Niahak's Place

Many, many years ago I was an avid reader of Nintendo Power.  I had already developed a taste for RPGs, although they were a bit less numerous back then.  A bunch of them were bad – and often, even Nintendo Power was willing to admit that.

Regardless, I would read each article about an RPG with fascination.  When it was a game I knew, I would enjoy flipping through the various artwork and reading about the tricky parts.  Otherwise, I’d quietly file it away in a hidden corner of my mind, to play later.

I’m finally working my way through the last few of those games I filed away – you can see in the last dozen or so posts that I reviewed Paladin’s Quest and 7th Saga, and a year or so back I played through a good chunk of Arcana.  All of these games I tracked down, purchased, and (with the exception of 7th Saga, which is too tedious) played on real hardware.  The only one left is Lagoon.

From this experience, I’ve learned a few things:

1.  I actually played most of the good RPGs of the time when I was a kid.  Paladin’s Quest is the only one of the set I’d play again.
2. Somehow, I still manage to enjoy even the bad RPGs.  The vast majority of RPGs at least have some optimization axis or story, and either one gets me.
3. Even bad RPGs are still pretty expensive by comparison (all of these were around $20ish).

This leads me to my latest game: Great Greed, a game released on the Game Boy in 1992.  As soon as I heard the name, I remembered reading about it in Nintendo Power and thinking that the description sounded really cool, and the artwork was kind of neat.  The context in which I heard the long-forgotten name was incredibly bizarre: a NeoGAF post about how the game asks you to pick your marriage partner at the end.  It turns out that the game allows you to marry another guy, an 11-year-old, and even the king or queen.

Now that my nostalgia was back in action, I decided to order the game and play through it on my Super Game Boy.  And, sadly… it’s the worst of the lot thus far.

It’s not like the game doesn’t sound entertaining.  By the one-hour mark, I was doing a break-in on an abandoned record factory to get an old washed-up singer’s debut album.  Some professor specializing in genealogy named the album as his price to investigate the family tree of the Crab family, so that princess Cup Cake and I could prove that the mysterious politician “Crabby” was actually a fraud working for the evil Bio-Haz.

If I heard that description, I would think “wow, that game sounds incredibly wacky.”  And in a way, it is.  The next section had me infiltrating Oasis Castle so that I could reclaim it for the Kimchi Tribe, who would in turn give me Golden Pepper to defeat the dragon guarding a prison where Dr. Bromide was being held.  I needed to talk to Dr. Bromide because… actually, the game didn’t tell me why.  Or, more accurately, Cup Cake didn’t tell me why.

You see, even at its very wackiest, Great Greed suffers from a complete lack of explanation.  Maybe it’s intentional parody of the RPGs of its time, which seems accurate enough.  It would be in good company there, since Earthbound happens to be a perfectly good game in its own right.  But where Great Greed fails is in the execution.  While Earthbound builds an interesting, fast-paced battle system and has interesting dialogue, Great Greed has neither.  Its battle system is quick, but it only has one party member.  Assistants (like Cup Cake, Lolly Pop, Candy, and so on) have a special effect that triggers at random, but it’s never enough to make things interesting.  When the grind is factored in, one realizes that the game likely takes about twice as long as it could if it threw balance to the wind and let the player enjoy the silly parody.

Technically, though, the game is actually a little bit impressive.  It allows saving anywhere (like the Final Fantasy Legend games), but more importantly it actually has an auto-save function.  In 1992!  It saved me about 25 minutes when I forgot to save just before a boss battle.

Story-wise, it’s incredibly obvious what the story is about – the main character is an environmental researcher of some kind, summoned to an alternate world where everything is named after food, and the evil Bio-Haz is trying to pollute the normally prosperous land.   Some of the towns do have bizarre themes, but they always tie back to the quest.  For example, one town has a set of laws you can spend money to re-randomize (i.e. Don’t Talk to Soldiers, Don’t Enter the Armory).  I didn’t actually get thrown in jail, but I assume it wouldn’t have done much.  Once you reach the prison, you find out all the prisoners were gathered to do forced labor mining pollution-causing rocks.

If it were not quite so grindy, Great Greed would be a fun little game and I would finish it for certain.  Perhaps for an RPG on the Game Boy – where most of the competition was the various inaccurately-localized Final Fantasy games, it wasn’t bad at all.

Since it is, though, the most interesting part of the game is the section from the aforementioned forum post – which I am unlikely to reach.  Sometimes, even I have to admit defeat so that I can play something more enjoyable.

Since the very beginning, Growlanser’s had a sort of cursed existence in the US.  The first game, on PSX, never came over (nor did its PSP remake).  The second and third games came over courtesy of Working Designs, but Sony of America only allowed it if they were sold as a pack and (as I recall) budget priced.  Atlus localized Growlanser: Heritage of War (I like to call it GrowHOW), but by that point the series had pretty much no fanbase on the continent.

