Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep Final Mix

I think it’s fair to say I’ve played this game to death now. I’ve seen the Japanese-only secret episode that ends with the enticing prospect of ‘Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep 2’ (though I would’ve preferred it to be labelled ‘Kingdom Hearts 3’). I’ve gotten all the trophies, collected all the ice creams and beaten all the hidden bosses – the one that seemed so hard in the original, the one that seemed so much harder in the international release, and the new arena bosses that make how the arena was before this seem like a joke. And all on critical mode. Yup, I’m done. The only thing I could do to get any further than this would be to beat the extra bosses again with Terra and Aqua, but I don’t really have any inclination to do that: once is enough, especially when it comes to the Mysterious Figure.

Of course, the core of the game is the same as it was before – the epic fantasy of Terra, Aqua and Ventus and how they come to be totally and utterly screwed over, which is actually my favourite Kingdom Hearts storyline so far, though the original still has the most charm. As I’ve said before, I thought aiming for too much seriousness would be the death of the franchise, but I was wrong and the concept works so, so much better than the main titles have since the introduction of Organization XIII. Of course, learning that most of the events of the main series were preordained when the main characters were very young and why exactly they’re so ‘special’ takes away a little of the impact of their stories, but makes for a more believable and complete world overall.

Final Mix, like the other final mixes, basically takes the international release and builds upon it. Thus, all the cutscenes but the new ones in the secret episode are delivered by the English voice cast, who I’ve never liked nearly so much as the originals – but thankfully, all cutscenes can be watched in the ‘theater’ menu in either language. The only disappointment with this arrangement is that the ice cream minigame carries over from the international version – which is to say, more songs but no ‘special’ mode, which is the only time the extra little game actually got challenging and fun. Other things that were added are mostly cosmetic – a fun new ‘rhythm mixer’ command style that gives you very satisfying DJ scratching noises as you zing about, new keyblades and a fun little world for Aqua at the end where for some reason it’s oddly thrilling to fight heartless instead of unversed.

Other than little additional cutscenes, it’s really the hidden bosses that get the attention – and took the most hard work! The Unknown Figure remains easily the hardest of them, with so many ridiculous attacks that will kill you instantly. What was really annoying about him was that he made the limitations of the PSP more obvious – the vast majority of times I died were when I was trying to change what spell I had selected while having to keep the analogue stick held in a direction, or because my thumb slipped slightly on the grip there. One tiny moment of not rolling one way or another and you die. No exaggeration. Luckily, I eventually found that fire surge is far more effective than thunder surge and won through.

The armoured forms of Eraqus and Xehanort are more interesting, but also much easier. They were fun, though, even if the latter is a hard slog if you haven’t levelled like crazy. They were far less frustrating than the Unknown Figure, though, because dying was usually something that made you realise you’d made a mistake, rather than because the hardware made things stupidly hard.

It’s been well worth getting everything possible out of Birth By Sleep – it’s easily my favourite PSP game, and favourite Kingdom Hearts title. I’m also very happy it has such an active fanscene, and modding my rom to have English text, Ventus wearing Sora’s clothes and Terra in constant ‘Terranort’ mode made everything that little bit more satisfying!

Final Fantasy Tactics

Final Fantasy Tactics has got to be the most disappointing game I’ve ever played. I’d heard a lot about it, recently as well as when it came out, and with the FF name attached, I had high expectations. But the game was awful.

I quite liked the unusual battle system – as the title suggests, more tactical than in most FF games. With a team of (usually) five players, you traverse a large playing area and defeat large numbers of enemies, adapting to their different powers. The trouble with this is that (a) it’s piss easy, since you can level up by attacking your own team-mates, so you can just wait until you have a weak enemy and level up to high heaven killing and healing yourself while the enemy chips ineffectually at you, and (b) if you leave a character knocked out for too long, they die and become unusable for the rest of the game. My characters I’ve spent hours building up? Uh-uh. I don’t think so. I’ve never reset a game so much in my life, usually simply because my revive spell didn’t work, since the ground was a bit slanted next to the body. Ugh.

Still, it’s quite fun, and the different job classes keep things interesting. So all could be forgiven (in this particular case; Wild ARMS’ deathly slow battles killed it) if the story was good. And I’d heard good things. It starts out well - a young noble called Ramza fails to prevent a kidnapping, and sees that one of the enemies is his old friend - but soon spiralls out of control, with a convoluted story of political intrigue where most of the large cast is totally flat, stupid McGuffins in the form of balls of power that turn you into a monster and then get swept under the carpet when they get in the way of a tacked-on ending, and characters who don’t develop at all, but just go through the motions. Not all of this can be blamed on bad translation, though I’ve never seen such a poor rush-job in an official release.

And Cloud? Totally not worth the 5 minutes or so it took to get him.

What a waste of 60+ hours. Oh well, it was fun getting a mime, and developing my magicians to take everyone on the field out on the first turn. But please, please let the next game I play be more interesting story-wise.

You could see that Suikoden II had been influenced by this game, and it in turn by the first Suikoden, but both were SO much better than this in story terms.

Narutimate Portable

The second game wasn’t nearly as fun as the first, half because you only got three characters (and I only really liked playing as Jiraiya) and half because two of the most fun game modes (copying Shikamaru and tree-climbing) were absent. Plus towards the end the fighting got quite dull; once you and the computer were adept at defence all that happened would be that you kept swapping places with the kawarimi no jutsu ad infinitum until one of you left an opening and got hit with a combo. Plus the story wasn’t as interesting in the second part. Still, a fun game. Not much replay value, but I enjoyed it while it lasted, and it was good for my Japanese practice.

The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker

The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker was not really worth the time I spent on it. It was a very long game, as a matter of fact – a lot of gameplay hours, which is usually a good thing, but that’s only if there’s a really good plot driving things. Here, unfortunately, the game got rather repetitive and the delays I encountered weren’t because of taxing puzzles that really made me think, but because so much of the game is spent sailing about, looking for tiny little islands or even moving cyclones, without which you cannot progress. Some of the things you had to find were really quite obscure – in the end, I resorted to using a guide.

Let me explain the way I like to play RPGs. In the old days, when I was quite the little computer geek, I would play a single game tirelessly for weeks on end, until every last secret, every last event had been discovered. I would always play it through once on my own, agonising over the difficult bits until I solved them, and wouldn’t check an online guide unless I had been truly stumped for days on end. After that, I would play again with a walkthrough, and make sure I collected absolutely everything there was to collect.

So, after all 108 allies in Suikoden were assembled, and Cloud and gang had a gold chocobo and could summon the Knights of the Round Table in Final Fantasy VII, I was satisfied. I played a dozen or more others, but those two remain my favourites, followed by Chrono Trigger and Wild Arms, though the latter was let down by a painfully slow combat system.

Well, games drifted out of my life in my later teens. I blame the quality of the games for this! And the fact that I made the dubious decision of buying a Japanese PS2. Anyway, these days I only play once, normally on my own, resorting to a guide if I get stuck for about an hour.

I play for the story, and pursue any sub-games I stumble upon until they get dull. So in The Windwaker, for example, I found The Nintendo Gallery (a silly, endless sub-game where you take photos of all the characters in the game), but didn’t bother taking many photos. I went to various hidden island, but needed someone to tell me where to find the ones I needed to get to in order for the game to continue. It’s the most satisfying way, and I just end up feeling that there are better things to do if I play for too long.

