Niahak's Place

Haven’t updated in nearly a month, and figured I should.  Here’s what I’ve been up to.

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.

Being a hopeless nerd, I have MP3s of NES tracks on my iPod.  This ranges from the puzzler classic Solstice to the action/adventure Guardian Legend.  Since I’m obsessive-compulsive about music, I have sorted most of these tracks into albums, placeholders for the game they’re from.  And because I enjoy looking at shiny things, I have crafted (from screenshots, box art, etc) “album” covers for several of these games so they show up on said iPod.

I was looking to create such for a couple Ultima: Exodus tracks yesterday and wasn’t having much luck finding a decent-sized picture of the box art.  Here’s the best I could find:

I liked Growlanser: Heritage of War. At least, I think so. It was a pretty solid game, maybe a little bit cliched, with a fairly complex plot, a few likeable characters, decent voice-acting for most characters, and so on.

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.

Playing through Persona 3 gradually for nearly a month straight has really taken away my will to play; I’m considering just giving up on the main story and going on ahead to The Answer.

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.

Star Ocean didn’t last very long.  I’m again a bit sad – it’s a good enough game, but I couldn’t stick with it.  Part of the problem is that I just can’t play the game “normally” anymore.  The game is practically built to be broken via the item creation system, and it’s quite feasible to get some of the best equipment in the game before you’re even halfway in.

This is often a problem for me.  Some games are so geared towards being exploited (or at least played optimally) that playing it any other way is impossible once you know how to do it.  This makes the games feel more mechanical and less fun than the first time around.

Because I run into this problem, most of my favorite games are nearly impossible to break.  Lunar 2 is going to be pretty rough no matter how you try and play it – only some aspects are partially breakable (the Crest system) and that only gives you some smallish advantages.  Suikoden 2 is possible to optimize which makes the end of the game easier – but I’ve never had an easy time of taking down Luca Blight.  Wild Arms requires a lot of strategy, even fairly at the end.

Here’s the thing: I like breaking games, but I don’t like playing games again once I have broken them.  Final Fantasy Tactics is the only game that survives game-breaking easily, and that’s because there are so many ways to do it.

I suppose Star Ocean is the only game I can think of at the moment that’s really bad about this.  Some games (pretty much any Final Fantasy, for example) get pretty bad this way near the end.

The game I picked up after Star Ocean is pretty tough to break.  Persona 3 is my favorite RPG on the PS2, and the semi-expansion FES came out a week or so ago.  So far I’m about 1/3 of the way through the “regular” P3 story (The Journey) and the improvements are fairly minor, but it is better than the first time around.

One main complaint about the game (aside from Tartarus being “dungeon-crawly”), as so eloquently put by Junpei:

Part of the reason I like Persona 3 so much is that it’s practically a good book in addition to being a good game.  When you’re tired of messing around in Tartarus, you can always wander around and talk to people, and vice-versa.  Even minor characters in P3 are more three-dimensional than many RPG characters – some more so than characters from several novels I’ve read.  To be fair, I tend to favor moderately cheesy fantasy.  I think Persona 3 is pretty much the best game of this past generation, and I hope more games learn from its example.  Its biggest flaw is that it drags on a bit, but it still managed to get me to start a second play-through within half a year of the first.