The first thing you will notice about Paladin’s Quest (titled Lennus in Japan) is that the design is pretty wild.  You’ll find 7 or 8 distinct races throughout Paladin’s Quest, and while every one is humanoid, not a single one is human.  Many have twirly eyebrows, fins for ears, etc, etc.  The most wild example is a late-game mercenary, who is clearly a hybrid of a few races – he has cat whiskers, a beard, some stubble *and* twirly eyebrows.  He was, of course, my MVP in the final battle.  It’s not just the characters who have interesting designs, either.  The trees have circular tops, bringing to mind stories of The Lorax and Sneetches.  You’ll find towns surrounded by magma, suspended by giant kites, and even – in one area – consisting of giant eggs with doorways.

Where the game unfortunately falls short is its music.  After 7th Saga – with its several distinct and memorable town themes, on top of multiple battle and overworld themes, the soundtrack for Paladin’s Quest sounds alternately relaxed and grating.  It didn’t quite reach the point where I wanted to turn off the sound entirely, but it came fairly close.

The core of the game, though, is good.  In a break from traditional RPG mechanics, Paladin’s Quest has no MP – only HP, which is consumed for spells.  It follows, then, that there are no healing spells whatsoever.  One might justifiably ask if this can possibly be balanced – and the answer is that it can and is.  Paladin’s Quest has surprisingly good balance from start to finish, with the only hiccup occurring right at the end of the game.  PQ uses a mechanic which limits the number of healing items you can receive and use at a time – you fill bottles with medicine in towns.  This goes well with a companion mechanic – no “item” menu in battle.  You can only use what’s on your character, which might include one such bottle.

One mechanic I found interesting enough to place in a separate paragraph (!) was the magic system.  As you progress, the primary characters (Chezni and Midia) gain access to new elements.  Elements combine to make spells (e.g. Fire + Air makes “Fire All”).  When you use elements in battle, the caster will gradually become more proficient.  Most important of all, though, increased proficiency makes a character more resistant to that element when attacked.  This means that unlike many RPGs with complex growth mechanics – Shin Megami Tensei, Suikoden 3, etc – one cannot ignore classes of spells entirely if one wants to make a character powerful.

Another system that I found interesting, especially just having played 7th Saga, was the mercenary system.  You have four character slots, but only two are filled by permanent characters.  The other two are filled with mercenaries – characters you recruit, usually for money, and dump when they’re no longer useful.  Sometimes they’re plot related, but for much of the game they’re just side characters that add some flavor.

“Chezni” is an even better main character name than “Rooks”.

At this point, it’s hard to tell whether you will actually enjoy this game.  It depends on your taste in RPGs – while Paladin’s Quest is certainly interesting and different, it is extremely light on story up until the end, and much of that story is optional “world” story level stuff.  The premise will be familiar to many: your character does something very bad, and spends the rest of the game trying to make up for it.

Ultimately, of course, Paladin’s Quest is a product of its time.  It is unpolished, a little clunky, has a few mistranslated bits (hell, the word “Paladin” never even comes up, to say nothing of the concept)… but it will give you a warm gooey sense of nostalgia – even if, like me, you never made it past the first couple sections when it came out.

First off – it is a difficult game, but only in its form as The 7th Saga.  The 7th Saga is a cruel, unforgiving grind-fest of a game which will offer only a few lines of dialogue for every hour of wasting time fighting the same enemies over and over.  I spent 16 hours trying to play this game in its “original” US format, and I got perhaps a third of the way through.  More than ten hours were spent not trying to progress – not even exploring, or side-questing, or talking to villagers – merely trying to survive in the new area where suddenly I was once again in grave danger of dying in every single battle.

Elnard, the game which 7th Saga is “based on” (the wording from the credits, not my own), was by comparison a much easier game.  Most enemies had considerably lower stats.  Although certain areas scaled up quite a bit, and some grinding is certainly still required, level-ups improved considerably later on – to the point where, at level 30, you would be gaining two or even three levels’ worth of stats – +3 points to each relevant stat – compared to what you would normally gain.

How much of the transition was accident and how much was intention is hard to determine.  My guess, since monster data is pretty hard to screw up, is that monster stats were buffed intentionally.  Maybe the game was reviled in Japan for its low difficulty, or the producer decided to do some tweaking independently for the US release (given that games like Phantasy Star and the first Final Fantasy did fairly well, and the Western RPG scene was known for Wizardry in particular in Japan, “the US likes hard games” isn’t an impossible conclusion).  The leveling scheme seems more likely a mistake, because it wasn’t done consistently.  Other apprentices gain the bonuses even though the player doesn’t.  Some data was moved around in the transition, so it’s not impossible for someone involved in the process to overwrite something that didn’t look important…

For those that might be interested at this point, there is a patch out there that restores monster stats and does some initial leveling growth fixes. it doesn’t fully restore the leveling bonuses, though.

So, on its own, 7th Saga isn’t Elnard – the original was, at its core, if not plot-driven (haha, with its 10 minutes of actual story), at least more exploration focused than 7th Saga.  With the difficulty patch it becomes clear that exploration while leveling is not suicidal – far from it, it’s actually fairly easy to do!

But wait, if 7th Saga may actually not be a terrible game fundamentally, what’s so great about it?  What does it do that no other game* of its time and genre bothered with?

7th Saga introduced the concept of other “players” in the form of your rival apprentices.  Although the core of the story is the same, each character has their own motivations.  Not only do natural friendships form between characters with similar motivations – Esuna, Kamil, and Valsu, for example, who are predisposed to be friendly to one another – events over the course of the game will form a slightly different narrative each time.  Since you can recruit one other apprentice to fight on your side, your party makeup will often differ – in my initial play-through, Lux joined me, but in my second, he refused to even consider it.

