungeon, do not forget to take time to improve your attack and defensive capabilities. If you do, you might find yourself in the unenviable position of being turned into mulch by stronger, faster enemies.” See — that’s just kind of hokey. I like this one, too: “be sure to pay attention to the types of items you have equipped as well as talk to some of the people around town.” In some cultures, these kinds of aborted sentence structures are revered as highly as pottery.
Man! Taking the proverbial piss out of a videogame publisher is a lot of fun! It feels like work, it feels like pumping iron! It’s satisfying! Though you know what? It’s not nearly as satisfying as hacking through hundreds of monsters of your own invitation in [Chronicle of]Dungeon Maker[: Hunting Ground], available now for the Sony PSP! Buy it today, or just wait until they release a PSP with a screen that doesn’t ghost like a haunted house. (Warning: this game deals with dark subject matter. As in, the backgrounds are black or dark brown most of the time.)
I believe that’s what we in the games journalism industry call a “conclusion”!
★★★★
“THE MOST ENTERTAINING -- AND AFFORDABLE -- PSYCHOLOGY TEXTBOOK YOU CAN FIND AT A VIDEOGAME SHOP.”
Global A Entertainment’s first game of any importance, and one of the best Japanese games of 2006, Chronicles of Dungeon Maker (Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground in its American release) is the chief reason I wish I didn’t loathe the Sony PlayStation Portable. It’s crisp, elegant, crunchy, meaty, deep, and a multitude of other food-like adjectives, wrapped in a tasty videogame shell, piping hot and fresh full of classy, bubbly music that recalls Taito’s illustrious history of making games that refuse to attempt to appeal to everyone at the same time.
Back in 1986, when everyone was entranced with plumbers eating mushrooms, growing to twice their height, stomping turtles, and rescuing princesses, there was Taito, making a splash with a game about soap-bubble-blowing dinosaurs who made a living by killing little wind-up toy-gadgets to get to the next screen, which may or may not have been just “too weird” for some people. Taito’s one-offishness has manifested itself at many points in their history, usually to their inconvenience. They’ve repeatedly made games — like the excellent RPG Estopolis (Lufia) II — which might have been the top of their genre if someone somewhere had just thrown a little extra effort or money at them. At other times, they go and make these games that kind of fit into existing genres, and kind of don’t. They’re a hardcore gamer’s game-maker, and they also sadly prove the obvious: sometimes, being open-minded and risky is not the best way to make a lot of money.
When the Sony PSP came out, most developers took a look at the specification sheet and then called a board meeting to brainstorm a single idea: that is, how to shoehorn a PlayStation 2 game onto that greasy brick, with its ghosty screen and its painful buttons and its low headphone volume and its awful loading times. Taito took a different route, and tried to make a game that took into account certain faults of the PSP — like how most people with hands larger than those of infants can’t touch the shoulder buttons without experiencing Awesome Searing Tendon Pain. Their risky project was called Exit — it was a miraculous little thing that was simultaneously frantic and slow-paced, like watching a high-speed car chase on “COPS” while lightly stoned and blessed with delicious pizza. The game wasn’t, precisely, much of a success, though Square-Enix top-brass producer Akitoshi Kawazu (Action Button Dot Net‘s official pick for “Best Dressed Man in Gaming”) was quoted as telling a meeting room “This is what portable gaming should be. This is the kind of thing I want you to make.”
Eventually, Square-Enix released Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II as “Anniversary Editions” for the PSP, and after that, they broke major ground in the field of originality by releasing a remake of their nine-year old classic Final Fantasy Tactics. Well, hey. Let’s put it this way: if Square-Enix were in the habit of listening to Akitoshi Kawazu — the mastermind of SaGa — the numbers would overtake the graphics in their RPGs, while experience levels ceased to mean anything.
Or: eventually, Square-Enix bought Taito.
Moving right along, after a sequel to Exit (smartly called “Thinking Exit” in Japan, so as to better communicate the game’s simple, common-sense appeal by way of more words), Taito introduced and subsequently plopped out Chronicle of Dungeon Maker, a game that apparently had anime characters’ faces in the dialogue windows (a big “+” for the anime fans out there) and also dealt somehow with dungeon questing, shown in a third-person Zelda-like perspective (a big “-” to those hoping it would be more or less exactly like Wizardry VII Gaiden 2). It fell off the map before it landed on the map. Then Weekly Famitsu, Japan’s most blindly trusted videogame publication (they’re blindly trusted because they get scoops and exclusive screenshots, and are kind of enough to run them in exchange for protection money from game developers) broke some serious convention by having four reviews about it that more or less disagreed. You’ve got to love the non-paid-for Famitsu reviews. It’s so easy to spot them.
Chronicle of Dungeon Maker received a straight flush: 7, 8, 9, 10. On Famitsu‘s “everybody gets out alive” grading scale, that’s like a 1, 2, 3, 4. That’s dynamic stuff. I read the ground-pounding, earth-shattering sixteen-word reviews with shaking curiosity. They all said: the game is fun. Holy lord! I needed to buy this game right away. I let my misty eyes (always tearing up when I’m looking at Famitsu, so engorged is my soul with the thrill of the realization that I LIVE IN JAPAN where they SELL FAMITSU AT THE 7-ELEVEN which totally proves that MY MOM WAS WRONG) drift over to the “10” review, and let them slip into soft focus, like I was looking at one of those magic eye puzzles. The words popped out: if you have an enthusiastic friend, this game will last forever, and you shall never tire of it.
Thanks to my job at a Large Japanese Videogame Corporation, I was able to walk over to the secretary and say something that sounded urgent: I need a copy of this game on my desk before lunch tomorrow. Investigating a potential problem, is all. PR stuff. “Yes, sir!” (She didn’t actually say that.)
What glory the game ended up being. I’ve played it more or less an hour a week for nine months. It has never gotten old.
The story goes like this: there’s a town in a fantasy world. It’s being overrun with monsters. You are an apprentice dungeon-maker (yeah, like that‘s a real job!) who shows up in town with a plan: build a dungeon for all the monsters to go and play in. This will, of course, keep the monsters away from the town. The dungeon-maker must have some kind of weird little sympathy for the monsters, you might think — he realizes that all they want is a place of their own to cavort, something with homey decorations, chairs, and such. Well, when you actually play the game, and you discover that the dungeon-maker goes into the dungeon and mercilessly slaughters the monsters, it starts to make more sense. Kill the monsters, take their treasures, use the money to buy provisions in town, repeat, repeat. Buy building supplies at the construction shop, buy weapons and armor at the warrior shop, sell your miscellaneous monster droppings at the market in town square. Not in that order — preferably, you’ll sell the monster droppings (jewels and the like) first, and then spend your money. Go to the food market to buy food supplies, go home, make yourself dinner, and go to bed. The new day in the dungeon begins.
When you head back into the dungeon the next day, your character is stronger — each meal you prepare (from a list of recipes) will increase one or more of your statistics — and is carrying more building materials. Build hallways or rooms, plant a fountain or a luxurious bedroom set to attract bigger monsters the next day. Save up enough money, and you can plant a treasure chest room. When you go into the dungeon the next day, the treasure chest room door will be locked. One of the monsters in the dungeon has the key. Find him and kill him to gain access to the treasure chest room and empty the treasure chests. Sell the treasure in town a couple of days in a row, and the chest room has paid for itself. Build enough of a dungeon to earn the right to buy a boss room; place it wherever you like. Beat the boss to earn the elevator key to the next floor. Now, build the next floor.
You can build up to twenty floors, though just because you’ve moved on to floor two doesn’t mean you’re done with floor one. Not by a long shot — you can always buy new wood kits to spruce up the hallways — change those bare wood frames into luxurious mansion walls if you’re willing to spend enough hours — which ends up attracting higher-level monsters. Break down walls and add swerving, confusing paths away from the central dungeon elevator; put a treasure room as far from the boss room as possible, so as to drive any hypothetical intruders mad: they’ll see the treasure room door, and they’ll need the treasure enough to trudge around looking for the key until their health is chipped so low they can’t in their right mind challenge the boss.
If you’re playing the game all alone, this is compelling as few games ever can be. You might start to forget where things are in your own dungeon, after you’ve built five rounded-out floors or so. Things might start to surprise you. This game, then, presents a rare opportunity to the average Jotaro Tanaka: learn how Bill Gates feels when he takes a wrong turn and, “Hey, I didn’t know there was a jacuzzi in here.”
This game is ingenious as a single-player brass-polishing exercise, to be sure, and it does for the collectathon-itis of recent game design (Castlevania of late, et al) what Edward Norton’s performance as a fake &^#$# / master thief in “The Score” did for Hollywood’s Academy-Award-nominated &^#$#s: that is to say, it exposes the painful simplicity in the most poetic fashion. Why are you collecting things in Dungeon Maker, some out-of-the-loop someone might ask. And you’ll answer, “To make the dungeon bigger”. That’s one thing Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow can’t provide — nothing you do can make the game bigger; nothing you do can make you own Dracula’s castle.
Ideally, though, you’re not going to be playing alone. In most excellent fashion, this game includes a dungeon-trading feature. Once your friend (or foe) trades dungeons with you, his (or her) dungeon appears outside your town map. It’s marked as “Ancient Ruins”, most cleverly. Ah-ha. You can explore your friend’s dungeon as deeply as you’ve built your own dungeon. If your dungeon is ten floors, and your friend’s is twelve, you can only progress to floor ten. Progress to floor twelve of your own dungeon, and you can progress to floor twelve of your friend’s. Keep in touch with your friend, via your preferred method of voice or text communication (cellular phone, for example), to let him know how you’re enjoying his dungeon. He’ll tell you he’s smoothed out some spots, and even added another floor, and you’ll say, hey, I should download that from you sometime.
For the singleplayer mode, thrilling and fulfilling on its on, is only focus-testing for the miles-apart multiplayer experience. In each day of the game’s internal timer, you are entering and penetrating a dungeon of your design. If you get into a tight spot, you’ll also have to make it out alive. If you can’t make it out of your own dungeon alive, you’re playing the game wrong. No — you’re playing the game impossibly. Because see, for whatever it’s worth, of all the things that are possible in this game, it’s impossible to make your dungeon impossible. Dungeon Maker is the current trend of “user-generated content”, it is the future, where you don’t have to be part of some hidden, shady internet chat community in order to have access to some hilarious user-created first-person shooter maps. It’s a complete package, captured in one UMD.
And when your friend tells you he decided to kind of stop seeing that one girl he was thinking of going out with, and you ask him why, and he says because she introduced him to this guy, at a party, who she used to “kind of go out” with, and he says, “I never knew I was that kind of guy, you know, to just, kind of, flake out like that”, you can nod, and recall how he put all of the treasure chests on floor one of his dungeon as far from the elevator as possible, which only tricks you the first time you try to explore the whole floor, and you can just say, “It kind of makes sense to me, man.”
As something to do on a bus or a train, this game is worth its weight in gold, minus a hundred dollars for every ten seconds of loading time. As an exercise in amateur psychology, it’s priceless. As an answer to our suspicions that there was something almost therapeutic lurking just beyond the shadow of the mouse-bashing in Diablo II, that there was some great possibility embedded in the half-assed casinos and mini-games of classic RPGs, that the “Hidden Base” mini-game of Pokemon really does deserve to be explored in its own game, Dungeon Maker is something of a godsend. Up alongside recent releases like Microsoft’s Shadowrun, which feels so hollow and lonely without a singleplayer mode, Dungeon Maker proves that it can be a good idea for developers to focus a game on one brilliant knife-point, so long as they follow through with vigor.
It may or may not have a couple of tiny control issues, though hey! So did Elevator Action Returns: that stuff was floaty, and that’s why we loved it. Yes. I am saying, right here, that Dungeon Maker is up there with Elevator Action Returns: it is rife with charismatic, glory-full floatiness in the swings and hacks of its swords and axes, in the castings of its fire-breathing magic spells. It grips that floatiness like floatiness was the Olympic torch.
The American version of this game, called Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground, was released on June 19th, 2007 — hey, that’s yesterday! — by X-SEED Games, which is a silly name for a games publisher, though hey, at least the letters make a nice shape. Many critics will gloss over this game with extreme prejudice, so we here at Action Button Dot Net make a conscientious decision to break one of our own unwritten rules (that being the one that states we refuse to rate any PSP game higher than three stars because the PSP blows) and give it four stars for emphasis.
Dungeon Maker is the second of X-SEED Games’ 2007 releases to score four stars from Action Button Dot Net (the first was Wild Arms V) — and it will not be the last (stay tuned for the next one). Lest the reader assume we here have some kind of agreement with X-SEED Games, I will now say some bad things about them: they ruined the box art, which was some of the best box art I’ve ever seen on a Japanese game, and I’m not even kidding (see the official site for a huge picture). Second, the URL for their official site is too long. And third, some of the writing on said official site is pretty hokey: “While it’s important to keep expanding your dungeon, do not forget to take time to improve your attack and defensive capabilities. If you do, you might find yourself in the unenviable position of being turned into mulch by stronger, faster enemies.” See — that’s just kind of hokey. I like this one, too: “be sure to pay attention to the types of items you have equipped as well as talk to some of the people around town.” In some cultures, these kinds of aborted sentence structures are revered as highly as pottery.
Man! Taking the proverbial piss out of a videogame publisher is a lot of fun! It feels like work, it feels like pumping iron! It’s satisfying! Though you know what? It’s not nearly as satisfying as hacking through hundreds of monsters of your own invitation in [Chronicle of]Dungeon Maker[: Hunting Ground], available now for the Sony PSP! Buy it today, or just wait until they release a PSP with a screen that doesn’t ghost like a haunted house. (Warning: this game deals with dark subject matter. As in, the backgrounds are black or dark brown most of the time.)
I believe that’s what we in the games journalism industry call a “conclusion”!
1993
text by Ario Barzan
★★★☆
“LIKE FEELING THE SHORELINE BRUSH AGAINST YOUR FEET ON PLANET X.”
In the earlier days, videogame companies were in the business of pumping often terminally hip mascot-hopefuls out by the truckload. The eagerness to catch on like Mario or Sonic did, the wishful, perhaps less than noble, sweat, was almost palpable. The Great Giana Sisters, Boogerman, and Aero the Acrobat were but a few. Sometimes, figures’ escapades would continue on, for whatever reason (though to occasional delight). Bubsy, a pants-less bobcat who starred in a diseased tsunami of a game, and who mimicked tapping the TV’s screen if you waited long enough, would seal his fate in 3D. Rygar, shield-slinging warrior, made a gorgeous, kind of boring comeback on the Playstation 2. To this day, there still is the rare release promoting a cartoon-ish character with the glimmer of Franchise in their look – Psychonauts and Blinx come to mind.
Put alongside this slew of odd characters and the history of video games, Plok is a rare find, because not only is the game damn good – it is also immensely obscure, and has never been capitalized on further. This is puzzling. When you see Plok himself, he’s clean and approachable. Two prime colors comprise his design: yellow and red. His head resembles a Hershey’s Kiss with eyes. His body comes close to a person you’d see a six-year old make with silly putty. Unadorned, honest, Plok is a good guy who you are satisfied guiding. If you leave the controls alone, he doesn’t crack any painful witticisms or start juggling oranges or some stuff – he’ll simply move his shoulders up and down to visualize breathing.
The game calmly, surely eases you into its world. Plok is a territorial fellow, and when his flag has been stolen, he sets out to a nearby island to retrieve it from the miscreants. The start-off point is a hilly, un-broken path that acquaints you with the mechanics. Plok attacks by shooting his limbs out – all four of them if you tap the button fast enough. He has a normal, short jump, along with a higher spin jump. And, well, he can crouch. The landscape is divided into two pieces – an immediate, glossy foreground dotted with floating flowers and funky trees, and a distant background of the ocean and bodies of land, rendered in an Impressionistic hand.
At the end of each level, you will arrive at a flagpole, only to find it’s a fake. And at the start of each new one, signs of an oncoming evening will become more evident. When you confront the boss, the fact that it’s a couple of giants with lips for heads is acceptable after the previous weirdness – but the game suddenly sends shivers down your spine, perks your eyebrows up, because this is where Plok truly begins. The boss anthem is a thudding thing with a sense of humor and a 90’s dance rhythm, a song that is so sudden, so wonderful, so this isn’t on an SNES…is it?, it makes you wait around after the cretins have been finished off just to hear its entirety. The nighttime colors are beautiful and you can feel the whisper of promises.
This is an enormous part of what sets Plok apart from the crowd. It wants to impress ambience onto you. It wants to show you that it has soul. The thing’s got style, a real feel. True to the sensation, the narrative follows suit and shows that while you were gone trying to find your flag, the Flea Queen has replaced all of Plok’s flags with her own. It’s only by ridding the established number of her offspring (who don’t look like fleas, at all) that you can clear each stage. Before you may object to the “gotta catch ‘em all†situation, you’re on a surreal beach, waves at the base of the screen, a morning sun shining on the far-off water, with crashing, glorious music playing. And as you go on, you realize that the level design has changed, has become quite good. Everything before was a prelude to get you ready for the actual structure. It is manageable, though exact and textured enough to keep you on your toes.
One of the highlights enters soon afterwards, wherein Plok comes home and, wondering where his grandfather buried a magical amulet, dozes off. Gameplay resumes moments later, and everything is in black and white as you take a leap back into history and assume the role of the grandfather when he was looking for the amulet. The stage names appear on flickering, silent film plaques, a jittery piano and frumpy backup puff out, Grandpappy Plok has a mustache, and the lip-headed dudes you fought before are a trio, rather than a duo. It’s “old-schoolâ€-tough and grin-inducingly clever.
Part of what makes Plok so absorbing is its focus. The world isn’t crammed with a deluge of crazy varmints attacking you as if they’re starving and you’re the steak, or heaps of power ups, or complex puzzles (enjoyable as those things may be!) – the conflict is between you, the eccentric land, and appropriately dispersed critters. Environments are lovingly crafted, mindful of leaving room for thinking, and bold when need be. A certain segment has you traveling through a melancholy, abandoned town with “For Sale†signs poking out of the ground and boarded up buildings. As Plok makes his way past bumblebees and projectile-spitting flowers, up lopsided cliffs topped by pasta vegetation, forested hills beyond giving way to the sky, the music pulls your eyes open and grips your hands. It is stuff you can listen to outside of the source and yearn to go back to something you never even had (as I’ve found the case to be with Earthbound’s soundtrack).
There are no save points or password system. This might be a problem, were it a bit longer. Fortunately, Plok is digestible in one sitting. Such a decision on the part of designers completes a subtle role, as well. Since you’re not leaving the system and having other occurrences in between, playing becomes singularly connected.
If one stumbling block does rear up, it’s the final portion: the Flea Pit. It isn’t poorly made, so much as it can’t stand up to the panache of the rest with its bubbling tar pits and crags. Also, every so often, it contradicts the overall reasonable difficulty. To be honest, right before this transition, I generally switch the game off. I’m satisfied with what I’ve been offered. For me, the quest ends when Plok finishes reclaiming his flags.
At the core is adventure. There’s the necessary objective, but that plays second fiddle to the compulsion spurred in the mind to navigate that peculiar, smart universe. Plok is not perfect, but it is one of kind, and unquestionably worthy of being tracked down.
★★★☆
“LIKE FEELING THE SHORELINE BRUSH AGAINST YOUR FEET ON PLANET X.”
In the earlier days, videogame companies were in the business of pumping often terminally hip mascot-hopefuls out by the truckload. The eagerness to catch on like Mario or Sonic did, the wishful, perhaps less than noble, sweat, was almost palpable. The Great Giana Sisters, Boogerman, and Aero the Acrobat were but a few. Sometimes, figures’ escapades would continue on, for whatever reason (though to occasional delight). Bubsy, a pants-less bobcat who starred in a diseased tsunami of a game, and who mimicked tapping the TV’s screen if you waited long enough, would seal his fate in 3D. Rygar, shield-slinging warrior, made a gorgeous, kind of boring comeback on the Playstation 2. To this day, there still is the rare release promoting a cartoon-ish character with the glimmer of Franchise in their look – Psychonauts and Blinx come to mind.
Put alongside this slew of odd characters and the history of video games, Plok is a rare find, because not only is the game damn good – it is also immensely obscure, and has never been capitalized on further. This is puzzling. When you see Plok himself, he’s clean and approachable. Two prime colors comprise his design: yellow and red. His head resembles a Hershey’s Kiss with eyes. His body comes close to a person you’d see a six-year old make with silly putty. Unadorned, honest, Plok is a good guy who you are satisfied guiding. If you leave the controls alone, he doesn’t crack any painful witticisms or start juggling oranges or some stuff – he’ll simply move his shoulders up and down to visualize breathing.
The game calmly, surely eases you into its world. Plok is a territorial fellow, and when his flag has been stolen, he sets out to a nearby island to retrieve it from the miscreants. The start-off point is a hilly, un-broken path that acquaints you with the mechanics. Plok attacks by shooting his limbs out – all four of them if you tap the button fast enough. He has a normal, short jump, along with a higher spin jump. And, well, he can crouch. The landscape is divided into two pieces – an immediate, glossy foreground dotted with floating flowers and funky trees, and a distant background of the ocean and bodies of land, rendered in an Impressionistic hand.
At the end of each level, you will arrive at a flagpole, only to find it’s a fake. And at the start of each new one, signs of an oncoming evening will become more evident. When you confront the boss, the fact that it’s a couple of giants with lips for heads is acceptable after the previous weirdness – but the game suddenly sends shivers down your spine, perks your eyebrows up, because this is where Plok truly begins. The boss anthem is a thudding thing with a sense of humor and a 90’s dance rhythm, a song that is so sudden, so wonderful, so this isn’t on an SNES…is it?, it makes you wait around after the cretins have been finished off just to hear its entirety. The nighttime colors are beautiful and you can feel the whisper of promises.
This is an enormous part of what sets Plok apart from the crowd. It wants to impress ambience onto you. It wants to show you that it has soul. The thing’s got style, a real feel. True to the sensation, the narrative follows suit and shows that while you were gone trying to find your flag, the Flea Queen has replaced all of Plok’s flags with her own. It’s only by ridding the established number of her offspring (who don’t look like fleas, at all) that you can clear each stage. Before you may object to the “gotta catch ‘em all†situation, you’re on a surreal beach, waves at the base of the screen, a morning sun shining on the far-off water, with crashing, glorious music playing. And as you go on, you realize that the level design has changed, has become quite good. Everything before was a prelude to get you ready for the actual structure. It is manageable, though exact and textured enough to keep you on your toes.
One of the highlights enters soon afterwards, wherein Plok comes home and, wondering where his grandfather buried a magical amulet, dozes off. Gameplay resumes moments later, and everything is in black and white as you take a leap back into history and assume the role of the grandfather when he was looking for the amulet. The stage names appear on flickering, silent film plaques, a jittery piano and frumpy backup puff out, Grandpappy Plok has a mustache, and the lip-headed dudes you fought before are a trio, rather than a duo. It’s “old-schoolâ€-tough and grin-inducingly clever.
Part of what makes Plok so absorbing is its focus. The world isn’t crammed with a deluge of crazy varmints attacking you as if they’re starving and you’re the steak, or heaps of power ups, or complex puzzles (enjoyable as those things may be!) – the conflict is between you, the eccentric land, and appropriately dispersed critters. Environments are lovingly crafted, mindful of leaving room for thinking, and bold when need be. A certain segment has you traveling through a melancholy, abandoned town with “For Sale†signs poking out of the ground and boarded up buildings. As Plok makes his way past bumblebees and projectile-spitting flowers, up lopsided cliffs topped by pasta vegetation, forested hills beyond giving way to the sky, the music pulls your eyes open and grips your hands. It is stuff you can listen to outside of the source and yearn to go back to something you never even had (as I’ve found the case to be with Earthbound’s soundtrack).
