Niahak's Place

Reader beware! The following post is meandering, vague, switches focus (and tense) and is likely to bore the hell out of anyone who doesn’t like the JRPG genre. I try to remain somewhat focused for my usual posts, but it has failed here and so I must say: Beware of blog!

A year or so ago, I was trying to figure out what I liked most in RPGs. I laid out the requisite pieces for an RPG – battle system and story – and eventually I decided that a solid battle engine was a necessity, while plot is merely a nice-to-have.

Then I played Persona 3 in August. “Story” split into “Plot” (the main thread of the story) and “Characterization”, since the story of P3 was pretty much unknown until 4/5 of the way through the game. I decided both were good, but not absolutely needed.

Shortly after Persona 3, I played through Skies of Arcadia. Now, I should really have picked up on this with other games – most notably Wild Arms 3 – but I picked up on something entirely separate with Skies. The plot is incredibly cliched, the characters (with 2 exceptions) feel factory-made, and battles are bland and numerous. The setting, however, makes the entire game worth it. Top to bottom, end to end, the game feels hand-crafted. Cities feel entirely as though they belong in their home-country, shopkeepers gesticulate wildly as they ask you to look over their wares, ships careen through the sky on their merry way. It’s hard not to get at least a little bit sucked in by the excitement throughout the game. As I’ve said before – it’s fantasy in the classic sense. An entirely new world to explore.

So it added “setting”. Surely there’s more out there… but a good setting is pretty much necessary, right?

It was Wild Arms V, however, that made me change my priorities. Here is a game with a solid difficulty level and a good, if recycled, battle system. It’s a must-play just for that, right? Well… not entirely. The plot is awful. It’s not quite mind-numbing, but it’s the same old crap. Long summary follows.

Young man with uncompromising morals and unbounded idealism sets out to save the world. He is accompanied by Love Interest 1, who he’s known all his life, and Love Interest 2, a mysterious girl who only recently appeared. He is, of course, completely oblivious to the crush that both have on him (1). On his merry travels, he comes across an older (~30) man who is out for revenge. Gradually our hero convinces him that revenge is empty and he should instead start a new life (2). Two more plucky young adventurers join him (3), and together they confront overcome five sub-bosses (4). Overcoming each of these minions of evil grants wisdom as well as an internal revelation to one of the party members (5). Each, of course, ends the game being either plainly dead or on the player’s side, watching from the sidelines because they can’t join your team. In the end, they confront the evil boss on his own, who is about to bring his dastardly plan to fruition but has for some stupid reason waited until the hero was right outside. The finale is mostly happy, but just sad enough to look vaguely original, with a cop-out explanation for an earlier mysterious cutscene.

(1) Dean’s only redeeming quality is that he names his shovels stuff like “Death-bringing Bone Crusher” and “Arctic Blade”. This is mentioned once during the main plot and never comes up again.

(2) Greg is a bad rip-off of Jack from Wild Arms 1. Jack, however, has a panache and the aura of a seasoned adventurer that Greg lacks. In Greg’s favor, his father-in-law made for a surprisingly good minor character. Jack gets more bonus points, though, since he was trying to get revenge for an entire nation.
(3) Chuck is moderately interesting, since he has a one-sided love story. For some reason the instruction book said he wasn’t too bright, but he comes off as much more intelligent than most of the rest of the cast. Carol was simply not interesting (I actually had to look up her name just to write it here).

(4) To be fair, said sub-bosses are generally more interesting than their corresponding party member. Avril has no counterpart, probably because she has no personality and a vague back-story involving a bizarre time loop. Nightburn, Dean’s counterpart, deserves special mention because he is just about the best villain so far in a Wild Arms game. He’s like Indiana Jones, only he carries a submachine gun, smokes cigars, and wants to destroy humanity because his dreams didn’t come true. Although his redemption is cliched it’s actually pretty well-done. I actually wanted to see his expected return-from-certain-death.

(5) Most of these revelations are horrid. Dean’s is “maybe I should change the metaphor I’m using in all my speeches”. Rebecca’s is “love is important” or some crap. Greg’s, of course, is “revenge won’t bring back my family”. If I remember right, Chuck’s is “I guess I can live with not having a girlfriend for now”. I’m pretty sure Chuck’s was the most original.

(Divider here for footnotes)

In the end, WA5 made me readjust my metrics. Plot is definitely important. Battle system not as much.

But in writing several paragraphs about how the plot is awful, you’ve probably noticed my tone changed between the main description and the footnotes. Whoops. Instead of absolutely vilifying the game, I talked about all its good points. But here we finally come to the point I was going to go for when I started writing this.

Wild Arms 5 has an awful plot, mostly bad characters, and an only-decent setting. It has a good battle system and some decent puzzles. Most importantly, and as-yet undiscussed: Wild Arms 5 also has an awesome soundtrack.

A month ago, I bought it. I paid more than I did for the game, actually – I’d recommend you download it instead, but to me it was worth it. See a future post where I plan to talk about why.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve listened to the soundtrack several times. Each time, I felt a little detail from the game come back to mind. And each time, I felt a little more inclined to think the game was good. The tower themes from near the end of the game are particularly incredible, and while at the time they felt like a bad laundry-list, I now think they’re the height of the game.

This isn’t the first game where this has happened. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how important music can be.

Chrono Cross has a mediocre battle system. The setting is pretty good, but the plot wanders a lot and the characters are colorful, but one-dimensional. What it does have, though, is an incredibly good soundtrack. Every time I listen to the Chronopolis music, in particular, I have an urge to start up the game again.

The first Persona game is difficult and combat ranges from nice to incredibly frustrating. The characters (as in P3) are amazingly well-done, but it was the music that got me back into the game. As a side note, a lot of the better music was not actually released in the soundtrack – I had to wait until someone ripped a .psf to hear my favorite tracks.

Drakkhen has unbalanced difficulty, many unexplained oddities, a confusing battle system… but great music that really blends in with how mysterious the rest of the game is.

Legacy of the Wizard is a difficult and frustrating action game with bits of exploration. Music brought me from vaguely remembering the game as bad to playing through it in its entirety.

In fact, looking at all the games I wrote GOTD entries on, which don’t have good (or at least better than average) music?

• Harvest Moon – Somewhat repetitive. Arguably good.
• Uncharted Waters 2 – The first game’s tracks were great. UW2 has more features, so it still wins…
• Armored Core – To be honest, I don’t remember *any* music from this game. It was probably not good.
• Jumping Flash! 2 – Sadly below average.
• Seven Kingdoms 2 – Claims to have music. Lies.
• Suikoden 3 – Otherwise good, but I hate that goddamn plains battle music. It’s horribly inappropriate for the game.

Out of 38 games I liked enough to write a few paragraphs about, five (and 1/4) have somewhat lacking music. With two exceptions, I have some music from every single other game lying around that I’ve listened to. It seems to me there’s a correlation between good games and good music.

Meanwhile, how many games were clearly bad (i.e. not worth playing) despite having good music?

My first example isn’t hard to come up with: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest has a rocking soundtrack, even though it’s a bad game.

I’m actually drawing a blank on any others. Once I come up with some, I’ll add them to this post.