Swan Dance of the New Peach Shogunate
Gasp!
More than two days without an update! That's a new record!
I hope you haven't all been killing yourself in desperation.
But I'm sure you'll get better.
So, finished Ganbare Goemon and The Excessively Long Subtitle yesterday, very short game, only 6 hours or so. It's nice enough.
The game is pretty straightforward, you're pretty much going from A to B all the time, with some very minor backtracking, most of which is to the same small town.
Once again, I have to state the the humor is really wonderful in this game, it's completely crazy and that's what keeps your attention, cos the gameplay is nothing unique or outstanding. Nothing bad in any way, but nothing to make you go 'wow' either.
I do have to say that I cannot imagine this game to be so much fun in any other language than Japanese. The whole setting of the game is Japanese and the humor is definitely adjusted to the setting, so I don't think this can work in English.
Also, since the game takes place in the whole of Japan, there's a LOT of regional speech and dialects, very true to the original environments, which adds color and some credibility which must be hard to purvey in English.
But since this game was after all very much aimed at the Japanese market, I shall judge it as such. This was never meant to be brought to these shores I think.
I have to point out though that the Camera is absolutely atrocious. Horrendous.
Insidious even. The camera is hardly ever where you want it to be, so you have to shift it a lot, but if you press the scroll button one time too many (which is TWICE actually) the camera will make an entire 360 degree turn, free of charge, and you can imagine how useful
that is when you're negotiating small platforms.
Even when adjusting the angle, the camera is very jerky, and often gets into conflict with walls, or it doesn't when in fact it should. This one time, it went to so completely mad, jerking back and forth and shaking about, that the game fucking froze on me! IT FROZE ON ME! BAD KONAMI, BAD!
I think that, in my approximate 20 years as a gamer, the amount of cartridge-based games that have frozen on me can be counted on the fingers of a Simpson's Hand.
CD's are an entirely different affair though (Thanks, Sony!).
And even more bizarre, the music just completey blanked out during the final battle!
I mean, I was checking what the heck happened, but my Headphones were still working, there was nothing wrong with the RGB cable, my Stereo was still on and set to the right channel, the sound just disappeared! When I reset the N64 it was back and acted as if nothing had happened! Snotty little brat!
So yeah, kinda buggy this game, it seems, but still very decent.
Good music (when it's there), nice graphics (for the time), great humor.
I'll give this an 8, for being worth checking out.
Which reminds me, I'll put up a rough guide to my scoring system in the Rules section:
Here.
Ganbare Goemon!
I'm glad I'm making the rules here.
So whilst I'm working on FF4 I'm fully allowed to skip the rest of the FF series for the time being and move on to the next game on the list, which is Ganbare Goemon: Neo-Momoyama Bakufu no Odori, known in the West as Mystical Ninja: Starring Goemon.
The Japanese subtitle, in case you were wondering, means "The Dance of the Neo Momoyama Shogunate" which only goes halfway of indicating how incredibly insane this game is.
Initially you play as Goemon and his tubby friend Ebisumaru who has some exhibitionist tendencies. Later on you will be joined by Bodyguard/Pretty Girl Yae and Sasuke the robotic Ninja, whom you need to revive by finding his battery first.
Crazy? You ain't seen half of it yet.
The opening sequence shows Goemon and Ebisumaru getting kicked out of a Bar because Ebisumaru's "Enchanting Dance" which apparently involves him getting naked.
At that precise moment though, a huge flying Peach appears in the sky manned by the main bad guy and girl and their 4 Queer Sidekicks. Insane? Hold on, I'm still getting there.
With their wonderful Flying Peach they shoot a laser beam at the Castle of O'edo turning it into a Disneyworld-esque European-style Pretty Boy Castle.
Why? Because they want to turn Ancient Japan into a stage for their new musical of course! That's not so weird is it? Right? Right!
And before long you find yourself listening to scantilly clad guys for information, talking to dogs about geography and riding a huge robot that sings Enka and plays in foreign movies in his spare time. I
swear I'm not making any of this up.
The game is a kind of Zelda-esque Action RPG, although I think it was made long before Ocarina of Time. This was the first RPG I ever played in Japanese I think, and the first time I played it, at the beginning of my study, I didn't understand a single word of it. So it became a kind of challenge for me to pop in this game every once in a while to see if I had progressed enough to understand more.