For example, the castle town of Patrof is taken over by an apprentice gone rogue – the Rune it once guarded seized, and its townspeople living in fear – but which apprentice it is can differ from game to game, with certain limitations.  Dialogue with the apprentice in question is always the same, but the characterwill be dead upon completion of the Patrof section of the game, and will never return.  Another example – If you’re particularly brave, and join forces with a rival with totally different motivations (Valsu/Lejes, for example, the priest and demon characters), there’s even a chance that your companion will betray you and try to steal your runes.

Finally, some sections of the game even differ based on your primary or companion character.  Olvan, the dwarf, can go to his hometown and find out about a hidden passage in a secret cave (although other characters can find the cave, you must have Olvan in your party to pass to the final area).  Lux and Esuna twice get ‘breaks’ in the form of free rides to certain places, while other characters have to pay money or go through dungeons.

Before you get your hopes up, this isn’t a totally emergent experience.  The order of runes, aside from a few which can be gotten in any order, will always be the same.  The dungeons will, with only a couple exceptions, come in exactly the same order for every character.  The ending is the same no matter who you choose, and your companion character will never speak (unless he/she betrays you!).

Even with all those caveats, 7th Saga actually has some really cool ideas – and, if characterization were especially good (like in, say, The Spirit Engine 2 which has a few ‘emergent’ moments), such a narrative could be really powerful.  In the 7th Saga, characters (and their reactions to you) do change slightly over the course of the game – however, tracking them down to figure out how they’re doing is not just tedious, it’s dangerous.  By the halfway point, most characters will simply challenge you to a duel.  And why not – you have the most runes!  Imagine what a modern game could do with this concept, though – modern games like Space Rangers and Mount & Blade point at the same idea – give the player rivals – but go fully emergent in nature, with the narrative ultimately suffering (and most rivals being faceless by the end).

When you factor in its sorta-post-apocalyptic lonely world, complete with demons, aliens, 30 or so 5,000-year-old amnesiac robots (okay, Tetsujin) wandering around (one of which is a primary character), you kind of see what kind of story 7th Saga was going for.  It’s not typical, and this is absolutely a good thing.

Oh, and of course it has good variety in music – four overworld themes, several totally distinct town themes, four battle themes.  Not all of them are great, but I found them memorable.  Decent games always have good music.

Is 7th Saga worth playing?  Maybe if the Elnard patch gets finalized, or if the player is dedicated enough to modify their save-states manually (*cough*).  If one has enough free time, or a turbo button, the original might be okay.  The game’s atmosphere may not totally be unique, but its 7-archetype-rivals system sets it apart enough for me.  7th Saga may not be worth playing, but in my book it’s worth thinking about.

*Well, to say no game of its time built its narrative this way might be an overstatement.  Inindo did this sort of thing – better mechanically, but worse in terms of story – when it built its strategy-game-in-the-background system, with dozens of adventurers wandering Japan at the same time.  Too bad Inindo’s otherwise much less compelling!

Kawazu has a long history of working on the SaGa games, and it is entirely reasonable to call TLR a stealth entry in the series, since it has many of the hallmarks.  Aside from standard battle system/plot dichotomy, there’s a wonderfully imaginative world that very little is actually done with, entertaining side characters that never really break into the third dimension, incredibly good music that has only bits and pieces of substance to go with, and enough sidequests to deliberately avoid the main story for hour on end.  Atmosphere is fed in small spoonfuls for completing hour-long quests, while stat increases are passed out like candy on Halloween after every single battle.

After all of that negative stuff said about both SaGa and this game, I still really enjoyed much of my time spent on it.  Of that enjoyed time, perhaps 10% was actually plot – the parts that are most enjoyable, of course, are totally independent of the reckless, clueless main character (appropriately named Rush) and focus instead on Marquis David of Athlum and his subordinates, as they struggle to deal with the political realities of the world.  The other 90% was spent chasing various rabbits cleverly disguised as sidequests; find this dungeon somewhere on the world map, often via dungeons, and then explore it until you fight a boss.  Along the way you’ll gather materials, adjust unit layouts to deal with new enemies, acquire various items, find optional bosses and so on.  At least half of the dungeons are fully optional and many of them can be accessed not long into the game – although if you spend a long time leveling up your initial characters, you’ll run into difficulty when you get new ones that are either more relevant or are better long-term.

The battle system includes lots of bars and numbers.  It will make you feel important.

The battle system, of course, is the best part of the game.  It’s an unusual approach to making the game feel larger-scale; rather than individual characters fighting, you organize people into groups (Unions) with combined health, give them high-level commands (Attack with Combat Arts!) and point them at the enemy.  They’ll do their best to follow your commands, but they might get intercepted by an enemy unit and have to readjust.  Other mechanics, such as deadlocking (once two units are engaged, neither can move to attack others until one of them disengages deliberately), long-range attacks, formations, a morale system, and so on lend more credence to this large-scale approach.  In the end, the result is much the same as a standard RPG; if you win, you get rewards and occasionally stat increases to individual units.  Since this is, of course, a modern RPG, and casting spells or using items between battles is simply barbaric, TLR restores all health between battles.  The only penalty for losing a unit entirely is that nobody in that group will improve for that battle.

Unfortunately, The Last Remnant went the standard Kawazu route for difficulty balance and made enemies scale with a “battle level” which measures your progress.  This means that grinding will often not help you overcome a particularly hard boss.  In the PC version, at least, it rarely hurts you – but it’s not like it will help you move through the game faster if you spend 10 hours sidequesting before continuing with your plot.  Many optional bosses will be incredibly difficult until you reach a certain point – and even then, will require very specific strategies to overcome.  Storyline bosses, meanwhile, will still slaughter any unit sent in to deadlock them, which makes even storyline boss battles an endless loop of resurrecting your dead unions while putting up enough of a wall to hold the lines.  This constant life on the edge during battles makes the victory in the end sweeter, but it also makes it feel totally ridiculous and somewhat random.