The game wasn’t a bad one by any means. It’s a good, solid combat system, which means you don’t have to go through the tedium of levelling up all the time. The story starts out much like any other RPG: the young hero’s sister is kidnapped, and in the attempt to rescue her, he stumbles across an evil plot that threatens the world, and discovers his true destiny. Unfortunately, it pretty much remains as generic as that, and at no point did I particularly care about my little neo-Link (who I called Link anyway) or his little friends. This wasn’t because of the cutesy graphics – they’re fine by me, and a lot more detailed than FFVII’s Cloud ever was, not to mention the sprites of Suikoden! I would perhaps have preferred something a little less twee, but that’s what the upcoming sequel will deal with, I’m sure.

No, it was the lack of anything to really interest me plot- or character-wise, and the repetitive structure (collect so many of these, then so many of those, and fight the same 10 or so baddies over and over again) that were the disappointments. Plus the fact that the game was very easy, despite its length. Oh well! Tomorrow I shall try something new! The game invited me to start all over again (with a worrying moment where the main character is given invisible clothes…but that only meant he stayed in his regular outfit, not that there was going to be some sort of nude mode, which REALLY wouldn’t suit this game!), but I don’t think there’s much appeal to that!

The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time

Even in 2005 this game was showing its age, and not just in terms of graphics. Perhaps it’s because I was used to the refined control system in The Wind Waker, but it was just incredibly frustrating. Fiddly, often badly-designed and with enemies that were supposed to be tricky but were just stupid, I soon got rather bored. And Navi was not only annoying but bloody useless at doing her job in battle. Too much block-pushing, too: bad memories of Tomb Raider. I resorted to a guide soon after Link became an adult. On the plus side, the story was rather better than The Wind Waker’s, if still not exactly a Square epic. And the biggest plot twist…well, unfortunately, playing Super Smash Brothers had already given it away – and other than that, it was all pretty generic.

Suikoden II

Suikoden is a very important game to me. It was the first RPG that really hooked me, that really made me see how computer games could be a way of telling a good story rather than just being an adrenaline rush. It’s the game that steered me away from beat-em-ups, then my genre of choice, and to RPGs. Yes, I had loved adventure games with RPG elements as early as playing Dizzy on my Commodore 64, but the plotlines there were nothing close to the fully-involving environment Suikoden offered. It was my introduction to the world, and it was only after playing Suikoden that I discovered older classics like Chrono Trigger, and came to wait in anticipation for Final Fantasy VII.

So even before Suikoden II came out, I was excited, downloading the artwork and hearing reports that it was even better than its predecessor. I snapped it up as a US import, and should have played it through years ago.
So what happened?

Well, firstly, I’d sold my Playstation and got a Japanese Playstation 2, expecting to be able to get a mod chip easily, which would have played US and UK games. I never did get that mod chip. I had a Playstation emulator on my PC, but it crashed several times while I was playing Suikoden 2, and finally, various other pursuits just pushed it to the back of my mind.

Well, finally, I’ve played it through. It’s still often heralded as the best of the series (and I have little interest in the ugly-looking 3 and 4), and it was certainly a lot of fun. However, for me at least, it doesn’t come close to the first game.

Yes, perhaps to a degree it’s because I was a lot younger then, and more accepting of cheesy plotlines. But Suikoden 2 is weak in a way Suikoden never was. The original game was a simple story, based on the old Water Margin tales – the son of a general discovers the corruption of the empire he is a part of, becomes part of the Liberation Army and fights against the evil emperor. It was very basic, but it worked, and the characters made it a gripping and moving story, with all sorts of mini-adventures. The second game works similarly – two childhood friends are fighting in the Highland army when the camp is ambushed and wiped out…except of course for our young heroes. It turns out that the brigade was attacked by its own side disguised as the enemy in order to foil a peace treaty (seems clever until you think…why didn’t they just break the peace treaty by attacking the enemy in the first place?). Once again, there is the classic opposition between a young hero who gradually rises up to be a great leader, and a ‘bad guy’. Only this time, the bad guy isn’t a weak figure being manipulated, and doesn’t have much of a story of his own. He’s just a nut. But he’ll do nicely as an antagonist. The problem comes when he gets killed and the hero’s childhood friend becomes the main opposition.

There is just never a satisfactory reason for his continued bad guy status. The writers never seem to be able to make it sound like he really wants to do anything he’s doing, even though he does it anyway. There are a whole bunch of half-hearted reasons why he must keep fighting with the hero, but they all seem so contrived that the suspension of disbelief vanishes, and disbelief comes crashing down on top of your head.

Still, plot aside, there are a plethora of little extras. I played the original for weeks, getting every little extra. Here, I didn’t really bother – not only do I not really want to spend that much time on each game any more, but once I found out that I had already lost my chance to see the scenes with Clive in, I kinda lost interest in being a completist. Nonetheless, I did the vast majority of what’s available in the game, with a guide (because there are 108 recruitable characters, and some of them will only come with you after some VERY obscure conditions are met, like the one who needed an item that only appeared very rarely in one shop), and saw all the different endings, none of which had the sense of drama or closure the original had. Plus some glitch in the game gave me four powerhouse characters at level 99 automatically, so none of the fights were any real challenge at all. And for the most part, the story of the hero’s rise, the little sub-plots, the humorous moments, the way the castle grows and changes as more people join and the fun of the big epic battles made it a very enjoyable experience. And while the translation was really terrible, that provided some unintentionally humorous moments, and I could often tell what the original Japanese was behind some of the odder moments (for example, Jowy randomly says ‘Sorry’, which was probably ‘Warui’, in the context meaning something closer to ‘Thanks, and I’m sorry to be a bother to you’).

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of the two heroes ending up on opposing sides. Indeed, it can work really well. It just needs to have a good reason, and be believable.

Probably the best thing about the game, though, is the great character design. The three central characters are all great, and look very pretty. Not sure why, though, but the ones I thought were cutest were the boys that look like girls (Tuta) and girls that look like boys (Wakaba). I just can’t resist androgyny!

Hatsune Miku Project Diva: Dreamy Theater

I got the first Project Diva game quite a few years ago, now, and the second about as soon as it was available. On the other hand, I got my PS3 relatively recently, and it was only within the last few months that I felt familiar enough with the system to get this game running. It’s not simple in the least, especially if – like me – you want to keep custom firmware on your PSP. Which I did, for while I have a Pandora’s battery, it would be a pain constantly switching back and forth, and I wanted to keep playing my patched ROMs.

Project Diva: Dreamy Theater plays the content you have on your PSP version of the game on the PS3, with beautiful graphics befitting the powerhouse system. That’s about it, though. You can’t unlock songs on there, or use the edit mode. You can’t have a little room for your Vocaloid, or get new costumes. So really, it’s an add-on more than a game in its own right. Not only that, but every time you load the game, you have to plug in your PSP (version 6.20 firmware at least), hook it up to the PS3 using a special program (which I had to download from the PSN because it didn’t want to transfer) and let it recognise that you have a saved game on there uniquely linked to your PSP – ie, not a Prometheus CFW save. The first time took a while.

But I was soon hooked. The pretty graphics are draw enough, and the songs remain a lot of fun. I much prefer playing the rhythm game when the buttons aren’t attached to the screen, and soon was flying through the songs. When I discovered that you had to have at least 39 downloaded edit songs, I initially struggled, but once I had figured out how to get them onto the game had a ball with the silly custom songs others had made, and they ensure I’ll never delete the game even though the rest of the content is included in the sequel. Soon, I had all the trophies except for two remained: one for starting the game 39 times (One reading for 39 in Japanese = Miku) and one for getting a ‘perfect’ on all songs on the hardest setting. The only song left was the Christmas song, ‘Kogane no Seiya Sousetsu ni Kuchite’ (something like ‘Holy Night of Gold Decays into Snow’…), which I knew was formidable. In looking up what the hidden trophies are, I’d found a lot of people complaining about how hard the song is and how they’d tried it for months. I was fortunate, I suppose. Only took me a few tries!