There are no save points or password system. This might be a problem, were it a bit longer. Fortunately, Plok is digestible in one sitting. Such a decision on the part of designers completes a subtle role, as well. Since you’re not leaving the system and having other occurrences in between, playing becomes singularly connected.
If one stumbling block does rear up, it’s the final portion: the Flea Pit. It isn’t poorly made, so much as it can’t stand up to the panache of the rest with its bubbling tar pits and crags. Also, every so often, it contradicts the overall reasonable difficulty. To be honest, right before this transition, I generally switch the game off. I’m satisfied with what I’ve been offered. For me, the quest ends when Plok finishes reclaiming his flags.
At the core is adventure. There’s the necessary objective, but that plays second fiddle to the compulsion spurred in the mind to navigate that peculiar, smart universe. Plok is not perfect, but it is one of kind, and unquestionably worthy of being tracked down.
text by tim rogers
★★⋆☆
“DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO 'THE NEW RETRO'.”
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Biohazard (Resident Evil) 4 to the “Five years or less away from being considered ‘Retro Gaming'” club. The third version of this game (after the Gamecube original and the PlayStation 2 port) is for the Nintendo Wii, and the inclusion of precise, snappy motion controls simultaneously perfects the beautiful skeleton that’s existed for three years and exposes all the tiniest flaws to new scrutiny.
First, know this: if you or someone you trust has recently expressed doubts about playing Resident Evil 4 on the Nintendo Wii because you’re “not sure how the motion controls could add anything to the experience”, or maybe because you’ve “played that Red Steel (1/2*) game, and boy that sucked ass“, you need to wake up and smell the wrong and/or get the heck over yourself. Motion controls make this game control perfectly. I do not use that word lightly: perfectly. If you want to shoot a zombie in the head, you point the remote at his head and you press the B button (on the bottom of the remote) to command Leon S. Kennedy to whip out his firearm and aim it right at that nasty Hispanic cranium, and then you press the Action Button to fire the shot. Some will puzzle about this game, and declare with a weird degree of mouth-breathing fetishism that they need not possess in order to continue living that this game was perfect with the Nintendo Gamecube controller so they’ll only buy the Wii version for its true 16:9 video output, and only if you can play it with the Gamecube controller. Really, though, this isn’t Zelda, with motion controls shoehorned in cutely: this is a game about shooting mobs of deranged men in the head in rapid succession, and the point-and-shoot interface here is about as good as it gets. If you’d rather consider holding a big pillowy shoulder button down and moving an analog stick to aim “perfect”, be my guest, and be also wrong. You’re probably the kind of person who wanted a dual-analog-stick control scheme in Metroid Prime, because the auto-lock thing is “so fake” and “for babies”. Yeah, I’m sure the boys in the foxholes in World War I enjoyed drawing figure-eights against the starry skies of Germany with their gun muzzles.
Wii remote aiming is visceral and weirdly real; it feels like a lightgun shooter felt before you were too mature to realize how vapid Duck Hunt was — and it’s deep, because you’re controlling the character’s movement, as well. The sound of a spent shotgun cartridge hitting a wooden floor echoing out of the speaker in the middle of the videogame controller in your hands is worth the price admission to anyone with a Shadow of the Colossus limited-edition print poster on his wall. Pointing, aiming and shooting with the Wii remote is unabashedly fantastic stuff. No, it’s nothing like aiming with a mouse and a keyboard. It’s not that tacky. It feels real — you aim, you shoot. Moving Leon with the nunchuk is pretty smooth as well. Sometimes the position of the nunchuk shifts around in my hand so that I’m holding it a little funny, and I accidentally press it to the left or right when I mean to go up, though I guess that’s my fault for not knowing the palms of my own hands very well, or my fault (again) for not buying the rubber sweat-grip-thing for the nunchuk, or even Nintendo’s fault for not making the nunchuk out of a surface more conducive to gripping ecstatically while hip-deep in the semi-undead.
If pressed to mention a negative aspect of the Wii remote controls, I’d have to say that the lack of an option to turn the aiming reticle off is kind of stupid. I mean, it’s so intuitive as-is. You know when you’re pointing at a zombie’s head, because you can see the remote pointing at the television. Hell, the remote even thumps in your hand when you aim the gun at an enemy. Why can’t we rely completely on the tactile feedback? Wouldn’t that add a neat little element of challenge? Instead, there’s the aiming reticle, crowding up the screen. Hey, at least it’s not as bad as the enormous HUD in Zelda: Twilight Princess.
And that’s about it. As the old saying goes, it takes only one blinged-out young man with diamond-encrusted platinum teeth (we call those “ice teeth”) to steal a tricky ho off an old playah, and Gears of War has long held Resident Evil 4 over its thigh and spanked the ever-loving stuff out of it. If the game industry were working correctly (Protip: it’s kind of not), this is how it would be for the next couple of years: game A revolutionizes a genre, and then game B arrives, taking the revolution into account, while marrying the genre back into the family where it belongs and rendering game A pretty much irrelevant. Gears of War has perfected the Resident Evil 4 formula: the challenges are faster and the enemies are more thrilling to kill. The set-pieces are simple and more honest; in Gears of War, climbing up a staircase into a mansion feels meatier and more meaningful than the original Resident Evil‘s entire zombie-infested mansion. After Gears of War, Resident Evil 4 feels more like a frequently-interrupted stroll through some rustic horror film scenery.
Dead or Alive producer Tomonobu Itagaki once somewhat-famously quipped, of Resident Evil 4, that though he appreciated the game for its integration of concepts, he couldn’t exactly stand playing it for too long because of how the main character had to stop and stand in place every time he fired his pistol. “What kind of man stops to fire a pistol?” asked Itagaki, to the fist-pumping, aww-yeahing, and hilarity of much of the internet. The truth is, a man who doesn’t want to throw his back out is the kind of man who stops to fire a pistol. Though you know what? I can let Itagaki’s ignorance slide; he’s obviously the kind of man who learned everything he needs to know about real life from Contra III: The Alien Wars. He knows what this world is about: brawny men hefting two-ton beef-cannons and strut-rushing into the collective face of the red-fleshed alien bitch-menace. And you know what else? Maybe he’s kind of right. There’s a certain avant-garde love to be found in this recent art-like obsession with detailing, in fiction of whatever format, the real-life-like reactions of ordinary people to fantastic situations. We’re a couple half-decades away from “summer blockbuster” being synonymous with a film about a labcoat-wearing scientist defeating a Hummer full of werewolves with a champagne glass full of orange Skittles.
Either way, why not let Leon move when he’s firing his gun? Really? The situation around him is already pretty hecked-up; disbelief all over the place is going to be suspended through the roof. We’ve got hundreds of psychic Spanish-speakers sharing a half a dozen faces, starting fires and brandishing pitchforks, over here. Leon is able to pause the action whenever he wants, and eat one of many green herbs that he finds conveniently lying all over the place. Why stay dead-realistic about the gun aiming, then? I’m not asking for rocket shoes and X-ray vision or anything. In fact, I could hardly even care less about being able to walk and shoot simultaneously. I’m sure it would be nice, though, really, I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it.
“I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it”. That’s a pretty meek way of putting it, though hey. There you go.
What other game-design misdemeanors do we put up with in the name of “enjoying” a “classic”? How about the completely, terribly bullstuff story? Resident Evil 4‘s story is pretty bad. Sorry to have to break it to you, kiddo. Does its story have to be good? I guess not; Super Mario Bros. had a lame-ass story about a guy rescuing the princess of a fungus fairyland from a turtle-dragon, though it manages to ascend to the status of almost art because it carries itself with noblest distinction.
Resident Evil 4 is not so noble. It’s lazy, in fact: it begins with a man named Leon S. Kennedy, who once fought zombies on his first day as a police officer (because a rookie cop was a good choice for a main character of a game (Resident Evil 2) set during a zombie outbreak in a small town), now on his way to a city in a Spanish-speaking country the name of which was omitted because Capcom Japan feared legal action from a tourism department or two, to rescue the president’s daughter from an unknown organization with unknown demands. “The president’s daughter” is the primary goal of this mission at the start because “The president” seemed too difficult for the story planners: on the one hand, the United States of America Tourism Department might end up suing Capcom because of the implication that the American President’s bodyguards are weak enough to allow him to be captured, which might increase the possibility of terrorism attempts; on the other hand, this is a Japanese videogame, and there is significantly less opportunity to show the president’s panties than there is to show the president’s daughter‘s panties, because the president probably wouldn’t be wearing a skirt, even on vacation.
Right from the start, the storytelling is hokey; the little secrets and somethings they’re not telling us are either groaningly obvious or sighingly contrived. The “president’s daughter” could be a brilliant MacGuffin, though in order for that to happen, it would have to stay a MacGuffin. You rescue her, because the planners were eager to get a skirt on the screen, and the “real plot” begins. That a “real plot” exists at all is kind of &^#$#ed; in the end, all they’re doing is giving Leon reasons to shoot beastly men in the head (or reasons to shoot them anywhere except the head), and each longwinded radio conversation screen functions something like a ten-minute cut-scene between world 2-4 and world 3-1 of Super Mario Bros., during which Super Mario meets a gnarly old man in the woods, eats sausages while discussing the meaning of life until sundown, and is eventually driven, on the old man’s bitching Harley, to the castle gates at World 3 under cover of midnight: thus, the sky being blue in World 2 and black in World 3. In other words, who the heck cares? In other words: don’t you dare say to me that Resident Evil 4 is a silly action game, and the story “doesn’t matter”. The simple fact that it has a story is confirmation enough, straight from the developers’ mouths, that they believed a story was necessary.
This weird, cautious self-importance manages to seep into the game’s soil and poison its reservoir in the tiniest spots. The story’s “chapters” are made up of large, ingenious interconnecting set-pieces teeming with the semi-undead; usually, to get from one section to another, you need to open up a few treasure boxes and find magic items — crests or whatever — to open doors. The first time I played this game, I’m pretty sure I didn’t ever once reach a door and find I didn’t have the right items. Why have the items at all? Why advertise the game’s genre as “Survival Horror” on the box (yes, that’s what the genre is listed as in the Japanese version), if it’s more of an “Adventure Horror”? Sure, “survival” in this case indicates that we must move forward at all costs, which means finding those crests, keys, or whatever. The menu screen is pretty nice — Diablo-like, space-based, kind of a mini-game in and of itself — though really, why have herbs and whatnot, anyway? This game lets you continue at the beginning of an area when you die, just like any old FPS. And death normally comes pretty suddenly, after a short burst of hard hits. Why not just have a Gears of War-esque “run away, take cover, and wait” healing system? I suppose that would be because the enemies aren’t very smart, and running away from them isn’t always difficult.
Let’s see how many more times we can mention Gears of War: how about the radio communication segments? Why does this have to take up the whole screen? I’m sure that the little camera whirling around Leon as he detaches the radio from his belt and holds it up to his ear has become something of a gaming archetype in recent years, though really, let’s look at this, here. When the screen fades to the radio correspondence mode, Leon is holding the radio up to his ear. Yet now we see a video image of him. And we see a video image of whoever he’s talking to. Of course, as he’s holding the radio up to his ear, this means that the camera in front of Leon must be hovering on an invisible wire over his face, and that the image of his current conversation partner is kind of sitting against his cheek. At first, the game’s eagerness to show you the radio is kind of understandable, because you’ve never seen the person that Leon is going to be talking to, so they might as well show you. Eventually, though, little things stick out like gangrenous thumbs: why the hell is the name of the character speaking displayed above the (huge) subtitle window? There are obviously only two faces visible at any given time, and if we can’t tell the difference between the two characters’ voices, then it’s not our fault — it’s the storytellers’. Why, in Gears of War, the main character only ever converses on the radio with someone he’s seen in person before, and even then, it’s only in voiceover. Sure, radio transmission also forces the main character to stick his finger in his ear and slow his trotting pace down to a crawl, though hey! At least it doesn’t swamp up the whole hecking screen and make our trigger fingers itchy. Dead Rising did something kind of right smack in the middle of Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War, with the walkie-talkie banter being displayed only in text and requiring the main character to hold the walkie talkie up to his head powerlessly. Either Gears of War 2 or Resident Evil 5 will have fixed this I’m guessing.
Either way, here it is, broken as can be, stinking up several parts of Resident Evil 4; the break-ins aren’t as frequent as in, say, Metal Gear Solid 3, though I dare say that they are also not one-tenth as well-written.
And here I will also compliment Resident Evil 4, by saying that even though the interruptions are not frequent, they are terribly painful, because I want to continue playing the game.
And now I will frown: the voice acting, as per Capcom, is pretty bone-chillingly atrocious, which may or may not have been for “camp” value, or maybe not. If the bad voice-acting, the stuffty story, and the weird inconsistencies like the radio-screen video-image paradox are, in any way, ever confirmed to be throwbacks, elbow-nudges, or send-ups of other “videogame cliches”, then I will be boarding an airplane with a pair of ceramic brass knuckles in my carry-on baggage, I swear. Resident Evil is already a send-up of horror movie cliches, now made thrilling because I’m in control of the action. We don’t need “ironic” videogame references stuffting in the game design gene pool, please.
If you read the internet (Protip: You’re doing so right now), you might have seen a story with “OMG” in the headline, which detailed the censorship of the Japanese version of this game. The censorship is not new news; the previous Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions were censored in exactly the same way. Namely, there’s no blood (none, of any kind, at all, et cetera) and the satisfying, explosive pop-splash of shooting a man in the head is deleted in favor of making every single location on an enemy’s body cause the same amount of damage when shot. Yes, this means you can shoot an enemy in the head five or six times in a row. Yes, this kind of breaks the game as the story starts to develop. Capcom is a fan of doing this to their games on both sides of every ocean: here in Japan, for example, where the content rating system consists of four ratings that are not “enforced” (A (all ages), B (12-13), C (13-17), D (17 and up)) and one rating that is “enforced” (Z (ages 18 and up only)), companies like Capcom are left with no other choice than to cast a vote of no-confidence in the system, and censor their games out of “social responsibility”. The simplest way of looking at it is this: the ratings board is stating from the start that none of their ratings matter except the one that does, so why should retailers trust the one rating that does, if the board is admitting that all of the other ratings are bullstuff? And, ironically, as with anything containing “mature” content (blood, alcohol, cigarettes, sex, income taxes), games like Resident Evil 4 are mostly popular amongst snot-nosed twelve-year-olds, anyway. It’s a shame, then, that the censorship practices have to kind of break the game — not as bad as in the US release of Monster Hunter, though, where the blood was removed because the enemies’ similarities to animals elevated the game to something of an animal-cruelty simulator, which is not to be chuckled at in this time of hooker-killing-simulators. Unfortunately, blood was also the game’s indicator of when you were hitting an enemy in the right spot (Monster Hunter keeps numbers out of the gameplay), so the game was essentially broken.
It’s a weird culture-clash, I tell you. The best solution, probably, is to just leave the games how they are intended to be, and everyone will be happy. I’ll be damned if the mere sight of a realistic man pointing a gun at a realistic man-monster wasn’t enough to cause an actual girl who dresses mostly in pink to avert her eyes from the screen. Should she keep her eyes on the screen after the “bang”, even she would raise critical questions about the absence of blood.
Like Ninja Gaiden on the PlayStation 3, Resident Evil 4 is getting a somewhat-deserved second wind on the Wii. It’s a breezy game despite its heavy subject matter, and despite the intrusion of some nasty game design archetypes and some groan-worthy narrative choices, it has exceptional flow, some awesome bosses, and tons of visceral crunch. The Wii version is the best version available, and I’m trying real hard to not mention how heart-breaking it is that the game can’t display in at least 720p resolutions, or how I wish Gears of War could use this control scheme, because hey, these things just aren’t possible. You have to make do with what you have.
I’ve saved the best for last: you know those brain-dead quick-timer events in the Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions, where you have to press a button quickly in order to make Leon cinematically avoid chains of certain perils? If you answered “Yes, that’s one of the dumbest trends in videogames today”, then you’re correct. They’re all gone in the Wii version — kind of. Rather than press buttons in time, all you have to do for every quick-timer event is shake the controller from side to side as vigorously as possible. Even long, elaborate sequences require no more than a vigorous controller shaking. I was prepared to call this the worst part of the game, and bemoan it as the lamest possible forced implementation of the Wii motion controls. I was going to say that, in a game where the motion controls are used so maturely and cleanly, they really didn’t have to put this in here. That was until I figured out the secret — you don’t have to shake the controller side-to-side. No, no, if you’re a man, you already know the best way to grip the controller. I tell you, I was sitting here in the middle of the night, window open, cool spring breeze wafting in, jerking this Wiimote like it was a pretty plastic penis, and there, on the screen in front of me, not some hot babe engaged in pornographic pleasure — no, it was Leon S. Kennedy running toward the screen, huffing and puffing, a boulder hot on his heels. There was a sudden, electric disconnect between Leon’s huffing and puffing and the jacking-off-like motion of my hand on the Wiimote, and a big spark jumped up in my throat and I had what was probably the best laugh I’ve had in months. Of course, I thought, of course. Thank you, Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, for making that perfectly clear to me. I’d been on the fence about it for years.
★★⋆☆
“DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO 'THE NEW RETRO'.”
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Biohazard (Resident Evil) 4 to the “Five years or less away from being considered ‘Retro Gaming'” club. The third version of this game (after the Gamecube original and the PlayStation 2 port) is for the Nintendo Wii, and the inclusion of precise, snappy motion controls simultaneously perfects the beautiful skeleton that’s existed for three years and exposes all the tiniest flaws to new scrutiny.
First, know this: if you or someone you trust has recently expressed doubts about playing Resident Evil 4 on the Nintendo Wii because you’re “not sure how the motion controls could add anything to the experience”, or maybe because you’ve “played that Red Steel (1/2*) game, and boy that sucked ass“, you need to wake up and smell the wrong and/or get the heck over yourself. Motion controls make this game control perfectly. I do not use that word lightly: perfectly. If you want to shoot a zombie in the head, you point the remote at his head and you press the B button (on the bottom of the remote) to command Leon S. Kennedy to whip out his firearm and aim it right at that nasty Hispanic cranium, and then you press the Action Button to fire the shot. Some will puzzle about this game, and declare with a weird degree of mouth-breathing fetishism that they need not possess in order to continue living that this game was perfect with the Nintendo Gamecube controller so they’ll only buy the Wii version for its true 16:9 video output, and only if you can play it with the Gamecube controller. Really, though, this isn’t Zelda, with motion controls shoehorned in cutely: this is a game about shooting mobs of deranged men in the head in rapid succession, and the point-and-shoot interface here is about as good as it gets. If you’d rather consider holding a big pillowy shoulder button down and moving an analog stick to aim “perfect”, be my guest, and be also wrong. You’re probably the kind of person who wanted a dual-analog-stick control scheme in Metroid Prime, because the auto-lock thing is “so fake” and “for babies”. Yeah, I’m sure the boys in the foxholes in World War I enjoyed drawing figure-eights against the starry skies of Germany with their gun muzzles.
Wii remote aiming is visceral and weirdly real; it feels like a lightgun shooter felt before you were too mature to realize how vapid Duck Hunt was — and it’s deep, because you’re controlling the character’s movement, as well. The sound of a spent shotgun cartridge hitting a wooden floor echoing out of the speaker in the middle of the videogame controller in your hands is worth the price admission to anyone with a Shadow of the Colossus limited-edition print poster on his wall. Pointing, aiming and shooting with the Wii remote is unabashedly fantastic stuff. No, it’s nothing like aiming with a mouse and a keyboard. It’s not that tacky. It feels real — you aim, you shoot. Moving Leon with the nunchuk is pretty smooth as well. Sometimes the position of the nunchuk shifts around in my hand so that I’m holding it a little funny, and I accidentally press it to the left or right when I mean to go up, though I guess that’s my fault for not knowing the palms of my own hands very well, or my fault (again) for not buying the rubber sweat-grip-thing for the nunchuk, or even Nintendo’s fault for not making the nunchuk out of a surface more conducive to gripping ecstatically while hip-deep in the semi-undead.
If pressed to mention a negative aspect of the Wii remote controls, I’d have to say that the lack of an option to turn the aiming reticle off is kind of stupid. I mean, it’s so intuitive as-is. You know when you’re pointing at a zombie’s head, because you can see the remote pointing at the television. Hell, the remote even thumps in your hand when you aim the gun at an enemy. Why can’t we rely completely on the tactile feedback? Wouldn’t that add a neat little element of challenge? Instead, there’s the aiming reticle, crowding up the screen. Hey, at least it’s not as bad as the enormous HUD in Zelda: Twilight Princess.
And that’s about it. As the old saying goes, it takes only one blinged-out young man with diamond-encrusted platinum teeth (we call those “ice teeth”) to steal a tricky ho off an old playah, and Gears of War has long held Resident Evil 4 over its thigh and spanked the ever-loving stuff out of it. If the game industry were working correctly (Protip: it’s kind of not), this is how it would be for the next couple of years: game A revolutionizes a genre, and then game B arrives, taking the revolution into account, while marrying the genre back into the family where it belongs and rendering game A pretty much irrelevant. Gears of War has perfected the Resident Evil 4 formula: the challenges are faster and the enemies are more thrilling to kill. The set-pieces are simple and more honest; in Gears of War, climbing up a staircase into a mansion feels meatier and more meaningful than the original Resident Evil‘s entire zombie-infested mansion. After Gears of War, Resident Evil 4 feels more like a frequently-interrupted stroll through some rustic horror film scenery.
Dead or Alive producer Tomonobu Itagaki once somewhat-famously quipped, of Resident Evil 4, that though he appreciated the game for its integration of concepts, he couldn’t exactly stand playing it for too long because of how the main character had to stop and stand in place every time he fired his pistol. “What kind of man stops to fire a pistol?” asked Itagaki, to the fist-pumping, aww-yeahing, and hilarity of much of the internet. The truth is, a man who doesn’t want to throw his back out is the kind of man who stops to fire a pistol. Though you know what? I can let Itagaki’s ignorance slide; he’s obviously the kind of man who learned everything he needs to know about real life from Contra III: The Alien Wars. He knows what this world is about: brawny men hefting two-ton beef-cannons and strut-rushing into the collective face of the red-fleshed alien bitch-menace. And you know what else? Maybe he’s kind of right. There’s a certain avant-garde love to be found in this recent art-like obsession with detailing, in fiction of whatever format, the real-life-like reactions of ordinary people to fantastic situations. We’re a couple half-decades away from “summer blockbuster” being synonymous with a film about a labcoat-wearing scientist defeating a Hummer full of werewolves with a champagne glass full of orange Skittles.
Either way, why not let Leon move when he’s firing his gun? Really? The situation around him is already pretty hecked-up; disbelief all over the place is going to be suspended through the roof. We’ve got hundreds of psychic Spanish-speakers sharing a half a dozen faces, starting fires and brandishing pitchforks, over here. Leon is able to pause the action whenever he wants, and eat one of many green herbs that he finds conveniently lying all over the place. Why stay dead-realistic about the gun aiming, then? I’m not asking for rocket shoes and X-ray vision or anything. In fact, I could hardly even care less about being able to walk and shoot simultaneously. I’m sure it would be nice, though, really, I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it.
“I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it”. That’s a pretty meek way of putting it, though hey. There you go.