So I have a kind of nostalgic connection with this game. And I can say that my Japanese is now advanced enough to understand everything, except for the more obscure jokes, but at least I get all the dialects and patterns of speech now.
As you may suspect already, this game has a great sense of humor, extremely Japanese, which is good if you get it. I've been pretty much laughing out loud at every conversation I've had so far, and I really can't imagine the localisation of this game being as funny as the original. It's far too Japanese-specific.
It's fairly short though, so I think I'll be able to give the review soon.
Stay tuned!
TicTacs
Just finished Final Fantasy Tactics! Yay!
Wow!
I mean...
Wow!
I'm sorry I have to get positive for a change here, but this is really one of the best games I've ever played in my whole life! Squaresoft really knew what they were doing back then.
I mean, everything about the game just SCREAMS quality. You could put this game in a room filled with 500 Chinese, and it would still drown out their voices!
Great FMV, superb special effects, incredibly imaginative Map Design, beautiful majestic music, a quick, easy to get into, intuitive battle system, lots of variation in jobs, plenty of subquests, an intelligent (albeit overly complicated) plot, challenging gameplay, a great and satisfying ending, hell even some FF7 cameo's!
THIS GAME HAS IT ALL!
I don't care if you don't like Tactical RPG's, if you don't like this, you're an idiot and you should be shot. Until you die!
"But Ingen, you have to bitch about something! You whore!"
Well, lemme see then....
Okay, if there's one thing that slightly bothered me, it's that the game has Random Encounters. A game like this really doesn't need Random Encounters. Sometimes you just want to get from one city to the other on the map, just to buy some stuff, and you can get drawn into battle at every battle site you cross. This felt a bit unnecessary to me. I mean, you
need to fight anyway, to build up your character and job levels, and fighting is fun, but if would be better if you had more control. Just being able to select a "Fight!" option at every site, or have enemy symbols running around the map (like they did for the GBA sequel) would have saved some slight frustration perhaps.
And secondly, the game is HARD. HARD HARD
HARD.
Sometimes really a bit too hard. Now this is only, like 3 battles out of a total of 53 (there are 53 Event Battles in the game, the rest are random and/or optional).
Difficulty in general is rather high, but there are 3 battles which can really start to get annoying if you have to try them for the umpteenth time.
The first is against Wiegraf, as mentioned before, the Second against Marquis "let's turn everyone into an undead" Elmdor and his sidekicks "we have instant death attacks" Celia and Lede and the Third against some guy named Balk and his horde of Three-headed Superstrong Hydra's.
Sometimes you can really feel very overpowered, but in general there's always multiple solutions for dealing with a certain situation and you're never really forced into taking a specific job or using a specific ability over and over.
Very well-balanced, so I guess I shouldn't be whining too much.
Anyway, Fantastic game, shame about the Random encounters, comes Highly Recommended to anyone who has even a remote sense of taste and basically noone should miss out on this one. A 9.6!
The Neverending Story
It is here! Doomsday has come!
I have started playing the regular Final Fantasy Series!
See you in 2006 then!
Ugh. First up is Final Fantasy IV, fortunately I don't own any of the first three, so that at least saves me some time. I'm playing FF4 Easy to be exact, which is the Japanese remake of the American version apparently. The original Japanese version is ROCKHARD, so they toned it down for those silly Westerners and consequently rereleased it in Japanese for the non-sadists.
So in more popular terms, this would be Final Fantasy IV International. Only in Japanese. Or something.
I've only played one hour so far, and I've reached the Underground Waterway, also known as the Cave of the Antlion. Yippee, I guess.
One thing is immediately noticeable though. Nobuo Uematsu was BRILLIANT at that time.
The SNES era was definitely the highlight of his musical career (His work on FFX and FFXI sucked ass, excluding the orchestral stuff), but the music in this game just feels so RIGHT. You'll find yourself humming along to practically everything within one minute. Great Stuff. And the game is charming, as usual. It does suffer from some non-user-friendly quirks though, but I'll tell you more about that later.
Shouldn't judge this too much by today's standards of course, but some things should just be common sense.