So this is my first game where I have 100% of the trophies (no Platinum here though). And it was a whole lot of fun!

Patapon 3

Patapon 3 was a big disappointment. I loved the first game, found the system even better in the second even if the story wasn’t as smooth and iconic – and so had high hopes for the third. But the designers ruined everything that was good about Patapon, and made a frustrating game I finished only out of dogged loyalty, not enjoyment.

The first and biggest flaw was that they decided that instead of a full Patapon army, the player could use only 4 units, like the second game’s hero mode for multiplayer. This is the crux of it: in order to be able to expand the whole game to play multiplayer, the concept of controlling a cute and varied army was excised. Well, I don’t like playing Patapon multiplayer – I like playing it on the train. And the whole appeal for me was building up a big army with lots of units for different jobs. To make it worse, the different units aren’t even all fully customisable – apart from the main hero, each has only a limited number of variants. Thus, rather than exploring in depth, I found the class I liked most for each and stuck with it from about mission 5 to the very end of the game. And the spear unit was pretty useless no matter what.

The change in army style also meant a change in gameplay – the ways to lose were for everybody to die (rare except when there were stupid traps) or for your flag-bearing Hatapon to die. Hatapon becomes vulnerable when all units with a shield die. My only unit with a shield was my big, powerful attack unit. Thus the entire game was nothing more than keep-your-tank-alive-or-die. With stupid summons (which are nothing more than dull button-mashing in hopes of ‘perfect’ ratings and cannot be varied without multiplayer) to bring him back to life once or twice.

The difficulty progression was stupid. The difference in power between levels is absurd, to the point that the game overall was ‘die on every attempt until your units go up one level, and then easily beat what was until then near-impossible’. This held true right to the very end, where the last dungeon was horrible at level 29 but a piece of cake at 30.

The minigames that broke up the action are gone. The humour has all but gone – the crazy bosses that raise a smile are repeats from previous games, and the one fun new enemy, a great big ogre, reappears so much he’s soon a bore.

The story makes little sense and seems very carelessly translated. Your soldiers spout the most random nonsense, and the bad guys are semi-coherent. That there are multiple endings based purely on a choice at the end only frustrates. Gone is the charming simplicity of the quest of the first game, or the fun of discovery of the second. A repetitive, weird and dull game I never thought could have been made from Patapon is all that’s left. Such a shame.

Tales of Symphonia

I started playing the celebrated Gamecube RPG Tales of Symphonia in December 2005, and was pleasantly hooked. I found a cute little adventure story full of hackneyed RPG concepts: the teenaged Lloyd and his silver-haired buddy Genis help their friend Colette to fulfil the prophecy given to her at birth – that she will save the world - and find themselves battling the corruption of tyrannical rulers. Oh yes. The clichés get more and more obvious – Lloyd is the dumb-but-loveable hero, Genis is an elven magician, Colette is a ditzy blonde, and the evil half-elves are turning humans into big wibbly green monsters! Oh no! When Lloyd and Genis attack the testing facility, retribution falls on their village, causing much angst and exile – so the only thing left for them to do is to go and join Colette on her journey to save the world!

Yes, it’s all cheerful, childish, unchallenging fare, done in bold anime style. There’s a beautiful animated intro, cell-shaded SD-style graphics and some adorable character designs – Lloyd and Genis in particular are very cute. Best of all is the voice acting: a step up from most English video games’ dreck, but still very much over-acted, with the Boy Hits Car guy who plays Robin in Teen Titans giving his best melodramatic performance as Lloyd, and his father – a dwarf – boasting a VERY iffy Scottish accent. Still, the ham suits the cheerful tone, and I knew from the start it would all get very angsty later on. Colette has the perfect ditzy American voice, sounding rather like an Olsen twin, and Genis has one of the most adorable boy-voices America has ever managed to record. It all makes me very happy, in the full knowledge that it’s all a bit naff, but naff with conviction!

When I finished it five days later, it struck me that writing an RPG video game must a very individual art form – you have to spin out a story for hours and hours, get your characters from fight to fight and sling in every twist and betrayal and redemption known to man to keep things moving. The story still wasn't great in this game, though. What starts as a nice, slightly preachy story about half-elves and humans discriminating against each other, and the half-elf Desians running human experimentation ranches while keeping the humans suppressed, gets muddled by every half-arsed vaguely-Nordic high-concept twist they can think of. Yeah, there’s, like, this giant tree, the source of all mana, and then this person sealed there, and these other half-elves who’ve become angels, and, like ANOTHER WORLD man, and high technology and magic and dwarfs and ninjas and a sword that holds the whole world together and STUFF! It all feels like someone was only vaguely in control of themselves as they were writing it, so it hops around randomly with only the most tenuous of links and all sorts of magical contrivance. Plus whenever the subject of discrimination comes up, you can tell that the writer is so opposed to it that they just can’t convincingly portray anyone who actually holds prejudices, and it comes across as rather superimposed.

But the characters are great. Typical shounen protagonist Lloyd, more 14 than the official 17, rather thick but utterly good-hearted; sensible, occasionally obsessive teacher Raine; goofy, masculine female ninja Sheena who’s actually very sweet; womanising Zelos who seems pretty flat and annoying at first but actually develops into quite an interesting character; Presea who lost several years of her life and will never get them back – and especially Genis, the cute little child prodigy whose arrogant, bratty streak is tempered by his sheer adorableness and propensity to say things like ‘We’ll be friends forever!’ Bless!

Of course, everyone spends the entire game wracked by guilt over the things they’ve done, endlessly apologising and looking angsty, and it’s all a bit didactic, but hey, I’ve come to expect that of RPGs, and what’s more, the fight system was a lot of fun, so it all worked nicely.

Enzai

Since I wrote my opinion of the two-episode anime, somewhat shocked at the scenes of bloody rape of a 14-year-old boy and the graphic depictions of non-consensual sexual torture, Enzai surprisingly enough became the first yaoi game ever to be commercially released in the States. Only a handful of visual novels have ever officially made it over here, but I confess to being very surprised that about the only one ever expected to be bought by a (close to exclusively female) paying audience would be the one about prison rape.

But…well, I suppose I was, if anything, exaggerating my prudishness. I’ve read enough fanfictions and doujinshis to know that a lot of porn, for both genders, involves humiliation, subjugation, helplessness and horror, with of course the safety of knowing that it is all fantasy. With writing and drawing in particular, you know no-one is hurt in the making of what you’re watching. And we have to face it at some point, seeing the demand, the endless extremes of the internet, and the fact that I actually went back to Enzai and found that I actually found it kinda hot – call it empowerment, dominance or kink, but there’s something very appealing about non-con.

And thus I have been very surprised at the depth and sophistication of Enzai. It is not deep, nor sophisticated, but is far from the shameless porn I had expected. The first time I played it, I made all the wrong choices (there’s no actual skill to visual novels – you pick a choice and where it leads you will be totally random) and managed to get three ‘bad end’s in a row, which only served to make me think this was brainless smut even more than I already did, with poor Guys suffering really horrible things that definitely didn’t align with any fetishes I have. Also, while I was surprised to see that the mosaic censorship that is required by law in Japan had been removed, at times that only made me despair of some of the artists’ grip of anatomy. The penis cannot be inserted into the perineum!