What other game-design misdemeanors do we put up with in the name of “enjoying” a “classic”? How about the completely, terribly bullstuff story? Resident Evil 4‘s story is pretty bad. Sorry to have to break it to you, kiddo. Does its story have to be good? I guess not; Super Mario Bros. had a lame-ass story about a guy rescuing the princess of a fungus fairyland from a turtle-dragon, though it manages to ascend to the status of almost art because it carries itself with noblest distinction.
Resident Evil 4 is not so noble. It’s lazy, in fact: it begins with a man named Leon S. Kennedy, who once fought zombies on his first day as a police officer (because a rookie cop was a good choice for a main character of a game (Resident Evil 2) set during a zombie outbreak in a small town), now on his way to a city in a Spanish-speaking country the name of which was omitted because Capcom Japan feared legal action from a tourism department or two, to rescue the president’s daughter from an unknown organization with unknown demands. “The president’s daughter” is the primary goal of this mission at the start because “The president” seemed too difficult for the story planners: on the one hand, the United States of America Tourism Department might end up suing Capcom because of the implication that the American President’s bodyguards are weak enough to allow him to be captured, which might increase the possibility of terrorism attempts; on the other hand, this is a Japanese videogame, and there is significantly less opportunity to show the president’s panties than there is to show the president’s daughter‘s panties, because the president probably wouldn’t be wearing a skirt, even on vacation.
Right from the start, the storytelling is hokey; the little secrets and somethings they’re not telling us are either groaningly obvious or sighingly contrived. The “president’s daughter” could be a brilliant MacGuffin, though in order for that to happen, it would have to stay a MacGuffin. You rescue her, because the planners were eager to get a skirt on the screen, and the “real plot” begins. That a “real plot” exists at all is kind of &^#$#ed; in the end, all they’re doing is giving Leon reasons to shoot beastly men in the head (or reasons to shoot them anywhere except the head), and each longwinded radio conversation screen functions something like a ten-minute cut-scene between world 2-4 and world 3-1 of Super Mario Bros., during which Super Mario meets a gnarly old man in the woods, eats sausages while discussing the meaning of life until sundown, and is eventually driven, on the old man’s bitching Harley, to the castle gates at World 3 under cover of midnight: thus, the sky being blue in World 2 and black in World 3. In other words, who the heck cares? In other words: don’t you dare say to me that Resident Evil 4 is a silly action game, and the story “doesn’t matter”. The simple fact that it has a story is confirmation enough, straight from the developers’ mouths, that they believed a story was necessary.
This weird, cautious self-importance manages to seep into the game’s soil and poison its reservoir in the tiniest spots. The story’s “chapters” are made up of large, ingenious interconnecting set-pieces teeming with the semi-undead; usually, to get from one section to another, you need to open up a few treasure boxes and find magic items — crests or whatever — to open doors. The first time I played this game, I’m pretty sure I didn’t ever once reach a door and find I didn’t have the right items. Why have the items at all? Why advertise the game’s genre as “Survival Horror” on the box (yes, that’s what the genre is listed as in the Japanese version), if it’s more of an “Adventure Horror”? Sure, “survival” in this case indicates that we must move forward at all costs, which means finding those crests, keys, or whatever. The menu screen is pretty nice — Diablo-like, space-based, kind of a mini-game in and of itself — though really, why have herbs and whatnot, anyway? This game lets you continue at the beginning of an area when you die, just like any old FPS. And death normally comes pretty suddenly, after a short burst of hard hits. Why not just have a Gears of War-esque “run away, take cover, and wait” healing system? I suppose that would be because the enemies aren’t very smart, and running away from them isn’t always difficult.
Let’s see how many more times we can mention Gears of War: how about the radio communication segments? Why does this have to take up the whole screen? I’m sure that the little camera whirling around Leon as he detaches the radio from his belt and holds it up to his ear has become something of a gaming archetype in recent years, though really, let’s look at this, here. When the screen fades to the radio correspondence mode, Leon is holding the radio up to his ear. Yet now we see a video image of him. And we see a video image of whoever he’s talking to. Of course, as he’s holding the radio up to his ear, this means that the camera in front of Leon must be hovering on an invisible wire over his face, and that the image of his current conversation partner is kind of sitting against his cheek. At first, the game’s eagerness to show you the radio is kind of understandable, because you’ve never seen the person that Leon is going to be talking to, so they might as well show you. Eventually, though, little things stick out like gangrenous thumbs: why the hell is the name of the character speaking displayed above the (huge) subtitle window? There are obviously only two faces visible at any given time, and if we can’t tell the difference between the two characters’ voices, then it’s not our fault — it’s the storytellers’. Why, in Gears of War, the main character only ever converses on the radio with someone he’s seen in person before, and even then, it’s only in voiceover. Sure, radio transmission also forces the main character to stick his finger in his ear and slow his trotting pace down to a crawl, though hey! At least it doesn’t swamp up the whole hecking screen and make our trigger fingers itchy. Dead Rising did something kind of right smack in the middle of Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War, with the walkie-talkie banter being displayed only in text and requiring the main character to hold the walkie talkie up to his head powerlessly. Either Gears of War 2 or Resident Evil 5 will have fixed this I’m guessing.
Either way, here it is, broken as can be, stinking up several parts of Resident Evil 4; the break-ins aren’t as frequent as in, say, Metal Gear Solid 3, though I dare say that they are also not one-tenth as well-written.
And here I will also compliment Resident Evil 4, by saying that even though the interruptions are not frequent, they are terribly painful, because I want to continue playing the game.
And now I will frown: the voice acting, as per Capcom, is pretty bone-chillingly atrocious, which may or may not have been for “camp” value, or maybe not. If the bad voice-acting, the stuffty story, and the weird inconsistencies like the radio-screen video-image paradox are, in any way, ever confirmed to be throwbacks, elbow-nudges, or send-ups of other “videogame cliches”, then I will be boarding an airplane with a pair of ceramic brass knuckles in my carry-on baggage, I swear. Resident Evil is already a send-up of horror movie cliches, now made thrilling because I’m in control of the action. We don’t need “ironic” videogame references stuffting in the game design gene pool, please.
If you read the internet (Protip: You’re doing so right now), you might have seen a story with “OMG” in the headline, which detailed the censorship of the Japanese version of this game. The censorship is not new news; the previous Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions were censored in exactly the same way. Namely, there’s no blood (none, of any kind, at all, et cetera) and the satisfying, explosive pop-splash of shooting a man in the head is deleted in favor of making every single location on an enemy’s body cause the same amount of damage when shot. Yes, this means you can shoot an enemy in the head five or six times in a row. Yes, this kind of breaks the game as the story starts to develop. Capcom is a fan of doing this to their games on both sides of every ocean: here in Japan, for example, where the content rating system consists of four ratings that are not “enforced” (A (all ages), B (12-13), C (13-17), D (17 and up)) and one rating that is “enforced” (Z (ages 18 and up only)), companies like Capcom are left with no other choice than to cast a vote of no-confidence in the system, and censor their games out of “social responsibility”. The simplest way of looking at it is this: the ratings board is stating from the start that none of their ratings matter except the one that does, so why should retailers trust the one rating that does, if the board is admitting that all of the other ratings are bullstuff? And, ironically, as with anything containing “mature” content (blood, alcohol, cigarettes, sex, income taxes), games like Resident Evil 4 are mostly popular amongst snot-nosed twelve-year-olds, anyway. It’s a shame, then, that the censorship practices have to kind of break the game — not as bad as in the US release of Monster Hunter, though, where the blood was removed because the enemies’ similarities to animals elevated the game to something of an animal-cruelty simulator, which is not to be chuckled at in this time of hooker-killing-simulators. Unfortunately, blood was also the game’s indicator of when you were hitting an enemy in the right spot (Monster Hunter keeps numbers out of the gameplay), so the game was essentially broken.
It’s a weird culture-clash, I tell you. The best solution, probably, is to just leave the games how they are intended to be, and everyone will be happy. I’ll be damned if the mere sight of a realistic man pointing a gun at a realistic man-monster wasn’t enough to cause an actual girl who dresses mostly in pink to avert her eyes from the screen. Should she keep her eyes on the screen after the “bang”, even she would raise critical questions about the absence of blood.
Like Ninja Gaiden on the PlayStation 3, Resident Evil 4 is getting a somewhat-deserved second wind on the Wii. It’s a breezy game despite its heavy subject matter, and despite the intrusion of some nasty game design archetypes and some groan-worthy narrative choices, it has exceptional flow, some awesome bosses, and tons of visceral crunch. The Wii version is the best version available, and I’m trying real hard to not mention how heart-breaking it is that the game can’t display in at least 720p resolutions, or how I wish Gears of War could use this control scheme, because hey, these things just aren’t possible. You have to make do with what you have.
I’ve saved the best for last: you know those brain-dead quick-timer events in the Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions, where you have to press a button quickly in order to make Leon cinematically avoid chains of certain perils? If you answered “Yes, that’s one of the dumbest trends in videogames today”, then you’re correct. They’re all gone in the Wii version — kind of. Rather than press buttons in time, all you have to do for every quick-timer event is shake the controller from side to side as vigorously as possible. Even long, elaborate sequences require no more than a vigorous controller shaking. I was prepared to call this the worst part of the game, and bemoan it as the lamest possible forced implementation of the Wii motion controls. I was going to say that, in a game where the motion controls are used so maturely and cleanly, they really didn’t have to put this in here. That was until I figured out the secret — you don’t have to shake the controller side-to-side. No, no, if you’re a man, you already know the best way to grip the controller. I tell you, I was sitting here in the middle of the night, window open, cool spring breeze wafting in, jerking this Wiimote like it was a pretty plastic penis, and there, on the screen in front of me, not some hot babe engaged in pornographic pleasure — no, it was Leon S. Kennedy running toward the screen, huffing and puffing, a boulder hot on his heels. There was a sudden, electric disconnect between Leon’s huffing and puffing and the jacking-off-like motion of my hand on the Wiimote, and a big spark jumped up in my throat and I had what was probably the best laugh I’ve had in months. Of course, I thought, of course. Thank you, Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, for making that perfectly clear to me. I’d been on the fence about it for years.
2012
text by Bennett
★★★★
“LIKE ALL THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE, NOT FOR KIDS.”
Let’s talk about difficulty in games.
In the early days, games were usually written, drawn, coded and directed by one lone nerd. The nerd usually had around six weeks to produce a game which would suck down a billion coins in video arcades worldwide. The nerd’s goal was onefold: the game had to suck down as many coins as possible.
The obstacle in the path of the nerd’s goal was also onefold. Because of time and manpower constraints, the game would have around twenty minutes worth of unique content, meaning that players could quickly become bored, and take their precious coins elsewhere. Thus there was a problem: videogames could not reach commercial success until the obstacle could be overcome and the goal could be met.
In 1980, Eugene Jarvis solved the problem at Williams when he was programming ‘Defender‘: he made the game amazingly hard, and it went on to suck down more coins than any other game other than Pacman. (Full disclosure: these facts have been dramatized.)
The eighties saw a large number of very difficult games introduced into arcades and even into homes. Of course, on a home console, Jarvis’ elegant solution for attracting coins to the slot was irrelevant; every sale of a cartridge, disk or a tape was – and is – final. But since many of the most popular games were written for the arcades and ported for the home, the difficulty remained.
In the 90s, though, the arcades gradually died, and there was no longer any commercial reason for games to be hard. And gradually, the difficulty went away. The old Prince of Persia gave you no option to save your game, and one hour to finish the entire game. The new Prince of Persia gives you a rewind button. Every PC game lets you save at will, inching through the game by trial and error like a climber on a two-inch safety rope, because they get much lower review scores if they do not. Games today offer step-by-step tutorials, balloon help, and almost never require you to read the manual. It’s not a matter of controversy: modern games are easy.
Every year a survey tells us that the median age of gamers has increased. Last year, the average US gamer was 33. This means that majority of today’s gamers were weaned on games which were exceedingly difficult. But they cannot buy games to test their skills and their patience. They are like Spartan warriors or Vikings who have been forcibly migrated to modern Sweden.
It is no longer a viable commercial proposition to write a game for these hardened champions. The only way that these games can be made is if they are made for free, and distributed for free.
Which brings us to La Mulana, a Japanese freeware indie game in the mold of Castlevania and Metroid. The developers want you to feel as though they have released a sequel to Maze of Galious for your dusty, electrically-unsafe MSX console. From the collectible MSX game cartridges in the game’s dungeons, to the portable MSX laptop which is used to decipher inscriptions and read maps, this game is a 100-hour love letter to the ‘Xbox of 1983’. It runs happily on a Pentium 66, and it’s reasonable to describe it as ‘retro stylee’.
Yet somehow, La Mulana manages to avoid the clunky presentation and gameplay which has aged the real 1980s games so dramatically. Operating without real 8-bit constraints, the developers have made an 8-bit game with modern ambition. It makes me want to throw away my next-gen devices, but at the same time it is richer and more satisfying than any game I could find for an emulator. La Mulana is deeper and more complicated than any other game with 16-colour graphics, though it is never inaccessible or obtuse. It is exceedingly difficult without ever feeling arbitrary.
Did I just say difficult? La Mulana, unlike almost every other recent game of merit, is more than difficult. It is the kind of difficult which is no longer present outside of Japanese arcades.
Let me paint a picture. Your character is Professor Lemeza Kosugi, but let’s call him ‘Indiana Jones’ for short. Dr. Jones has come to a room which is pitch black. Somewhere in the room, there is a torch which can be lit with his newly-acquired flare gun, but he only has seven flares, and the torch will only stay lit for around five seconds. This is nowhere near long enough to traverse the platforms and spike traps which line the room. But he cannot simply step through the room flailing his whip like a coward. For if he accidentally whips a sacred monument in the darkness, an angry god will strike him with lightning. Dr. Jones will have to memorise the room!
In La Mulana, you cannot save your game until you get enough money to buy a save card. Even then, you can’t save without returning to the beginning of the game. You’ll certainly get stuck. You may have to call your friends to ask them how to solve a particular puzzle, or overcome a particular boss. You’ll need to read the (html) manual from cover to cover. You’ll want to write the game to a floppy disk so you can wrench it out of the drive and throw it across the room and stomp on it.
It is such a refreshment. For the last few years, most games I’ve played have given me a feeling of inevitability – as though I will certainly reach the end, even if I play like a brain-dead cabbage with Lou Gehrig’s disease. It can feel like reading a repetitive book. By contrast, La Mulana makes it feel like you are changing the outcome through your actions. You can fail, even to the point where you might give up. Since it is possible to fail, it becomes possible to succeed.
Satoru Iwata recently described the appeal of Zelda thus:
“Whenever I solve a difficult puzzle in Zelda, it always makes me think “I might be pretty smart!”
When I cleared the first boss in La Mulana, I knew I was smart. This feeling totally eclipsed my feelings of guilt for having forsaken my work, my dinner, and my personal hygiene for the preceding 48 hours.
Yes, there are other hard games out there. There are other games where it is possible to fail. But not many of them are platformers, and not many of them have La Mulana’s quality. La Mulana is not ‘good for an indie game’ or ‘good for a freeware title’. It’s the best game I’ve played in a year. You get the feeling that the history of video games went awry about 20 years ago, and that La Mulana somehow came to us through a wormhole from a beautiful parallel universe.
★★★★
“LIKE ALL THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE, NOT FOR KIDS.”
Let’s talk about difficulty in games.
In the early days, games were usually written, drawn, coded and directed by one lone nerd. The nerd usually had around six weeks to produce a game which would suck down a billion coins in video arcades worldwide. The nerd’s goal was onefold: the game had to suck down as many coins as possible.
The obstacle in the path of the nerd’s goal was also onefold. Because of time and manpower constraints, the game would have around twenty minutes worth of unique content, meaning that players could quickly become bored, and take their precious coins elsewhere. Thus there was a problem: videogames could not reach commercial success until the obstacle could be overcome and the goal could be met.
In 1980, Eugene Jarvis solved the problem at Williams when he was programming ‘Defender‘: he made the game amazingly hard, and it went on to suck down more coins than any other game other than Pacman. (Full disclosure: these facts have been dramatized.)
The eighties saw a large number of very difficult games introduced into arcades and even into homes. Of course, on a home console, Jarvis’ elegant solution for attracting coins to the slot was irrelevant; every sale of a cartridge, disk or a tape was – and is – final. But since many of the most popular games were written for the arcades and ported for the home, the difficulty remained.
In the 90s, though, the arcades gradually died, and there was no longer any commercial reason for games to be hard. And gradually, the difficulty went away. The old Prince of Persia gave you no option to save your game, and one hour to finish the entire game. The new Prince of Persia gives you a rewind button. Every PC game lets you save at will, inching through the game by trial and error like a climber on a two-inch safety rope, because they get much lower review scores if they do not. Games today offer step-by-step tutorials, balloon help, and almost never require you to read the manual. It’s not a matter of controversy: modern games are easy.
Every year a survey tells us that the median age of gamers has increased. Last year, the average US gamer was 33. This means that majority of today’s gamers were weaned on games which were exceedingly difficult. But they cannot buy games to test their skills and their patience. They are like Spartan warriors or Vikings who have been forcibly migrated to modern Sweden.
It is no longer a viable commercial proposition to write a game for these hardened champions. The only way that these games can be made is if they are made for free, and distributed for free.
Which brings us to La Mulana, a Japanese freeware indie game in the mold of Castlevania and Metroid. The developers want you to feel as though they have released a sequel to Maze of Galious for your dusty, electrically-unsafe MSX console. From the collectible MSX game cartridges in the game’s dungeons, to the portable MSX laptop which is used to decipher inscriptions and read maps, this game is a 100-hour love letter to the ‘Xbox of 1983’. It runs happily on a Pentium 66, and it’s reasonable to describe it as ‘retro stylee’.
Yet somehow, La Mulana manages to avoid the clunky presentation and gameplay which has aged the real 1980s games so dramatically. Operating without real 8-bit constraints, the developers have made an 8-bit game with modern ambition. It makes me want to throw away my next-gen devices, but at the same time it is richer and more satisfying than any game I could find for an emulator. La Mulana is deeper and more complicated than any other game with 16-colour graphics, though it is never inaccessible or obtuse. It is exceedingly difficult without ever feeling arbitrary.
Did I just say difficult? La Mulana, unlike almost every other recent game of merit, is more than difficult. It is the kind of difficult which is no longer present outside of Japanese arcades.
Let me paint a picture. Your character is Professor Lemeza Kosugi, but let’s call him ‘Indiana Jones’ for short. Dr. Jones has come to a room which is pitch black. Somewhere in the room, there is a torch which can be lit with his newly-acquired flare gun, but he only has seven flares, and the torch will only stay lit for around five seconds. This is nowhere near long enough to traverse the platforms and spike traps which line the room. But he cannot simply step through the room flailing his whip like a coward. For if he accidentally whips a sacred monument in the darkness, an angry god will strike him with lightning. Dr. Jones will have to memorise the room!
In La Mulana, you cannot save your game until you get enough money to buy a save card. Even then, you can’t save without returning to the beginning of the game. You’ll certainly get stuck. You may have to call your friends to ask them how to solve a particular puzzle, or overcome a particular boss. You’ll need to read the (html) manual from cover to cover. You’ll want to write the game to a floppy disk so you can wrench it out of the drive and throw it across the room and stomp on it.
It is such a refreshment. For the last few years, most games I’ve played have given me a feeling of inevitability – as though I will certainly reach the end, even if I play like a brain-dead cabbage with Lou Gehrig’s disease. It can feel like reading a repetitive book. By contrast, La Mulana makes it feel like you are changing the outcome through your actions. You can fail, even to the point where you might give up. Since it is possible to fail, it becomes possible to succeed.
Satoru Iwata recently described the appeal of Zelda thus:
“Whenever I solve a difficult puzzle in Zelda, it always makes me think “I might be pretty smart!”
When I cleared the first boss in La Mulana, I knew I was smart. This feeling totally eclipsed my feelings of guilt for having forsaken my work, my dinner, and my personal hygiene for the preceding 48 hours.
Yes, there are other hard games out there. There are other games where it is possible to fail. But not many of them are platformers, and not many of them have La Mulana’s quality. La Mulana is not ‘good for an indie game’ or ‘good for a freeware title’. It’s the best game I’ve played in a year. You get the feeling that the history of video games went awry about 20 years ago, and that La Mulana somehow came to us through a wormhole from a beautiful parallel universe.
2006
text by tim rogers
★☆☆☆
“NOT A ROCK AND ROLL STAR OR AN ASTRONAUT DREAMING BIG DREAMS -- IT'S A TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR SUPERMARKET MANAGER GOING OVER HIS TAXES.”
I’ve checked my Wii Weather Channel twice today, and tomorrow’s forecast hasn’t changed: it’s going to be “Manic”, with a slight chance of scattered “Normal”; so while I’m still here sitting on “Depressive”, let’s do the unthinkable, and talk about how much I dislike — or even, possibly, hate — Wii Sports.
First, though, a disclaimer: do you realize how hecking long it took me to get my Wii online? If you said “almost six months” (or even “almost half a year”), then you’re absolutely right. Well, that’s not to say that I was trying for the whole time. Just that I bought the Wii, brought it home, groaned at the fact that it can’t display high-definition resolutions yet is compatible only to wireless internet connections — which seemed even more backward in reality than it did on paper — and then just let it sit there, unconnected to the rich, honey-dripping goodness of the internet, for nearly half a year. I checked the Virtual Console page on Nintendo’s website every couple weeks, wondering if anything was coming out that I wanted. And then, just two days ago, I got around to configuring my Macbook Pro to share my internet connection wirelessly, and after entering IP addresses and such into the Wii, it now triumphantly works online. There are still no Virtual Console games I would like to play that I don’t already own the original versions of.
I wonder if there’s some psychological equivalent of the IP address entry procedure that I need to complete before I can like Wii Sports. If anything, I’m confident that I don’t enjoy Wii Sports because it’s not for me — it’s for people who either haven’t ever played videogames or people who were old enough to purchase marijuana back when Pong was brand-spanking new, people who gave up on the videogame fad back when no top analyst was capable of believably making the prediction that someday game characters would start to look less like solid white lines and more like people. In Wii Sports, players frantically wave a Wii remote around in order to make their on-screen avatar, a puppet-like human being who may or may not resemble the player or one of the player’s loved (or hated) ones, perform various sports-like tasks. The game opens with three or four steel-handed disclaimers: secure the Wii remote strap tightly around your wrist, be careful not to hit anyone as you swing your arms, don’t wake the neighbors with your triumphant cries of “heck yeah”, et cetera. Though in this reviewer’s humble opinion, most of it isn’t really necessary. You don’t even need to stand up and look like a jerk-ass, like the people on the back of the box, to play this game. You can just sit on the sofa twiddling your wrists. If you don’t believe me, check The Internet. I do believe this phenomenon has been reported in other places.
Here at Action Button Dot Net, we play-test all games we review using a large enough high-definition television situated in the cockpit of a grounded F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, and even within these cramped confines we were able to bowl strikes in Wii Sports Bowling, or punch out our molasses-slow would-be adversaries in Wii Sports Boxing. We were even able to hit a homerun in Wii Sports Baseball. It’s really not that difficult to play and succeed at this game without growing a horrifying hairstyle and/or hiding under the sofa and/or flashing a smile so artificially white as to blind the Wii sensor bar atop your television.
When the Wii’s dynamic and interesting remote control was introduced to the public, some keen observers were quick to note that tilt sensitivity had been something that people wanted, perhaps subconsciously: remember your little sister playing Super Mario Bros. forever ago, yanking the controller up above shoulder level every time Mario jumped. You thought nothing of it, back then, and neither did she. And perhaps Nintendo themselves were thinking nothing of it when they created the Wii remote — from the start, their only intent had been to make a “new” controller, for “new” playing “experiences”, and the final design was probably just about as good as they were going to get. I mean, one of the other prototypes showed a “Hungry Hungry Hippos”-looking plastic toy platform with one giant button in the middle, for Peach’s sake.
