Niahak's Place

Over this weekend, I finally beat Suikoden Tactics, the Strategy RPG semi-sequel to Suikoden IV.  As a long-time fan of the series, I had intended to beat the game for some time, held off by two things.  First, Suikoden IV wasn’t very good and the story never resonated with me.  Second, Suikoden Tactics has the much-maligned feature of permanent death for non-story characters.  When combined with the grid elemental system and a massive set of things enemies can do, it’s extremely difficult at times to predict whether a character will die in any given situation.

Since I beat Suikoden IV for the second full time just a few months ago, the time was right.  I didn’t start the game with much gusto, but at about the 15-hour mark (~25 hours total in the game), suddenly everything clicked and I finished Tactics in two days.  There were two successive epiphanies I had:

1. Suikoden Tactics is totally unlike any other Suikoden game in that it is about 5:1 game:exposition ratio.  If you play it hoping for more plot, expect to be disappointed.
2. Tactics has an arguably better implementation of many Suikoden mechanics than the core Suikoden games do, for three primary reasons: complexity, variety, and difficulty.

So it’s been exactly a month to the day from when Jesus was re-released as Jesus: Tale of the Dreadful Bio-Monster.  This was a multi-year effort, which is actually kind of sad given that I’m extremely familiar with the script and it’s not a huge game content-wise.  Regardless, I’m happy to have a better representation of my translation/writing ability out there – this one attached to a game that’s beatable (Akira being another recent release, an adventure game which makes Jesus look downright intuitive and normal).

Likewise, Destiny of an Editor has been an ongoing project for the past year or so, and is now up to version 0.98d, which includes integrated text editing, map editing, taunt/closer editing, loads portraits directly from your ROM, and may even make coffee for you.  Taste and existence of the coffee not guaranteed.  Both pages have been updated to reflect these releases.

When I’m not working, doing these fan-worky projects, or melting in the ungodly heat of summer in the midwest, I’ve been playing Dragon’s Dogma, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, and Crusader Kings II.  They are from widely varying genres (the only commonality being some sort of stat system, I suppose), but I guess suffice to say it’s still a good time to be a gamer.  Dragon’s Dogma is like a delicious blending of an Elder Scrolls game and Monster Hunter, the result being an open-ended game that has tighter combat and better pacing than most WRPGs.  Theatrhythm is, as I’m sure you’ve heard, sort of like Elite Beat Agents with Final Fantasy music, except with dozens of unlockable songs and characters, a experience and equipment systems, and so on.  It’s nostalgia, but it’s nostalgia with a good deal of depth – and, in my opinion, better than anything else Square Enix has published in the past couple of years.  Crusader Kings II, meanwhile, is a hardcore European strategy game that simulates the bloody, scheming-filled times from the late 11th to the mid 15th century.  Though not particularly difficult once one surmounts the 10-hour learning curve, it is nonetheless a very deep strategy experience – like the Total War game without the pesky combat that I always dreamed of, all family and vassal management.  That last part makes it sound disturbingly like The Sims, but at no point do you have to fuss over toilet placement (so far).

I hope to put together some decent reviews some time in the next couple of weeks… and will likely post them to videolamer, if it doesn’t break again.