If anyone's looking for me, I'll be locked in my room for the rest of the year.
Incidentally, have you ever noticed how, every time you try to look for pictures using google, you ALWAYS get at least one picture of a Cat, no matter what you are looking for? You could type in 'dog' and you'd still get 50 cat pictures.
I'm serious here, try ANY name, and you'll get at least one pic.
It's pretty much a given if you use a normal name, but, and I kid you not, why the Hell do I get a cat picture when I type 'FF4' as a command?
I mean, that just doesn't make SENSE
Silence of Ruins
Estpolis Gaiden is finished! YAY!
This was really one of those games that made me go: "Why the Hell am I doing this again?" and it certainly doesn't make you feel good to be a gamer or anything.
It's so tremendously, astoundingly, stupefyingly BORING.
The game took me a whopping 33 hours, which is very impressive for a GBA game, and certainly a very respectable length for an RPG, if it's any bloody FUN, but it ISN'T.
Battles are very slow and uneventful, and too numerous. The only redeeming factor is that there are no random battles, I was very happy with that, but instead, enemy characters can be seen on screen and you can effect the start of the battle, depending on how you touch them. Please don't make any jokes, I've heard 'em all.
Ideally you should approach them from behind (I'm warning you!) so you can start the battle with a preemptive attack. It really sucks if it happens the other way round though. It can really turn the tables on you.
But no matter what, battles are just SO boring and SO slow; I'm glad I played this on the Emulator, cos at least that allowed me to just surf around the Internet whilst the battles were going on. That saved my sanity (or what was left of it) probably.
And there's another thing, there are practically NO save points in this game. You can only save at churches in some villages, other than that NOTHING. You can make a temporary save anywhere you want though, but the problem is, if you load that save, it'll be gone forever, meaning that if you die you'll have to restart from the last time you made a real save, which can be a long time ago. Extremely Frustrating.
Add to that the fact that Reviving spells and items are exceedingly rare (reviving is generally also done at a church) and you have one shitty annoying game on your hands.
Dungeons? Long and boring! Without any save points! Yay!
There is the very occasional puzzle, but it's usually ridiculously easy and an insult to everyone's intelligence, even to people who are just sitting next to you when you play this on the train. In fact, I got a 25 Euro fine for playing this in a public place once. Damn you, Atlus! I want my money back!
Is there nothing nice to say about this game then? Well, you can turn it off when it starts to annoy you, that's pretty cool.
Oh, one thing! You can catch monsters! In a feeble attempt to copy the Pokemon rage, you can capture most of the enemies you meet in dungeons, using a special kind of monster-catching-disc and you can raise them, use them in battle and even merge with them, to form some kind of monster-human-hybrid thingy! I think that's how Pavarotti was born!
Granted, that feature is pretty cool, there is some decent music, the game doesn't look bad at all and I never felt really reluctant to play, so I'm going to give this a 'barely-sufficient' mark: 5.8
But I never want to have to do this again!
In other news, I've reached the Battle with Wiegraf in Final Fantasy Tactics.
If you've played the game, you'll know what this means and you'll probably burn some candles for me, if you don't know what this means, then you've simply never experienced the true meaning of the words
Motherfucking Hard.
This is one of those epic one-on-one battles with a major bad guy, the Hero's brother in this case. (don't get me started on the whole family-relations business in this game, I don't think the Internet has enough storage space to hold it).
He's Strong. He's got high Attack and Defense powers. He's Fast. He can act twice in one turn. He can hit you from a distance. You are
DEAD.
Still, it's not impossible, if you use steroids and have a breakfast of 50 raw eggs and 5 unprocessed cows. I'm going to win though. Cos, you know, I'm INGEN!
Greek Drama
Time for Backlog No.4!
Argos no Senshi, to be exact, being the Japanese name for Rygar, the PS2 version in this case.
In this game you play a Warrior who I suppose is called Rygar, although I don't think his name is actually ever mentioned. It takes place against an ancient Greek/Roman background with collosea, mythological creatures and whatnot.
As Rygar you are bestowed with the magical DiscArmor, which is a kinda yoyo with
edges and you have to basically destroy everything in your path.