Sure, tilt sensitivity is pretty awesome. I’ve played a couple demos of Wii games that felt tight and polished and sublimely enjoyable — Dragon Quest Swords, for example — though Wii Sports just, quite frankly, ain’t the future. It’s cheap and tiny; it’s not a rock star dreaming big dreams, it’s the manager of a twenty-four hour supermarket. It’s sold nearly 2 million copies in Japan to date, and it wasn’t released in America for more than two weeks before somebody wrote a letter to Kotaku about how the game had helped them lose something like fourteen pounds, and how they think they could be a spokesperson for Nintendo, the way Jared was for Subway sandwiches. Wii Sports is the weirdest kind of euphoria-exploitation, and it kind of chills me. It’s a little cheap parlor trick, a toy. I went into my Large Japanese Videogame Corporation after the New Years’ holiday had ended, and just about threw up in my mouth when a person I really respected beamed about how much they’d enjoyed playing Wii Sports with their family every night for literally eight days in a row. I asked this person if they’d not found the game kind of cheap and dull, and they replied, “Well, yeah. It was nice to see everyone else in my family having fun, though.”
Tilt sensitivity is a pretty awesome thing, as I’ve said in the above paragraph. I still think that. And I’m pretty dead convinced that Wii Sports doesn’t use it very well. The game that blew the doors off the DS, for example, was Nintendo’s Brain Age — a game about answering simple mathematical problems as per an actual doctor’s recommendation, in the interest of staving off Alzheimer’s disease. Compare this to the over-eager Nintendo DS playable demos shown behind closed doors at that year’s E3: Sega had shown a Sonic the Hedgehog demo with blocky 32-bit polygon graphics and no gameplay aside from the ability to make Sonic run faster and faster by scraping the bottom screen with the stylus. Wii Sports is to that Sonic demo as Dragon Quest Swords is to Brain Training, if you ask me. However, Dragon Quest Swords most likely does not present the “evergreen” quality to sell nearly as many copies to nearly as many consumers of nearly as many age groups as Brain Training.
This review then serves two purposes: Firstly, I’m being optimistic that, despite its great sales numbers, Wii Sports has not blown the doors off the Nintendo Wii. No, the door-blower-offer is still hidden somewhere shadowy, and it’s not Super Mario Galaxy, tear-jerkingly amazing as that game will likely be.
Secondly, I’m going to be pessimistic, though more about myself than about videogames: I’m just a guy writing a review on the internet, and not one of Nintendo’s marketing geniuses, so I can’t fathom what game will ultimately redeem the Nintendo Wii. If I worked for Nintendo, I’d probably make sure that their consoles had LAN ports, because even some people who own HDTVs don’t have wireless routers (ahem!), or else I’d insist on a minimum maximum resolution of 720p for all games, or maybe I’d bring a riding crop to board meetings and slap bald heads en masse until they agreed that rechargeable battery packs and a controller charging cradle were pack-in necessities for their system. (Seriously, I’ve changed the batteries in my Wii remotes like six times now, and I’ve barely played anything on it.) Though you know what? Einstein apparently failed basic math in high school, and needed to ask his friend to do his income taxes for him; piano virtuosos throughout the centuries have tripped on their untied shoelaces while shuffling out for an encore time and time again. As Nintendo is currently the golden boy of pioneering game innovation, we, the loving parents of adorable little Miis and proud owners of Nintendo Wiis and sweat-proof rubber Wiimote covers, might behold Nintendo’s little missteps — the vapidity of Wii Sports, the bleating shamelessness of Nintendo of America’s neanderthal president (seriously, this is business, not wrestling; or: seriously, the guy used to work at Pizza Hut; or: seriously, “Blue Ocean” means you’re not “fighting” anyone; “doing our own thing” means you don’t have to worry about laying “smack-downs” on your rivals — because you should be busy doing your “own thing”) — as dribbles of spittle coagulating at the corner of an idiot savant’s mouth. One day before he masturbates himself to death at the mercy of an issue of Dog Fancy, this unkempt little bastard is going to invent the Ultimate Toothbrushing Solution, which will prevent cavities and kill plaque and tartar in all peace-loving people after just one dose.
We here at Action Button Dot Net have been under fire, recently — before the official launch of our website, in fact — for writing reviews that accentuate the negative things in videogames, while applauding none of their strengths. A comment on one review bemoaned it for being “off-topic” and “rambling”; I think I replied to that comment personally, with a link to IGN and a well-wishing: “Have fun dying alone!” To wit: I’m sure that kid didn’t give a heck about the game I was reviewing, and neither did I. The goal of this website, as it were, is not to be the “Best source for reviews, previews, screenshots, and news regarding [GAME TITLE]” — it is to use reviews as tools for provoking discussion on videogames. That is to say, if you want a “review” of Wii Sports that tells you everything you need to know about the game, look somewhere else. I merely felt compelled to write something about the game, and didn’t arrive at any other conclusion than this sad realization: “This game is not for me. It’s not for me because I’ve played too many videogames, and seen what they can do.” If the game were a gateway drug pointing the way to a lifetime of substance abuse, it’d probably be Pixy Stix.
Let’s get critical for just a moment, though: the graphics kind of do suck. I’m not saying that I hate the way the Mii characters look, because hey, artistic expression and whatnot. Instead, I’ll say that the colors are washed out and acutely drab. The music is bouncy samba-pop trash. And, to reiterate, the gameplay is vapid and weirdly self-important. For example, in Wii Sports Tennis, where your onscreen avatar moves entirely on his or her own, all you can control is the swinging of the racket — of course, done by shaking the remote. You can do backhands or forehands, apparently, and you can (kind of) control the strength of your swing. I’ve pored over it for over five hours, however, and still don’t quite find the execution delicate enough to laud as triumphant. I can play the game seated on my sofa with a hand on my crotch, and still not lose. So why does the game split the screen when you’re playing with two or more players? The immediate answer is “So each player can see the game from his own perspective, and choose between backhand and forehand effectively.” I get really touchy when games split the screen, especially when they don’t have to. To test myself, I watched my avatar only as represented at the top of my friend’s side of the screen. I had no problem whatsoever differentiating between backhand and forehand. Do normal people not possess the spatial perception to backhand effectively without the screen being split? “No, they don’t,” quipped my friend. How about you? I asked him. I told him to look at my screen instead of his. He won the point. “I guess I can, though.” To be as blunt as possible, I feel a greater sense of intricate challenge when I grab the world globe on my Wii News Channel, and spin it with all my might, and try to grab and stop it on the exact point where I started. (In all honesty, that’s become a great and precious hobby these past twenty-four hours.)
In a way, Wii Sports makes me feel awesome for being able to do something Nintendo’s play-testers apparently thought most people can’t do. In another way, it makes me kind of cringe, because it’s so cheap and tacky that it’s not entirely adorable. Tennis is always doubles, which is kind of hokey, even if you’re just playing two players. When I swing my remote, both players on my team swing their rackets in unison, which is even hokier. It’s enough to make me imagine, for a second, a world where Konami ditches the excellent Winning Eleven series to instead focus on foosball table simulators; where games like Bandai-Namco’s Magic Taizen card-trick-trainer for Nintendo DS are actually popular — that hecking game includes a deck of cards in its box, so you can test the card tricks out on your friends. I say, don’t ask videogames to do what other things can do for you — if you want to learn card tricks, read a book about card tricks. If you want to play foosball, buy a foosball table. Certainly, Wii Sports stands head and shoulders above these two examples, though mostly only because it managed to fulfill its promise without even, you know, making a promise to begin with: it got people together, it got grandma to peel her eyes off her handheld Casio TV and the soap operas within, it got the goth sons and vegan daughters to come out of the basements and garages and enjoy Thanksgiving dinner like they’ll probably never enjoy Thanksgiving dinner again. Each sale of the game represents a flash-in-the-pan holiday for one someone somewhere; it is with sadness that I say that my first experience with the game was not such a monumental occasion, and therefore I can score it no higher than one star. If you disagree with this review, congratulations: you’re far more likely to marry your high school sweetheart than I. I didn’t even have a high school sweetheart, come to think of it — I was a borderline sociopath who spent six hours a night writing letters under dozens of pseudonyms to DIE HARD GAME FAN instead of sleeping, for God’s sake.
And . . . now I’ve said a bit too much.
★☆☆☆
“NOT A ROCK AND ROLL STAR OR AN ASTRONAUT DREAMING BIG DREAMS -- IT'S A TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR SUPERMARKET MANAGER GOING OVER HIS TAXES.”
I’ve checked my Wii Weather Channel twice today, and tomorrow’s forecast hasn’t changed: it’s going to be “Manic”, with a slight chance of scattered “Normal”; so while I’m still here sitting on “Depressive”, let’s do the unthinkable, and talk about how much I dislike — or even, possibly, hate — Wii Sports.
First, though, a disclaimer: do you realize how hecking long it took me to get my Wii online? If you said “almost six months” (or even “almost half a year”), then you’re absolutely right. Well, that’s not to say that I was trying for the whole time. Just that I bought the Wii, brought it home, groaned at the fact that it can’t display high-definition resolutions yet is compatible only to wireless internet connections — which seemed even more backward in reality than it did on paper — and then just let it sit there, unconnected to the rich, honey-dripping goodness of the internet, for nearly half a year. I checked the Virtual Console page on Nintendo’s website every couple weeks, wondering if anything was coming out that I wanted. And then, just two days ago, I got around to configuring my Macbook Pro to share my internet connection wirelessly, and after entering IP addresses and such into the Wii, it now triumphantly works online. There are still no Virtual Console games I would like to play that I don’t already own the original versions of.
I wonder if there’s some psychological equivalent of the IP address entry procedure that I need to complete before I can like Wii Sports. If anything, I’m confident that I don’t enjoy Wii Sports because it’s not for me — it’s for people who either haven’t ever played videogames or people who were old enough to purchase marijuana back when Pong was brand-spanking new, people who gave up on the videogame fad back when no top analyst was capable of believably making the prediction that someday game characters would start to look less like solid white lines and more like people. In Wii Sports, players frantically wave a Wii remote around in order to make their on-screen avatar, a puppet-like human being who may or may not resemble the player or one of the player’s loved (or hated) ones, perform various sports-like tasks. The game opens with three or four steel-handed disclaimers: secure the Wii remote strap tightly around your wrist, be careful not to hit anyone as you swing your arms, don’t wake the neighbors with your triumphant cries of “heck yeah”, et cetera. Though in this reviewer’s humble opinion, most of it isn’t really necessary. You don’t even need to stand up and look like a jerk-ass, like the people on the back of the box, to play this game. You can just sit on the sofa twiddling your wrists. If you don’t believe me, check The Internet. I do believe this phenomenon has been reported in other places.
Here at Action Button Dot Net, we play-test all games we review using a large enough high-definition television situated in the cockpit of a grounded F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, and even within these cramped confines we were able to bowl strikes in Wii Sports Bowling, or punch out our molasses-slow would-be adversaries in Wii Sports Boxing. We were even able to hit a homerun in Wii Sports Baseball. It’s really not that difficult to play and succeed at this game without growing a horrifying hairstyle and/or hiding under the sofa and/or flashing a smile so artificially white as to blind the Wii sensor bar atop your television.
When the Wii’s dynamic and interesting remote control was introduced to the public, some keen observers were quick to note that tilt sensitivity had been something that people wanted, perhaps subconsciously: remember your little sister playing Super Mario Bros. forever ago, yanking the controller up above shoulder level every time Mario jumped. You thought nothing of it, back then, and neither did she. And perhaps Nintendo themselves were thinking nothing of it when they created the Wii remote — from the start, their only intent had been to make a “new” controller, for “new” playing “experiences”, and the final design was probably just about as good as they were going to get. I mean, one of the other prototypes showed a “Hungry Hungry Hippos”-looking plastic toy platform with one giant button in the middle, for Peach’s sake.
Sure, tilt sensitivity is pretty awesome. I’ve played a couple demos of Wii games that felt tight and polished and sublimely enjoyable — Dragon Quest Swords, for example — though Wii Sports just, quite frankly, ain’t the future. It’s cheap and tiny; it’s not a rock star dreaming big dreams, it’s the manager of a twenty-four hour supermarket. It’s sold nearly 2 million copies in Japan to date, and it wasn’t released in America for more than two weeks before somebody wrote a letter to Kotaku about how the game had helped them lose something like fourteen pounds, and how they think they could be a spokesperson for Nintendo, the way Jared was for Subway sandwiches. Wii Sports is the weirdest kind of euphoria-exploitation, and it kind of chills me. It’s a little cheap parlor trick, a toy. I went into my Large Japanese Videogame Corporation after the New Years’ holiday had ended, and just about threw up in my mouth when a person I really respected beamed about how much they’d enjoyed playing Wii Sports with their family every night for literally eight days in a row. I asked this person if they’d not found the game kind of cheap and dull, and they replied, “Well, yeah. It was nice to see everyone else in my family having fun, though.”
Tilt sensitivity is a pretty awesome thing, as I’ve said in the above paragraph. I still think that. And I’m pretty dead convinced that Wii Sports doesn’t use it very well. The game that blew the doors off the DS, for example, was Nintendo’s Brain Age — a game about answering simple mathematical problems as per an actual doctor’s recommendation, in the interest of staving off Alzheimer’s disease. Compare this to the over-eager Nintendo DS playable demos shown behind closed doors at that year’s E3: Sega had shown a Sonic the Hedgehog demo with blocky 32-bit polygon graphics and no gameplay aside from the ability to make Sonic run faster and faster by scraping the bottom screen with the stylus. Wii Sports is to that Sonic demo as Dragon Quest Swords is to Brain Training, if you ask me. However, Dragon Quest Swords most likely does not present the “evergreen” quality to sell nearly as many copies to nearly as many consumers of nearly as many age groups as Brain Training.
This review then serves two purposes: Firstly, I’m being optimistic that, despite its great sales numbers, Wii Sports has not blown the doors off the Nintendo Wii. No, the door-blower-offer is still hidden somewhere shadowy, and it’s not Super Mario Galaxy, tear-jerkingly amazing as that game will likely be.
Secondly, I’m going to be pessimistic, though more about myself than about videogames: I’m just a guy writing a review on the internet, and not one of Nintendo’s marketing geniuses, so I can’t fathom what game will ultimately redeem the Nintendo Wii. If I worked for Nintendo, I’d probably make sure that their consoles had LAN ports, because even some people who own HDTVs don’t have wireless routers (ahem!), or else I’d insist on a minimum maximum resolution of 720p for all games, or maybe I’d bring a riding crop to board meetings and slap bald heads en masse until they agreed that rechargeable battery packs and a controller charging cradle were pack-in necessities for their system. (Seriously, I’ve changed the batteries in my Wii remotes like six times now, and I’ve barely played anything on it.) Though you know what? Einstein apparently failed basic math in high school, and needed to ask his friend to do his income taxes for him; piano virtuosos throughout the centuries have tripped on their untied shoelaces while shuffling out for an encore time and time again. As Nintendo is currently the golden boy of pioneering game innovation, we, the loving parents of adorable little Miis and proud owners of Nintendo Wiis and sweat-proof rubber Wiimote covers, might behold Nintendo’s little missteps — the vapidity of Wii Sports, the bleating shamelessness of Nintendo of America’s neanderthal president (seriously, this is business, not wrestling; or: seriously, the guy used to work at Pizza Hut; or: seriously, “Blue Ocean” means you’re not “fighting” anyone; “doing our own thing” means you don’t have to worry about laying “smack-downs” on your rivals — because you should be busy doing your “own thing”) — as dribbles of spittle coagulating at the corner of an idiot savant’s mouth. One day before he masturbates himself to death at the mercy of an issue of Dog Fancy, this unkempt little bastard is going to invent the Ultimate Toothbrushing Solution, which will prevent cavities and kill plaque and tartar in all peace-loving people after just one dose.
We here at Action Button Dot Net have been under fire, recently — before the official launch of our website, in fact — for writing reviews that accentuate the negative things in videogames, while applauding none of their strengths. A comment on one review bemoaned it for being “off-topic” and “rambling”; I think I replied to that comment personally, with a link to IGN and a well-wishing: “Have fun dying alone!” To wit: I’m sure that kid didn’t give a heck about the game I was reviewing, and neither did I. The goal of this website, as it were, is not to be the “Best source for reviews, previews, screenshots, and news regarding [GAME TITLE]” — it is to use reviews as tools for provoking discussion on videogames. That is to say, if you want a “review” of Wii Sports that tells you everything you need to know about the game, look somewhere else. I merely felt compelled to write something about the game, and didn’t arrive at any other conclusion than this sad realization: “This game is not for me. It’s not for me because I’ve played too many videogames, and seen what they can do.” If the game were a gateway drug pointing the way to a lifetime of substance abuse, it’d probably be Pixy Stix.
Let’s get critical for just a moment, though: the graphics kind of do suck. I’m not saying that I hate the way the Mii characters look, because hey, artistic expression and whatnot. Instead, I’ll say that the colors are washed out and acutely drab. The music is bouncy samba-pop trash. And, to reiterate, the gameplay is vapid and weirdly self-important. For example, in Wii Sports Tennis, where your onscreen avatar moves entirely on his or her own, all you can control is the swinging of the racket — of course, done by shaking the remote. You can do backhands or forehands, apparently, and you can (kind of) control the strength of your swing. I’ve pored over it for over five hours, however, and still don’t quite find the execution delicate enough to laud as triumphant. I can play the game seated on my sofa with a hand on my crotch, and still not lose. So why does the game split the screen when you’re playing with two or more players? The immediate answer is “So each player can see the game from his own perspective, and choose between backhand and forehand effectively.” I get really touchy when games split the screen, especially when they don’t have to. To test myself, I watched my avatar only as represented at the top of my friend’s side of the screen. I had no problem whatsoever differentiating between backhand and forehand. Do normal people not possess the spatial perception to backhand effectively without the screen being split? “No, they don’t,” quipped my friend. How about you? I asked him. I told him to look at my screen instead of his. He won the point. “I guess I can, though.” To be as blunt as possible, I feel a greater sense of intricate challenge when I grab the world globe on my Wii News Channel, and spin it with all my might, and try to grab and stop it on the exact point where I started. (In all honesty, that’s become a great and precious hobby these past twenty-four hours.)
In a way, Wii Sports makes me feel awesome for being able to do something Nintendo’s play-testers apparently thought most people can’t do. In another way, it makes me kind of cringe, because it’s so cheap and tacky that it’s not entirely adorable. Tennis is always doubles, which is kind of hokey, even if you’re just playing two players. When I swing my remote, both players on my team swing their rackets in unison, which is even hokier. It’s enough to make me imagine, for a second, a world where Konami ditches the excellent Winning Eleven series to instead focus on foosball table simulators; where games like Bandai-Namco’s Magic Taizen card-trick-trainer for Nintendo DS are actually popular — that hecking game includes a deck of cards in its box, so you can test the card tricks out on your friends. I say, don’t ask videogames to do what other things can do for you — if you want to learn card tricks, read a book about card tricks. If you want to play foosball, buy a foosball table. Certainly, Wii Sports stands head and shoulders above these two examples, though mostly only because it managed to fulfill its promise without even, you know, making a promise to begin with: it got people together, it got grandma to peel her eyes off her handheld Casio TV and the soap operas within, it got the goth sons and vegan daughters to come out of the basements and garages and enjoy Thanksgiving dinner like they’ll probably never enjoy Thanksgiving dinner again. Each sale of the game represents a flash-in-the-pan holiday for one someone somewhere; it is with sadness that I say that my first experience with the game was not such a monumental occasion, and therefore I can score it no higher than one star. If you disagree with this review, congratulations: you’re far more likely to marry your high school sweetheart than I. I didn’t even have a high school sweetheart, come to think of it — I was a borderline sociopath who spent six hours a night writing letters under dozens of pseudonyms to DIE HARD GAME FAN instead of sleeping, for God’s sake.
And . . . now I’ve said a bit too much.
text by Brandon Parker
★⋆☆☆
“STILL REAL TO ME DAMMIT.”
I think there’s a lot action video games could learn from wrestling video games. In most action video games, you run up, hit your opponent a few times, possibly with attacks that are either weak or strong. While that opponent is still going through his dying animation you’ve already killed the next six or so guys. There’s not a lot of time to get personal with your enemy.
Now me, I prefer circling around my opponent for a bit, sizing him up. We stare at each other for awhile maybe, move our fingers like we’re playing an invisible piano or what-have-you, then we start grabbing each other. There’s just something more satisfying to me about grabbing onto a man, trying to bend him into painful and awkward looking positions, reversing and countering my opponents moves while coming back from an ass beating, and generally just seeing two guys grappling on each other, pulling out their moves and trying to gain the upper hand.
The problem with wrestling video games for me is, they try too much to be like wrestling television. The wrestling you see on television is fake. Everyone knows this. For those who forget, you need only to make a wrestling related purchase and the sales clerk will undoubtedly inquire of you, “You know wrestling is fake, right?” as a reminder. It’s possible he might not say this verbally, look for clues in his body language such as a rolling of the eyes. You can also hear it from friends and family, if you have any of those and are comfortable enough around them to bring up the subject of wrasslin’.
Video games are fake simulations of “things,” you push buttons and if the game is good enough are tricked into thinking the task you’re performing is enjoyable. But wrestling is already a simulation. You watch it and if it’s good enough are tricked into thinking the two guys wrestling each other are really two guys pissed off at each other and wanting to beat the other guy, and JESUS look what he just did to that guys HEAD! Video games have their own limitations that require you to have a suspension of disbelief, I don’t see any reason they need to take on wrestling’s limitations as well.
In SmackDown vs. Raw 2007, there’s a part in the single-player storyline where you get hit on the head with a magic wand and as a consequence are turned into a female. This part got me a little excited, I think I even leaned forward to get a closer look. Here, I thought, maybe the designers have finally realized they don’t have to be shackled into pretending the game is a real TV show with real actor people. But they took the easy way out like the compromising bitches they are and went for the, “it was all just a dream,” bullstuff.
In a wrestling video game, Undertaker can really be a guy who comes back from the dead, instead of a guy who pretends to be dead. An old woman can really give birth to a hand. Why not have somebody, say Kurt Angle or whoever, get knifed to death in the locker room by some crazy wrestler out for revenge. Maybe Kurt spilled coffee on him, I don’t know. Anyway, say later on you’re investigating the murder, new clues surface, etc., and it turns out the guy who murdered Kurt is your opponent this Sunday, at the PAY-PER-VIEW! Not only that, you’re wrestling him in a flaming cage and there’s going to be a lion in there as well. You’re going to need help for this one so you talk to Papa Shango, who resurrects Kurt Angle as a wrestler eating zombie with his voodoo magic so you two can go and get your vengeance at what I’m sure is the VENGEANCE pay-per-view. If Vince McMahon could get away with that I know he’d do it. So why hold back in the video game?
You know what my ideal wrestling game is? Let me tell you. Imagine somebody, let’s say Shawn Michaels, is trudging through some type of African savanna or Australian badlands type of terrain. He comes across a watering hole. He’s thirsty, so he gets a drink. Mmm, that’s good. Wait! He hears a gazelle approaching, so he climbs up into a nearby tree. The gazelle cautiously approaches the watering hole. He looks around for predators and, seeing none, lowers his head to get a drink. Shawn Michaels strikes! “ELBOW DROP FROM THE TOP OF THE OAK TREE ONTO THAT GAZELLE, BAH GAWD! HE JUST KILLED THAT DAMN GAZELLE!! HE’S GOT NO SOOWWWWLLL!“ The Heartbreak Kid lifts up that damn dead gazelle and lugs it across his back, carrying it across the wasteland to his tribal leader Triple H. A great feast is prepared for the coming attack on the Luchadore tribe a few hills over, but they get into an argument over the food. For example, Triple H might say, “I want the heart.” Then Shawn Michaels may say, “No.” Then they beat each other with steel folding chairs.