It’s no more shameful than enjoying the sight of suffering and gore on the screen, which many years have shown us is almost universally approved of by our society. And as I say, I was surprised at the sophistication of the story, and the court case that resolves everything (even if some part of the evidence are daft, like a clever murderer just leaving weapons in a nearby abandoned house for months) is really quite smart.

Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings

I didn’t know what to expect from Revenant Wings, the Nintendo DS sequel to Final Fantasy XII, the PS2 game that as far as I can tell I enjoyed more than most. I liked the sketches I’d seen and I thought there was definitely more story to tell.

In the event, Revenant Wings was more or less a Final Fantasy Tactics game, without the turn-based system. It had c ute sprites, a fun slow-paced strategy system and rather strange video clips that made the characters look like puppets – but was still appealing to look at. The story is also so very different from the tone of FFXII that it feels like something wildly different, which somehow has a lot of charm. It’s like the world of FFXII transplanted into a cute old 16-bit RPG, which suits the sprites.

A year after the end of the main game, and with Vaan now a fully fledged sky pirate, he and Penelo get mixed up in Balthier’s latest pursuit, finding two strange crystals whose power is connected to a kingdom in the sky, and can summon creatures to do the bidding of the stones’ owners. Along with his urchin friends Kytes and Filo, who features extremely briefly in the main game and here receive redesigns and turn out to be quite adorable, along with the slightly more prominent and wily Tomaj, they head to the sky kingdom and meet Llyud, part of a winged race called the Aegyl, currently under attack by the ‘judge of wings’, who looks like the armoured judges of the main game but has no affiliation with them – and is winged.

The game is fun to play, a real-time strategy engine where five characters command little groups and have to meet various objectives. There were little complexities to figure out, which I generally waited until I was getting stuck to tackle, and by the end you have a wide range of characters and so many abilities it can be quite frantic switching between characters to get a good use of the best. It gets very hard at the end if you want to get 100% (and the secret ending, that is frivolous other than developing Vaan and Penelo’s relationship a little), and grinding for the final boss took several hours.

Cute, interesting, fun and actually a challenge unlike most of Square’s portable games, I’m glad I gave this a chance – and it’s made me want to play the updated version of Tactics, as well as its various sequels. After a whole lot of others waiting!

Final Fantasy XIII

Let’s get this straight first: FFXIII is not a good Final Fantasy game. It’s not even a good RPG at all. Its reviews were oddly laudatory, especially in Japan (Famitsu’s reader poll in 2010 even came out with it as best game ever), while most of my friends and Facebook acquaintances seem to think very poorly of it. In every way that makes a Final Fantasy game special – story, characters and combat system – it fell short. And yet in some small way, I loved it.

I don’t say this with just a cursory playthrough. I put almost as much time into this as I did into FFXII: I got everyone to level 5 in all their job roles, my three main characters all had their final weapons in levels around 90, Fang’s being maxed, I finished every mission and I could farm Long Gui and Shao Long Gui with very little difficulty. This takes a lot of hours, and raises the question – if it’s not a good game to play, why invest so much time into it?

Well, there are a few reasons. Firstly, it is stunningly beautiful. Nothing I have ever played comes close to this. The visuals in this game are the best I’ve ever seen, a step above everything else I’ve experienced even on their generation of incredibly powerful consoles. Several times in the game I actually stopped, put my character somewhere where I could see things from a good angle, and just stared at the backgrounds. I even felt sad that there would be so much fantastic scenery that just goes unseen by the vast majority of players because they don’t take the time to point cameras up or down – and of course, nobody can see everything on a regular run-through. I had to wonder if parts the camera can never see were rendered in such exquisite detail, too, and lamented the lack of a camera that could be properly controlled independent of the character.

Secondly, I liked the characters. Lightning was a refreshing protagonist, being at first rather Cloud- or Squall-like but gradually showing her softer, more human, far more vulnerable side. Fang was a great strong female character. Sazh was likeable and probably the most identifiable character, often clownish but also showing plenty of emotion. And while he’s hated by many, I found Hope adorable. So he whines a lot – watching the death of the person who means the most to you in the world will do that to you. He hit all my protective instincts and by the end he was absurdly powerful (if still crappy HP-wise).

I didn’t much like Snow or Vanille. Snow is the type to go on about being a hero, which never seems a character trait anyone would actually have, and he’s goofy-looking too. Vanille was the main reason I was annoyed there was no option to hear the original Japanese voices (as they had actually taken the time to re-animate mouth movements for the language, which is impressive), only when I actually heard the original cast, Vanille in Japanese was even more annoying than in English. And Hope’s voice was much more generic and obvious. Some cheesy minor villains aside, the voice acting is great.

The story…was weak and limited. In the world of the game, humans live either on the world of Gran Pulse, a dangerous place with a lot of monsters, or in the developed city of Cocoon, which floats above the planet’s surface and is ruled over by a group called Sanctum. This is made possible by the fal’Cie, huge and powerful non-human creatures, who do things like supply air and keep immense spheres aloft. A human who comes into contact with a fal’Cie can become a l’Cie, a branded human who must complete a task or be turned into a monstrous Cie’th. Even if they fulfil this ‘focus’, however, they are turned into crystals. Becoming a l’Cie is essentially a death sentence.

The story begins, as many do, with the evil government performing some ethnic cleansing, repackaged in sci-fi terms. A group of Cocoon residents are being ‘purged’ because they met fal’Cie from Pulse. Most of our plucky heroes meet here: they are being purged or want to find and save someone who is. However, it all goes awry when they meet the wrong fal’Cie and are turned into l’Cie themselves, with a vague notion of their task being to do with Ragnarok, a being who attacked Cocoon many years ago. Most of the game is spent questioning whether they can change their fate, as well as meeting those who seem to be pulling the strings.

The problem with this story is that it severely lacks real impetus. The plot device of a ‘do or die’ mission from barely-understood godlike creatures is a dull contrivance. The end tries to be too clever: apparent bad guy Barthandelus is manipulating l’Cie in a stupid plot that just might bring back a higher god (based on speculation alone), his target Orphan has his own plan to be set free from a tiresome existence which matches up well with what the party were doing and allows for more confusion and less anticlimax, while the party finally make a decision that could well have killed everyone on the planet but doesn’t because of a property of their newfound power there’s no way they could have known would come about. Sloppy.

I was disappointed by the game system. I didn’t like only being able to control one character, and hated how it was game over if just your lead fighter was knocked out. I didn’t like how shallow strategy became. I didn’t like the lack of real challenges: even in the endgame, there’s no real superbosses: the long gui go down as easily as adamantoises, and Vercingetorix was no challenge at all (unless you are going for a five-star rating). In fact, while the mission sidequests take many hours, they are not satisfactory side-quests: they are dull, repetitive, do not flesh out characters and only show the inadequacies of a game without an airship and only substandard teleportation. The last battles were a grind, not a challenge of strategy.

I also disliked the level-up system, a non-versatile and linear version of FFX’s sphere grid. The music often needed to be more dynamic and though lush and sometimes superb, often felt inadequate and needed more contrast. The final level of shifting platforms was plain ugly. I feel this game came close to being good, but didn’t manage it. How will FFXIII-2 fare?

