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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s also short.  For an RPG this isn’t always a good thing, and most RPGs are expected to be 20+ hours.  PE was 6.5 hours, but feels like Symphony of the Night – it’s a game that knows not to overstay its welcome.  The Chrysler building is available for those who insist on more, but I felt pretty good leaving it as-is.

Arguably, there are only a couple ways PE could be overall improved.  Voice acting (if good) would help it out a lot, since its scenes are short but emotional.  Its battle system gets unbalanced quickly though, and some of the bosses reach the point where attacks are unavoidable.  For its length, it’s good enough – I have no idea if PE2 kept the same engine, though.

Other than PE, I have been playing FF4DS.  I’m pretty impressed so far, but it’s starting to drag a bit.  Even at the fastest setting, using the very nice auto-battle feature, things run a bit slow, and the encounter rate feels too high.

I have also started a non-hacking side project, which may never amount to anything.  In the event it starts to do so, this will be the first place I’ll post about it.

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.

P3: FES is one hell of a game.  Whether that is a good or a bad hell depends on your taste, but it’s epic in scale and I still think back on it months later.  I am really looking forward to P4, which was recently announced for a release date of December 9th stateside.

P.T.O. 4 is somewhat lackluster.  Pacific Theatre of Operations was one of Koei’s little strategy-sim experiments in the SNES days.  At the time, it felt too complex for its own good.  The PS2 edition (which I hadn’t known existed until just a week ago) is either far too complex or far too simple.  The game recommends you automate ship development, plane management, and politics – which leaves you with management of your navy officers and your navy itself, which feels far too simple.  Battles are done by giving your fleets vague objectives (sometimes they even listen) and you usually want to take out enemy airports.  It feels sort of like half a game with automation, but after a brief look at ship-building, it looks like I could spend weeks trying to figure it out.  I’m probably just not going to bother.

Chrono Trigger, meanwhile, is still a great game.  My tastes have changed since I was younger and I now favor games with more strategy and dialogue, but CT is certainly among the best of its generation and, like Lord of the Rings, will stick in my mind as an example of what the medium can do.  I have found many fantasy novels that build on LotR, but few can match its depth and remain so concise.  CT’s pace is nearly breakneck (few dungeons take more than a half hour) which is a big refresher after games that take 10 hours to ramp up the plot.  I wonder if that makes Chrono Cross the Silmarillion or the Unfinished Tales?  Either way, it is my current project.

I am continuing my hacking forays into the NES game Destiny of an Emperor.  I have updated the officer editor with a portrait preview feature and have been gradually working on a script editor (which does not yet have its own page).  I would try and mesh the two into one codebase, but I looked at some of the original editor’s code and it’s a total mess (so says more than a year of software development).  I’d rather just rework how things are, which I may do once I’ve got the script editor further along.

That’s all I’ve got for now.  Got to get to bed before spies start sapping my alarm clock.

The thing is, I sort of forgot I played it. There was this blank in my mind and I was wondering what I’d played after Wild Arms 5. I couldn’t think of much, so I figured I just hadn’t been playing any RPGs or something. After a while, I remembered that it’d been Growlanser. What is it that makes Growlanser so much more forgettable to me than Wild Arms 5? The characters are arguably more interesting, the plot more complex, the battle system more tactical (although with is less difficulty)… the only things WA5 has on Growlanser are difficulty and music, really.

As much fun as it would be to try and chalk it up to quality of music, I think the fact is that Growlanser is more seamless than WA5. Overall, it might be a better game – but there is very little in the plot that requires you to think. I remember one moment where I thought to myself, “Holy crap, that really sucks”, but otherwise, I didn’t get very engaged in the game. Even character interaction often has options that boil down to “be nice”, “be angry”, “be badass”, “be irreverent”, and by the end of the game your “personality” is mostly decided so you can’t use most of them.

There are practically no load times, so there’s no downtime either. Combat requires setting up an initial strategy (mostly character placement) and then carrying it out. “Knacks” or skill-type special abilities have very little effect most of the time, so it gets to be very mindless.

It’s not like Growlanser’s a bad game, it’s just highly forgettable.   It’s like watching a cliched, fantasy anime – not a whole lot of thought required, just good clean somewhat-cheesy fun.  That makes it nice for a quick, low-intensity game… but I’m not sure if I’ll ever play it again because that means I’d have to remember I have it.

Perhaps as a reaction to Persona 3, in which the main dungeon is the endless-seeming tower of Tartarus, I started playing through Final Fantasy Legend, whose story centers around The Demon Tower.