So I guess it would be something like wrestling, Snake Eater and Afrika. Some sort of survival grappling game. Compared to this ideal game, this, rogue nation of wrestle heaven, I have to say that WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2007 doesn’t really come close. As a simulation of an actual episode of WWE television it’s pretty accurate though, but that’s more like living in wrestle hell. You have to listen to assy rock music at every menu and loading screen and have a roster of mostly generic and uninteresting people to play as. There’s also the repetitive commentary and stupid stuff like “bra & panty” matches.
I don’t have time for that nonsense. I’m a man and I just want to see two other men of great athletic skill pretend to fight each other. It’s also a bonus if there’s a compelling reason for their pretend fight. This hardly happens on TV wrestling though. So while it’s accurate as a TV wrestling simulator, they should worry more about making a fun wrestling game instead. It’s like a video game based on the game Madden based on the sport of football, when instead it should be a game based on modern day gladiatorial combat.
I still recommend you give it a play though if you’ve never played a wrestling game before or get embarrassed just from seeing it on television while flipping through channels. It’d be good for you to experience something new. You should round up three or more other people, get a controller for each of them, a multi-tap if you need one of those, and have yourselves a 6 man ladder match. It’s fun beating the stuff out of your friends, trying to be the first to climb up a ladder while anywhere around 4 other guys are trying to knock it down or get up there themselves. Next time you play Fight Night you’ll wish they had Tornado-Tag Matches.
★⋆☆☆
“STILL REAL TO ME DAMMIT.”
I think there’s a lot action video games could learn from wrestling video games. In most action video games, you run up, hit your opponent a few times, possibly with attacks that are either weak or strong. While that opponent is still going through his dying animation you’ve already killed the next six or so guys. There’s not a lot of time to get personal with your enemy.
Now me, I prefer circling around my opponent for a bit, sizing him up. We stare at each other for awhile maybe, move our fingers like we’re playing an invisible piano or what-have-you, then we start grabbing each other. There’s just something more satisfying to me about grabbing onto a man, trying to bend him into painful and awkward looking positions, reversing and countering my opponents moves while coming back from an ass beating, and generally just seeing two guys grappling on each other, pulling out their moves and trying to gain the upper hand.
The problem with wrestling video games for me is, they try too much to be like wrestling television. The wrestling you see on television is fake. Everyone knows this. For those who forget, you need only to make a wrestling related purchase and the sales clerk will undoubtedly inquire of you, “You know wrestling is fake, right?” as a reminder. It’s possible he might not say this verbally, look for clues in his body language such as a rolling of the eyes. You can also hear it from friends and family, if you have any of those and are comfortable enough around them to bring up the subject of wrasslin’.
Video games are fake simulations of “things,” you push buttons and if the game is good enough are tricked into thinking the task you’re performing is enjoyable. But wrestling is already a simulation. You watch it and if it’s good enough are tricked into thinking the two guys wrestling each other are really two guys pissed off at each other and wanting to beat the other guy, and JESUS look what he just did to that guys HEAD! Video games have their own limitations that require you to have a suspension of disbelief, I don’t see any reason they need to take on wrestling’s limitations as well.
In SmackDown vs. Raw 2007, there’s a part in the single-player storyline where you get hit on the head with a magic wand and as a consequence are turned into a female. This part got me a little excited, I think I even leaned forward to get a closer look. Here, I thought, maybe the designers have finally realized they don’t have to be shackled into pretending the game is a real TV show with real actor people. But they took the easy way out like the compromising bitches they are and went for the, “it was all just a dream,” bullstuff.
In a wrestling video game, Undertaker can really be a guy who comes back from the dead, instead of a guy who pretends to be dead. An old woman can really give birth to a hand. Why not have somebody, say Kurt Angle or whoever, get knifed to death in the locker room by some crazy wrestler out for revenge. Maybe Kurt spilled coffee on him, I don’t know. Anyway, say later on you’re investigating the murder, new clues surface, etc., and it turns out the guy who murdered Kurt is your opponent this Sunday, at the PAY-PER-VIEW! Not only that, you’re wrestling him in a flaming cage and there’s going to be a lion in there as well. You’re going to need help for this one so you talk to Papa Shango, who resurrects Kurt Angle as a wrestler eating zombie with his voodoo magic so you two can go and get your vengeance at what I’m sure is the VENGEANCE pay-per-view. If Vince McMahon could get away with that I know he’d do it. So why hold back in the video game?
You know what my ideal wrestling game is? Let me tell you. Imagine somebody, let’s say Shawn Michaels, is trudging through some type of African savanna or Australian badlands type of terrain. He comes across a watering hole. He’s thirsty, so he gets a drink. Mmm, that’s good. Wait! He hears a gazelle approaching, so he climbs up into a nearby tree. The gazelle cautiously approaches the watering hole. He looks around for predators and, seeing none, lowers his head to get a drink. Shawn Michaels strikes! “ELBOW DROP FROM THE TOP OF THE OAK TREE ONTO THAT GAZELLE, BAH GAWD! HE JUST KILLED THAT DAMN GAZELLE!! HE’S GOT NO SOOWWWWLLL!“ The Heartbreak Kid lifts up that damn dead gazelle and lugs it across his back, carrying it across the wasteland to his tribal leader Triple H. A great feast is prepared for the coming attack on the Luchadore tribe a few hills over, but they get into an argument over the food. For example, Triple H might say, “I want the heart.” Then Shawn Michaels may say, “No.” Then they beat each other with steel folding chairs.
So I guess it would be something like wrestling, Snake Eater and Afrika. Some sort of survival grappling game. Compared to this ideal game, this, rogue nation of wrestle heaven, I have to say that WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2007 doesn’t really come close. As a simulation of an actual episode of WWE television it’s pretty accurate though, but that’s more like living in wrestle hell. You have to listen to assy rock music at every menu and loading screen and have a roster of mostly generic and uninteresting people to play as. There’s also the repetitive commentary and stupid stuff like “bra & panty” matches.
I don’t have time for that nonsense. I’m a man and I just want to see two other men of great athletic skill pretend to fight each other. It’s also a bonus if there’s a compelling reason for their pretend fight. This hardly happens on TV wrestling though. So while it’s accurate as a TV wrestling simulator, they should worry more about making a fun wrestling game instead. It’s like a video game based on the game Madden based on the sport of football, when instead it should be a game based on modern day gladiatorial combat.
I still recommend you give it a play though if you’ve never played a wrestling game before or get embarrassed just from seeing it on television while flipping through channels. It’d be good for you to experience something new. You should round up three or more other people, get a controller for each of them, a multi-tap if you need one of those, and have yourselves a 6 man ladder match. It’s fun beating the stuff out of your friends, trying to be the first to climb up a ladder while anywhere around 4 other guys are trying to knock it down or get up there themselves. Next time you play Fight Night you’ll wish they had Tornado-Tag Matches.
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“PRECISELY THE KIND OF TOSSED-OFF, DOWN-TO-EARTH POP-SONG VIDEOGAME THESE PEOPLE NEED TO BE MAKING A WHOLE LOT MORE OF.”
More shocking things have happened than Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings‘ not being a terrible videogame at all. What with all the breeding and inbreeding surrounding it, you’d think it would have no right to be anything other than complete trash. It’s a spinoff of a Final Fantasy game that “average gamers” hated despite its accidental brilliance; in the perfect world as represented by the Square-Enix corporate umbrella, the “niche gamers” that are able to find the genius in a game like Final Fantasy XII can go to hell and then die again. You’d think that if they were going to make a spinoff or a side-story, they’d also spray a thick layer of bullstuff all over it, to make it the same brand of zippers-and-pleather fetishism schlock that they make most of their money from these days. Not so — Square-Enix have decided to do the previously unthinkable, and respect their audience, though only in the most ham-handed way: they have graciously created the “Ivalice Alliance”, a brand name for videogames existing within the “Final Fantasy” brand name, which happen to take place in the mythical land of Ivalice, where lizard men and bunny girls politely obey the laws of combat and agility stat numbers as they fight for the future, where the music of Hitoshi Sakimoto, which is like a special kind of language developed to convey strategic thought, booms down from the sky at intense moments, or twitters in the background while generals are micromanaging troops. The “Ivalice Alliance” will no doubt eventually pop out an all-new Final Fantasy Tactics adventure; setting up a new brand name to house remakes and spinoffs is kind of &^#$#ed. At present, the brand is already off to a rolling start, with Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings and Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War, already released, and Final Fantasy Tactics A2 and Final Fantasy XII: International + Zodiac Job System on the way. I don’t know about “Job System” being in a game title, especially preceded by a mathematic symbol. It leaves kind of a weird aftertaste. It also makes me kind of thirsty for the inevitable day that someone makes a game title that contains a balanced equation.
At any rate, Revenant Wings is a shockingly not terrible game, for what it’s worth. You think it would play something like Kingdom Hearts without the Disney or Sephiroth, though I guess the 160-year-old man who makes the important business decisions (strike down innovation in the name of paying as few full salaries as possible) was out attending his grandson’s funeral or something, because someone decided to roll with the crazy idea to try to make this actually a good game.
It’s a real-time strategy game, sort of, though less like StarCraft and more like Ogre Battle. Final Fantasy XII was something original because it played kind of like Ogre Battle without all of the fading to black and auto-fighting. FFXII was producer Yasumi Matsuno’s way of trying to come to grips with his dream to create a numberless, dynamic, evolving role-playing adventure game, though Square’s desire to repress his more interesting ideas apparently sent him running. Matsuno is one of the few people in game design we can probably call a “genius”; he was without a doubt the most creatively talented person getting a monthly direct bank deposit from the Square-Enix corporation, or perhaps any Japanese videogame corporation. As convinced as I and we are that Matsuno can make a hell of a videogame if only someone would give him enough money and trust, we’re not about to say that Revenant Wings was doomed to be a horrible game just because Matsuno wasn’t involved.
It’s still a shock that it wound up not being terrible.
Someone with a couple more-than-interesting ideas threw them together, and here you have it. It’s a real-time strategy game that flows kind of like Final Fantasy XII; most of the missions take place indoors, which is quaint. It feels at times almost like Baldur’s Gate, though at many moments the truth shines in: the people who made this game never played Baldur’s Gate, maybe because Baldur’s Gate was never released in the Japanese language. In many ways, the game is free to do whatever it wants because of this pseudo-fact — just as the terrifyingly bad third-person shooter Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII was free to do whatever it wanted because none of its designers had apparently ever played a good shooting game. Where Dirge took the path to the dark side, Revenant takes the path to the light side. It’s a cute, pleasant little game, like Baldur’s Gate meets the stage-by-stage action-adventure spirit of one of those above-average side-scrollers on the Super Famicom.
The game makes nice use of the Nintendo DS touch screen for controlling your units. The bottom screen is the field screen; the top screen is a map; press the L or R button to reverse the two screens; with the map on the bottom screen, touch a location to go there. It’s pretty tight and fast. Almost too fast at times — there’s no speed setting option, and there’s no way to pause the battle and issue commands, which, come to think of it, is kind of inexcusable.
There’s plenty of pleasant brain-clutter all over the place: summon gates allow you to summon monsters; choose the types of monsters you want to be able to summon before the battle by forging a “Summon Deck”; assign the monsters to specific “leader” characters, click the leader character’s portrait at the top of the field screen to select that leader and all of his or her monsters. Pay careful mind to the types of opponents you’re fighting, so you know whom to send after whom. Magic units beat flying units, close-range units beat magic units, close-range units beat flying units. Position your healing units in the right spot on the battlefield to keep your troops living.
The battles get pretty hectic, and sometimes it’s kind of impossible to know what the hell is going on. The graphics are nice enough when you’re not relying on them to do your laundry, I guess. The backgrounds are some Xenogears-esque polygonal 3D, though the screen doesn’t rotate — early Weekly Famitsu articles depicted a little icon in the corner of the screen that you could tap to drag-rotate the map, though that would probably be the lifeboat that broke the battleship’s back, and render the game an unwieldy mess. Speaking of messy, the character sprites are kind of hard to make out, most of the time. When the screen isn’t actively discombobulating in the name of bitching 3D, the sprites are so “Vintage Final Fantasy” that it might make a man serene inside. Once things start moving, it gets confusing. At least the music is nicer than nice; it’s kind of funny how much post-Final Fantasy Tactics Hitoshi Sakimoto’s stuff sounds like it’d fit into Chrono Trigger when it’s rendered with the DS sound chip. The save menu music, in particular, is pretty sublime. During battle, you can hear some choice cuts from Final Fantasy XII now played with warmer, happier, more lovably handheld-feeling synthesizers.
In short, this game is cute and small and kind of easy and mostly good. There’s no two-player wireless versus or co-op mode, which is just plain not cool, though the one-player quest is a breezy and poppy and breathless story about dumb little kids on a dumb air-pirate-battling adventure on a floating continent; it never stops or stoops to pander, which, in this day and age, is utterly remarkable. You can open the menu between battles to unlock new summon monsters using crystals earned in battle, or to put new swords or armor on your troops, which mostly feels like busywork because the swords or armor are just things you find in the natural course of the missions, anyway, though for the most part, it all flows very well. It’s Square’s second attempt at a real-time strategy for the Nintendo DS, after Heroes of Mana, which was so easy that it felt vaguely wrong, like breaking into someone’s kitchen to eat leftovers out of their refrigerator while they’re upstairs watching TV in bed.
Square has flip-flopped back and forth between utter conviction that the DS is a piece of stuff and yen-sign-irised hope that at least a million of those ten million units sold might have found the hands of die-hard Final Fantasy fans. To wit: they announced Dragon Quest IX for DS, and then scrapped the controversial action-RPG style of Dragon Quest IX because Children of Mana (an action-RPG) didn’t sell well enough. There’s going to come a time that Square-Enix has to untie the bundle of controller cords in their game shelf, to sort the pride from the common sense. If Heroes of Mana, Square’s obvious water-testing DS RTS, had sold a half a million copies (it didn’t), Revenant Wings, blest with a Final Fantasy brand name, would no doubt have received the smothering, triple-A, canon treatment, and the story would be bogged down with children whining about how they don’t want to grow up. Instead, we get pages torn out of the “Dragon Ball” rulebook; for example, we have a character who hates the good guys, yet is forced to fight on your side because of some dopey magic torture ring. The game flow follows suit in charming little lapses of game-design grammar, like how a “Gambit” is just the single action you configure a character to automatically use over and over again, not the complicated yet elegant (and kind of revolutionary) AI scripting the term represented in Final Fantasy XII. Et cetera. Though the final product is kind of gimped out of a multiplayer mode or very much real depth at all behind edge-of-the-moment strategic planning, this is seriously the kind of tossed-off, down-to-earth videogame these people need to be making a whole lot more of.
★★☆☆
“PRECISELY THE KIND OF TOSSED-OFF, DOWN-TO-EARTH POP-SONG VIDEOGAME THESE PEOPLE NEED TO BE MAKING A WHOLE LOT MORE OF.”
More shocking things have happened than Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings‘ not being a terrible videogame at all. What with all the breeding and inbreeding surrounding it, you’d think it would have no right to be anything other than complete trash. It’s a spinoff of a Final Fantasy game that “average gamers” hated despite its accidental brilliance; in the perfect world as represented by the Square-Enix corporate umbrella, the “niche gamers” that are able to find the genius in a game like Final Fantasy XII can go to hell and then die again. You’d think that if they were going to make a spinoff or a side-story, they’d also spray a thick layer of bullstuff all over it, to make it the same brand of zippers-and-pleather fetishism schlock that they make most of their money from these days. Not so — Square-Enix have decided to do the previously unthinkable, and respect their audience, though only in the most ham-handed way: they have graciously created the “Ivalice Alliance”, a brand name for videogames existing within the “Final Fantasy” brand name, which happen to take place in the mythical land of Ivalice, where lizard men and bunny girls politely obey the laws of combat and agility stat numbers as they fight for the future, where the music of Hitoshi Sakimoto, which is like a special kind of language developed to convey strategic thought, booms down from the sky at intense moments, or twitters in the background while generals are micromanaging troops. The “Ivalice Alliance” will no doubt eventually pop out an all-new Final Fantasy Tactics adventure; setting up a new brand name to house remakes and spinoffs is kind of &^#$#ed. At present, the brand is already off to a rolling start, with Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings and Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War, already released, and Final Fantasy Tactics A2 and Final Fantasy XII: International + Zodiac Job System on the way. I don’t know about “Job System” being in a game title, especially preceded by a mathematic symbol. It leaves kind of a weird aftertaste. It also makes me kind of thirsty for the inevitable day that someone makes a game title that contains a balanced equation.
At any rate, Revenant Wings is a shockingly not terrible game, for what it’s worth. You think it would play something like Kingdom Hearts without the Disney or Sephiroth, though I guess the 160-year-old man who makes the important business decisions (strike down innovation in the name of paying as few full salaries as possible) was out attending his grandson’s funeral or something, because someone decided to roll with the crazy idea to try to make this actually a good game.
It’s a real-time strategy game, sort of, though less like StarCraft and more like Ogre Battle. Final Fantasy XII was something original because it played kind of like Ogre Battle without all of the fading to black and auto-fighting. FFXII was producer Yasumi Matsuno’s way of trying to come to grips with his dream to create a numberless, dynamic, evolving role-playing adventure game, though Square’s desire to repress his more interesting ideas apparently sent him running. Matsuno is one of the few people in game design we can probably call a “genius”; he was without a doubt the most creatively talented person getting a monthly direct bank deposit from the Square-Enix corporation, or perhaps any Japanese videogame corporation. As convinced as I and we are that Matsuno can make a hell of a videogame if only someone would give him enough money and trust, we’re not about to say that Revenant Wings was doomed to be a horrible game just because Matsuno wasn’t involved.
It’s still a shock that it wound up not being terrible.
Someone with a couple more-than-interesting ideas threw them together, and here you have it. It’s a real-time strategy game that flows kind of like Final Fantasy XII; most of the missions take place indoors, which is quaint. It feels at times almost like Baldur’s Gate, though at many moments the truth shines in: the people who made this game never played Baldur’s Gate, maybe because Baldur’s Gate was never released in the Japanese language. In many ways, the game is free to do whatever it wants because of this pseudo-fact — just as the terrifyingly bad third-person shooter Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII was free to do whatever it wanted because none of its designers had apparently ever played a good shooting game. Where Dirge took the path to the dark side, Revenant takes the path to the light side. It’s a cute, pleasant little game, like Baldur’s Gate meets the stage-by-stage action-adventure spirit of one of those above-average side-scrollers on the Super Famicom.
The game makes nice use of the Nintendo DS touch screen for controlling your units. The bottom screen is the field screen; the top screen is a map; press the L or R button to reverse the two screens; with the map on the bottom screen, touch a location to go there. It’s pretty tight and fast. Almost too fast at times — there’s no speed setting option, and there’s no way to pause the battle and issue commands, which, come to think of it, is kind of inexcusable.
There’s plenty of pleasant brain-clutter all over the place: summon gates allow you to summon monsters; choose the types of monsters you want to be able to summon before the battle by forging a “Summon Deck”; assign the monsters to specific “leader” characters, click the leader character’s portrait at the top of the field screen to select that leader and all of his or her monsters. Pay careful mind to the types of opponents you’re fighting, so you know whom to send after whom. Magic units beat flying units, close-range units beat magic units, close-range units beat flying units. Position your healing units in the right spot on the battlefield to keep your troops living.
The battles get pretty hectic, and sometimes it’s kind of impossible to know what the hell is going on. The graphics are nice enough when you’re not relying on them to do your laundry, I guess. The backgrounds are some Xenogears-esque polygonal 3D, though the screen doesn’t rotate — early Weekly Famitsu articles depicted a little icon in the corner of the screen that you could tap to drag-rotate the map, though that would probably be the lifeboat that broke the battleship’s back, and render the game an unwieldy mess. Speaking of messy, the character sprites are kind of hard to make out, most of the time. When the screen isn’t actively discombobulating in the name of bitching 3D, the sprites are so “Vintage Final Fantasy” that it might make a man serene inside. Once things start moving, it gets confusing. At least the music is nicer than nice; it’s kind of funny how much post-Final Fantasy Tactics Hitoshi Sakimoto’s stuff sounds like it’d fit into Chrono Trigger when it’s rendered with the DS sound chip. The save menu music, in particular, is pretty sublime. During battle, you can hear some choice cuts from Final Fantasy XII now played with warmer, happier, more lovably handheld-feeling synthesizers.
In short, this game is cute and small and kind of easy and mostly good. There’s no two-player wireless versus or co-op mode, which is just plain not cool, though the one-player quest is a breezy and poppy and breathless story about dumb little kids on a dumb air-pirate-battling adventure on a floating continent; it never stops or stoops to pander, which, in this day and age, is utterly remarkable. You can open the menu between battles to unlock new summon monsters using crystals earned in battle, or to put new swords or armor on your troops, which mostly feels like busywork because the swords or armor are just things you find in the natural course of the missions, anyway, though for the most part, it all flows very well. It’s Square’s second attempt at a real-time strategy for the Nintendo DS, after Heroes of Mana, which was so easy that it felt vaguely wrong, like breaking into someone’s kitchen to eat leftovers out of their refrigerator while they’re upstairs watching TV in bed.
Square has flip-flopped back and forth between utter conviction that the DS is a piece of stuff and yen-sign-irised hope that at least a million of those ten million units sold might have found the hands of die-hard Final Fantasy fans. To wit: they announced Dragon Quest IX for DS, and then scrapped the controversial action-RPG style of Dragon Quest IX because Children of Mana (an action-RPG) didn’t sell well enough. There’s going to come a time that Square-Enix has to untie the bundle of controller cords in their game shelf, to sort the pride from the common sense. If Heroes of Mana, Square’s obvious water-testing DS RTS, had sold a half a million copies (it didn’t), Revenant Wings, blest with a Final Fantasy brand name, would no doubt have received the smothering, triple-A, canon treatment, and the story would be bogged down with children whining about how they don’t want to grow up. Instead, we get pages torn out of the “Dragon Ball” rulebook; for example, we have a character who hates the good guys, yet is forced to fight on your side because of some dopey magic torture ring. The game flow follows suit in charming little lapses of game-design grammar, like how a “Gambit” is just the single action you configure a character to automatically use over and over again, not the complicated yet elegant (and kind of revolutionary) AI scripting the term represented in Final Fantasy XII. Et cetera. Though the final product is kind of gimped out of a multiplayer mode or very much real depth at all behind edge-of-the-moment strategic planning, this is seriously the kind of tossed-off, down-to-earth videogame these people need to be making a whole lot more of.
2007
text by Carl Bohlin
★★★☆
“IS TO THE ORIGINAL WARCRAFT WHAT A MODERN BULLET-HELL SHOOTER IS TO THE FIRST GRADIUS.”
Supreme Commander takes the RTS genre to its logical short-term conclusion. Want to build 100 amphibious tanks? Okay, just queue that stuff up and you’ll have them in a few minutes. Want to give them all orders at once? Sure, absolutely no problem. There is no upper limit to the amount of units you can have selected at any one time. Want to tell all of your warships with legs that maybe they should head over there for a while, even though they’re scattered all over the (motherhecking insanely gigantic) map? You just zoom out enough that you can see the entire map, which is terribly easy and rewarding, select every unit on the field, click on the warship icon, and there you go!
