Niahak's Place

I can no longer keep my silence regarding this game.

Some of you may have heard of The Spirit Engine, a freeware RPG that surfaced 5 years ago or so.  It had the interesting feature of choosing your party at the beginning, which significantly changed character interactions and dialogue, as well as a pretty cool battle system and great music.  Personally, I played it for several hours but moved on before completing it.

Now I regret that decision and will certainly be rethinking it.  Its sequel has arrived.  Though there was a brief break, on Sunday night I played it for 5 hours.  I am hooked as I have rarely been to any game; I have only played one other game since I started The Spirit Engine 2 in earnest – and that was a brief bout of Stepmania, in which I created a simfile for a song from TSE2.

The Spirit Engine 2 develops on all the strengths of the original, and adds its own to boot.  All characters have a detailed portrait – including shopkeepers and random one-line townspeople.  Dialogue is excellent, and each character has a unique feel and style of speaking.

Thus far I am more than somewhat impressed; TSE2 was, after all, developed by two people.  Mark Pay is now among my heroes for having not only programmed but also written all dialogue and done all artwork for the game, and Josh Whelchel is a great composer.  I’ve already bought the soundtrack.

It’s really a breath of fresh air.  In a genre that’s often fettered by standard, bland characters, little significant character development and rehashed or simply broken combat systems, TSE2 stands as a beacon of both stability and innovation.

A full review will follow once I’ve completed this game.  Expect very little from me until that point; I fully intend to use most of my free time to continue.

I wanted to consolidate my thoughts about Grandia 2 in one place before I go on to the next topic, so here goes.

Grandia 2 starts out quick and is really a great game for about 15 hours.  At around that point, there have been a few interesting subplots, including (to my mind) the best one (“the Eye”), which is both vaguely creepy and depressing.  Neither is done often in JRPGs, and in Grandia 2, they are done well with supporting and main characters feeling quite real.

Likewise, combat at that point is both swift and challenging.  Bosses are tough, and even regular enemies will wear your party down after a while.  The Eye in particular is tricky and satisfying to defeat.

Unfortunately, at that point the game begins to degrade.  Ryudo’s one-liners are still enjoyable, and he is among my favorite non-silent main characters… but the rest of the party becomes somewhat cliche.  Roan deserves mention for at least having an interesting struggle with himself in his subplot, but nobody else has any particularly redeeming development.

Things begin to slow down in battles, too.  Bosses become increasingly easy, and regular enemies are a joke – in the final dungeons, every normal battle can be finished with a single super-move, making each battle just 20 seconds of load-watch-super-move-end.  The end plot points are, naturally (it being a Game Arts game – both Lunars and Grandia 1 did the same) quite cliche, and would be nigh painful if Ryudo didn’t say something offbeat every so often.

Is it worth a play?  Certainly.  I’d say it’s in the upper half of PS2 RPGs.  It’s still good fun, but it does become rather tedious.

Few more Game-y things:

Over the trip I finished Final Fantasy IV DS and Advance Wars DS.  I was impressed with both, however:

• FFIV has a tendency to slow down around 15 hours in.  This should be familiar to those who played the original (particularly the PSX remake, since it was the original difficulty).  You can Slow every enemy in the game, bosses included, which is the only winning strategy against most.  Augments make the game more interesting, but ultimately it is still FFIV with a more verbose plot, better graphics, and some other minor improvements.
• Advance Wars DS has a RPG-ish leveling system, but it is effectively “boundless” (i.e. you can “grind” on stages outside of the campaign).  It’s a cool system, skill-based and all, but the later COs are impossible to keep up with your originals.

I have, since getting back, started in on Grandia II for the first time.  As it stands, it is so far beyond the first game, both in terms of characters and situations, that I’m really enjoying it.  Some of the subplots are really well done – one in particular was highly depressing (something that I so rarely see, but I’ve always enjoyed – I don’t see why stories always need to be happy).  I have been told that the battle system will become less enjoyable, but honestly – every so often, it’s fun to play a game that tries to do cliches well, instead of tripping all over itself trying to avoid cliche.

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.

Just a quick little post.

A friend linked me to this earlier today.  It’s a review of, of all things, an iPod game.

Unexpectedly, it sounds quite good.  Creating characters out of songs reminds me of Monster Rancher, which allowed you to create monsters out of CDs – only better.  I bought an iPod for easy music a couple months ago; who thought I’d be using it for a tactical RPG by Square-Enix?

I have now been playing the game a little over an hour and it’s surprisingly good.  Apparently the music I listen to (an assortment of power metal, video game originals/remixes, and chiptunes) makes for amazingly good archers and powerful-but-defenseless warriors.  I managed to get a great mage out of one of the tracks from The Guardian Legend, I think.

Just making warriors is good fun, and thus far the battle system is cool.  If nothing else, this is a great idea for a game – and at $5, it’s definitely worth it just for what I’ve seen.