Niahak’s Place

So it’s been a long time since I wrote up anything here.  More than two months, in fact.

My main purpose in posting here is to point out the nice swath of RPG/strategy (or in one case, just incredibly interesting) games that are coming out in March.

Infinite Space is a Sega RPG on DS that looks to have more breadth and depth than most of Sega’s fare; I’m hoping it turns out as good or better than Valkyria Chronicles.  From what I’ve heard so far, you get to do some exploring reminiscent of Skies and command a fleet of ships, assigning roles to various crew members and such.  It sounds very interesting, and I haven’t read anything negative about it yet – but it’s a bit early for that, obviously.  It’s out 3/16.

Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is an adventure / survival game for the Wii where the main character wanders alone in a post-apocalyptic world filled mostly with ruins.  Although it has combat, it sounds like the focus is more on puzzle and story elements.  I love any game with a somber or lonely tone (if only because they’re so rare).  It sounded for a while like this was going to be yet another Japan-only game, but XSeed picked it up and it will also release 3/16.

Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love is appropriately titled, given it is a PS2 game.  It will also release on the Wii in a less-deluxe set.  It’s the first game in the much-vaunted Sakura Wars series to reach our shores.  Other games in the series routinely find their way to the top of fan-voted lists, so even if this game is a pale shadow of the best games in the series it will probably be worth it to see what all the fuss is about.  The series is sort of relationship-RPG-strategy, where how well you get along with your companions affects their performance in battle.  It will probably be at least partly Guilty Pleasure genre, but still should be a good time.  It comes out on 3/23.

Finally, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey will be coming out for DS.  The SMT series is so consistently solid mechanics-wise and intriguing story-wise that it would be hard to pass this one up.  Particularly after Devil Survivor was so good, Strange Journey should be one hell of a trip to the Antarctic.  It will also release 3/23.

January and February look sort of slow – the actual US release of White Knight Chronicle aside – so I’m hoping to knock my current set of games well out of the way so that I can start in on these entries once they arrive.

Lately I’ve been playing Eternal Sonata and Civ 4: Colonization.  Eternal Sonata is pretty and sounds very nice, but the difficulty is just short of crushing.  If it gets much worse, I might not end up beating it.  Story-wise it’s like a standard JRPG interrupted briefly by History Channel-esque segments on events in Chopin’s life.  I’m not even seeing much in the way of allegory here.  As far as Colonization goes, I enjoyed the original a lot and this is just more of the same – slightly improved, spiffier-looking, and more expensive.  Can’t really complain.

Projects are trucking along as always – sometimes more, sometimes less, including some minor work continuing on Jesus.  There’s not much to show at this point – or more accurately, what there is is hardly mine to show, as I’m just retranslating.  Stardust Crusaders of romhacking.net offered to take a look at expanding things, so he’s doing the hard part.

I picked up the PSP remake of Persona last week.  Thus far I’ve found it to be mostly superior to the original, with some relatively minor negatives.

The biggest positive is that the relatively low-quality and occasionally downright strange original localization has been replaced with a spiffy, high-quality and more accurate job.  No longer does the game pretend to take place in the sleepy U.S. town of Lunarvale, and no longer does Guido Sardenia plot to do evil things to said sleepy town.  The localization work in PPSP is overall great and, near as I can tell, accurate (aside from one small gaffe; apparently the “Hiremon Stone” is in St. Hermelin’s courtyard, rather than the Philemon Stone).

The only negatives I’ve seen thus far have to do with sound effects.  While I do miss the original voicing (remarkably good for the time) the new stuff is better.  But the small pieces that formed a greater feel for the game – the sort-of-scifi sound effects, the Persona summon sound effect, even the surprised scream when you walk into a trapdoor – all are missing, usually simply silent.  When the Deva System goes into overload, there’s no indication whatsoever.

While it’s still worth picking up – I can’t help but think that it still lost something in the process of gaining a new subquest, improved translation and reworked soundtrack.

Hey, it’s been awhile.

In the past several weeks, I have beaten two games that start with “P” and end with “4″.

First off is Persona 4, which is an excellent game.  At this point I think it’s in the running for my favorite RPG ever.  It is leaps and bounds beyond Persona 3, and far easier to stick with than many RPGs, since it uses the Social Link system and does not focus only on battles  – though it also takes a bit longer than most to really get going.

Second is Phantasy Star 4, a Genesis classic which I have experienced for the first time on Virtual Console.  It’s a bit rough by today’s standards, but it is a really nice game – the cutscenes, done in panels of drawings, are unique – the only game that comes close is Wild Arms 4′s random juggling of character positions and expressions.  Overall, though, PS4 is a solid game, and is particularly good for anyone who enjoys a bit more sci-fi in their JRPG.

Some good news has trickled out of Japan, and I’m a bit excited about it.