Quick history on the series – the Growlanser games are Careersoft’s continued effort at strategy RPGs now that their Langrisser games have been concluded.  They’re pausable, real-time strategy games focused on a small number of playable characters (usually up to 4), with a sort of ATB system reminiscent of Grandia (e.g. you can delay opponents’ turns by attacking them).  The hallmarks of the series are its varied missions, politically focused stories, and interesting / unusual / creepy character designs by Satoshi Urushihara, most famous for his work on Record of Lodoss War and in *cough* hentai.

Luckily for us few fans of the series, Atlus was willing to publish the PSP remake of Growlanser 4 (with additional characters, ending paths, etc) as Wayfarer of Time.  Though some aspects leave something to be desired – specifically, voices were cut from the US release – textually it’s a very impressive effort, since the game includes such a large variety of response patterns and branching paths.  Despite the large volume of text, all of it reads very naturally.

Wayfarer of Time is considered by the series’ hardcore fans (not me – I’m a fair weather fan and don’t like to import much) to be the best in the series, and it’s easy to see why.  The politics behind the primary conflict in the game – between the militaristic republic of Dulkheim and the stable kingdom of Valkania – is shown in detail, and offset by lesser conflicts, some of which are more traditional JRPG fare (Angels vs. Humans).  Character relationships are built up and change as the war progresses, and tough decisions eventually need to be made.

One of the interesting features of the game is the large number of side-quests, many of which are hidden.  For example, there are characters whose life or death depends upon you doing certain things prior to story events.  In my own play-through, I missed at least a couple of these.  The difference story-wise is often minor, but that’s pretty understandable from a writing point of view.  There are also three distinct routes, although one is only available on a second play-through and another is determined based on a (fairly) arbitrary matter of character recruitment.

Play-wise, the difficulty curve seems a bit on the steep end for the middle of the game (~10-20 hr point of 28ish overall for me).  Each mission in the game has a “Mission Complete” (ideal) outcome, as well as Mission Clear (OK) and Mission Passed (barely won), and many are pretty much un-Complete-able unless you know what you’re getting into ahead of time.  This isn’t a huge deal, though, as only a few endings require certain battles to be Mission Completes.

Overall, the game’s my favorite entry in the series thus far (having played 2, 3, 4, and 5 now) and one of the best RPGs available on PSP.  Hopefully we get to see the rest of the Growlanser games in English as well.

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.

It’s been a few months since last posting, and a bunch of stuff has happened… so I’ll try to do a quick run-down.

I went to PAX East, and had the opportunity to show off Suikogaiden (sadly, just the publicly available demo) on real hardware to a good-sized group, including a couple of game journalism celebrities whose writing I thoroughly enjoy.  Met some really cool people, saw a good friend for the first time in 7 years, and played some generally underwhelming demos of upcoming games.  Although it was a great experience, I’m still not sure about PAX Prime (Seattle) this year.  Seattle has a great layout near the convention center, and the center itself is more navigable than Boston’s, but the PAX experience is pretty overwhelming for me and the panels and audience generally seem to be better at Boston.

Xenoblade came out that same weekend, and I’ve been gradually making my way through that (reasons to follow).  It is an incredibly beautiful game – much like Opoona, it thrives in spite of the hardware in large part due to its attention to detail.  Xenoblade allows the player to explore practically anywhere that can be seen, and the sheer spectacle of the game itself is enough to keep me playing.  It isn’t so much the variety of environments as the open space, the detailed background work, and the overall atmosphere.  The game itself (thus far) takes place on the surface of a giant ancient being called the Bionis, and the characters gradually work their way up it.  In the distance of most sections, one can see other limbs of the Bionis or those of its opposing also-ancient being, the Mechonis.

So in case it isn’t clear, I highly recommend Xenoblade.  It is mechanically solid (MMO-style mechanics, light action-RPG controls), has good music, great voice acting (the English is far superior to the original Japanese in my brief switching between the two) and plenty of content.  By the point I’ve reached, it has started to slow down a bit – potentially requiring the player to do some quests – but to me, the game is simply so enjoyable I can continue on regardless.

Also, the (North American) Demon’s Souls servers are going down on May 31st.  This means that next month is the final opportunity to enjoy Demon’s Souls as it is meant to be played – with the potential threat of Invasion from other players, as well as co-operation in most areas (less common than Dark Souls’) and the message/bloodstain mechanics.  I didn’t give Demon’s Souls much of a chance, but have finally started by creating two characters (one “Conan” build and one sorcerer build).  I’m about 2/3 of the way through the game, and I can definitely say that Dark Souls is the better game of the two.  Demon’s Souls takes a less structured approach to progress, with stages all branching out from a single hub.  Dark Souls is designed much more like a Castlevania or Metroid game, with clearly defined progression (and small pieces of non-linearity).  The bonfire mechanic is also a significant improvement, and stage design is considerably better as well.  The only things I’ve seen that Demon’s Souls do better are magic acquisition (trading boss drops for magic/miracles) and the harsh, unforgiving and hopeless tone of the Tower of Latria (to give an idea – the first stage is a prison filled with the no-longer-sane wailing of the convicted, patrolled by dark octopus-faced wardens who carry chimes and suck the life out of those who get in their way).