One of the later dungeons in TLR.  Lots of variety in dungeons, which is good since that’s where most of your time will be spent.

Luckily for the PC player, The Last Remnant is not only available on PC, it is by far the better version of the game.  It has good gamepad support, adjustable graphics, dual-language voice options, and the most important part – a turbo mode for battles, which makes them easily three times faster.  Although a casual PC gamer may not have the specs to run the game, anyone trying to keep up – even on less graphically intensive genres – will probably have a machine capable of running it.  Still better, since it’s on Steam, it can be bought on the cheap at least twice a year – and still seems to be fairly popular.

Since I make a habit of doing a quick plot overview pretty much all the time, I may as well give TLR the benefit of the doubt – someone may be intrigued enough by my summary to consider the game.  Rush is a guy living on an island with his (adoptive? they’re vague) sister.  She gets kidnapped by a guy with a flying Remnant (oh yeah, Remnants are ancient, mysterious tools that can do many things and are bound to people).  His parents are busy on the continent doing Important Remnant Research and totally impossible to contact, so Rush runs off on his own to find his sister.  He runs into the middle of a battlefield where David Athlum is beating down some monsters.  Upon introduction, David recognizes his last name and decides to help him out for no adequately explained reason.  Much of the rest of the game is spent taking on increasingly unrealistic challenges, coupled with revelations about who wields true political power in a world filled with destructive and/or beneficial ancient tools that nobody really understands.  Only in the end, of course, does the title become relevant.  There is a Remnant, and it is The Last One.  The end.  The entire game is full of people with poorly explained or simply unexplained reasons for the decisions they make.  There are a couple of cool cutscenes, but there is nothing redeemable in the plot.

To be honest, though, it’s not like the plot is that bad.  It is no Final Fantasy, filled to the brim with melodrama and with endlessly intertwining backstories.  Nor is it a Dragon Quest, filled with standard vignettes to fill the space between dungeons.  There is plot, and while it is not good, neither is it unbearable.  It merely is, and if the player can simply go with the flow and let it wash over them, it can be fully ignored and the battle and item customization systems enjoyed for their own sake.

Describing the inauspiciously (or is it?) abbreviated TitS’ gameplay systems is like writing a laundry list of the best mechanics of great RPGs.  What kind of encounters do people prefer?  Non-random and avoidable.  What are some of the better liked battle systems (e.g. Chrono Trigger, Lunar series)? Location-based, erring on the side of less management by the player.  Magic acquisition? Custom, with the ability to swap in and out pieces that interact (similar to FF7′s Materia system, but less broken).  Other aspects of battle?  How about a fury-like system (Wild ARMs) with especially powerful abilities available after taking lots of damage (FF series’ Limit Break and co), that allow you to interrupt battle flow (Xenosaga)?

Unfortunately, spelling things out like that makes TitS sound like a Frankenstein-like mishmash of totally unrelated mechanics.  Nothing could be further from the truth; each individual piece links perfectly into the next, forming a gooey, tasty set of mechanics.  It’s not so free-form that it can be totally broken, which is a trap most games fall into.  Instead, it’s just complex enough that it requires the player to strategize to win battles the first time around. If the player loses (I did a couple times), TitS is nice enough to have a feature that makes subsequent battles easier.

Trails in the Sky has superb difficulty balance.  Very few games can reach the cusp between “this is too easy and incredibly boring” and “each fight is half an hour of nail-biting”, but this one does just that much of the time.  The main quest is difficult enough that plot-based fights take a little longer and involve more thought, and some side-quests are available to give you other fun situations to try, such as enemies that drain your MP but are weak to spells.

Plot-wise, I hesitate to go into too much detail.  Suffice it to say, there’s betrayal, good people who seem evil, evil people who seem good, a bit of romance, lots of entertaining dialogue, and so on. The primary characters are likable and fairly realistic.  They are, of course, standard JRPG archetypes, but they have enough nuance to them that they rise above the standard.  Secondary characters often recur, which helps you get to know them a bit better and avoids having a multitude of inconsequential townspeople diluting the core of the story.

One of the nicer things about the plot is that characters freely flow into and out of your party (outside your duo of main protagonists).  This allows the fairly largish cast of playable characters to get a little bit more development than they’d otherwise see.  It also requires a bit more work on the part of the player – in a good way – so that each combination works out in battle.

I’d argue that the worst thing about TitS is the fact that it’s on the PSP rather than, say, the PC, where it saw its initial release in Japan.  For all that, though, it does handle the PSP very lightly.  Many games “jog” the loading quite a bit (sucking more battery out of the system AND potentially damaging the disc, in some cases), forcing the PSP into loading tons of data at once.  TitS had no such issue, and is available on PSN in any case.  In terms of actual gameplay, though, battles do feel a little slow, particularly during a few sequences where you only have two party members.  In my opinion, this is a relatively minor issue and is overshadowed by the strategy involved.  Otherwise, the game feels well-balanced; there are no overly long sequences of either dungeons or plot.

Just in case Metacritic stops by, I’ll call this a 94%. I don’t like giving numbers for reviews, since I can’t possibly compare, say, Baroque and Final Fantasy Legend 2 on equal footing.   But I’ll pretend to be a Real Reviewer™ for now.

In this ancient shop simulation, you would buy various items (clothes, appliances, and so on) at a base price, and sell these items at a markup, arranging them in your store to draw in customers. You could even visit the nearby department huge store to view their prices, and undercut them slightly to draw in more people. I think there was even an initial debt to repay.