The first piece is that that SaGa 2, AKA Final Fantasy Legend 2 over here, is getting remade for the DS.  Here’s hoping Square localizes it!  FFL2 is my favorite GB game by far, so I’m looking forward to seeing how (or if) they can improve it.

Second is that Persona 1 and Growlanser are being ported to the PSP.  If both are localized, that makes four (!) great PSX RPGs that are available for PSP, and I may just have to finally get one – that doesn’t even count the Star Ocean 2 remake, which I haven’t heard much about yet.

I don’t know what’s more sad – that companies can make so much money off of reworking old games, or that I think these ports and remakes will be among the best games to come out in the next year – and I’m perfectly willing to buy them despite owning many of the originals.

Over the past week, I played through Parasite Eve.  I’d played through it years ago, but only remembered a couple of the scenes and areas.  Now that it’s fresher in my mind, it’s a game that’s largely impressive, but has some issues here and there.

First, the game really is cinematic.  It makes great use of perspective, like the Resident Evil games, except in PE a sudden shift in perspective won’t kill you.  It has a great realistic ambiance and feel to it despite the fact that its premise is campy and the “engine” abandons any sense of realism (i.e. kill a rat, get 6 bullets, kill a T-Rex, get a nice pistol).  Whereas RE, Doom, and the like tend to go for cheap “shocks”, PE follows the footsteps of the System Shocks by generating an atmosphere of menace.  Its puzzles are likewise more realistic – instead of finding a key lying on the ground in a room, you might find it in a desk, or on a corpse – there’s a motivation to search everything that might contain something. (more…)

There is a lack of effort involved in the majority of RPGs that I have to confess I enjoy.

The JRPG genre is filled to the brim with games that are so ridiculously easy they are bad “games” – in the sense that a game is something you should play optimally.  The Suikoden series, my favorite of the past two generations, has gone from being “somewhat tricky in one or two battles” to “a breeze even at the worst”, with pretty much no thought involved.

Part of this is a plague of the genre – the phenomenon of grinding.  For those who don’t want to think about what they’re doing, grinding is an easy way out.  There’s no need to play perfectly when you can spend a couple hours killing baddies and come back able to beat the tar out of the bigger baddies.  It takes time, but then JRPGs are filled with fluff (mostly grinding, ironically) already, so spending a bit of time leveling up doesn’t sound too bad.

But strategy is largely lost on RPGs.  I have only played two RPGs – the Lunar series – where playing optimally is not only recommended but required for boss fights, and, if only for that, they deserve much praise.  Even in the Persona games, which I have lauded for the strategy required, thought is needed more in preparation than during actual fights.

Part of this is, perhaps, an unreasonable expectation on my part.  The JRPG is inherently a single-player endeavor, and not everyone is going to want to play for a challenge.  I’ve wrestled with the story vs. gameplay question myself, but my favorites are all games that have both.  For a lot of players, bosses that simply repeat a pattern of moves or use them randomly are enough.  In Persona 3, bosses use some strategy, but several fights in FES revealed that boss AI is every bit as bad as the teammate AI.  Thus far, I’ve been disappointed.  Even Lunar 2′s bosses use set patterns, but the patterns are balanced so well that using the best set of moves is needed for victory.

Is it too much to ask to have a bossfight that involves the same limitations on both sides?  Every boss of every game has a higher HP total than your party combined.  Remember the fight against Magus in CT, where he had thousands of hit points?  Why can’t a game be more balanced?  In most games, your characters can one-shot kill themselves, but have a hard time combining all their strength to take out a single mage – who later joins your party and turns out to be a complete wuss.  I’d like to see a game with fights where the sides are closer to equal in terms of strength, but where the cunning AI will give a lazy player a rough time.

Taking out “grinding” isn’t even that difficult – the leveling scheme in Chrono Cross (which I have made fun of in the past) actually does things pretty well.  If the non-boss fights are kept to a small amount, it could certainly work out in another game.  It surprises me, considering how many complain about grinding, that no game has excluded grinding entirely.

But then – to some degree, I find I still enjoy the laziness of playing thoughtless games.  If I have to think, that means expending effort – if there’s too much of it (like if I have to think in every single fight, for example) things start to feel more like work.  Some games do pretty well by being a book where you press X a bunch and occasionally explore to find things – The Phoenix Wright-like RPG.  Rogue Galaxy and Suikoden V do that pretty well.  FFXII even takes out the part where you press X, and funnels the strategy into a bite-sized area right around the time you get gambits.  These games are good fluff – they’re like an easy-to-read, but not very deep novel.

But the really rewarding games challenge the mind on two fronts – by having an intriguing story while maintaining an edge of challenge in between plot points.  They keep the “game” in role-playing game without losing the role.  It takes balance, just like a good boss battle.