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.

In the vein of games like Arcana and 7th Saga, I picked up a copy of Paladin’s Quest.  Unlike the former two, I find Paladin’s Quest to be quite tolerable in difficulty, if unintuitive.  All three have their strong points, but PQ is by far the most playable.

I’m not sure I can call this a “review”, but I do want to write down a few things about the much-maligned (and rightly so!) 7th Saga.

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.