And that is immediately one of the coolest things about this game, you can actually destroy practically anything you see, and most of the environment holds some kind of item, or secret or something.
You get 3 kinds of DiscArmor, Fire, Water and Earth and you can equip them with runes to make yourself more powerful, and you can upgrade them with souls. Cool.
What is NOT cool, is the Story, because it's totally uninteresting, and, above (or beneath I should say) all else, the voice-acting.
It is Hor-Ren-Dous. Really. I have never EVER experienced voice acting THIS bad, and I've watched plenty a dubbed anime. It makes Resident Evil sound like motherfucking Shakespeare. In fact, I think Shakespeare got into a good deal of motherfu......but that's beside the point.
This game was made by Tecmo, the wonderful people who brought you That Fighting Game with The Big Bouncy Boobs, so you are ensured of very pretty graphics with very....
liberal.....physics. Fortunately, Rygar is a man, so no wobbly bust for him, and the insides of his mail are not animated, thank Zeus.
It does mean he can jump about 2 times his own height though. Jumping is actually implemented really well, you don't actually have to be very accurate, cos you get a kinda auto-aim, like in Devil May Cry, which is good.
Oh, and I have to point out the magnificent soundtrack! Argos no Senshi was scored by, I think some Polish Orchestra or something, so it's all majestic orchestrations, which are very good. They sure spent a lot of money on this one.
It's a shame therefore, that it's so incredibly SHORT, you'll blast through in no time at all, there are lots of secret pick-ups to find, which unlock artwork, a sound test, etc. so there is some good replay value.
All in all, a very decent action game and one to recommend: a nice round 8.
Offtopic
Or Ontopic, if you consider Final Fantasy 7.
You may have read something about this Meteorite that is apparently going to pass earth in roughly a quarter of a century from now. It's called 2004MN4 apparently, which once again goes to show scientists need to get more fresh air.
A friend of my mother's works at the Town Hall and she said scientists regularly come in (or it would be regular if any of them ever got out for long enough to actually meet women, so a more accurate way to say it would be 'irregularly') to register their children with deranged names like "Y2K", "E=MC2" or "Bob".
Anyway, this meteorite, right, it's gonna pass earth in 2029 and some people think it's going to get too close for comfort. George W. has already offered to put a restraining order on it, bless the little man, and otherwise he can just use his Fantastic Rocket Shield Project and maybe blow raspberries at it until it goes away with its tail (ahaha) between its legs.
Thing is, although chances of it hitting earth in 2029 are second to none, British Scientists (is it just me, or does this phrase sound as idiotic as American Modesty, French Altruism or Dutch Intelligence?) fear that the meteorite will like what it's gonna see and come back for a closer inspection in 2035 or 2036.
NASA claims there's a Risk of 1 on the Torino Scale, which sounds like the body parts of a Tropical Fish to me.
Hands up, who's ever heard of the Torino Scale?
....
....
....
You're all liars!
Apparently 1 on the Torino Scale is only marginally worse than 0, in that there is NOT a 0% chance, but it's ridiculously low in any case. It's code Green, and Green is widely acknowledged as the most harmless color in existence, although it also means the Comet doesn't have to stop at a traffic sign I think.
Anyhow, this is just another one of those typical "Let's scare the general public with something incredibly unlikely"-plans, like Boogeymen, Werewolves and Michael Jackson.
Still, I think it would be kinda cool to have a meteorite crash into the planet.
In any case, I think it'll be a considerbaly more effective way of birth control than that stupid one-child rule! Bloody Chinese!
And hey, maybe if you make sure you're close to the impact, you can absorb all of the planet's energy that is released and you can become some kind of God-type thingy.
With only one wing! You'll have to start wearing a hair-net though.
See you at the Gates!
Games? oh, yeah!
I'm very close to the end in Estpolis Gaiden, and about 70% through Final Fantasy Tactics I think. Just downloaded the Rockman Zero 4 ROM (I figured, with the meteorite coming, I'm allowed to do something illegal every now and then), so that'll probably stagnate the normal proceedings a bit, but expect a fresh update soon! Have to finish before 2029!
Arc the Lad
Just now I was downloading some Porn, and suddenly a wonderful idea hit me!