After I stopped going to that computer camp, I simply stopped playing the game. It was sort of interesting, but back then the internet was a mere fledgling of what it is now, and I doubt that the halls of AOL or Compuserve would have had any information on it regardless.

Recettear is the modern Bentley Bear’s Store. Known long-form as “An Item Shop’s Tale”, Recettear is the poster child for translation of Japanese indie (often called “doujin”) games. Much like the store-sim game of my youth, in Recettear you purchase items from either a Guild Shop or the global Marketplace, and sell them at a negotiated markup (that markup often depending upon the willingness of the customer in question to haggle). You arrange them in the store in such a way as to draw in customers, and later you can even design the walls, floor, and counters of your store to attract specific kinds.

One aspect that makes Recettear more interesting is that it adds many sub-mechanics on top of a simple store sim. Initially, prices are static and you merely sell things that you put out on display. As you progress, your customers will start to bring in stuff they wish to sell – most often food or “treasures” (antiques, statuettes, and other things) that can be hard to resell. Price of goods will fluctuate – sometimes wildly, giving the advantage to the savvy store owner who stocks a large variety of goods. For example, I was selling a ton of weapons and suddenly the price for metal hits rock bottom. Losing money on sales is bad – but at the same time, price of sweet foods went up. I had a few melons and a bunch of other fruit stocked up, so I revamped my stock and made a killing. Each customer type has an “affection”, or stated more directly, Loyalty rating, as well – so there may well be advantage to selling things directly asked-for at a loss. More loyal customers will come in more often, with more money in their pockets, and will haggle less. Certain (named/portraited) customers, once they become loyal enough, will give you their Adventurer card, allowing you to use them in dungeon-delves to acquire new goods.

Being such an experimental game, however – despite drawing on such classic sim fare – Recettear has rough edges. Dungeon-delving might seem fundamental to a game with a fantasy theme, but in reality it isn’t that helpful. The first few sets are pretty useful, often yielding on-par or better gear than can be initially bought and helping to unlock recipes to create still better equipment. After that point, there is a steep dive in quality which is aided by a devious random number generator. On floor 5 of the third dungeon, I found an iron breastplate worth $8000. Decent money for that point. Not a single treasure chest from then until floor 35 had anything worth more than $1100, making the entire delve a waste of time (aside from meeting a new “customer”). Adventuring takes two of the four timeslots in a day, and I could’ve earned $50,000 easily had I spent that half of the day tending shop instead.

Despite all this, adventuring makes for a nice change of pace in a game that is largely about numbers and the overall experience benefits from a little adventuring.

On my initial playthrough (recently completed my second), I found hitting the targets for debt repayment increasingly difficult until – on the final repayment – I had to hang up my shopkeeping hat, run over to the Guild Shop, and sell every single item I had at a significant loss, just to win the game. From that experience I learned it is much better to offer prices people will initially accept (generally, 105-110% depending on the customer) than to suggest prices and have them haggle (~130%, which only the guild master will actually accept). This drives up your merchant XP, giving you earlier access to better goods – and earlier access to price fluctuation, which can earn you a huge amount of money.

Although Recettear is now old-hat (oh my, it was released 7 months ago!) and long since had a significant boom in sales (ensuring Carpe Fulgur will stay around to localize more titles), it is still well worth the $20 price of entry. It’s a quick, fun play-through (9-10 hours at most) and even offers additional plot to those willing to plumb its depths in the Endless Mode following the “normal” game.

Note, this marks the transition of Game of the Day to Game of the Moment. Thanks to you-know-who-you-are for this suggestion to keep me consistent. No, I’m not renaming old ones, so it’s not going to be consistent. Take that.

We don’t get visual novels much over here.  In fact, even one of the most popular ones to come out of Japan, Umineko no Naku Koro Ni, is fan translated but still has only a niche following.  Granted – it’s too large for me to get very far into even the second chapter of four – and that doesn’t count the “Chiru” chapters.  Many VNs have been translated, but the genre just hasn’t caught on in “official” channels.

Aksys, however, has (in their wisdom) granted us the chance to experience a fantastic sample of the genre on DS.  It has some great artwork, a thrilling plot, and some pretty cool puzzles to solve.  It deserves support, and you deserve to play it.

Unlike Umineko, 9/9/9 is very easy to get into.  After all – there are only nine characters and nine doors.  How complicated could it be?  The game certainly took me longer than nine hours, but I went through it five separate times.  Yes, I went through it five separate times and I just complained about not having enough time to play RPGs.  That’s because the writing in this game puts RPGs – or at least, the ones I’ve been playing recently – to shame.

Final Fantasy XIII, for example – for all the effort they put into deliberately wrenching around the player emotionally and intertwining the backgrounds of every single character – has awful characters.  9/9/9 is how all plot-centered games should be written; gradually getting to know the characters bit by bit.  This doesn’t mean finding out their life story, or even their hidden eccentricities – it means getting a feel for how they react to situations, how they start plotting against the other “players”, and so on.

I only have two complaints about this game.  The first is that text is incredibly slow the first time through, so I think my DS’s A button has nearly worn out.  Second, the requirements for getting the “intended” endings are not hinted at.  I accidentally got the least conclusive ending the first time through, and I was initially convinced all of them were that bland.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

To conclude my meandering proto-review: play this game.

I’m not even really sure NieR can be called a game.  While it has many elements of a game, so many of its parts are clearly parody – of Zelda, Resident Evil, text adventures,  God of War, and even bullet-hell games – that I’m not sure there’s much left you can really call NieR at its core.  Yet at the same time, it is a game with a highly serious plot.  On the other hand, it has all sorts of nonsensical banter – your floating-book companion, Grimoire Weiss, makes fun of you incessantly for accepting the most inane quests from villagers.  Kainé is also a wonderful vehicle for (more profane) banter.