User empowerment through enhancements to the interface, though, is what this game is about: Taking away all the dumb limitations that hem the strategic thinking and innovation of the player in. The game is like comparing the tabbed, spell-checking, greasemonkey’d, fasterfox’d, adblocked Firefox to the rest of the genre’s Internet Explorer 3.0 for Palm and it’s incredible how easy, fun and rewarding it is to use the tools they’ve given you.
Supreme Commander is a game that really, truly wants to make the people who play RTS games ask themselves just what in the hell it is that they’ve been putting up with for all these years. The standard user interface for this particular genre is still trying to respect the limitations set down by games with a lower resolution than my cellphone. It is like intentionally making paper an inch thick because we used to write on stone tablets — which is kind of puzzling, and makes you wonder if these people actually understand what it they’re making. If they ever play their own creations, or just keep making them as some kind of weird tribute to the games that they liked when they were kids. Take Starcraft for one: The player can only select a tiny amount of units at once, he can only give them a single order, and if he wants to be competitive against even the dumbest AI, he will need to constantly micromanage them. The base-building is slow, inefficient, and needs constant looking after, even though it would be terrible easy to give the player more of an indirect, hands-off building tool. Think something more along the lines of planning the base, and then creating some engineers to do it for you, without needing constant input from you. Instead you are forced to both plan the base out in your mind, give tiny, stupid orders to your builders, and just generally micromanage everything to a terrible degree.
Clearly, this was something that shouldn’t, couldn’t last. Not in such a technophilic environment as game design.
Enter Gas-Powered Games, and let none who experience their creation tolerate anything less than what they have created from now on. And yet, I am afraid that it will be remembered as more of a Dragon Quarter than a Goldeneye. Something that could have shown the entire genre it was spawned from how to save itself: To become something that it should always have wanted to become, yet was ignored and cast away because not enough people bought it, or really got what it was trying to do. This game deserves better than that — but then again, so did Dragon Quarter, and, well, that didn’t mean nothing at all.
I could talk about the individual units, the way there are a million avenues of attack, the way everything plays off of everything else, and how you need to constantly balance your needs with your offensive wants — but that’s not really important here. What’s great about the game isn’t the balance, the units or how you actually play it. I mean, it IS really great, and it’s actually incredibly well done, but none of those things are as innovative and powerful as what the UI achieves. The interface is an amazing example of punctuated equilibrium in game design, how the evolution of a genre can stand still for a long time and then shoot forward at a huge speed with the release of a single game, just because of a few designers reinventing the steering wheel, so to speak. That’s exactly what the RTS genre needed at this point in time, and if their ideas and thoughts are heeded, we are going to see some really interesting things happen to it in the near future, as soon as the lessons of this pretty insanely great piece have been absorbed.
★★★☆
“IS TO THE ORIGINAL WARCRAFT WHAT A MODERN BULLET-HELL SHOOTER IS TO THE FIRST GRADIUS.”
Supreme Commander takes the RTS genre to its logical short-term conclusion. Want to build 100 amphibious tanks? Okay, just queue that stuff up and you’ll have them in a few minutes. Want to give them all orders at once? Sure, absolutely no problem. There is no upper limit to the amount of units you can have selected at any one time. Want to tell all of your warships with legs that maybe they should head over there for a while, even though they’re scattered all over the (motherhecking insanely gigantic) map? You just zoom out enough that you can see the entire map, which is terribly easy and rewarding, select every unit on the field, click on the warship icon, and there you go!
User empowerment through enhancements to the interface, though, is what this game is about: Taking away all the dumb limitations that hem the strategic thinking and innovation of the player in. The game is like comparing the tabbed, spell-checking, greasemonkey’d, fasterfox’d, adblocked Firefox to the rest of the genre’s Internet Explorer 3.0 for Palm and it’s incredible how easy, fun and rewarding it is to use the tools they’ve given you.
Supreme Commander is a game that really, truly wants to make the people who play RTS games ask themselves just what in the hell it is that they’ve been putting up with for all these years. The standard user interface for this particular genre is still trying to respect the limitations set down by games with a lower resolution than my cellphone. It is like intentionally making paper an inch thick because we used to write on stone tablets — which is kind of puzzling, and makes you wonder if these people actually understand what it they’re making. If they ever play their own creations, or just keep making them as some kind of weird tribute to the games that they liked when they were kids. Take Starcraft for one: The player can only select a tiny amount of units at once, he can only give them a single order, and if he wants to be competitive against even the dumbest AI, he will need to constantly micromanage them. The base-building is slow, inefficient, and needs constant looking after, even though it would be terrible easy to give the player more of an indirect, hands-off building tool. Think something more along the lines of planning the base, and then creating some engineers to do it for you, without needing constant input from you. Instead you are forced to both plan the base out in your mind, give tiny, stupid orders to your builders, and just generally micromanage everything to a terrible degree.
Clearly, this was something that shouldn’t, couldn’t last. Not in such a technophilic environment as game design.
Enter Gas-Powered Games, and let none who experience their creation tolerate anything less than what they have created from now on. And yet, I am afraid that it will be remembered as more of a Dragon Quarter than a Goldeneye. Something that could have shown the entire genre it was spawned from how to save itself: To become something that it should always have wanted to become, yet was ignored and cast away because not enough people bought it, or really got what it was trying to do. This game deserves better than that — but then again, so did Dragon Quarter, and, well, that didn’t mean nothing at all.
I could talk about the individual units, the way there are a million avenues of attack, the way everything plays off of everything else, and how you need to constantly balance your needs with your offensive wants — but that’s not really important here. What’s great about the game isn’t the balance, the units or how you actually play it. I mean, it IS really great, and it’s actually incredibly well done, but none of those things are as innovative and powerful as what the UI achieves. The interface is an amazing example of punctuated equilibrium in game design, how the evolution of a genre can stand still for a long time and then shoot forward at a huge speed with the release of a single game, just because of a few designers reinventing the steering wheel, so to speak. That’s exactly what the RTS genre needed at this point in time, and if their ideas and thoughts are heeded, we are going to see some really interesting things happen to it in the near future, as soon as the lessons of this pretty insanely great piece have been absorbed.
2006
text by Bennett
★★☆☆
“PERFECT IN FORM AND FUNCTION; OTHERWISE, BAD.”
Final Fantasy XII is probably the deepest, lengthiest and most detailed game ever produced. When I finished it, the clock showed over a hundred hours of play, and I think I had plumbed no more than half of its optional sidequests and secret treasures. It has an epic plot, with hours of beautiful video and a richly-detailed script which is voiced perfectly. It has more beautiful art than I have ever seen on a single DVD.
When the credits rolled at the end, I thought to myself: “That’s it? That’s all there is?” I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. Had I invested 100 hours in this game for this?
I had to wonder how it could be that I was feeling this way. I had never played a game with superior production values, nor with superior depth. I loved the characters, and the lush, expansive world they inhabited. But somehow, in this Final Fantasy, which had more substance than any of its ancestors, the core experience seemed to be absent. I had to wonder what secret spice was missing which would have recreated the elation I felt at the end of installments VII, VIII and X.
The biggest critical complaint about XII has been that its combat system produces the same kind of repetitive ‘grind’ that is present in an MMO. To my mind, this is an ignorant claim. The Final Fantasy series already had this classic MMO ‘problem’ in spades – indeed, it was Sakaguchi who invented it. By contrast, the new real-time model allows you to avoid random monsters and frees you from endlessly repeated button combinations. It allows you to focus directly on the story and quest mechanics. It lets you constantly interact. The new system is not the problem. So what is it that ruins the game?
There are some obvious suspects. The new summon system asks you to wait five minutes while the summoned creature, or ‘esper’, is introduced. The esper appears, forming a party of two with the summoner. All the nearby monsters wisely attack the summoner, leaving the impotent esper alone, because they know that the esper will disappear when the summoner is killed. The result? You will never call an esper more than once.
The experience system is utterly broken. This is the first Final Fantasy game which puts more weight on your character’s level than on his equipment or tactics. About halfway through the game, it became apparent: you can either buy the largest, most expensive sword, or you can run around in the fields killing monsters for half an hour. The effect is exactly the same. As a result, you are never excited to get treasure.
These problems are annoying because they would have been easy to fix, if an insightful producer had been at the helm. But they don’t stop you from enjoying the game. What stops you from enjoying the game is a much more fundamental problem.
This is what I have realised: When we say a game is a role-playing game, or that it has ‘RPG elements’, we mean that the game allows you to increase your character’s skills and powers over time. Sometimes this device exists only as a Pavlovian reward – a way to addict you to a repetitive process, like the one in Diablo. In good role-playing games, it is a quantified metaphor for the advancement and development of a heroic character.
The development of a character from zero to hero is a powerful and satisfying theme when it appears in books or films. Luke Skywalker, Musashi, Spiderman, Neo, and King Arthur all moved from humble beginnings to a glorious pinnacle. This is at the core of any heroic story, not by convention but by necessity, because it is that contrast in power which gives the story its gravity and its emotional power.
Final Fantasy games always force you to spend the bulk of your time with one central character. It is this character who you bond with – he is the protagonist who must undergo that heroic metamorphosis.
In VII, the protagonist is a Han Solo-esque mercenary whose heroic deeds ultimately win the admiration of his companions. By the end, none of them care that he is an impostor who stole the identity of his girlfriend’s next-door neighbour. Their respect is not misplaced – in a single blow, he defeats his old mentor, a deranged genius who was initially hundreds of times more powerful.
In X, your central character is a dream. By the end of the story, your friends want the dream to be true so badly that they spend a whole sequel scouring the earth for him. Or so I am led to believe – I’m not going to play a game where you change jobs by trying on a new dress.
In XII, the lead is Vaan, once more an androgynous teenaged misfit with a sword. He falls in with a bunch of adults – royalty and thieves. In the closing scenes, one character explicitly suggests that Vaan is the hero of the story. But he never does a single thing to earn this respect.
He’s present in every dramatic scene, and often yells out some defiant line, or words of encouragement to another character. But he never does anything. He has no special powers. He has no particular significant relationship with any of the antagonists. He doesn’t even teach anyone an important emotional lesson, like Naruto would.
He is, in other words, exactly like a sidekick. Vaan is more Pippin than Frodo, more Watson than Holmes. But nobody plays Danger Mouse to Vaan’s Penfold. It’s like a story about Robin, but Batman isn’t around. or It’s Chewbacca Gaiden. It’s Ron Weasley and the Failed Attempt to Protect the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s Luigi at Peach and Bowser’s Wedding.
In the end this opulent, ornate game is a bitter disappointment. Yes, your characters all become much stronger over time. But you get the sense that they would have overcome their challenges whether or not you had gained a single level. And they certainly could have done the whole thing without the help of Vaan.
After VII, VIII and X, I was hooked on a feeling. But you can’t get that feeling back by playing XII.
★★☆☆
“PERFECT IN FORM AND FUNCTION; OTHERWISE, BAD.”
Final Fantasy XII is probably the deepest, lengthiest and most detailed game ever produced. When I finished it, the clock showed over a hundred hours of play, and I think I had plumbed no more than half of its optional sidequests and secret treasures. It has an epic plot, with hours of beautiful video and a richly-detailed script which is voiced perfectly. It has more beautiful art than I have ever seen on a single DVD.
When the credits rolled at the end, I thought to myself: “That’s it? That’s all there is?” I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. Had I invested 100 hours in this game for this?
I had to wonder how it could be that I was feeling this way. I had never played a game with superior production values, nor with superior depth. I loved the characters, and the lush, expansive world they inhabited. But somehow, in this Final Fantasy, which had more substance than any of its ancestors, the core experience seemed to be absent. I had to wonder what secret spice was missing which would have recreated the elation I felt at the end of installments VII, VIII and X.
The biggest critical complaint about XII has been that its combat system produces the same kind of repetitive ‘grind’ that is present in an MMO. To my mind, this is an ignorant claim. The Final Fantasy series already had this classic MMO ‘problem’ in spades – indeed, it was Sakaguchi who invented it. By contrast, the new real-time model allows you to avoid random monsters and frees you from endlessly repeated button combinations. It allows you to focus directly on the story and quest mechanics. It lets you constantly interact. The new system is not the problem. So what is it that ruins the game?
There are some obvious suspects. The new summon system asks you to wait five minutes while the summoned creature, or ‘esper’, is introduced. The esper appears, forming a party of two with the summoner. All the nearby monsters wisely attack the summoner, leaving the impotent esper alone, because they know that the esper will disappear when the summoner is killed. The result? You will never call an esper more than once.
The experience system is utterly broken. This is the first Final Fantasy game which puts more weight on your character’s level than on his equipment or tactics. About halfway through the game, it became apparent: you can either buy the largest, most expensive sword, or you can run around in the fields killing monsters for half an hour. The effect is exactly the same. As a result, you are never excited to get treasure.
These problems are annoying because they would have been easy to fix, if an insightful producer had been at the helm. But they don’t stop you from enjoying the game. What stops you from enjoying the game is a much more fundamental problem.
This is what I have realised: When we say a game is a role-playing game, or that it has ‘RPG elements’, we mean that the game allows you to increase your character’s skills and powers over time. Sometimes this device exists only as a Pavlovian reward – a way to addict you to a repetitive process, like the one in Diablo. In good role-playing games, it is a quantified metaphor for the advancement and development of a heroic character.
The development of a character from zero to hero is a powerful and satisfying theme when it appears in books or films. Luke Skywalker, Musashi, Spiderman, Neo, and King Arthur all moved from humble beginnings to a glorious pinnacle. This is at the core of any heroic story, not by convention but by necessity, because it is that contrast in power which gives the story its gravity and its emotional power.
Final Fantasy games always force you to spend the bulk of your time with one central character. It is this character who you bond with – he is the protagonist who must undergo that heroic metamorphosis.
In VII, the protagonist is a Han Solo-esque mercenary whose heroic deeds ultimately win the admiration of his companions. By the end, none of them care that he is an impostor who stole the identity of his girlfriend’s next-door neighbour. Their respect is not misplaced – in a single blow, he defeats his old mentor, a deranged genius who was initially hundreds of times more powerful.
In X, your central character is a dream. By the end of the story, your friends want the dream to be true so badly that they spend a whole sequel scouring the earth for him. Or so I am led to believe – I’m not going to play a game where you change jobs by trying on a new dress.
In XII, the lead is Vaan, once more an androgynous teenaged misfit with a sword. He falls in with a bunch of adults – royalty and thieves. In the closing scenes, one character explicitly suggests that Vaan is the hero of the story. But he never does a single thing to earn this respect.
He’s present in every dramatic scene, and often yells out some defiant line, or words of encouragement to another character. But he never does anything. He has no special powers. He has no particular significant relationship with any of the antagonists. He doesn’t even teach anyone an important emotional lesson, like Naruto would.
He is, in other words, exactly like a sidekick. Vaan is more Pippin than Frodo, more Watson than Holmes. But nobody plays Danger Mouse to Vaan’s Penfold. It’s like a story about Robin, but Batman isn’t around. or It’s Chewbacca Gaiden. It’s Ron Weasley and the Failed Attempt to Protect the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s Luigi at Peach and Bowser’s Wedding.
In the end this opulent, ornate game is a bitter disappointment. Yes, your characters all become much stronger over time. But you get the sense that they would have overcome their challenges whether or not you had gained a single level. And they certainly could have done the whole thing without the help of Vaan.
After VII, VIII and X, I was hooked on a feeling. But you can’t get that feeling back by playing XII.
text by David Cabrera
★⋆☆☆
“GONNA PLAY SOME STREET FIGHTER FOUR OUTSIDE, RIGHT NOW!!”
Kong Man Center is my other Chinatown arcade. At first glance yet another of the CD/DVD/VCD shops that lines the street, Kong Man, when one presses into the back of the store, houses a secret compartment of delights which I have affectionately dubbed the “closet arcade”. The closet arcade is just that; a dark, enclosed back room which only has room for five arcade cabinets and–barely– their players. The owner is clearly an SNK fan; when I first came here, to play King of Fighters 2003 before most people would play it, I found myself surrounded by not just the 2003 version of KoF, but every King of Fighters game: even the surreal, recolored bootleg Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2003. Some time later, when Neo Geo Battle Coliseum was released, word got out that, again, Kong Man had it before anybody else. There ended up being an unintentional gathering. These things tend to happen when there is only one place, anywhere, to play a certain videogame right now. The same people tend to come out.
So, as expected, the lot of us crowded around a strange new game which we could see being played before us, but could not yet understand. There was only one guy who knew what the hell he was doing; this is another common circumstance at these things. One guy has always prepared: he’s studied match videos, he’s read Arcadia, something. This guy’s efforts are rewarded by his only having to pay fifty cents all night. Meanwhile the rest of us, the huddled masses, bear the burden of feeding the machine, only to have our sore pixelated asses– retouched 90’s relics, they clash with the beautiful high-resolution backgrounds– dragon-punched into the air over and over again by his Kyo. All I can say for these fights is that NGBC‘s pleasantly quick pace makes these beatdowns mercifully brief, at least. It’s neither much fun for the audience nor for the players to fight such one-sided battles, but this was the only machine we had.
A huge man, the hero of our story, walks into the closet and pushes the human mass, already straining for space, further back, closer, as though a group of three had just entered. After watching a few of the beatings, he loudly proclaims– in this tiny room his yell bounces off the walls, enters and exits our poor, overworked and suffering ears– that our champion is, in fact, a tier-whoring scrub. “Kyo is hecking brooo-ken!” he howl-whines: Kyo is, in layman’s terms, too strong, too unfair to be inflicted upon others. A tier-whoring scrub only uses the strongest characters, because his abilities are themselves insufficient to win fairly. If it wasn’t for Kyo, and that dragon punch bullstuff, he continues, would beat his ass. With Marco.
Kyo Kusanagi feels more or less the same way he feels in latter-day King of Fighters, but as with every incremental upgrade, Kyo has little tricks that need to be learned. In this game, during a juggle combo, the trick is that Kyo can use his dragon punch equivalent three times in a row. He kicks you up into the air; you wait, you fall. He does the dragon punch: you wait, you fall. And then again, and again. It’s not a glitch or an exploit; it’s there because the designers wanted it to be. It’s not overly damaging, not unfair- but it’s terribly frustrating.
It was really pissing this guy off, and he wasn’t even the one losing to it. He was way down on the quarter line; the only way he could think to kill time was to continue to complain to the room. Nobody really wanted to hear it, especially not for the thirty minutes it took him to get to the front of the line. Finally, he moved some people over, stepped up to the machine, picked Marco, and began to fight.
Marco is in fact the Marco you may know from the Metal Slug series: he’s also one of the bigger oddballs in a very unusual cast assembled from all over SNK’s gameography, from Fatal Fury to Aggressors of Dark Kombat. Being a character ripped out of another genre entirely, Marco does not play very conventionally: if you don’t already know what you’re doing, you’re dead. In other words, our hero has made a promise he cannot keep. Marco flops around like a dying fish, his tag teammate who I don’t remember doesn’t fare any better, and Kyo dragon punches them both to his heart’s content. It’s over quickly.
Our defeated protagonist lumbers away from the machine, seething, mumbling to himself. He shuts up for about half a minute. Then, without warning, it is back to the song and dance from before, but louder, with more righteous indignation. Our hero is spiraling into barely coherent rage. He suggests, tentatively, that the champion, a much smaller, fitter guy, come out and have a fight with him, a real one, conducted via bare fists, to prove who is truly the superior joystick-and-buttons fighter. Nobody pays this any mind– we can’t even visualize these two fighting– until he repeats himself a few more times, demands our attention more and more insistently.
“YOU AND ME! WE’RE GONNA PLAY SOME STREET FIGHTER FOUR OUTSIDE, RIGHT NOW!!”
Did I even hear that stuff, in the middle of the closet arcade at Kong Man Center? Did I really hear something so ridiculous? Was it just something I read on a Shoryuken.com thread? Didn’t I hear it at both places? Who knows anymore. The point is that the man wanted to take it outside over a videogame, and that furthermore, he is only able to understand this hypothetical confrontation in terms of another goddamn videogame. Standing out there on the sidewalk, he would see gauges and lifebars in the corners of his mind’s eye.
The owner pops the closet door open after this loudest declaration: he doesn’t know or care what the hell anybody is talking about in here, but he wants us to keep it down, for Christ’s sake. As the owner stares our hero in the face, he casts his eyes down like a child avoiding blame. The volume of his ranting fades, subsides into murmuring. Eventually our hero storms out, our champion leaves with his girlfriend, and I finally get some quality time in with the game: time with people I have a chance of beating.
On even competitive ground, this is SNK’s best in years; a thought-out, solid, unique fighting system coupled with a nearly dangerous overload of SNK’s trademark self-referential fanservice. The latter is SNK’s main export and you can get it packed in with anything they sell nowadays. Pleasant, but not special. The former is rare and precious, and the only reason I ever really loved to play SNK’s games. It was this core that got the twenty-some people to huddle up in the closet-arcade, and later put up with the sound, the smell of our hero; it was also what drove him into a raving videogame tantrum. Whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, a good videogame is still that strong.
★⋆☆☆
“GONNA PLAY SOME STREET FIGHTER FOUR OUTSIDE, RIGHT NOW!!”
Kong Man Center is my other Chinatown arcade. At first glance yet another of the CD/DVD/VCD shops that lines the street, Kong Man, when one presses into the back of the store, houses a secret compartment of delights which I have affectionately dubbed the “closet arcade”. The closet arcade is just that; a dark, enclosed back room which only has room for five arcade cabinets and–barely– their players. The owner is clearly an SNK fan; when I first came here, to play King of Fighters 2003 before most people would play it, I found myself surrounded by not just the 2003 version of KoF, but every King of Fighters game: even the surreal, recolored bootleg Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2003. Some time later, when Neo Geo Battle Coliseum was released, word got out that, again, Kong Man had it before anybody else. There ended up being an unintentional gathering. These things tend to happen when there is only one place, anywhere, to play a certain videogame right now. The same people tend to come out.
So, as expected, the lot of us crowded around a strange new game which we could see being played before us, but could not yet understand. There was only one guy who knew what the hell he was doing; this is another common circumstance at these things. One guy has always prepared: he’s studied match videos, he’s read Arcadia, something. This guy’s efforts are rewarded by his only having to pay fifty cents all night. Meanwhile the rest of us, the huddled masses, bear the burden of feeding the machine, only to have our sore pixelated asses– retouched 90’s relics, they clash with the beautiful high-resolution backgrounds– dragon-punched into the air over and over again by his Kyo. All I can say for these fights is that NGBC‘s pleasantly quick pace makes these beatdowns mercifully brief, at least. It’s neither much fun for the audience nor for the players to fight such one-sided battles, but this was the only machine we had.
A huge man, the hero of our story, walks into the closet and pushes the human mass, already straining for space, further back, closer, as though a group of three had just entered. After watching a few of the beatings, he loudly proclaims– in this tiny room his yell bounces off the walls, enters and exits our poor, overworked and suffering ears– that our champion is, in fact, a tier-whoring scrub. “Kyo is hecking brooo-ken!” he howl-whines: Kyo is, in layman’s terms, too strong, too unfair to be inflicted upon others. A tier-whoring scrub only uses the strongest characters, because his abilities are themselves insufficient to win fairly. If it wasn’t for Kyo, and that dragon punch bullstuff, he continues, would beat his ass. With Marco.