I'm going to run for Pope! It's completely obvious that none of the contestants are any good, the Unholy Bastards, I think I saw one of them in a Castlevania game once.
And here's me, Young, Vigorous and with a very unhealthy interest in small children, I'd say I'm more than cut out for the job!
Start the White Smoke, we have a winner!
So, as I was saying: Arc the Lad.
I have no idea why I picked up this game when I did, it probably had something to do with the fact that it was ridiculously cheap, and I must've been looking for a new RPG or something.
This is another one of those Tactics RPG's, where you fight turn-based battles in an arena set up of squares. Every turn you get to walk a certain amount of squares and perform an attack if there's something close enough to hit. Very simple and quite entertaining, if you do it right.
But the question is, does Arc the Lad do it right?
Graphic-wise, this game looks awful. Even considering the fact that this must've been a very early title, it looks considerably worse than even very mediocre Super Nintendo games and the sound is barely any better either. There IS some nice orchestral music during the opening and the ending though.
The game is also very VERY short, clocking in at a measly 7 hours or so.
I later found out that this was nothing more than a prelude to Arc the Lad II, which is apparently the REAL game, and this was just a teaser or something.
There is really no reason to play this game, other than if you're planning to play the sequel. It's not bad by any means but it's just thouroughly uninteresting and the presentation will make your eyes water as well. There's even a very feeble attempt at CG movies in here, although it looks like dead monkey remains.
Have you ever seen dead monkey remains? It's not pretty, I can tell you that.
Let's make this a 6.7 for being not bad, but for deserving more work being put into it than the creators obviously did.
Backlog #2
Once upon a Time, there was a little known Company named Nintendo.
After making a little known game starring plumbers and mushrooms, they decided the world needed something new that didn't involve falling into a pit every 5 steps.
That game, was The Legend of Zelda, starring green-clad elven boy Link and it spawned all kinds of hideous commercials, both in the West and in Japan, and maybe I'll share them with you once the time cometh, My Young Grasshoppers.
What it
also spawned was this: A LOT (and I mean a LOT) of derivatives and copy-cats, an endless stream of wannabe's still continuing to this day, and none have ever reached the same lofty heights, even though, and let's be fair here, the first two Zelda games were really rather crappy.
Alundra is one such game. YOU play as Alundra, otherwise known as The Dream Walker, and you have the uncanny ability to transport yourself into other people's dreams to rid them of their nightmares. The Rustic village Inoa is being plagued by nightmares, caused by the Evil Demon (as opposed to all those Really Swell Demons out there) Melzas, whom the villagers wrongfully worship as their God.
Now don't get me wrong, as far as Zelda clones go, this game isn't really that bad, it's just that, in their urge to discern themselves from the Big N, Sony Computer Entertainment decided to include an all new gameplay factor, which is commonly called: Frustration.
Yes, this game can really be the nail on your coffin at times and that really destroys so many of the good things it has to offer. There's cool dungeons (by which I mean Ice levels. Hur Hur) and clever puzzles, lots of Humor and even a very decent story. The problem is, they made this also a kind of platform game. There's a lot of puzzles that involve Jumping, and if you're playing an RPG with an overhead view like this, Jumps are very hard to judge. It's not so bad if you have to jump from left to right or something, but if you're going from front to back, distances are extremely hard to measure. And the game requires you to do this a LOT.
Imagine how much fun this is when you're hanging over a Lava Pit, trying to Freeze rapidly moving Balls of Fire into icy stepping stones to get up to a very high ledge indeed, and you will understand how enormously annoying this can be.
Other than that the game is great fun and the ending is still one of the absolute best I've ever come across, so definitely worth the while. A 7.5! Chilling!
A History Lesson
That's right!
In between playing the dreadfully long-winded Estpolis Gaiden (
please stop already!) and the much too time-consuming Final Fantasy Tactics (but in a good way! People who are looking forward to seeing an acid-pissing review of this one are going to be disappointed, I friggin'
LOVE this game!) I have decided to create some backlogs on what has happened before I started this whole mad Blog thingy.
I got this Blog last month, but this insane project has been going on since July 28th 2004, and a LOT has happened in that time, and I'm not talking about the world in general, because, you know, nobody cares,
right?So! The very first game that kicked off this most useful pass-time was:
Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare!