Kingdom Hearts 2

Decided to finish Kingdom Hearts 2, including getting Jiminy's Journal complete. Didn’t take long, but longer than I would’ve liked – I ran out of stupid Dark Crystals just as I’d almost got the synthesis list finished. The last boss was more fiddly and annoying than I would’ve expected, and I hated having to be Riku almost as much as I hated having to be Roxas, but I was satisfied with the game’s ending. Another bit of Japanese media that ends on the old ‘Tadaima/okaeri’ chestnut, which never translates well into English - we don’t place such importance on ‘Welcome home/I’m back’ – and wow, the kids really did look Japanese in that ending FMV. I also loved how they just dropped all but the thinnest pretence that the storyline isn’t totally homoerotic at the end, too. The secret ending was really lame, but I’d’ve felt bad, not seeing it.

To be honest, though, it definitely doesn’t match up to the first game, story-wise. The new worlds never fit into the mood well, and Organisation XIII just aren’t very interesting as antagonists. It relies so much on intrigue that when all is revealed, it’s just increasingly disappointing. Xemnas is off his rocker, a two-dimensional baddie and none of the others are sufficiently developed. All style, no substance. At least Sora is the kind of character who can really carry a story, even if he IS generic shounen character #1.

Eternal Sonata

Last night, I unexpectedly finished Eternal Sonata. I really didn’t think I was close to the end. I thought I was about halfway through, and that the rubbish final dungeon with the ridiculously easy bosses was some kind of transition. And then, abruptly, ‘Final Stage’. Another easy boss (though I have to admit it was a surprise who he was), and the ending. Which was very, very strange. 45 minutes of being directly lectured by pretty RPG characters, some incoherent story, and then after the credits, some weird allegorical tale about a snail and a caterpillar – that they had forgotten to subtitle!

I want to play it again with a guide (and in English), to see if there are any significant chunks I have missed, any hidden worlds, so I will reserve judgement until then, but I have to say, judging from my overall experience thus far, I’m very disappointed that such a beautiful game, with such potential to be epic and such great designs, was so lacking in substance. Everything about it was limited, except the visual feast – but in an RPG, that simply isn’t enough.

Crisis Core

Overall, it was a great game and I’m glad I played it, but it had some major flaws. I’ll play it through again with a guide this time, but probably not for a while yet. Definitely more enjoyable playing a game with no spoilers, but perhaps I’d’ve benefited from a guide when unwinnable battles came along and I spent way too long struggling to survive. There’s a lot I haven’t seen, but playing it again is the best way to level up, since you can start a new game with stats intact.

Crisis Core is a prequel to Final Fantasy VII, which made a deep impression on me. Of course, I won’t be putting in the same hours as I did as a bewitched 13-year-old awed by the power of Playstation, but the fan in me was very happy with the fanservice here. It’s bizarre to think just how many of the current generation of gamers simply won’t have played FFVII, and never will until there’s a remake that isn’t so dated, and just won’t see how much of the game is replicated here, from the intro to several memorable locales. It’s a familiar world to me, one I’m fond of, and little in-jokes like mentions of Don Kanonji and the missions with a very young Yuffie make me smile. We finally see Zack’s story, elevating him from the plot function of the main game to a fleshed-out character. He’s given a typical happy-go-lucky Shounen personality, which surprised me at first but which I soon grew to find quite agreeable. His development as he learns about his fellow SOLDIER members and the world he lives in is a pleasure, and though the inevitability of the ending seems almost tacked-on and bizarre, it still has a sting. Nice, also, to give Tseng a bigger role than the more appreciated Reno/Rude duo.

Other parts of the plot aren’t so great. Sure, Cloud and Tifa’s memories are a big plot point of the main game, so what happens here make sense (even if Cloud has to be unconscious for some half of his screentime), but why Aerith never mentions any of what happens here, or no-one from Shin-ra who knew Cloud and Zack seem to say anything, or why Hojo reacts to Cloud quite like he does in the main game doesn’t seem to hang well with events here. Oh well, there’ll always be a bit of retcon in a prequel like this, and by and large, those quibbles are minor. Angeal works, too, but the weird monster things that soon appear with his characteristics are mostly really goofy and attempts to make them sympathetic at the end don’t really work. Genesis, apparently a Dirge of Cerberus character (I should play that sometime, really), mostly doesn’t work very well as an antagonist, much like Sephiroth towards the very end of FFVII, being too loopy to really seem threatening or to be understood. I can kind of see how it worked in Japan, with someone with the stature of Gackt hamming up the pastiche poetry of ‘Loveless’, an in-game prophetic text, but I don’t like that something like that should be necessary, and I definitely don’t think that it works in the English version, let alone being pivotal to a character’s motives. This is largely why the final third of the game or so is so unsatisfying.

Gameplay is good, though, much more influenced by Kingdom Hearts than other FF games, albeit less frenetic and slicker. Sometimes the targeting system was very frustrating, and it was daft that so many enemies can be killed just by mashing X, but there was a good bit of strategy towards the end and I got very used to dodge-rolling. On the other hand, there were some real frustrations. I made the mistake of choosing ‘Hard’ at the beginning, remembering how Kingdom Hearts II was just way too easy on normal, and regretted it. Hard mode doesn’t seem to make a better challenge, or require more skill or adapt itself to a decent learning curve. It just cranks up damage, I think. So you get hugely frustrating scenarios where you can beat the ordinary grunts very easily and then a boss comes who on normal mode would be a slight jump up and a fun challenge, but in hard just wipes you out with one attack. It made things much more frustrating, not fun. Then there’s the badly-thought-out limit break/levelling system, based on chance and infuriating, sometimes totally overloading you with power, sometimes never registering its presence at all. And it may be hard mode, but I ended up just having to always equip items preventing stun, stop and death, because against any powerful enemies, getting any one of these usually meant game over. Death in particular was just stupid.

The missions idea isn’t bad per se, but there was just way, way too much of the same things, over and over. I feel like I did endless stupid missions, but have barely limped over half of the total…

I’ll say this, though – he may be a solid everyman in FFVII and quite badass in Advent Crisis, but in Crisis Core, wow, they make Cloud a cute, rather hapless uke. Somehow I like him a whole lot more…

Kingdom Hearts: Re:CoM

Finally got around to finishing Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories. Honestly, Riku’s story was a drag, with too much trawling through worlds without any plot and far too little reward. It was too easy even on Proud Mode, too – I was very surprised when I beat the final boss, expecting it to be only the first part of a longer battle.

Very much worthwhile as a free extra, but certainly not something that ought to be sold as a standalone game.

The abiding impressions I’ve been left with by this game:

• Most of the organisation are totally pointless, useless and uninteresting.
• Naminé is more interesting than I remembered, and Riku more likeable.
• I still don’t quite see where his blindfold comes from.
• No matter the graphical engine used, the grid pattern on the back of Roxas’s head looks really, really silly.
• Riku is actually far more sympathetic than I gave him credit for, even if his part of the game is dull.

Well, that’s out of the way. Next, I ought to go back to Final Fantasy XII, if I’m gonna be cosplaying from it sometime soon. Then Persona 3 and the numerous other games I have lined up, including KH2: FM. Plus the handheld games that keep distracting me: I finished a chapter today, but far later than expected because I kept grabbing my new DS to play Professor Layton and the Curious Village or my PSP to play Patapon. But hey…games, particularly games with a good story and strong characters, never seem like time wasted.

Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village

This afternoon, I decided that before doing anything more productive, I’d finish the first DS game I bought, the brilliantly charming Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village. It hasn’t been eating up the most recent part of my life (shame the same can’t be said of Patapon and its sequel) but I at least put enough hours into the fun little game to solve all its puzzles, including the bonus ones. And I’m proud to say that I didn’t need any help beyond the in-game hints to solve ’em, although some of the more annoying trick puzzles took me quite a while, and I did have to resort to a guide to help me find a couple of the hidden puzzles right at the end. Hidden in windows indeed!

As someone who grew up playing The 7th Guest, the puzzles here were comparatively very easy (could solve one of the hardest ‘99 Picarat’ puzzles here in seconds because it was in that game), but then the target audience is younger and back then, games generally were made more of a challenge.

But over and above the puzzles and gameplay, it’s the world and story created here that really charm. I have to say, I love it when Japanese writers take a stab at making a very quaint and twee British world. Few things can be more charming than the nostalgic, idealised and stereotypical portrayal of early 20th-century European life than the one here, where the Holmes-like Professor Layton and his little sidekick Luke (who I remain very pleased they redubbed with a cockney accent for the UK release, even if it was even more over-the-top, because…well, everything about the game is over-the-top and that suits the game well) can blithely go around a town where a murder investigation is underway and find puzzles everywhere, commenting on it all in their broad accents.

I also find myself rather amused that there is a thriving yaoi-based fandom for the games…tsk tsk tsk!

Birth By Sleep first impressions

I’ve just started to play Birth By Sleep, the latest Kingdom Hearts game for the PSP. It’s extremely impressive, really, what Square can get out of a handheld console. The DS was pushed hard with 358/2 Days, but BBS really does look and play like a PS2 title. The graphics are beautifully-rendered, in a similar style to Crisis Core but if anything, suiting the more cartoony look of Kingdom Hearts more.

And while 358/2 really didn’t bring much to the story of Kingdom Hearts, I actually quite like the angle BBS is presenting. Honestly, I was fully prepared to hate it, thinking the pretentiousness would further ruin a neat concept, which after all has got progressively less coherent, more morally dubious and certainly less interesting as it has got more focused on Organization XIII. I always found them underdeveloped, clichéd and poorly-motivated, no matter where fandom has taken the characters. Going way back for a prequel in a more Final Fantasy-like setting with lots of mysteries and a new cast isn’t just recycling the formula, and there are some differences in paying style. I like the new gameplay elements like the focus bursts and going into speed rave mode is lots of fun.

For once, Proud Mode is also actually quite tricky, although almost entirely because the damage is up so high.

I think I like Ventus a lot more than Roxas, too. He’s sweet and a little bratty, his world isn’t as annoying as Twilight Town and his connection with Terra seems much more substantial than his doppelganger’s friendship based on…well, the guy who’s generally around when he wakes up and sometimes has ice cream with him.

That said…even though it’s not quite such a load of squares, the back of his head is still annoying to look at! Ooh, and I like the fact that Xenahort looks like the Harkonnen mentat from Dune 2, heheh. There’s a lot of plot to uncover yet, but so far it’s been packed with minigames and fun little stories. Nice, too, to see some Disney worlds that aren’t repeated from the first two games – although dear Shirayuki-hime was quite annoying, always needing saving.

At the very least, it’s the first game since #2 that’s actually made me want to go back to it quickly. That says a lot!

Monkey Island II: Special Edition

Anyway, I may have stayed up late last night playing through Monkey Island II: Special Edition. In a single sitting I got 65% of the way through the game, to the second map piece. Essentially, Lucasarts have taken the classic game, updated it with hi-res graphics, rerecorded the soundtrack and at certain points offered a creators’ commentary, which is quite a fun addition. I enjoyed playing through it, but strictly as something complimentary. I would actually be sad if someone played only the updated version and didn’t have the joy of getting absorbed in the original as I did.

Honestly, I don’t like the graphics very much. Granted, I’m happy that Guybrush no longer looks like he’s forty, but I don’t like that he looks and moves as if he’s made of plasticine. Some of the voices are brilliant, like Wally the Cartographer’s, but others just don’t seem to understand their lines and really muck up the deadpan humour. Worst of all, most of the characters just… didn’t end up looking like they did in the original, totally changing perceptions of their haughtiness or humility. Percy in particular just doesn’t look as sweet as he used to, and most of the fat and loveable characters now look fat and repulsive. The strangest thing about it is that the concept art for the update almost always gets it spot-on!

The humour isn’t quite as good as I remember, either, although it is excellent. There’s a lot more breaking the fourth wall than I remember, which never escapes being unfunny, and some of the puzzles are just ridiculous. How is anyone supposed to figure out how to turn off the waterfall pump, or what books are needed from the library? And I still leapt for a bit of paper when the skeleton dance came on, as I always did as a boy, never knowing that Guybrush writes the instructions on the spit-encrusted paper. I always thought if you missed writing it down, you were screwed!

Lastly, I simply cannot forgive one omission: how can they cut out the dancing monkeys from the intro? They were the thing I was looking forward to the most!

FINAL FANTASY X

It was a game I took a long time to get around to playing, but thought that I would really love. It has a good reputation amongst enthusiasts and so much about it looked like a lot of fun. I do not, however, think that I had unreasonable expectations: just high hopes. Either way, I found myself disappointed – with the story, the gameplay, the graphics, the characters…even the music, because despite the very pleasant opening theme, that prayer theme is a motif I never, never want to hear again if I can help it.

I play most Final Fantasy titles to the ground. I put well over a hundred hours into FFVII when I was in my middle teens, finding every last hidden scene, materia and hidden boss. I put enough into FFXII to beat Yiazmat and Omega mk XIII. I found Ozma in Final Fantasy IX surprisingly easy and still want to revisit the game to try to make more sense out of that ending. But FFX ranks alongside Final Fantasy VIII as one I just didn’t care about and wanted to be over and done with as soon as possible. Granted, I didn’t dislike FFX as much as FFVIII, in which I didn’t even bother to get all the summons because I was so sick of Squall and his grumpy face, but the sidequests in FFX are so downright dull, overlong and pointless that I really cannot be bothered. Blitzball is terrible – I played it through several tournaments, and it never got fun…I recruited one guy with a level 3 sleep tackle, he always got the ball, passed it to one of my strikers, and they always scored. Even when it was balanced, it’s a game of chance and numbers…played…excruciatingly…slowly. And after the hours I played it…my reward was some overdrive moves for Wakka I never used. Great. The chocobo racing was horribly clunky and frustrating, with those bloody seagulls. The monster arena concept was endlessly dull, and even the one zone I did involved fighting 30 annoying enemies to get the last one I needed to come out. And as for dodging lightning 200 times…you must be joking.

The Dark Aeons and Penance I had no inclination to fight. It annoys me that the hidden parts of the game are so ridiculously far ahead of everything else in terms of required level that it’s absurd…and makes a mockery of the regular game, as the tools to help you at that stage are so overpowered that they plough through everything in the final dungeons with absurd simplicity. I can understand Anima taking out all the regular enemies in one hit, but then you get the Magus Sisters who not only could do it three times over, but meant that I have no idea how the final boss fights, because I summoned them and they took out his first form in one hit and his second in an overdrive.