It is the seriousness that overwhelms the banter, though – and you get the sense that the constant back-and-forth is the characters coping with what is going on.  Still more important – not everyone knows what is going on.  The main character (presumably named Nier) doesn’t have the full picture.  You can only see it by going through a new game plus (less painful than you’d think – it can be done in about two hours).  It is, of course, depressing.

You may think it difficult for a game to become more depressing when it opens in a snowy, abandoned city (in summer, no less) in which a man uses a rusty pipe to keep bizarre apparitions away from his diseased daughter.  Somehow, it does, without the pathetic melodrama of Final Fantasy XIII – although you will probably have to play 20 hours to reach that point.

NieR is a mature game.  Not in the sense of blood-and-guts (although it does have blood, you are fighting faceless apparitions), nor in the sense of nudity (although Kainé could use a little more clothing) – but rather that the plot is that well-written.  The basic premise is pretty clear – a guy trying to find the cure to his daughter’s terminal illness – but there are much more detailed subplots, such as those of Kainé or Emil or Two Brothers Weaponry.  And, of course, at the end of the game you get a ton of “reveals” that explain most everything – a quick new game plus explains everything else.  The two additional endings after that are just icing on the cake.

As a bonus, NieR is not even that difficult.  I died due to stupidity a couple of times, but if you figure out the strategy for getting the best weapons early (hint: more expensive weapons are better) you’re fine on Normal difficulty for the vast majority of the game.  The gameplay is a little rough around the edges, but its annoyances can be safely ignored.

Speaking of ignored, if you play this game IGNORE ALL QUESTS not given you by the florist in the first 10 hours of the game.  This will make your experience much less tedious.  If you need money, once you have fields plant wheat with bounty fertilizer, then sell it when it’s ready to harvest (20-28 hours real-time, advance the system clock if you prefer).  Farming is more enjoyable and faster than 90% of the quests and has better rewards.

What I gave it above may be a bit of a rave review – but far and away the best aspect of the game is its music.  These are among my favorite tracks, but the vast majority of the soundtrack is fantastic (Chrono Cross quality).

Kainé/Escape (Youtube)

Hills of Radiant Winds (Youtube)

The Wretched Automatons (Youtube)

This interview is particularly fascinating, since it describes how the lyrics for the game were put together (The Wretched Automatons, for example, is intended to be futuristic English).

The soundtrack is even available on iTunes here.  Square Enix is awesome for putting it up there, since otherwise I would have been forced to import the soundtrack to get my fix.

Finally, yes, the title is a reference to Dragon Quest IX which has had me addicted for the past two weeks.  I don’t think I have ever enjoyed grinding so much.

I have also been playing one of the most popular RPG “classics” of our recently departed generation: Final Fantasy X.  This, no doubt, will give me the internet equivalent of street cred and my blog will now overflow with posts debating whether Sephiroth is the best villain ever.  My review follows.Let me say, first, that this game does rank pretty well in the standard of PS2 Final Fantasy games.  This is not a great metric to go by, though; FFXII was only saved from “unmitigated disaster” on the character front by Balthier, and though the plot was entertaining enough, much of the rest of the game was bland.  The license grid was fun for a while, then got boring and pointless; meanwhile the sphere grid is pointless for a while, and then gets fun.  But as fun as it is to rag on FFXII, this post is about FFX.

Once I got past the first 7 hours, Tidus went out of “whiny Blitzball player” mode and got a little less dense.  This allowed cooler characters (everyone else) to take a bit more of the stage.  Although the others are at times annoying, aside from Auron, all of them are at least unique.  This is one of FFX’s strengths, although none of the characters are compelling.  Unfortunately only Wakka shows any significant growth, and that is mostly because he goes from religious bigot to a somewhat understanding guy with a terrible accent.  Tidus and Yuna improve a bit, but Tidus remains the outwardly-confident inwardly-sensitive JRPG stereotype while Yuna maintains the strength-in-the-face-of-despair bit from start to finish.  Voice-wise, both have either poorly translated lines or shoddy delivery; I’m not sure which, and it could be both.  Auron, Rikku, Lulu, and  Kimahri are the only characters who feel well-voiced, and if they couldn’t do “awesome veteran warrior”, “stereotypical bouncy girl”, “goth girl” and “guy who never talks” right, I would not have bothered playing the game.

The world is definitely FFX’s strongest point.  Spira has all kinds of crazy stuff going on, and the landscapes seem at some times almost Seussian, others something like in Skies of Arcadia; generally, they are fascinating and fantastic.  Unfortunately, the initial wonder the player might feel at seeing something like the Thunder Plains, where a constant thunderstorm roils the landscape and specially placed lightning rods allow moderately safe passage, is almost immediately offset by annoyance.  See, the player has to dodge these lightning bolts in an incredibly annoying fashion, while dealing with the crushingly high standard encounter rate (seriously, once every 10 steps or something).  Likewise, in the somewhat-cliche-though-cool forested area, the player can do an incredibly annoying butterfly catching minigame.  Though there are areas where stupid minigames do not interfere with the dreamy, fantastic feel of Spira, they are few and far between.

Likewise, Spira’s constant assualt by Sin makes for an interesting move.  Much like the post-apocalyptic fourth world of Final Fantasy Legend, full of ruined cities destroyed by a rampaging phoenix, Spira goes through 10-year cycles at the end of which Sin reappears and begins laying waste to the landscape.  Any attempts to stop it by conventional means meet with death on a grand scale.   Sin’s nature (i.e. biology, power, etc) is never fully explored, though it is far better without explanation; all you need to know is that it has a freaking lot of bug things and laser beams it can shoot at you, and that somehow your entire party always survives every assault intact.