And I should point out that the "!" at the end makes the title already 10 times more scary than the game itself.
This is the 4th instalment of the Alone in the Dark series, which is widely credited as the series that started the whole Survival Horror genre, and although they were indeed first, it would be more accurate to say: Infogrames had this basic idea, and then Capcom looked at it and made it good.
I'll use my patented metaphor system to draw you an image:
Infogrames: Look, we made a huge pile of dung, but it's a completely new kind of Dung!
Capcom: And we've just mastered the ancient art of Alchemism and we're going to turn your Dung into gold! It won't be solid gold though, it will still retain it's core Dung value, but there'll be a very nice thick layer of gold around it.
Konami: "That's nice, we'll take that layer of gold then, and fill it with
Pure Darkness and solid HELL" and they created what can accurately be called the Scariest Shit out there.
To be honest though, Resident Evil wasn't all that Dungy, and especially the games that star Leon Kennedy kick major Ass. Oh, no, wait, Major
Butt, don't wanna get into trouble with the Animal Rights Association.
So what the Hell am I talking about?
I dunno! But that's never stopped me before!
The point is, AitD started the genre, by making an absolutely crappy game, then other companies tweaked the idea into something good, and then The New Nightmare copied that again and tried to get away with it.
So you're getting a Mansion with Pre-rendered backgrounds and Zombies, but you're also getting lousy gameplay and crappy controls.
The only thing they did manage to emulate perfectly is the excruciating voice-acting.
God is it ever bad. It might even be worse than Resident Evil 1. Barry is my hero.
The game offers 2 main characters with their own side of the story: Edward Carnby and Aline Cedrac. Carnby's voice acting isn't so bad, and he definitely has the most interesting course through the game, but Aline is absolutely horrible. And then there's the old woman at the beginning of Aline's story. She looks like an old woman, she's whiny like an old woman, but her voice is of a young inexperienced voice-actress trying to impersonate the voice of an old whiny woman. Crappy.
The renders are pretty nice though, but that's about the only positive thing I can say. Oh, and they make some original use of light in this game. Light can actually be used to keep some monsters at bay, and it is actively used in some puzzles, which is nice.
Music is horrible though. The Silent Hill series has built up a huge fanbase thanks to Akira Yamaoka's brilliant and critically acclaimed Industrial/Rock soundtracks, and it looks like Infogrames were thinking:"Hmmmm, Industrial eh? That means banging things together and making lots of noise, right? We can do that!"
No.
But there is one absolutely totally unforgivable aspect in this game, something that no other Survival Horror has done before, basically because it's an extremely stupid idea:
RESPAWNING ENEMIESSurival Horror has always been about limited health and limited weaponry and ammo, and this game is no exception, but we don't want to make it too easy right? So every enemy in the game respawns if you leave and enter the room again. THANKS Infogrames, I couldn't have done without that.
So basically, this game completely sucks, but it does have some nice surprises here and there, and you might still enjoy it if you're a fan of the genre. A 6 for this one.
Final Fantasy.......Tactics!
Yes, the Dark Days of the letter F have finally come.
However! Since I'm the one running the show here, and I can pretty much do anything I want, I decided to start with Final Fantasy Tactics first, before trying to tackle the main series, which is just too damn scary.
For one thing, I want to play at least FF 4 on an Emulator, since I only have the Japanese PSX version, which is not only ridiculously hard, but also suffers from loading times which is unforgivable. I may have to do the same thing for FF 5 and 6 as well, since I only own the PSX versions of those too.
And because I am already playing Estpolis Gaiden on emulator as well, I decided to skip right to a FF I can play on my normal TV screen. Don't want to hang around in front of the PC all day. TV is better!
So, FFT then.
Not much to say actually, it's one of those Strategy RPG thingies, which are not about dungeon exploration or solving puzzles, but about story and long long long strategic battles. Ever played Stratego? Well, it's a lot like that, only with better special effects. Unless you have one of those Diamond playsets. I mean...
That's just fancy!
So, unlike normal RPG's where a battle takes about 1 minute, tops (excluding boss battles), expect to spend at least 15 minutes per fight in a game like this. Boss battles can even take twice as long. It's good fun though, if you're into that kinda thing. Like Bestiality!