Kyo Kusanagi feels more or less the same way he feels in latter-day King of Fighters, but as with every incremental upgrade, Kyo has little tricks that need to be learned. In this game, during a juggle combo, the trick is that Kyo can use his dragon punch equivalent three times in a row. He kicks you up into the air; you wait, you fall. He does the dragon punch: you wait, you fall. And then again, and again. It’s not a glitch or an exploit; it’s there because the designers wanted it to be. It’s not overly damaging, not unfair- but it’s terribly frustrating.
It was really pissing this guy off, and he wasn’t even the one losing to it. He was way down on the quarter line; the only way he could think to kill time was to continue to complain to the room. Nobody really wanted to hear it, especially not for the thirty minutes it took him to get to the front of the line. Finally, he moved some people over, stepped up to the machine, picked Marco, and began to fight.
Marco is in fact the Marco you may know from the Metal Slug series: he’s also one of the bigger oddballs in a very unusual cast assembled from all over SNK’s gameography, from Fatal Fury to Aggressors of Dark Kombat. Being a character ripped out of another genre entirely, Marco does not play very conventionally: if you don’t already know what you’re doing, you’re dead. In other words, our hero has made a promise he cannot keep. Marco flops around like a dying fish, his tag teammate who I don’t remember doesn’t fare any better, and Kyo dragon punches them both to his heart’s content. It’s over quickly.
Our defeated protagonist lumbers away from the machine, seething, mumbling to himself. He shuts up for about half a minute. Then, without warning, it is back to the song and dance from before, but louder, with more righteous indignation. Our hero is spiraling into barely coherent rage. He suggests, tentatively, that the champion, a much smaller, fitter guy, come out and have a fight with him, a real one, conducted via bare fists, to prove who is truly the superior joystick-and-buttons fighter. Nobody pays this any mind– we can’t even visualize these two fighting– until he repeats himself a few more times, demands our attention more and more insistently.
“YOU AND ME! WE’RE GONNA PLAY SOME STREET FIGHTER FOUR OUTSIDE, RIGHT NOW!!”
Did I even hear that stuff, in the middle of the closet arcade at Kong Man Center? Did I really hear something so ridiculous? Was it just something I read on a Shoryuken.com thread? Didn’t I hear it at both places? Who knows anymore. The point is that the man wanted to take it outside over a videogame, and that furthermore, he is only able to understand this hypothetical confrontation in terms of another goddamn videogame. Standing out there on the sidewalk, he would see gauges and lifebars in the corners of his mind’s eye.
The owner pops the closet door open after this loudest declaration: he doesn’t know or care what the hell anybody is talking about in here, but he wants us to keep it down, for Christ’s sake. As the owner stares our hero in the face, he casts his eyes down like a child avoiding blame. The volume of his ranting fades, subsides into murmuring. Eventually our hero storms out, our champion leaves with his girlfriend, and I finally get some quality time in with the game: time with people I have a chance of beating.
On even competitive ground, this is SNK’s best in years; a thought-out, solid, unique fighting system coupled with a nearly dangerous overload of SNK’s trademark self-referential fanservice. The latter is SNK’s main export and you can get it packed in with anything they sell nowadays. Pleasant, but not special. The former is rare and precious, and the only reason I ever really loved to play SNK’s games. It was this core that got the twenty-some people to huddle up in the closet-arcade, and later put up with the sound, the smell of our hero; it was also what drove him into a raving videogame tantrum. Whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, a good videogame is still that strong.
text by Brendan Lee
★⋆☆☆
"BORING."
Most people are in complete agreement that shooters are second only to Those Rhythm Games in terms of sheer Pavlovian click-here-for-joy vacuity. If you’re the type of diehard that gets off on solitary pattern memorization – – and you’re, you know, not prone to epilepsy – – they’re pretty much the ultimate that this life has to offer you.
At least until they begin selling pre-chewed Pop Tarts.
It’s a format that’s rapidly wilting, shooters. People have, by and large, figured out the punchline; only the occasional efforts by a rambunctious, tow-headed doujin community and a handful of rickety old-skoolers have been able to slap enough maids and squirrel-voiced seiyuu into shooters to satisfy their few remaining devotees. Sadly, gamers don’t know how to move on, as a rule. They collectively realize that if you stare at a corpse long and hard enough, eventually some small movement will arise – – that it’s just the worms come to gnaw at the gristle is the sort of observation that only the pickiest of spoilsports would bother coughing into their hands.
The same innate sense of lonely isolation that has preserved the hardcore shooter fanbase is the enemy, in this age of multiplayer . . . and Senko no Ronde (flatly retitled WarTech for the Xbox 360) has the right idea. It is, in fact, a valiant effort to create a cooperative arcade culture from a fundamentally solitary gaming format. In this case, it means a mash-up: a dash of classic shooter dynamics, a jigger of close-quarters punch-up, and a large dollop swiped directly from Virtual On. The mix at least looks utterly compelling – – even if you don’t entirely buy into its Xenosaga-cum-Zegapain PastelBot regime. Any bit of the game you happen to see in motion has you sitting and playing for at least one round . . . it is its own attract mode, and it clearly knows it.
And then you play. And . . . well, it’s just kind of syrup-slow and boring, most of the time. Honestly, if they were expecting to build the same kind of army of nicotine-thumbed fighting fans that has allowed ARC to keep swapping out Guilty Gear color palettes, they should have actually given them something to keep their reflexes from going numb. The Rounders (PastelBots) move like capsule toys through delicious honey, and the Boss Mode combat has one of the worst my-turn-your-turn dynamics since Killer Instinct. The controls are intuitive enough for those with a little patience, but the way the game transitions from one battle mode to another is jarring and annoying enough to create the illusion that they aren’t. When you’re transitioning from the standard space battlefield to close-quarters combat, the camera zooms in to SHOW YOU ALL THE ACTION, and you’re immediately disoriented. When one of the PastelBots (Rounders) switches to Boss Mode, you get a little flashcard of slapdash anime clip-art and a chirpy voice to accompany the entire screen changing on you. If you’ve grown to accept random battles in RPGs and selecting FIGHT from text boxes, you’ll probably be able to shift gears along with Senko no Ronde as it shows you how many games it can try to be, but . . . I dunno, I been working on this thing where I’m less spastic lately.
And another thing: that Boss Mode. It’s . . . well, it’s damn creaky. Once the screen’s done its Big Woosh changing thing and your eyes have uncrossed, you (or your opponent) get the opportunity to be really Big and shoot a million jillion Glow Orbs all around – – just like the bosses in all those beloved shooters. It’s pointless and unnerving, especially with the Rounders inability to dodge with any speed or sensitivity . . . and it’s kind of a psychological kick in the balls for anyone who ever spent their time memorizing bullet patterns on more classically-conceptualized shooting titles. The game kind of realizes this, so don’t expect to spend much time Bossing it around – – it’s just a little Nostalgia Snack, and over before it begins. What a waste: it’s development time that could have been spent on making the normal combat more interesting and responsive.
These kinds of format mash-ups can work, on occasion . . . if you look at something like, say, Data East’s The Great Ragtimeshow, you’ll find a game that successfully blended Metal Slug‘s sense of humor and vehicular variety, the air combat of classic shooters, and an amazing feel for the era’s best platforming into a game that’s a visual feast and an utter joy (and hey, this was 1992). It takes a great deal of vision to make this kind of thing work, though, and it’s painfully obvious when a developer is just trying to ham-fist another format on top of another to help prop up weak gameplay.
Senko no Ronde, for all of the hype and keyfroth, is an also-ran: too wrapped up in making its Game Salad to remember that we’d ordered a hamburger. There may be something out there to defibrillate the paunchy mess of moe-shooters and frame-count twitch-fighters that are littering Japan’s arcades (and increasingly your Xbox 360), but this certainly ain’t it.
★⋆☆☆
"BORING."
Most people are in complete agreement that shooters are second only to Those Rhythm Games in terms of sheer Pavlovian click-here-for-joy vacuity. If you’re the type of diehard that gets off on solitary pattern memorization – – and you’re, you know, not prone to epilepsy – – they’re pretty much the ultimate that this life has to offer you.
At least until they begin selling pre-chewed Pop Tarts.
It’s a format that’s rapidly wilting, shooters. People have, by and large, figured out the punchline; only the occasional efforts by a rambunctious, tow-headed doujin community and a handful of rickety old-skoolers have been able to slap enough maids and squirrel-voiced seiyuu into shooters to satisfy their few remaining devotees. Sadly, gamers don’t know how to move on, as a rule. They collectively realize that if you stare at a corpse long and hard enough, eventually some small movement will arise – – that it’s just the worms come to gnaw at the gristle is the sort of observation that only the pickiest of spoilsports would bother coughing into their hands.
The same innate sense of lonely isolation that has preserved the hardcore shooter fanbase is the enemy, in this age of multiplayer . . . and Senko no Ronde (flatly retitled WarTech for the Xbox 360) has the right idea. It is, in fact, a valiant effort to create a cooperative arcade culture from a fundamentally solitary gaming format. In this case, it means a mash-up: a dash of classic shooter dynamics, a jigger of close-quarters punch-up, and a large dollop swiped directly from Virtual On. The mix at least looks utterly compelling – – even if you don’t entirely buy into its Xenosaga-cum-Zegapain PastelBot regime. Any bit of the game you happen to see in motion has you sitting and playing for at least one round . . . it is its own attract mode, and it clearly knows it.
And then you play. And . . . well, it’s just kind of syrup-slow and boring, most of the time. Honestly, if they were expecting to build the same kind of army of nicotine-thumbed fighting fans that has allowed ARC to keep swapping out Guilty Gear color palettes, they should have actually given them something to keep their reflexes from going numb. The Rounders (PastelBots) move like capsule toys through delicious honey, and the Boss Mode combat has one of the worst my-turn-your-turn dynamics since Killer Instinct. The controls are intuitive enough for those with a little patience, but the way the game transitions from one battle mode to another is jarring and annoying enough to create the illusion that they aren’t. When you’re transitioning from the standard space battlefield to close-quarters combat, the camera zooms in to SHOW YOU ALL THE ACTION, and you’re immediately disoriented. When one of the PastelBots (Rounders) switches to Boss Mode, you get a little flashcard of slapdash anime clip-art and a chirpy voice to accompany the entire screen changing on you. If you’ve grown to accept random battles in RPGs and selecting FIGHT from text boxes, you’ll probably be able to shift gears along with Senko no Ronde as it shows you how many games it can try to be, but . . . I dunno, I been working on this thing where I’m less spastic lately.
And another thing: that Boss Mode. It’s . . . well, it’s damn creaky. Once the screen’s done its Big Woosh changing thing and your eyes have uncrossed, you (or your opponent) get the opportunity to be really Big and shoot a million jillion Glow Orbs all around – – just like the bosses in all those beloved shooters. It’s pointless and unnerving, especially with the Rounders inability to dodge with any speed or sensitivity . . . and it’s kind of a psychological kick in the balls for anyone who ever spent their time memorizing bullet patterns on more classically-conceptualized shooting titles. The game kind of realizes this, so don’t expect to spend much time Bossing it around – – it’s just a little Nostalgia Snack, and over before it begins. What a waste: it’s development time that could have been spent on making the normal combat more interesting and responsive.
These kinds of format mash-ups can work, on occasion . . . if you look at something like, say, Data East’s The Great Ragtimeshow, you’ll find a game that successfully blended Metal Slug‘s sense of humor and vehicular variety, the air combat of classic shooters, and an amazing feel for the era’s best platforming into a game that’s a visual feast and an utter joy (and hey, this was 1992). It takes a great deal of vision to make this kind of thing work, though, and it’s painfully obvious when a developer is just trying to ham-fist another format on top of another to help prop up weak gameplay.
Senko no Ronde, for all of the hype and keyfroth, is an also-ran: too wrapped up in making its Game Salad to remember that we’d ordered a hamburger. There may be something out there to defibrillate the paunchy mess of moe-shooters and frame-count twitch-fighters that are littering Japan’s arcades (and increasingly your Xbox 360), but this certainly ain’t it.
2007
text by tim rogers
⋆☆☆☆
“APPARENTLY DESIGNED BY MEN WHO TOOK SIX YEARS TO OBTAIN BACHELORS' DEGREES IN POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONOLOGY.”
Musou Orochi is the latest in Koei’s line of sleazy hit games with the word “Musou” in the title. Every time one of these games is released it spikes to the top of the sales charts for a week and then disappears. This game did exactly the same thing. It may just be the same half a million people playing these games over and over again; Koei plays its audience the way a young Korean girl plays the violin, or perhaps the way you play that one friend who bought you six consecutive dinners in a row and genuinely didn’t notice.
Koei floundered for years as a company that just wanted to make games about actual historical events when everyone else was Scotch-taping adjectives over side-scrolling platform game design documents. As a game designer, Koei was always quite unique — one might even say that their works from the pre-Famicom era right up to the release of the PlayStation 2 were exceptionally focused on getting non-gamers to pick up a controller. Over a decade before Gran Turismo would sweep in and prove it was possible to get automobile junkies to buy a videogame console if you showed them enough numerical details, the progressive, hungry Koei was making the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games. These games were positioned on pedestals worldwide for their devotion to actual names, places, and approximated numbers, even if the critics weren’t familiar with the historical events being portrayed. For early players of Three Kingdoms, Nobunaga’s Ambition, or (my favorite) Bandit Kings of Ancient China, three games that are more or less alike, the basic requirement for enjoying the game was that you’d read more than two books about each of the names floating up on the screen at any given time. Test your knowledge of a particular historical battle by employing similar tactics (via menu selections), win, and feel really smart. It was a weird rush — different from Civilization or Sim City as Dragon Quest was different from Ultima. For the painstaking sensations they evoked, Koei’s efforts went on to find a niche even in countries where no one know who Liu Bei or Cao Cao were. Soon, Koei was making games about World War II — like the excellent P.T.O. II — and were even experimenting with making backgrounds that weren’t completely black. They were on something of a roll.
Blame Final Fantasy VII if you want; around 1997, all of Japan breathed in the same bus fumes and got to feeling loopy: something shat in the pool and told them that they could, if they wanted, enjoy more success than the niches they’d settled into. Perhaps this accounts for the first Dynasty Warriors game on the original PlayStation, or perhaps it doesn’t: it was a one-on-one fighting game in which historical figures from the Chinese civil war of the second century punched or kicked each other slowly over techno music that occasionally featured pan flutes. The game was high-budget enough to open with a computer-animated scene of such ferocious blockiness it could constipate the viewer for weeks or even months. The wasn’t much of a financial or even critical success. The same team was asked to make another game in a different style, using more or less the same characters, for the upcoming PlayStation 2. Rather than simply call the game Sangoku Musou 2, they decided to call it Shin Sangoku Musou — “REAL Dynasty Warriors”. When it was released outside Japan, the game was still called Dynasty Warriors 2, and this fact is kind of crucial.
The game was something of a lukewarm miracle. One might even say it changed the face of gaming. Imagine that — the first “Musou” had been a one-on-one fighting game just because one-on-one fighting in 3D was all the rage. The second game created a new genre — that of the 3D battlefield brawler. As far as new genres go, though, it wasn’t much. Essentially, it was just a thematic license to make a platform game in 3D, with no platform jumping. The “genre” that issued from Dynasty Warriors 2 is probably the same genre that the makers of the midget-punching Total Recall game for the NES would have made if they’d had better hardware: wide, empty spaces, characters who look like people you recognize if you’ve read the right book or seen the right movie, tons of faceless, motiveless enemies rushing at you and then stopping dead and waiting for you to hit them, et cetera. The posters could read: YOU play the part of the HERO! OBLITERATE the stuntmen!
“Musou” is a Japanese word meaning “peerless” or “matchless”. A “Musou” warrior is one whose name is whispered among grunt soldiers everywhere. They’re known for having killed a hundred opponents without flinching, or whatever. How can we dare say that such men did not exist? Novels like Three Kingdoms are able to list the names of every warrior that died at every battle in the war; the Chinese have always had an ear for history and an eye for detail. Names like Lu Bu surf atop the tides of generations, centuries, and millennia as the names of men who were essentially invincible in combat; they were detached from their own mortality in such a way that they could not fear death, or something. Combat, like any sport, is mostly mental, anyway. Think about all those characters in horror movies that viewers always yell at: “Don’t go that way! Shoot him!” Those characters are based on real-life personalities as well — they are the types of people who would not last on a battlefield. Certainly, there’s a little psyching up that happens prior to donning the armor and shaking a spear in the face of danger, though it was seldom ever enough for a farm boy to take down a legend. (See David and Goliath for an example of a farm boy who became a legend by taking down a legend.)
Any review — whether it’s a blurb in Weekly Famitsu or an Amazon.co.jp staff review, or even an Amazon.co.jp reader review — of a Musou game will mention the word “Soukaikan” — “Refreshing feeling” — in the first sentence. This may be a clue that someone in the PR industry is first-degreeing the murder of good natural human conversation, and at that we can only groan: Japanese people using a buzzword in their user reviews is nothing terrible, compared to, say, global warming. Examining the term closely sure makes me feel kind of lonely, though. They say they feel “refreshed” when they play a Musou game, and it scares me that I can recognize why. A Musou game puts you in the buckled boots of a peerless warrior — the man on the battlefield who gets things done. This appeals to so many tens of thousands of Japanese casual gamers simply because to some people games are not life; they are escapism; and the majority of the human population are or were not the type of twenty-two-year-old Ivy League college graduates to walk into his first day at work at a large multinational corporation in a leather jacket and ripped jeans and perfect hair, ignoring the dress code (tie, suit, bald), and flip off the boss and say “You old codgers need to change your game” and end up the CEO and the proud owner of a yacht within six months. We can’t all be rock stars; we can’t all be legendary warriors; we can’t all be Bill Gates; Musou games let us experience a world with the invincibility code turned on, where enemies stop and sputter before us, technomental canaries flying against the glass walls of an AI script that says “Even on hard difficulty, give him four or five seconds before attacking him”. This sort of medulla oblangata massage wouldn’t have worked on Super Famicom, because the graphics weren’t real enough. (Pseudo-ironically, the Gameboy Advance Musou is probably the best one in the series, because it uses Super Famicom-style graphics.)
I mentioned that Musou games sell about a quarter of a million to a half a million copies and then vanish from the sales charts. This could be because the majority of copies are sold back within a week of release; this isn’t because the games shock and repulse players with their shoddy shallowness — it’s because the players are not necessarily gamers or game collectors. They don’t let the games stock up on their shelves, they don’t show them off to friends. They play them the way a moviegoer watches a DVD: clear it once, check out all the special features, put it back in the case, tell the wife to return it, get yelled at and called lazy, take it back themselves. It’s not ironic, or hardly even funny, at all, that Koei has decided to start their own game rental service — called RentaNet, which is a (***)Â name — to rent out any games by any publishers who sign on the dotted line. Game rentals have been illegal in Japan ever since Nintendo whined up the government’s leg back in 1984. Keep in mind, this is also a country where CD rentals have been legal forever — for about two US dollars, you can rent a CD, rip all of the tracks into iTunes, and take it back the same day. Because the value of owning a CD started to descend through the floor, Japanese record labels began to offer special premiums — stickers, posters, big shiny boxes to contain the CD case. No special premiums, however, were premium enough to defeat the idea of CD rental and an MD player (and eventually iPod). This is why the price of a CD in Japan rose slowly to an average of around thirty US dollars. And thirty US dollars, I swear, is a big price to pay for much of the bullstuff they call music over here. Record shops started importing foreign CDs from their countries of origin, to save themselves and the customers money, much to the anger of the local Japanese label that would be releasing said CDs for a higher price in Japan, hence foreign artists always being encouraged to include a bonus track on the Japanese release of an album. New tracks means more complicated rights, means higher prices. Around and around it goes.
Why is Koei trying to bring back game rental in Japan? The simplest answer is because used game sales, which account for most game sales in Japan (if you’ve spent two minutes in a used Japanese game shop, you cannot doubt this), never count toward official sales rankings. The CD analogy continues further: in order to encourage players to buy new, Koei has been releasing “Treasure Box” versions of every Musou game since the bigwigs became confident that the series was a qualified hit. These boxes are full of the most carnival-prize-esque trinkets — mouse pads, et cetera. The games themselves are soaked in enough tacky “extras” — unlockable art galleries and/or voice clip playback devices — for a shadowy reason: keep the players playing more than a week, long enough for the used shop buyback rates to go down. That first weekend is a big’un — if a hopeful buyer can’t find the game used because someone who bought it new is still unlocking costume colors, that’s another new copy sold — that’s another tick-mark on the Famitsu ranking! If the roots of Koei’s rental service were to plant themselves fully into the earth, that would make a new ranking chart for Famitsu to report every week: the rental chart. A-ha.
The more complicated answer would be “Because of Musou Orochi“. It’s precisely the kind of thing no corporation, even one with a tacky goldfish pond in their headquarters’ lobby, one with a little wooden bridge to walk over and everything (yes, I’ve been there), could possibly muster up the anti-conscience to only sell to people, unless they’d been ordered to do so by Satan himself.
Over the years, Koei has been called masters of “historical detail”: in the Gundam Musou expose in Weekly Famitsu earlier this year, the press-release-language said that Koei had been drafted to apply their expertise with regard to historical detail to the entire “Gundam” story, in order to make the most accurate “Gundam” videogame to date. This was a hell of a polite nod to series fans — Omega Force and Koei would be giving the “Gundam” story the same historical treatment that they’d given the great real-life battles of the Chinese Three Kingdoms period and the Japanese Warring States period.
That treatment includes setting each battle up with a map screen and a talking-head dialogue sequence that goes on a minute too long, before plopping the player, boots and all, into the ping-pong-ball-on-mouse-traps of a lively battlefield. Back two decades and an aeon ago, the history lessons had been the thing; now, our fingers have evolved, and we are no longer apes: we are chimps, and we are chumps, and we have transcended pushing buttons to stay alive — we are pushing buttons to kill. In short, it’s nonsense. The violin has been purloined, and replaced with a kid in a purple sweat suit, with eraserhead hair and tinted glasses, banging out a math-rock solo on a Casio keyboard.
It used to be that anyone and everyone could shrug and exhale and let these games exist because hey, at least the history spoken in slow words at the start of the battle is based on real events. Yeah, and the same people could debunk the game design worth of more exhilarating and crunchy games like Onimusha because they portrayed real-life fifteenth-century warlord Oda Nobunaga as a crazed, frothing, rabid old madman who commanded a legion of zombie samurai against Jean Reno.
Musou Orochi files this justification under the heading “bullstuff”; just as Omega Force got hungry for fighting-game fame with the first Dynasty Warriors, they jump straight into the Kingdom Hearts pool with Orochi — its story centers on a evil, demonic warlord named Orochi, who creates a rift in space-time and sucks the warriors from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war (Dynasty Warriors) and the warriors from the 15th-century Japanese civil war (Samurai Warriors) into the same grey-area time period, where they . . . do what, exactly? Battle against one another? Do the bad guys from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war team up with the bad guys of the 15th-century Japanese civil war, despite the obvious language barrier and disagreement on fashion or fighting techniques? What about ideals? Might it not be possible that the good guys from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war might agree with the bad guys from the 15th-centry Japanese civil war? And who says any of these people are “bad” anyway? “History is written by the winners” is a Western proverb, after all; centuries later, the Japanese were and are able to see the good points of the ambitious men who lost to more or less ambitious men in their own national history. We’ve seen plenty of videogames heroizing Toyotomi Hideyoshi, for example, and that man might have been hecking looney tunes.
No, though, in Orochi (to be titled Orochi Warriors for Western release, although “Orochi” isn’t an adjective, though I guess we can pretend: it sounds like something you’d call a hobo), the warriors form quick and dirty alliances in favor nothing in particular, and continue their internal conflicts while being confused about their surroundings. Orochi himself steps in to a couple of battles, and the audience members so inclined will clap their hands to see that new, large, red blip appear on their radar: a boss approaches! A boss approaches!