It is this lack of follow-through where Final Fantasy X falls apart.  Spira is consistently described as being death-filled; and perhaps it is.  But none of the characters who die have faces.  There are two minor characters – potentially three – who are even remotely likeable and die in the course of the game.  They each have perhaps four lines before their death.  What FFX really needed was for a significant character (preferably Tidus) to die a horribly violent death.  Perhaps getting crushed by Sin’s left pinky-equivalent.  Then the message of death would get through; but no, we can’t have any main characters die, because that’s too cliche.  And before anyone calls me out on a certain character, you should re-read the exact wording in the paragraph.  I know at least one person reading hasn’t played the game yet (yes, I’m sure you are the only one in the world who hasn’t now), and I try to keep this place spoiler-free.

Tales of Symphonia reminds me of Growlanser: Heritage of War for several reasons.  First is that the characters seem horribly cliched at first glance.  Second is that combat is almost unbelievably smooth; very, very few RPGs get this right, and ToS has pretty much no down-time (no loading time, no gameplay freezes during battle over .5s, easy controls).  Third is that the ToS world is full of intrigue and certain NPCs switch sides at least three times – when they don’t actively admit they’re working towards three different goals.  Fourth is that, sadly, I may forget this game before too long because the experience is almost too smooth.

But it really surpasses G:HOW in many respects.  The characters are actually pretty deep, and I found myself liking all of them (except Zelos, of course; nobody likes Zelos.  I suppose Genis gets a “meh” as well).  ToS has the JRPG standard where you explore the entire world and solve everybody’s problems.  In this respect it’s cliche; in the way that sometimes people die, and they’re not always bad people, it is not.  ToS also has good music, more balanced combat, and a much more enjoyable story.

All in all, a good game with a few flaws.  Some of the puzzles in dungeons are really annoying – not in the “hard-to-solve” way but rather the “why did they force me to do the same sequence 5 times” way.  AI is occasionally sketchy, but generally at least decent.  Difficulty is fairly well-balanced.  I lost a few boss battles along the way, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a team reorganization and a bit more planning.

Tales of Symphonia is highly derivative of Tales of Destiny 2 (Tales of Eternia, for those “in the know”) plot-wise but does just about everything better.  I would particularly recommend it for someone who hasn’t played any of the Tales series before.  It’s a really polished Action RPG, even if it does everything you’d expect from a JRPG.

I’m looking forward to Dawn of the New World.

Suikoden 2: Graphics: 8.5/10 Sound: 8.5/10 Gameplay: 9/10 Story: 9.5/10 Translation: 6.5/10 Overall: 9.4/10

Suikoden 3: Graphics: 9/10 Sound: 6/10 Gameplay: 9/10 Story: 9.8/10 Translation: 9/10 Overall: 9/10

Suikoden 4: Graphics: 9/10 Sound: 8/10 Gameplay: 6/10 Story: 7/10 Translation: 8.5/10 Overall: 7/10

Suikoden 5: Graphics: 7/10 Sound: 9/10 Gameplay: 9.5/10 Story: 9.3/10 Translation: 10/10 Overall: 9.3/10

This is going to be an unusual review in that I’m looking at a whole series. I’ll mention briefly the overall themes, then describe each game in turn.

The Suikoden series is loosely based on the novel Outlaws of the Marsh, a Chinese novel written in the 13th/14th century AD. It takes its name from the Japanese name for the story, translating directly to “Water Border Legend”, but probably more appropriately “Marsh Legend”.

Briefly, the novel is about 108 men and women (corresponding to 108 Stars of Heaven and Earth) who, persecuted by a corrupt bureaucracy, form a closely-knit group of outlaws at Liangshan Marsh. They declare loyalty to the emperor, whom they believe has no idea about what is going on. After they defeat government troops several times, they are eventually pardoned by the emperor and go on to distinguish themselves in wars against invading “barbarians”.
The Suikoden series takes from that novel the concept of 108 Stars of Destiny. That is to say, each individual game has 108 characters, several dozen of which the player must find scattered throughout the realm and recruit. The games also take several recurring themes from the novel, including a single friendly strategist who is miraculously cunning and well-informed (except in the case of 3, but that’s for later) and several characters being “non-fighters” (in the novel, there was a doctor, a seal carver, a calligrapher, horse expert…). Not all characters are required to finish the game, but they are necessary to get the most plot and the “best” ending in all the games. The player obtains (usually halfway through the game) a castle which grows in size and utility based on how many and which characters have been recruited.
It’s also interesting to note that all of these games, unlike most RPG series, take place in the same world. For example, Suikoden 1 takes place in the Toran Empire (“Scarlet Moon”). Suikoden 2 takes place around 5 years later, somewhat Northeast of there, and one of the places you must go for military aid is the capital of the newly formed Toran Republic.

All of these characteristics make for stories that are altogether believable and well-done. Characterization is remarkably good considering over 100 characters (in fact, much better than the original novel) and I still don’t see why the Suikoden series doesn’t seem to be especially popular.

Suikoden 1 is, naturally, the first of the series, and as such is not especially well-polished. The sprites and portraits, though generally not bad quality, are fuzzy and it is sometimes difficult to tell what is going on. That said, music is quite good, carrying the theme of any given part of the game.

Battle mechanics are somewhat odd for the genre – you have a 6-person team with which to fight normal battles. Multiple enemies can be attacked (or attack) at the same time, so rounds go relatively quickly. The magic system is somewhat akin to that of Final Fantasy 1, but has several improvements to make it much nicer.

There are also “major battles”, which work like a gigantic rock-paper-scissors match, with enough quirks to make it relatively strategic.