Perhaps it’s because I had recently finished FFXII, but I think this pales in comparison. The fixed camera and weird weightless running animations look poor after XII, and the voice acting is just horrible beside the surprisingly accomplished work there – so bad that when I play X-2, even though I’ve legitimately bought it, I’ll play the ‘undub’. I hate the sphere grid, especially since I ended up taking a couple of my characters down the wrong path with no guidance and they ended up very poor until right at the end. It’s annoying to have to go to its screen after almost every battle as well. I hated the vague shadow of the job system that meant you had to match a certain character to a certain style of enemy, which seemed to me awkward and slow. I hated that weapons only make a difference when attributes are configured. And I really hated how several bosses did not rely on the strength of your characters or intuitive strategies but on your psychic ability to know what statuses they might inflict on you, or what they do when they die. Seriously, there should be no boss that can just inflict a status on you and kill you in one turn, and that I once got a game over screen because I didn’t know that if you struggle inside an underwater boss when its HP is low and kill it, that means instant death for your entire party. Seriously. That’s just extremely poor design.

The graphics didn’t sit well with me, either. I should say that the most positive aspect of this game for me is the character design, especially of Lulu and Auron, who are two of the most visually striking and awesome characters in any game. Summons like Yojimbo and Anima look great, too, and I must say that I find the Magus Sisters to be brilliant despite being quite comedic. Indeed, if you could take Wakka, Tidus and Rikku out of the party and have the Magus Sisters instead, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Despite the nice characters, though, the backgrounds are mostly horribly, horribly repetitive and boring, especially since you don’t get an airship til near the end and even then it mostly makes you trek through areas to get anywhere you want to go anyway. And I haven’t heard anyone else have this problem, but for me the transition between in-game graphics to FMV really jar because to me, Tidus and Yuna especially look like completely different people after the transition…with totally different racial characteristics.

So it doesn’t look nice, sound nice or play well. But with a great story I could forgive that. Well, this ain’t great. Set in a world where the dead don’t go away until they’re ‘sent’, you get one boss who you have to kill about seven million times, yet he keeps coming back. It’s horribly irritating and he isn’t even interesting to begin with. This also leads to several plot twists much less clever than they seem to think they are. A dichotomy between the technologically advanced world of the prologue and the fantasy setting would have been interesting, but it never comes, replaced by some cheap debates underpinning racial prejudice, done very clumsily. And as with XII, the end came too quickly, just as if felt like the story might actually be starting to get good. It never did, leaving FFX best summarised as a trek between a bunch of temples and a big scrap with the big bad guy you know you’ll have to fight from the start.

And that’s not even mentioning how certainty about an afterlife ought to really affect the way death is viewed…

I don’t think I’ll play X-2 that soon. I think I’ll relax with Okami first, then play through Persona 3. Undubbed.

Okami

Okami is one of the PS2 games I bought in Brunei, in the astonishing pirate-tastic store right there in the middle of one of Bandar Seri Baguwan’s main shopping malls – one, indeed, of quite a few like that. It’s been a looong time since then – and plenty of other games from back then remain as-yet unplayed – and I thought it would be a quick and simple game to play through before I started to play something else. I’d seen screenshots and liked the stylised cel-shaded graphics, halfway between anime and traditional brush art, and the apparent RPG elements.

In the end, Okami was both more and less than I had expected. It has plenty going for it, and well deserves its excellent reputation, but its main flaw is that it is just too long. It’s more or less on rails, barring backtracking possibilities for minor hidden goodies, the combat is repetitive and only bosses really provide any sort of challenge. This length makes some of the things that were fun and silly at the start of the game grow tedious, like the mixed-up voices and the way talking animation is heads pulsating away. Some of the character designs are great, but one problem with the nice brush-based aesthetic is that it’s often hard to actually make it out. And I felt a bit put-out that through a good two thirds of the game, I thought Issun was some oily middle-aged pervert, rather than an adorable teenage-looking pervert. Which really does make a lot of difference to how appealing he was!

The story is quite simple: in feudal Japan, the evil snake Orochi has risen again 100 years after his defeat. The mother goddess Amaterasu, in the form of a wolf, must defeat this evil force, and perhaps trace the power back to its source to prevent his return once and for all. Orochi’s defeat this time causes chaos all over ‘Nippon’, resulting in several other demons awakening, leading Amaterasu and her tiny Poncle companion Issun up to the frozen north. It’s very traditional stuff, suiting the brush-like art, but there is some zany humour and an anything-goes mood, including sci-fi elements, anachronistic technology and Carry-On-style smuttiness that makes for an entertaining experience.

Some of the bosses are fantastic in design. My favourites were Lechku and Nechku, the mechanical owls, with hats and little stubby arms at the top of their wings. On the other hand, if anything was repetitive, it was the final dungeon. By then, I think most of the quality testers had given up checking through the translation, and there was a fair bit of confusion between ‘its’ and ‘it’s’, and that sort of error, which struck me as oddly unprofessional for this sort of title. It was doubly frustrating because by that point, I really just wanted to get to the end. Thankfully I’d saved up all my big explosive things, so even the last boss went down easily enough when I got the hang of what was going on.

Overlong and with an unsatisfying climax, it was nevertheless a game full of charm and invention, and well worth playing!

FINAL FANTASY IX

You can clearly see what Square were thinking. ‘Hey, the last game didn’t work so well because we made it too real, too futuristic, too dull. Let’s do something playful. Let’s go back to our roots.' And thank goodness for that. I haven’t played FFX yet, but FFVIII definitely made me want a break from trying to be realistic and the attempt to have mature storylines.

Thus, FFIX’s world is a slightly silly one. There are rat-people and weird puffy glutton creatures and dwarfs and moogles and best of all, someone went, ‘Hey, you know those black mages we’ve always had? Why don’t we make one a main character?’ Stroke of genius.

And the gameplay got more fun, too. Thank goodness that dreadful magic-drawing system disappeared, and while I always liked the complex, highly customisable materia system from FFVII, it’s fun to see the job classes make a return post-Final Fantasy Tactics, and having each character be capable of a different set of skills kept things interesting, though meant I had some characters I never used at all. Four in a party is better than three as well – though I still prefer Suikoden’s six for turn-based combat!

Shame about the card game. Having an element of chance involved (badly explained) made the games really much too unpredictable, luck being more important than skill.

Characters are a plus here. Having a playful world meant that the characters can be nicely exaggerated. Thankfully, for the first time in a while, a Final Fantasy game got an interesting protagonist in Zidane. Even though he was a smug bastard and I didn’t like him, and even though under his cool clothes and nice hair he looked kinda like Leonardo DiCaprio with dwarfism, I still cared about his exploits – even though I was mostly hoping he’d get a good sharp shock that would make him a nicer person that never really came. I liked Vivi’s (bibi-kun…geddit, Japanese fans?) stuttering, stumbling shyness, and Steiner’s bumbling ineptitude, and Eiko’s hyperactivity, but the other playable characters were left a bit underdeveloped, even our heroine. Wilful, boyish (even facially!) Garnet could have been interesting, but kinda faded into the background after her strong introduction. And I wish I’d known that her name change was gonna be permanent. I expected it to be only for a few scenes, and I thought naming her after a dagger was daft, so I called her ‘Mipsy’ – and she was stuck like that until disc three! Despite being constant tanks in my party, Freya and Amarant got only a token nod in story terms, which was a shame, and Quina was even acknowledged as a bit of a joke in the script.

These characters made the plot enjoyable, even when it got a bit ropey. The opening quests were good, but towards the end it just became typical FF overwrought guff, and badly suffered for having (a) no decent bad guys (Brahe was a perfect mid-boss), but Kuja was just uninteresting and silly-looking) and (b) no cool-factor. (FFVII had Sephiroth, Vincent and the Turks. FFIX has Amarant, who just grunts like a teenager and has a funny-shaped head.) The overall impression of story was a nice basis, some good characters, but then a lack of ideas towards the end making things drag on and on while trying to be clever with a daft story about souls. It was cute and funny – the scenes with the love letter could have been from a very likeable anime – but when it tried to be epic it fell short.