Dynasty Warriors 2 was interesting because it let you ride a horse and traverse battlefields, whilst killing — among the only other games available for the PlayStation 2 at the time was SSX, which was about snowboards: where’s the killing in that? Every once in a while, a large red blip appeared, and by that blip, a name — the name of someone you’ve read about in a book. It might be Lu Bu, even. You’d chase him down on your horse, and have a back-and-forth throttle-around with the only other guy on the battlefield who seems to know how to press the square button. This mechanic was enough to keep the game interesting for many players because these minibosses were always people you knew about outside the game world. In Gundam Musou, it works better, because the boss characters are not just approximations cobbled together from history books — they are based on a television show, so they look exactly like every fan knows they look. There’s no internet arguments about beard length or color of cape. In Orochi, the celebrity factor doesn’t work nearly as well; it feels made of cardboard. When you throw historical figures through a time rift and onto the same battlefield, you cheapen the idea of historical accuracy; you hover a magnifying glass over the flimsy paper plate onto which you’ve dropped this wedding-cake-chunk of a game, and the frosting starts to smolder.
Perhaps fearing that their fan-savants would some day begin to complain that these games were getting too boring and/or easy, Koei started to shoehorn “strategy” into the battles — every once in a while, one of your fellow Important Characters would get into a rough spot, and you’d have to fly across the battlefield to rescue them. I’m not sure if this is or is not a blatant insistence on Koei’s part that Chinese warlords had ready access to wireless radio communication, or psychic powers, or what. Either way, in Gundam Musou it works best, probably because giant robots have computers on board — boost-run across that epic battlefield, maybe crushing a few skulls on the way, and there’s your ally, rendered in high-definition glory, surrounded by ten to twenty enemies who are mostly just standing there, not attacking. If you had stayed where you were, on the other side of the battlefield, your ally’s life bar would deplete until he died. Saving his life takes about a quarter of a second, and makes you wonder if he was drunk or something. If you let him die — aw, stuff, Jack, you’re going to get a lower ranking at the end of the battle.
Thanks to this mechanic, Musou games of late have often required players to play each battle enough times to know where each Important Character will be when he needs saving, and at exactly which point in the battle this will happen. I might have been inclined to call this a reasonable facsimile of strategy if there was any topography to speak of: the battlefields are still flat and spare. The very sight of a wall is a blessing. Or if the act of running from one side of a battlefield to another wasn’t boring or tedious. If there was any joy in your character’s plodding movement, yeah, this might be a strategy. Instead, as what it is, it’s like a chocolate bar made of stuff instead of of chocolate; it doesn’t encourage rock-solid nerves-of-steel gamer skills like, say Ninja Gaiden, or even stat-mongering devotion like Dragon Quest. It’s just a weird kind of fetishism, and the setups are too ridiculous too often.
Atop this pile of a half-baked game concept, Orochi throws the spear that breaks the aircraft carrier’s back: multiple characters. Using the L2 and R2 buttons, you can now switch between characters! Take three characters into each battle — when you’re not controlling a character, the computer controls him for you! Maybe he’ll get in trouble, so if he does, you can switch to him and let him take care of himself. This is sham-fisted game design as plotted by wrongheaded focus testing and/or men who took six years to obtain their bachelors’ degrees in “PowerPoint Presentationology”. They graduated with 2.5 GPAs and their fathers probably consistently score at least ten strokes above par on whole games of golf (front nine holes, two-hour cigarette break, back nine holes). The short of this is: you can write this stuff in a design document, and you can program it into a videogame, though ultimately you’re only going to end up with pink vomit and/or a Jagermeister logo on your T-shirt, and if you can’t tell, on paper, why this game concept is flawed, then some part of your house might actually have been on fire for perhaps several years.
Games like Sengoku Basara (“Devil Kings”) or Drag-on Dragoon 2 were able to take the should-be-gleeful Musou formula and split its atom over and over again, simply by introducing little quirks like “imaginative scenarios”, “actual dynamic storytelling” (as opposed to talking heads in front of a map), a flying dragon to ride and scorch foes, a “block/parry/evade” system that lends fierce crunch and snap into each of the hundreds of encounters in every battle, and — get this! — enemies that actually attack you. And the king of this genre that would be Jesus, Spartan: Total Warrior, grinds many of Musou‘s concepts down to a razor edge, all while throwing out the unnecessary things. You will never find a sharper game than Spartan: Total Warrior, unless you’re slitting your wrist with a DVD shard.
I can buy the explanation that Koei makes its Musou games with a purpose — to entertain the refugees from life that find invincibility codes “refreshing”, the kind of souls who can’t quite put their finger on the fact that they possess the personalities of machines at a cardboard box factory and that this is what bothers them at all times, even while using the toilet. Musou is a sweet palliative for people who can’t be bothered to press a block button; it’s Campbell’s Chunky vegetable soup for the soul, for people who don’t have enough teeth to eat a steak. I’m not about to suggest that they make the games tongue-bitingly hard; I’m just saying they should at least conscientiously add some snap, and/or quit lying to themselves and us. These games are big soggy bowls of schlock and have been for years; the more they try to complicate them, the more ass-faced they look. Please Koei, give up the ghost. Cut these games back to their essence. Stop tacking on meaningless extras and/or art galleries and touting such flimsy bullstuff on the back of the box — we’ve seen Cao Cao before, man!
If the Musou games are truly the Madden of Japan, then “harder hits” and/or “more brutal tackles”, at least, are in order. Under the present game design circumstances, should any publication respectable enough to feature advertisements for videogames in addition to reviews of said videogames ever score a Musou game (Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, et al) higher than a four out of ten ever again, they will be placed on the Action Button Dot Net Sworn Enemies List, and we will proceed to find their staff members’ Xbox Live usernames and leave them all belligerent, unintelligible voice messages with diarrhea frequency from tomorrow until eternity.
⋆☆☆☆
“APPARENTLY DESIGNED BY MEN WHO TOOK SIX YEARS TO OBTAIN BACHELORS' DEGREES IN POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONOLOGY.”
Musou Orochi is the latest in Koei’s line of sleazy hit games with the word “Musou” in the title. Every time one of these games is released it spikes to the top of the sales charts for a week and then disappears. This game did exactly the same thing. It may just be the same half a million people playing these games over and over again; Koei plays its audience the way a young Korean girl plays the violin, or perhaps the way you play that one friend who bought you six consecutive dinners in a row and genuinely didn’t notice.
Koei floundered for years as a company that just wanted to make games about actual historical events when everyone else was Scotch-taping adjectives over side-scrolling platform game design documents. As a game designer, Koei was always quite unique — one might even say that their works from the pre-Famicom era right up to the release of the PlayStation 2 were exceptionally focused on getting non-gamers to pick up a controller. Over a decade before Gran Turismo would sweep in and prove it was possible to get automobile junkies to buy a videogame console if you showed them enough numerical details, the progressive, hungry Koei was making the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games. These games were positioned on pedestals worldwide for their devotion to actual names, places, and approximated numbers, even if the critics weren’t familiar with the historical events being portrayed. For early players of Three Kingdoms, Nobunaga’s Ambition, or (my favorite) Bandit Kings of Ancient China, three games that are more or less alike, the basic requirement for enjoying the game was that you’d read more than two books about each of the names floating up on the screen at any given time. Test your knowledge of a particular historical battle by employing similar tactics (via menu selections), win, and feel really smart. It was a weird rush — different from Civilization or Sim City as Dragon Quest was different from Ultima. For the painstaking sensations they evoked, Koei’s efforts went on to find a niche even in countries where no one know who Liu Bei or Cao Cao were. Soon, Koei was making games about World War II — like the excellent P.T.O. II — and were even experimenting with making backgrounds that weren’t completely black. They were on something of a roll.
Blame Final Fantasy VII if you want; around 1997, all of Japan breathed in the same bus fumes and got to feeling loopy: something shat in the pool and told them that they could, if they wanted, enjoy more success than the niches they’d settled into. Perhaps this accounts for the first Dynasty Warriors game on the original PlayStation, or perhaps it doesn’t: it was a one-on-one fighting game in which historical figures from the Chinese civil war of the second century punched or kicked each other slowly over techno music that occasionally featured pan flutes. The game was high-budget enough to open with a computer-animated scene of such ferocious blockiness it could constipate the viewer for weeks or even months. The wasn’t much of a financial or even critical success. The same team was asked to make another game in a different style, using more or less the same characters, for the upcoming PlayStation 2. Rather than simply call the game Sangoku Musou 2, they decided to call it Shin Sangoku Musou — “REAL Dynasty Warriors”. When it was released outside Japan, the game was still called Dynasty Warriors 2, and this fact is kind of crucial.
The game was something of a lukewarm miracle. One might even say it changed the face of gaming. Imagine that — the first “Musou” had been a one-on-one fighting game just because one-on-one fighting in 3D was all the rage. The second game created a new genre — that of the 3D battlefield brawler. As far as new genres go, though, it wasn’t much. Essentially, it was just a thematic license to make a platform game in 3D, with no platform jumping. The “genre” that issued from Dynasty Warriors 2 is probably the same genre that the makers of the midget-punching Total Recall game for the NES would have made if they’d had better hardware: wide, empty spaces, characters who look like people you recognize if you’ve read the right book or seen the right movie, tons of faceless, motiveless enemies rushing at you and then stopping dead and waiting for you to hit them, et cetera. The posters could read: YOU play the part of the HERO! OBLITERATE the stuntmen!
“Musou” is a Japanese word meaning “peerless” or “matchless”. A “Musou” warrior is one whose name is whispered among grunt soldiers everywhere. They’re known for having killed a hundred opponents without flinching, or whatever. How can we dare say that such men did not exist? Novels like Three Kingdoms are able to list the names of every warrior that died at every battle in the war; the Chinese have always had an ear for history and an eye for detail. Names like Lu Bu surf atop the tides of generations, centuries, and millennia as the names of men who were essentially invincible in combat; they were detached from their own mortality in such a way that they could not fear death, or something. Combat, like any sport, is mostly mental, anyway. Think about all those characters in horror movies that viewers always yell at: “Don’t go that way! Shoot him!” Those characters are based on real-life personalities as well — they are the types of people who would not last on a battlefield. Certainly, there’s a little psyching up that happens prior to donning the armor and shaking a spear in the face of danger, though it was seldom ever enough for a farm boy to take down a legend. (See David and Goliath for an example of a farm boy who became a legend by taking down a legend.)
Any review — whether it’s a blurb in Weekly Famitsu or an Amazon.co.jp staff review, or even an Amazon.co.jp reader review — of a Musou game will mention the word “Soukaikan” — “Refreshing feeling” — in the first sentence. This may be a clue that someone in the PR industry is first-degreeing the murder of good natural human conversation, and at that we can only groan: Japanese people using a buzzword in their user reviews is nothing terrible, compared to, say, global warming. Examining the term closely sure makes me feel kind of lonely, though. They say they feel “refreshed” when they play a Musou game, and it scares me that I can recognize why. A Musou game puts you in the buckled boots of a peerless warrior — the man on the battlefield who gets things done. This appeals to so many tens of thousands of Japanese casual gamers simply because to some people games are not life; they are escapism; and the majority of the human population are or were not the type of twenty-two-year-old Ivy League college graduates to walk into his first day at work at a large multinational corporation in a leather jacket and ripped jeans and perfect hair, ignoring the dress code (tie, suit, bald), and flip off the boss and say “You old codgers need to change your game” and end up the CEO and the proud owner of a yacht within six months. We can’t all be rock stars; we can’t all be legendary warriors; we can’t all be Bill Gates; Musou games let us experience a world with the invincibility code turned on, where enemies stop and sputter before us, technomental canaries flying against the glass walls of an AI script that says “Even on hard difficulty, give him four or five seconds before attacking him”. This sort of medulla oblangata massage wouldn’t have worked on Super Famicom, because the graphics weren’t real enough. (Pseudo-ironically, the Gameboy Advance Musou is probably the best one in the series, because it uses Super Famicom-style graphics.)
I mentioned that Musou games sell about a quarter of a million to a half a million copies and then vanish from the sales charts. This could be because the majority of copies are sold back within a week of release; this isn’t because the games shock and repulse players with their shoddy shallowness — it’s because the players are not necessarily gamers or game collectors. They don’t let the games stock up on their shelves, they don’t show them off to friends. They play them the way a moviegoer watches a DVD: clear it once, check out all the special features, put it back in the case, tell the wife to return it, get yelled at and called lazy, take it back themselves. It’s not ironic, or hardly even funny, at all, that Koei has decided to start their own game rental service — called RentaNet, which is a (***)Â name — to rent out any games by any publishers who sign on the dotted line. Game rentals have been illegal in Japan ever since Nintendo whined up the government’s leg back in 1984. Keep in mind, this is also a country where CD rentals have been legal forever — for about two US dollars, you can rent a CD, rip all of the tracks into iTunes, and take it back the same day. Because the value of owning a CD started to descend through the floor, Japanese record labels began to offer special premiums — stickers, posters, big shiny boxes to contain the CD case. No special premiums, however, were premium enough to defeat the idea of CD rental and an MD player (and eventually iPod). This is why the price of a CD in Japan rose slowly to an average of around thirty US dollars. And thirty US dollars, I swear, is a big price to pay for much of the bullstuff they call music over here. Record shops started importing foreign CDs from their countries of origin, to save themselves and the customers money, much to the anger of the local Japanese label that would be releasing said CDs for a higher price in Japan, hence foreign artists always being encouraged to include a bonus track on the Japanese release of an album. New tracks means more complicated rights, means higher prices. Around and around it goes.
Why is Koei trying to bring back game rental in Japan? The simplest answer is because used game sales, which account for most game sales in Japan (if you’ve spent two minutes in a used Japanese game shop, you cannot doubt this), never count toward official sales rankings. The CD analogy continues further: in order to encourage players to buy new, Koei has been releasing “Treasure Box” versions of every Musou game since the bigwigs became confident that the series was a qualified hit. These boxes are full of the most carnival-prize-esque trinkets — mouse pads, et cetera. The games themselves are soaked in enough tacky “extras” — unlockable art galleries and/or voice clip playback devices — for a shadowy reason: keep the players playing more than a week, long enough for the used shop buyback rates to go down. That first weekend is a big’un — if a hopeful buyer can’t find the game used because someone who bought it new is still unlocking costume colors, that’s another new copy sold — that’s another tick-mark on the Famitsu ranking! If the roots of Koei’s rental service were to plant themselves fully into the earth, that would make a new ranking chart for Famitsu to report every week: the rental chart. A-ha.
The more complicated answer would be “Because of Musou Orochi“. It’s precisely the kind of thing no corporation, even one with a tacky goldfish pond in their headquarters’ lobby, one with a little wooden bridge to walk over and everything (yes, I’ve been there), could possibly muster up the anti-conscience to only sell to people, unless they’d been ordered to do so by Satan himself.
Over the years, Koei has been called masters of “historical detail”: in the Gundam Musou expose in Weekly Famitsu earlier this year, the press-release-language said that Koei had been drafted to apply their expertise with regard to historical detail to the entire “Gundam” story, in order to make the most accurate “Gundam” videogame to date. This was a hell of a polite nod to series fans — Omega Force and Koei would be giving the “Gundam” story the same historical treatment that they’d given the great real-life battles of the Chinese Three Kingdoms period and the Japanese Warring States period.
That treatment includes setting each battle up with a map screen and a talking-head dialogue sequence that goes on a minute too long, before plopping the player, boots and all, into the ping-pong-ball-on-mouse-traps of a lively battlefield. Back two decades and an aeon ago, the history lessons had been the thing; now, our fingers have evolved, and we are no longer apes: we are chimps, and we are chumps, and we have transcended pushing buttons to stay alive — we are pushing buttons to kill. In short, it’s nonsense. The violin has been purloined, and replaced with a kid in a purple sweat suit, with eraserhead hair and tinted glasses, banging out a math-rock solo on a Casio keyboard.
It used to be that anyone and everyone could shrug and exhale and let these games exist because hey, at least the history spoken in slow words at the start of the battle is based on real events. Yeah, and the same people could debunk the game design worth of more exhilarating and crunchy games like Onimusha because they portrayed real-life fifteenth-century warlord Oda Nobunaga as a crazed, frothing, rabid old madman who commanded a legion of zombie samurai against Jean Reno.
Musou Orochi files this justification under the heading “bullstuff”; just as Omega Force got hungry for fighting-game fame with the first Dynasty Warriors, they jump straight into the Kingdom Hearts pool with Orochi — its story centers on a evil, demonic warlord named Orochi, who creates a rift in space-time and sucks the warriors from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war (Dynasty Warriors) and the warriors from the 15th-century Japanese civil war (Samurai Warriors) into the same grey-area time period, where they . . . do what, exactly? Battle against one another? Do the bad guys from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war team up with the bad guys of the 15th-century Japanese civil war, despite the obvious language barrier and disagreement on fashion or fighting techniques? What about ideals? Might it not be possible that the good guys from the 2nd-century Chinese civil war might agree with the bad guys from the 15th-centry Japanese civil war? And who says any of these people are “bad” anyway? “History is written by the winners” is a Western proverb, after all; centuries later, the Japanese were and are able to see the good points of the ambitious men who lost to more or less ambitious men in their own national history. We’ve seen plenty of videogames heroizing Toyotomi Hideyoshi, for example, and that man might have been hecking looney tunes.
No, though, in Orochi (to be titled Orochi Warriors for Western release, although “Orochi” isn’t an adjective, though I guess we can pretend: it sounds like something you’d call a hobo), the warriors form quick and dirty alliances in favor nothing in particular, and continue their internal conflicts while being confused about their surroundings. Orochi himself steps in to a couple of battles, and the audience members so inclined will clap their hands to see that new, large, red blip appear on their radar: a boss approaches! A boss approaches!
Dynasty Warriors 2 was interesting because it let you ride a horse and traverse battlefields, whilst killing — among the only other games available for the PlayStation 2 at the time was SSX, which was about snowboards: where’s the killing in that? Every once in a while, a large red blip appeared, and by that blip, a name — the name of someone you’ve read about in a book. It might be Lu Bu, even. You’d chase him down on your horse, and have a back-and-forth throttle-around with the only other guy on the battlefield who seems to know how to press the square button. This mechanic was enough to keep the game interesting for many players because these minibosses were always people you knew about outside the game world. In Gundam Musou, it works better, because the boss characters are not just approximations cobbled together from history books — they are based on a television show, so they look exactly like every fan knows they look. There’s no internet arguments about beard length or color of cape. In Orochi, the celebrity factor doesn’t work nearly as well; it feels made of cardboard. When you throw historical figures through a time rift and onto the same battlefield, you cheapen the idea of historical accuracy; you hover a magnifying glass over the flimsy paper plate onto which you’ve dropped this wedding-cake-chunk of a game, and the frosting starts to smolder.
Perhaps fearing that their fan-savants would some day begin to complain that these games were getting too boring and/or easy, Koei started to shoehorn “strategy” into the battles — every once in a while, one of your fellow Important Characters would get into a rough spot, and you’d have to fly across the battlefield to rescue them. I’m not sure if this is or is not a blatant insistence on Koei’s part that Chinese warlords had ready access to wireless radio communication, or psychic powers, or what. Either way, in Gundam Musou it works best, probably because giant robots have computers on board — boost-run across that epic battlefield, maybe crushing a few skulls on the way, and there’s your ally, rendered in high-definition glory, surrounded by ten to twenty enemies who are mostly just standing there, not attacking. If you had stayed where you were, on the other side of the battlefield, your ally’s life bar would deplete until he died. Saving his life takes about a quarter of a second, and makes you wonder if he was drunk or something. If you let him die — aw, stuff, Jack, you’re going to get a lower ranking at the end of the battle.
Thanks to this mechanic, Musou games of late have often required players to play each battle enough times to know where each Important Character will be when he needs saving, and at exactly which point in the battle this will happen. I might have been inclined to call this a reasonable facsimile of strategy if there was any topography to speak of: the battlefields are still flat and spare. The very sight of a wall is a blessing. Or if the act of running from one side of a battlefield to another wasn’t boring or tedious. If there was any joy in your character’s plodding movement, yeah, this might be a strategy. Instead, as what it is, it’s like a chocolate bar made of stuff instead of of chocolate; it doesn’t encourage rock-solid nerves-of-steel gamer skills like, say Ninja Gaiden, or even stat-mongering devotion like Dragon Quest. It’s just a weird kind of fetishism, and the setups are too ridiculous too often.
Atop this pile of a half-baked game concept, Orochi throws the spear that breaks the aircraft carrier’s back: multiple characters. Using the L2 and R2 buttons, you can now switch between characters! Take three characters into each battle — when you’re not controlling a character, the computer controls him for you! Maybe he’ll get in trouble, so if he does, you can switch to him and let him take care of himself. This is sham-fisted game design as plotted by wrongheaded focus testing and/or men who took six years to obtain their bachelors’ degrees in “PowerPoint Presentationology”. They graduated with 2.5 GPAs and their fathers probably consistently score at least ten strokes above par on whole games of golf (front nine holes, two-hour cigarette break, back nine holes). The short of this is: you can write this stuff in a design document, and you can program it into a videogame, though ultimately you’re only going to end up with pink vomit and/or a Jagermeister logo on your T-shirt, and if you can’t tell, on paper, why this game concept is flawed, then some part of your house might actually have been on fire for perhaps several years.
Games like Sengoku Basara (“Devil Kings”) or Drag-on Dragoon 2 were able to take the should-be-gleeful Musou formula and split its atom over and over again, simply by introducing little quirks like “imaginative scenarios”, “actual dynamic storytelling” (as opposed to talking heads in front of a map), a flying dragon to ride and scorch foes, a “block/parry/evade” system that lends fierce crunch and snap into each of the hundreds of encounters in every battle, and — get this! — enemies that actually attack you. And the king of this genre that would be Jesus, Spartan: Total Warrior, grinds many of Musou‘s concepts down to a razor edge, all while throwing out the unnecessary things. You will never find a sharper game than Spartan: Total Warrior, unless you’re slitting your wrist with a DVD shard.
I can buy the explanation that Koei makes its Musou games with a purpose — to entertain the refugees from life that find invincibility codes “refreshing”, the kind of souls who can’t quite put their finger on the fact that they possess the personalities of machines at a cardboard box factory and that this is what bothers them at all times, even while using the toilet. Musou is a sweet palliative for people who can’t be bothered to press a block button; it’s Campbell’s Chunky vegetable soup for the soul, for people who don’t have enough teeth to eat a steak. I’m not about to suggest that they make the games tongue-bitingly hard; I’m just saying they should at least conscientiously add some snap, and/or quit lying to themselves and us. These games are big soggy bowls of schlock and have been for years; the more they try to complicate them, the more ass-faced they look. Please Koei, give up the ghost. Cut these games back to their essence. Stop tacking on meaningless extras and/or art galleries and touting such flimsy bullstuff on the back of the box — we’ve seen Cao Cao before, man!
If the Musou games are truly the Madden of Japan, then “harder hits” and/or “more brutal tackles”, at least, are in order. Under the present game design circumstances, should any publication respectable enough to feature advertisements for videogames in addition to reviews of said videogames ever score a Musou game (Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors, et al) higher than a four out of ten ever again, they will be placed on the Action Button Dot Net Sworn Enemies List, and we will proceed to find their staff members’ Xbox Live usernames and leave them all belligerent, unintelligible voice messages with diarrhea frequency from tomorrow until eternity.