Niahak's Place

It’s been awhile!
I completed Dragon Quest XI S to my satisfaction over two months ago, after a break of nearly three years. While I enjoyed parts of it, I was really disappointed with others.

First – the good. The fun-sized forge is an excellent little minigame, with just enough randomness (and just the right level of reward). While it does feel like its level scaling is a little funky, that does incentivize revisiting items after progressing a little in the core game. Combat is a bit of a mixed bag – at no point did any of my characters feel particularly strong, which is good (things are somewhat balanced) and bad (did I make a wrong decision in a skill tree somewhere?). The latter feeling got worse as I progressed. For example, a late-joining character had some skills with a one-handed weapon that were especially powerful leaving me to believe I had missed some nuance in unlocking spear skills for Jade. The core story is more twist-driven than most Dragon Quests, which is exciting in places but disappointing in others.

Sailing Era is a weird mix. Its portraits are bright, expressive, and fun, but its 3d models feel somewhat lifeless and drab. A lot of the game feels the same way. For example, It’s really satisfying to make a good trade and shore up your cash-on-hand… but beyond a certain point, trading becomes meaningless because it is too profitable. This makes the whole system feel a little… unmoored. Another good example is explorations – they’re a great source of experience for your crew, and often yield useful treasure or discoveries you can turn in for port contribution points. They’re actually even a little bit fun in how they throw different challenges as you every so often. But the challenges don’t grow with your crew or even by “danger level” so you’re likely to outstrip them after about 5 hours of play – and without the need for growth, there is little need for the experience.

In the end the experience feels a bit like an idle game with extra steps. You’re leveling your crew to make leveling your crew easier, trading to get money to upgrade your trading ships to trade faster, fighting other ships for loot to build better ships to fight with, and so on.

This isn’t to say that it’s a bad game – actually a lot of games are like this, and I actually found it simultaneously addictive and relaxing. In Sailing Era it feels a little more blatant though. Like its inspiration, Uncharted Waters, Sailing Era is an easy game. The first couple hours may be tricky as the main quest throws some hard battles at you, or the trading situation may feel a little tenuous before you’ve built a fleet. Once you’re past a certain point – say, you have three ships in your fleet and are relatively comfortable with crew wages – you’re trading so many goods at a time, and the relative pricing for trades so generous, that you can easily turn a major profit.

When I was much younger, I very much enjoyed Koei’s weird brand of grand strategy game. Being focused on personalities over numbers, tech trees or deep city-building makes them feel a little lighter on strategy than even the Civilization games coming out around the same time. In retrospect, though, they were fairly deep while still being well tuned to a console experience. The “officer” layer adds another level of management, as well as some personality – even a portrait and a couple of numbers can go a long way towards making a character feel more real. This in turn adds a bit of additional flavor to the overall experience, which might make it feel more tolerable when – for example – playing as Chrysalis and Flax in Gemfire are much the same experience after you’ve surpassed the threats in the first few hours.

Chaos Galaxy (which I played on Switch, but is also available on PC along with its sequel) channels much of the same feel as those games, while adding some helpful tactical depth.

I may not have mentioned it here, but I played Monster Hunter Tri on Wii off and on for a little over 100 hours.  I’d been planning on buying a Wii U eventually in any case, since Monolith announced “X” and Xenoblade was among my favorite console games this generation.  When MH3 Ultimate was announced, I knew I was going to buy the console earlier than expected.

MH3 Ultimate is a sort of a reboot / remake of MH Tri.  The early-game has been groomed and reworked so that it is much easier to get going, with many redundant or silly quests removed and some starting equipment provided at the start.  “High-rank” quests, or quests with variants of monsters and more difficult move-sets, have been added to single-player.  Further, there are now two companions that can join you in SP (rather than just one in the original).  Some armor stats have been shuffled around to mix things up for veteran Tri players.

The appeal of Monster Hunter is more about the learning process and player execution than about pure action.  Mistakes can be made, or random elements can cause substantial pain to a hunter, but at no point is the pure reflex of, say, Castlevania or Ninja Gaiden required.  Preparedness is key, and in multiplayer it is essential to cooperate to some degree with your compatriots – while all four hunters could use a hammer, and it might even be appropriate for some battles, it’s much better to have a variety of equipment and to have each hunter focus on something separate, while all keep an eye out for certain situations anyone can handle.

To touch on the depth of the game slightly – the third large monster you fight is called the Quropeco.  It’s a giant bird-thing with flints on its wings that it can use to set fire to you.  It can heal itself and call other monsters using its horn/beak — including a Rathian, which is a major threat to any hunter at that point in the game.  There are several things to keep in mind when fighting a Quropeco:

1. When it is about to use its horn, its pouch will fill up and it will dance around.  If you hit its pouch or throw a sonic bomb, it will fail and stumble for several seconds.
2. Its wings are more durable than other parts of its body.  Depending on your weapon, it is most likely best to hit its face or rear.
3. If you can hit its wings, you can break the Quropeco’s flints.  This yields additional quest rewards.
4. With sufficient focus, you can also break its beak.
5. When Quropeco gets tired, it will often fly to a nest at the peak of the area and go to sleep.  With a charging weapon, it’s easy to give it a rude awakening.
6. If Quropeco calls another monster, you can use a dung bomb to convince it to leave.  If it calls a brown drake, dung bomb and get out.
7. If it changes up the rhythm with which it knocks its flints together, that means it’s about to hit three times instead of two.
8. While it’s flying, you can hit it for a bunch of damage or blind it using a flash bomb to bring it back down to the ground.