The best feature of Final Fantasy Legend is the fact that it is mysterious – much like Drakkhen, I find myself coming back to it time and again if only in the hope I will find something new again this time around. FFL rarely disappoints. There are four “cardinal” worlds:

• The starting world, which is standard fantasy fare: three kings seek to unify the world.
• The ocean world, with pirates, wizards, and the dragon Seiryu’s undersea palace;
• The sky world, in which Byakko’s glider-planes seek domination over an ongoing rebellion;
• The post-apocalyptic world, in which the fiery phoenix Suzaku destroys all who stray from the few protected dwellings.

Of these four, the last has the most compelling plot, in which your party aids a small group in raiding an abandoned nuclear power plant to obtain the technology to neutralize Suzaku.

And yet, though these worlds have in themselves good sub-stories, still more miniature worlds hide in the Tower for the most adventurous to find.

In between the first two world, I found both Heaven and Hell.

The first seems like the Paradise that motivated so many to enter the tower. Its inhabitants, however, are devoid of motivation. All they do is “eat, sleep and dream”, and they claim “it’s a wonderful life”, but they have forgotten how to “live”. It is mere temporary pleasure, and not true happiness. As a side note, Opoona has a similar theme at a major junction in the story.

On the other hand we have the world of Hell, which is found in the same area. Here it’s clear the only life is suffering; though one inhabitant proclaims, “if I can bear this, the gods will take me to paradise!”, others only scream for you to kill them to relieve their misery. Perhaps due to your characters unexplained moral fiber, or perhaps due to the monsters guarding their prisoners (then again, perhaps because they were unable to implement it) you cannot do so.

Do these worlds signify anything? I’m not sure what the original intent was. To me, each seems to be critical of a world view: some simply seek pleasure without thought, and thus won’t progress in life. Others punish themselves now in the hope of a “someday” reward that will never come. Though a path out may be before their eyes, neither seems to notice; perhaps they believe that change will be worse.

But at the same time, both give a motivation and a sense of purpose to a revelation that comes only at the top of the (explorable) portion of the tower.

I recall there being stranger and stranger “side rooms” further up in the tower, too. The person behind both this and Final Fantasy Legend 2, which has a similar feel to it, is Akitoshi Kawazu, who has headed up most of the SaGa games. Playing through and enjoying both of these GB classics is almost enough to motivate me to try SaGa Frontier again.

As the screenshots indicate, I’ve been playing through in Japanese both for practice and just in case the translation is missing something; thus far it’s been spot-on aside from a few small things.

After Opoona, I briefly tried the old PS2 open RPG Metal Saga.  It was $15 new, and I figured I couldn’t lose.  I wouldn’t say I lost, but I just about broke even.

It sounds great.  Post-apocalyptic, tanks, exploring, anime-styled, open-ended.  It builds up a great atmosphere… then thoroughly disembowels it.

Imagine you’re walking through an abandoned office building… it’s a dark area, complete with overturned desks, some junk in the corner a few chairs, all covered in dust.  You’re scrounging through closets for anything useful to sell.  These pre-disaster places sometimes still have untouched stuff… then you get into an encounter.  Is it bat-wielding ruffians?  Perhaps some sort of mutated critter?  Not exactly.  You’re fighting a rifle standing atop two bare human legs.  It is called “Pocket Rocket”.

Plus it has the worst loading times in towns of any game I’d ever seen.  If it takes 10 seconds of loading to enter and exit a shop, you had better have a damn good rest of the game – sadly, it does not.  I wanted to give this game a try, and I don’t feel good about giving it up, but it is damnably frustrating.

I have since started Star Ocean: The Second Story for the third time.  I’m not sure if I’ll play it all the way through, but it’ll do for now.

That said, here are a few more screenshots.

Oh really, Doug?  You just… go ahead and work with your containers.

Opoona chilling with his buddy the volcano (Opoona is a tricky fellow to take a screenshot of, hence the blurriness).

This battle could have come straight out of Earthbound.

Speaking of Earthbound, I’ve heard of some reviews of Opoona comparing the two.  I can say that thus far, Opoona has nowhere near the overwhelming amount of humor in Earthbound.  Are there puns?  A few.  Ridiculous situations?  Often (see Doug, above).  But I’d hesitate to compare them so readily.  Some of the feel is similar, but Earthbound pours satire atop pun, while Opoona pours awkward phrasing atop lacking grammar.

That said, the I liked the story of the first part a lot.  The only game I can compare the feel to is a portion of Lunar 2, and L2 was much less subtle about it.

Also, Captain Terry is awesome.  Just wanted to throw that out there.