The game, like Suikoden 2 and 4, has a ‘silent’ protagonist. The protagonist, that is, never says anything unless you are making a decision. These decisions range from relatively inane (whether or not you want to try and flirt with your female bodyguard) to more important (whether to execute an enemy general or try to recruit him), but the result is that characterization for the main character is pretty good despite him never really talking.

I won’t go into too much of the plot, but essentially ‘you’ are the son of a distinguished general, Tir McDohl. Your friend, Tim, who Tir adopted some years previous, has a disturbing secret which drags you into a rebellion against the empire, which by now you have realized is full of corruption. Eventually, you become leader of this rebellion, and gain the services of a strategist, a former teacher by the name of Mathiu Silverberg.

From there, the plot has several twists and turns, and I wouldn’t want to spoil anything. Suffice it to say, the story is good but not especially predictable.

Suikoden 2, the next entry of the series, is much better polished. Sprites are clear, portraits well-done, and the plot is well-written. Most music is better than in the first, but not all.

The battle mechanics are much the same, but since graphics are much clearer, you can get a much better idea of what is going on. Major battles are much better, but still play like a ‘lite’ strategy game (most like Warsong or a Shining Force / Fire Emblem game).

Plot is excellent. Since the game takes place only five years after the original, there is a good amount of room for overlap of characters, and instead of only having cameos, several of the major characters of the original work into the plot and are better characterized in this version.

There are so many good characters in this game that it is hard to think about beginning to describe them. A good portion of the way through the game, you’ll get Shu, a strategist who studied under Mathiu of the first game. Shu is by far my favorite of the strategists, mostly because he is well-informed and reminds me of Zhuge Liang of Three Kingdoms.

In fact, there are several references, minor and major, to Three Kingdoms. Whether it’s intentional or simply a side-effect of having a basis in Outlaws, it makes the game a bit more interesting if you’ve read the book or played the games.

This is not to say that you should avoid the game if you haven’t. Suikoden 2 is probably my second favorite RPG for the Playstation (after Lunar 2), and is well worth a play if you can track it down for less than $60.

The only major problem I have with this game is the translation, which ranges from a well-turned phrase to some of the most grammar-challenged stuff I’ve seen (a blacksmith says “I haven’t sharped in very long time”, for example). This generally doesn’t interfere with the plot, though.

Suikoden 3 was the major changing point for the series. While the second entry was a more polished version of the first, the third is a reimagining of the series – and what a reimagining it is.

The main difference is that KCET implemented what they call a “Trinity Sight” system, which in more plain words means that there are 3 main characters, each of whome has a unique perspective as to what is going on. The player will thus have a much larger view of the events in the game. This system is well-implemented, allowing you to choose which character’s chapter to play next each time one is finished. Chapters are between 1 and 4 hours long, and each character has 3, along with Chapters 4 and 5 where you select which character to become the ‘main’.

The world in Suikoden 3 is rich and colorful, but occasionally annoying. Environments are particularly nice-looking, with realistic-looking cliffs and forests. Characters themselves have very well-drawn portraits, as well as correspondingly nice models (done in an anime-esque style). Instead of modelling emotions as a shift in the polygons of the face, though, or not showing it at all, in Suikoden 3 the characters have drawn faces which change depending on the emotion conveyed. Although it can look rather odd, it usually has a nice effect. The only complaint I have with the graphics is that town environments range from very nice to drab and repetetive, but the nicer ones more than make up for the so-so ones.

Gameplay mechanics changed big time. The battle system is now location-based, which is to say it’s like the Lunar series, and honestly looks really nice. It’s very suitable for the series. In between battles, there is a skill system built atop the leveling system, allowing for some nice customization. If you like some number-crunching and optimization in your strategy-RPG games, you’ll probably enjoy this portion.

Music took a pretty big hit on this one. I’m not certain, since I haven’t checked the corresponding credits, but I think KCET lost their original composer for Suikoden games, which means that Suikoden 3 has music that is, while generally atmospheric, pretty repetetive and not especially inspiring. Some songs can be good (town music among them) but the main battle themes are short and not very suited to battle. Boss themes are somewhat better, but they’re even shorter.

Another slight gripe about this game is that sometimes it seems to take forever. It’s by far the longest of the series (my shortest game was 32 hours, while for 1, 2, and 4 I had 15, 20, and 15), which is mostly a good thing, but a goodly portion of that time was in running across the exact same field for the 10th time in a row. It becomes much easier to skip once you get the teleporting character and the Blinking Mirror, which takes you back to your base.

Plot-wise, this is the second best of the series. The three characters that can be chosen have different personalities, and each is well-characterized and pretty likeable. Two or three dozen minor characters are given good characterization as well. The strategist for this game, Caesar Silverberg, is interesting at first (being that he seems to be habitually lazy and unmotivated) but I got the impression he wasn’t really that skilled (and seems largely unnecessary as a character).

Throwbacks to Suikodens 1 & 2 can be found interspersed in the plot, but do not become a major issue. You can load in save data from Suikoden 2, but the only major perks are 2 scripts (1 if said Suikoden 2 data did not have loaded Suikoden 1 data) and the Suikoden 2 nation’s name (I forget the default) being changed to whatever you named it in-game. I’m glad that they allowed this because it’s always neat to see a country you named mentioned, even if only in passing. Some characters from earlier games reappear – Futch, Apple, Yuber, and Viki being the only ones from the first 2 and Tuta,being the only one from Suikoden 2 that I can recall. Several characters are referenced, though, such as Maximillian, Ronnie Bell, Freed Y… the end result is a slightly richer experience if you’ve played through the first two games.

All in all, this game is excellent. It is my second favorite PS2 RPG (though that might change with a new Valkyrie Profile) that I’ve played, and can still be found for a reasonable price (unlike 1 and 2!), though that price is going up. I highly recommend it. It is no wonder it has a successful manga series, even in the United States!