This might sound intimidating, but there are many patterns between monsters that make things easier, and much of the game early on will be learning small tricks – how to use bombs, how to trap monsters, what moves are most effective when hitting certain body parts, and so on.  Once that is learned, you can at least be a productive member of a team online, and the online community for MH3 Ultimate has been pretty good in my brief experience.

Just as important as the learning process is the payoff.  The best way I can put it is that playing Monster Hunter online in a well-oiled team is the closest thing to having a great team for a sport or a project at work.  MH3 may well be the best multi-player game I’ve played simply because it encourages and rewards the proper kinds of coordination – breaking off parts of a monster, using a flash bomb or a trap at exactly the right moment, dung-bombing a monster that has another player pinned, and so on are reminiscent of games like Left 4 Dead, but don’t feel quite as contrived.  At the same time, it feels almost like a personal sort of growth takes place as well.  You as a player are consistently improving for at least the first 40+ hours, whether it’s in terms of game mechanics or in terms of game statistics.  Much like Dark Souls, half of the ‘leveling’ is done by the player and subsequent play-throughs are much quicker and done with more confidence.

While I can’t recommend this game for some, as they don’t have the kind of time to sink into this game (the first 5+ hours aren’t especially rewarding), if you do have that time I would recommend giving it a try for sure.  MH3U is also on 3DS, although on that system it only has local multi-player which makes the experience considerably less engaging.

Baten Kaitos is one of the few RPGs exclusive to the Gamecube, and it has a sort of middling reputation.  I hear practically nothing about it, aside from the occasional “What under-appreciated RPG would you recommend” thread on this or that forum.  For that matter, I didn’t even know that there were two Baten Kaitos games (Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean, as well as Origins) until fairly recently.  Origins was made second and is rarer (generally considered “better” as well).

Throughout this review, I refer to BK: EWatLO as “Baten Kaitos” for simplicity.  I have not yet played Origins.

Baten Kaitos was made by Monolithsoft and Tri-Ace working together.  When you look at each pedigree, you might understand why many find it interesting:

• Monolithsoft: (largely consists of developers who worked on): Xenogears, Xenosaga, went on to make Xenoblade
• Tri-Ace: Star Ocean series, Valkyrie Profile, Tales series

So you have Monolithsoft to build an over-arching world with an impressive history as well as the tortured history of the protagonist, and Tri-Ace to make all other standard RPG stuff interesting.

Tri-Ace’s focus was clearly the Magnus system.  You accumulate cards which represent weaponry, spells, items, and so on.  Each character has their own deck (which grows as the game progresses) into which you put the cards you find.  During battle, each character is dealt their initial hand of cards with which to take actions – for example, you might get a hand including a couple of weapons with numbers in sequence.  If one is played after the other, bonus damage is dealt.  As far as mechanics go, Baten Kaitos is perfect at introducing the system to the player.  Initially only two cards can be played in sequence, and each card has only one number to pay attention to.  As the game progresses, you find cards with multiple numbers, your deck size increases, and you have to start paying attention to the element of the cards that you include to avoid inadvertently cancelling out your damage.  Some exotic (and honestly sort of pointless) static effects make keeping track of the numbers harder.

Artistically, Baten Kaitos impresses as well – showing Monolithsoft’s talents.  The world consists of a half-dozen (ish) floating islands, with the denizens of these islands eking out a living in a different way on each.  The overarching back-story tells of an ancient war with an evil god, and how he was sealed away at the cost of “the Ocean”.  It should come as no surprise that by the end of the game you discover the meaning behind the back-story in the course of visiting all the islands.

What is most impressive about the artwork in Baten Kaitos is the design for each of the towns.  Many of them are fairly bland (especially early on), but some of the towns have a unique look to them that no other game has quite captured.  Each is beautifully drawn, often with some kind of movement in the background as well.  The town themes are likewise the best music the game has to offer (in a score that is otherwise somewhat bland and repetitive).

As someone who looks for new and interesting worlds to explore in my games, this is where Baten Kaitos shines the most.  It is unfortunate that many of the towns are much smaller than they should be, and that the game focuses so heavily on combat, leveling mechanics, and collecting random items for side-quests.

Other than the two features – mechanics and atmosphere – I cannot really recommend Baten Kaitos.  The voice acting is so-so, with a few good characters (mostly Gibari) rounding out the somewhat bland performances put on by the rest.  All voices, without exception, sound like they were recorded inside a deep well, which I have heard blamed on the compression of the voice work.  Outside of combat, the mechanics are often confusing and pointless – with your Magnus changing over time (e.g green bananas turn into yellow bananas, then into rotten bananas and finally into a generic and useless “rotten fruit”).  Many recovery items are food that gradually rots over the course of game-play, and even some weapons change and become less useful as time goes on.  Much of the battle system requires the player to depend upon random chance – since every deck should have defensive and recovery items, there’s a nonzero chance your hand will be full of items that are largely useless –  simply because that character isn’t being targeted.  Finally, although atmosphere is good, the story suffers from its adherence to JRPG traditions – sudden “reveals” that involve flashbacks, each of which “changes everything” but is not nearly important enough for you to have figured it out much ahead of time.

There is one exception to the “reveals” being generally not that interesting – there is one that depends upon a certain aspect of the story that seems silly and odd at first.  This one twist about 2/3 through the game is interesting and unusual – but certainly not worth playing the game if it sounds otherwise uninteresting.

It may be sub-par in more ways than it’s interesting, but Baten Kaitos is another JRPG that a fan of the genre probably shouldn’t miss.  Those who don’t follow JRPGs religiously or have fallen behind should hold off on this one, though – many games in the genre are more engaging than Baten Kaitos.