And the translators should have been shot. Localising does NOT mean giving character accents that would make the Pythons say, ‘Tone it down a little, please…’ and slipping in Star Wars quotes. I DID laugh at, ‘No cloud, no squall will keep us apart’, though.

Overall, while it cannot replace FFVII’s place in my heart (entrenched there partially because when you’re 12 you accept faults more easily, I know), this was a lot of fun, a game I didn’t long to finish like FFVIII, and a charming experiment done well. My only real complaint was that it was too easy, and after about 50 minutes’ hard levelling, bosses fall like flies, and even the hidden bosses weren’t nearly the challenge that the Weapons were in FFVII. What WAS Ozma, anyway??

FINAL FANTASY 8

Well, last night I got to the final dungeon of FFVIII, so I thought I’d be a bit of a completist and go around getting all the little extras, but when I realised I’d got rid of a card I needed for a crappy subquest, and one of the GF summons would need me to go around hunting obscure monsters for hours to steal rare items from, I gave up, and decided to complete it this morning.

Started at half eleven and didn’t finish until 5 hours later. Should’ve known Square would make an incredibly frustrating, dull and repetitive final dungeon for this frustrating, dull and repetitive game.

It was always going to be hard to follow up something as seminal as FFVII, but Square seem to have kept all the flaws of the previous game without including any of the charm or character, and adding a whole plethora of new problems.

Graphically, of course the game has dated in almost seven years. But really, even for the PS1, the graphics are rather ugly. FFVII had an appealing cartoony style to the general gameplay, and there was obviously a conscious decision to get away from that by having very realistic character design, but the graphics are blocky, the prerendered backgrounds often difficult to navigate and the character animations extremely wooden. The fight scenes are where the focus has clearly gone, with huge summons similar to those of FFVII stealing the show, but of course, getting very dull after the first few times. CGI has progressed a long way, but the FMV sequences were still very nice to look at, if rather few and far between.

But FFVIII falls down in story terms. The characters are very badly portrayed: Squall somehow manages to be less charismatic and more irritating than most mute RPG protagonists, with his mood swings and occasional simian grunts, followed by oodles of angst. I never found a single reason why I (or Squall) should like Rinoa. Zell and especially Selphie were very entertaining, but always seemed like children stuck in adults’ bodies, and never had much of a chance to develop. None of the other characters got any real screentime at all, not even Seifer, whose story arc began as a rival in love and strength, but soon spiralled into that of a peripheral lapdog.

And the story is a mess. The promising initial setting suffers from Star Wars bathos (what seems to be an established institution with great power and influence turns out to be less than a generation old) and also Naruto temporal bias (where are all the other SeeDs who came before Squall and co, and why aren’t they at all important?). The big twists rely on huge leaps of faith, and there was no intriguing villain this time around, just a variety of sorceress figures leading to a very uninteresting climax. The best bit was the video camera sequence in the credits.

Not to say I didn’t have fun. I quite enjoyed going around the world fighting bosses for more GFs. The junctioning system was rather too time-consuming and I bet a lot of players just didn’t bother with it, but if you put some time and effort into it, it made the game very easy. Perhaps a little TOO easy, but I can’t deny the fun of kicking some random monster butt on occasion.

Overall, not a great game, not one I’d ever even THINK about playing again, but I’m glad I at least know what it’s all about now. Next, the 30000th time I’ve tried to play through Suikoden II!

Short note on Arkham Asylum

Unexpectedly finished Batman: Arkham Asylum today, my first PS3 game! I didn’t expect to be finishing it, as I thought the percentage on your saved game was how far through the story mode you were, not how many of the secrets and hidden parts you had found. It was a quick little game, but a lot of fun. I loved the stealth parts and the combat system remained fun right until the end. It was just a shame that it was really too easy, especially at the end.

Tales of Eternia

It took me a long time to play through this game, and that’s because there wasn’t a whole lot to bring me back to it. It had its charm, and was pretty fun to play, just not really fun enough, and badly lacking in a good story, which is what makes an RPG really addictive, even above its gameplay – though poor gameplay can kill even a good story (see Wild ARMS). A straightforward port of a PS1 game, it really doesn’t hold a candle to its sequel, Tales of Symphonia, which I now want to replay more than ever.

A plucky, simple-minded young hero and his two best friends, a feisty girl and a slightly cowardly scholar, find a crashed spacecraft with a strange dark-skinned girl inside, and get involved in an epic quest to stop her world coming crashing down onto theirs. With the usual flying ships and quests for elemental spirits, it’s very much an archetypal RPG story, so what really needs to bring it to life is its characters. And...well, Meredy is cute and Reid is a good leading character, but...well, they’re all a bit boring, the stabs at injecting romance don’t go anywhere, there’s no real impetus for the characters to do anything and none of the bad guys make any impact at all. This is the real problem, and the reason that having seen the weak ending, I now have little interest in going back to get all the attacks I never bothered to learn or go to the hidden dungeon that can only be reached after you’ve finished the game. Not by any means a bad game, but so unimaginative and lacking in character that its replay value is 0.

Kingdom Hearts: Re:Coded

I really took my time with Re:Coded. I was playing it for several weeks, and I think that in this way, I got the maximum enjoyment out of what is after all a pretty poor game.

After the excellent Birth By Sleep, the comparatively underpowered DS was never going to be able to provide a newer sequel that could really compare – especially not by simply updating a throwaway game made for mobile phones that was designed to sit alongside the main plot without advancing it. But that’s what Square Enix offered, with the additional carrot on a stick of added plot nuggets relating to BBS.

So the game itself was strung on an unimpressive piece of plotting: the data Jimminy recorded about Sora’s KH1 adventures got corrupted, so a data Sora is created to help piece the corrupted data back together again, mostly by hitting some blocks with his keyblade and destroying simulated heartless. Of course, the plot develops and become progressively more important to those in the real world it affects, but as a game for a small subset of fandom even in Japan, it was designed not to have any significance to plot.

But interestingly, despite its simplicity and lacklustre graphics, it has actually been the most fun I’ve had with Kingdom Hearts in quite some time – primarily because it is the game you can tweak the most…meaning you can if you wish make it absurdly hard. Birth By Sleep I liked, but it was simply too easy. KH1 had the Sephiroth fight, which remains one of the most fun gaming challenges I’ve taken on in any action game or RPG, but ever since there just hasn’t been anything of comparable difficulty. And though with Re:Coded there is no big bad hidden boss (the closest is a rather easy ‘bugged’ Roxas), the entire game can with the ‘cheats’ that are part of the game be made into a decent challenge, and that is what I enjoyed the most, even if eventually you reach a plateau where simply nothing can come close to challenging you any more unless you simply neuter yourself to a frustrating degree for no advantage.

It wasn’t easy, getting every weapon or quest item, or getting the 20 trophies necessary to see the hidden ending (a nice two minutes offering something of a bridge to KH3, but unsatisfying because it is far too short), and while I really liked the way the game offered minigames for just about each world to keep play varied, some where plain annoying.

The worst game in the series in story terms, no doubt, but for a gamer who actually wants something to play, rather than a story roped to some easy button-mashing fights…well, the other games could learn from the depth here.

But roll on KH 3D, with its Engrishy title, or better yet, BBS Final Mix – hopefully still with the Japanese cast, because I really didn’t like BBS’s dub…even though I’m back to playing it casually until I get to the new hidden boss in the Eng version.