Suikoden 4 is another changing point for the series – namely, back to the old. Unfortunately, there is really nothing I can say about the game that is definitely better than in any other game.

The battle system is the same as Suikoden 1/2 – the only differences being only having 4 members in a party (and only one “row”, so no more back row for easy survival of caster characters). Well, with such a drastic reduction of complexity, you’d better hope the other feature is darned neat. Unfortunately, the “rush” feature is largely an empty add-on, allowing for a single attack before batle starts under certain situations.

Thankfully, the game is easy enough that it doesn’t really matter. In fact, very little about the battle system matters – it’s less complex than the first entry of the series, and is an easier game.

Graphics are, as in Suikoden 3, 3-dimensional and quite nice. Characters look much more realistic than they did before. Towns look a little more repetetive than in 3, but it’s no big deal.

Story is sort of questionable. KCET went back to a “passive hero” – that is, one who only is considered to be speaking when you, the player, is making a decision. In the first two, there were more decisions that didn’t matter, and enough characters that the hero cared about to bring about some real characterization. The only character this hero seems to care about is the pompous Snowe, a character who is so weak, whiny and all-around unlikable that he’s nearly unbelievable (nearly as bad as the main character of FFX, possibly worse), yet he is still friends with the main character after being a real jerk to just about everybody who isn’t evil. Thankfully, the strategist Elenor Silverberg (ahh, that last name again) is funny enough to make up for Snowe, but some of the plot just seems too convenient / contrived / “easy” for the main character.

Translation is, like the third entry, excellent. Although no Working Designs (which incidentally went out of business recently), the translation team seems to know what it’s doing.

A major departure for the series is (finally, in the eyes of some – unnecessary, to me) is that of voice acting. The same studio that did Star Ocean did this game, and they seem to have done an even better job. That is to say, this is some of the best voice acting this side of PC games (Jagged Alliance, Arcanum, etc). Some characters have annoying voices, but they are generally in-character and audible. The main character, of course, has no voice.

Only a couple throwbacks in this game. Suikoden 4 takes place in the Island Nations off the coast of the major continent in the Suikdoen series, 50-some years before Suikoden 1, so they could only have a few. One, at least, is guaranteed to delight players of Suikoden 1, however.

Taking place on island nations does bring a couple of interesting mechanics to the game. You are expected to find islands based on relatively vague directions, which starts out interesting but ends up being annoying. The ships are generally slow and difficult to maneuver, so you will likely run into a dozen random battles betwen towns The headquarters, too, is a giant ship – but the teleporter character can be gotten so early that it hardly matters that it can move at all. The new Strategy Battle system is generally uninteresting – a large game of rock-paper-scissors with a few more elements at best.

My final problem with the game is that recruitment is sometimes random. There was only one ‘star’ character in the past three games where you had to wander and have a random chance of getting them; there are something like 6 or 7 in number 4 alone. On my last play-through, I gave up because of this frustration.

Overall, a good game, but certainly doesn’t live up to 2 and 3 – if it were a sequel to Suikoden 1, it would be a pretty decent game, but when they take out a nicely done skill system and a decent, nice-looking battle system and replace it with a system that is less complex than the *first* game in the series, there’s really nothing to be said. This is a good game, but only a mediocre way to continue the series.

Suikoden 5 is, in some ways, like 4 in that it is a return to the roots of the series. In 4′s case, however, Konami seemed to regress too far back, while in 5, the best parts of the old games – with the possible exception of the graphics – are meshed into one great game. There are only a couple aspects of the game that truly need improvement. Suikoden 5 is easily the best PS2 RPG I have ever played.

In terms of gameplay, the combat system is most like Suikoden 1/2, but it manages to incorporate some aspects of 3 (a toned-down version of the skill system) to create an excellent experience. Outside of the combat, wandering around towns is also like it was in 1 and 2 (which is somewhat disappointing), with the view being either too far zoomed in or too far zoomed out (you pick between one of three zooms). Since you can’t rotate the camera, it’s occasionally very hard to see things.

One of the few aspects of Suikoden 4 that was good in terms of gameplay (or lack thereof) – namely, the cutscene system – has been greatly improved, and despite a few lackluster performances (and a few annoying, if accurate ones) the plot is well carried out. This is aided by the best translation I’ve seen of a PS2 game (“Isn’t it the most awesomest thing EVAR?!”) to make the plot as well as the characters both accessible and entertaining.

The game takes place shortly after Suikoden I, and a few years before Suikoden II. Only five familiar faces show up in this game – namely the two characters who are always there (Jeane & Viki), Georg Prime (who appeared in Suikoden II), Lorelai and Killey(I/II and II). That is to say, it’s the lowest number of recurring characters for the games that are within a century of each other – but despite this, Konami created 103 new characters, the vast majority of whom are likeable.

The main character (although somewhat scary-looking) comes across as a more interesting character than the one in 4. Not only is the plot more interesting, but instead of coming across as a passive, dull guy who happens to have a true rune (and a passably interesting backstory) the main character in this game comes across as a pretty competent, likeable guy who got the short end of the stick early on.

Supporting cast members are interesting and well-carried-out. The plot develops very nicely, although it is a little slow at first (over 5 hours – minimum – before you get to the really good part). Strategy mode is sort of real-time, and can get overwhelming but reminded me most of II’s – which is a good thing!

On the whole, a great successor to the series. I can only hope Suikoden 6 is as good.

The entire series, taken as a whole, is quite good. Even if Suikoden 4 doesn’t stack up well against the others, it is not a terrible game – simply a frustrating and sometimes overly simple one. I have now played number 5 and I know it lives up to the series’ greatness.