I think I've hit that special unavoidable marker where I have to play nothing but LONG RPG's in a row, so I think I will have to start making some backlogs for the games I haven't told you about yet. So that means anything before Dark Chronicle, which is a hefty 40 games or so. Lucky you, eh!?
Moving On.
Now I want you to try and imagine something, as vividly as possible.
Let's say you're running this Sweatshop in Thailand, with about 50 children of about 6 or 7 years old, right? Now one day, you get this big assignment from a Huge Multinational Corporation, and you have to throw all of those kids into a small confined room with some pots and pans, some pieces of string and a couple of bits of wood. Then, by the miracle of Modern Technology, you shake the room around with all its contents, not completely dissimilar to a washing machine, and you record the sound it makes on a Late 1960s Bell & Howell Combination Cassette Recorder/AM-FM Radio. What would you get?
The soundtrack to Evergrace, that's what.
So that's the music part of the review over with, let's look at the rest:
Graphics: Well, I think this was a launch game, or at least it was released very shortly after, so it's nothing to be amazed at, but it does have its peculiar charm.
The indoor environments are very straightforward and boring, only the outside scenes are kinda nice. But in a sense, the simplicity of the graphics is in line with the nature of the game. The entire game itself is very no-nonsense, layed-back and runs at a leisurely pace. I think it's kinda nice to play games every once in a while that don't try to wow you with graphics and special effects and dramatic happenings.
Or indeed,
any happenings whatsoever. The story seems to be there, in that you sometimes get cutscenes and dialogue, so there has to be SOMETHING, but I'll be damned if I know.
It's like they tried to make a nice Swiss Cheese, but they only included the holes and forgot about the whole dairy part.
But as I said, I like the way the game comes across. No Drama, no Rush, just you, walking around a bit, solving some puzzles, killing some monsters.
And the puzzles are rather original too. As mentioned before, the game relies heavily on an active Equipment System, and most puzzles in the game are connected to what you are wearing, or indeed, NOT wearing, which is a pretty unique way of dealing with puzzles. It does get old though, and sometimes hints are rather obscure.
But a Review by me wouldn't be a Review by me if there wasn't something to
REALLY bitch about, so let me introduce you to the 2 most annoying parts of the game:
1 - Your Equipment deteriorates.
Fast. Dark Cloud also had a system where your weapons would run out of Hit Points as you used them, which does make some kind of sense, but not the kind of sense I particularly like to see in my Video Games.
But Evergrace is even worse, because not only your weapons, but also all of your armor deteriorates just with the passing of time alone! If you stand around doing nothing you can watch your Equipment HP just FLY down. Of course it can be mended in shops, and shops are never too far away (they can be accessed through the Save Point Menu, but it's just stupid anyway).
One time, I accidentally made the mistake of leaving the game on while I went to mastur.........uh........
donate to charity and when I came back my character had been basically stripped of everything, which cost me a lot of repair money.
But then there is 2 - and this is REALLY insane: We've all played 3D Action RPGs before right? Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Brave Fencer Musashiden, we all know them right? As a rule, this kind of game has Pits, Lava, Rivers etc. to fall into when you're not careful. Then what happens? You lose a smidgeon of health, naturally.
Not so Evergrace. Oh No.
Fall into
anything in Evergrace, and you DIE. You DIE like a whiny little Bitch. You DIE and you go to Evergrace HELL, which is almost the same as the Normal Hell only with less polygons and more boring textures. And I think Satan wears a Pumpkin on his head.
And, no, there's no "restart at the beginning of the room" feature either. You DIE like a Raped Maggot and you have to restart from the last point you saved at. The only slight twinkling of light in this Big Black Darkness is that at least, after restarting, you can skip conversations. But that doesn't make up for
squat.
I don't need to tell you that this gets TERRIBLY frustrating very very soon. Especially when you have to fight bosses on small platforms (nice one, From Software!), which as a rule are so far away you have to stand on the edge to be able to hit them (and with almost EVERY weapon you use you take a step forward when you swing it) and they are usually so strong they can send you flying with one single hit.
Very Nice.Despite all this, the game is really extremely easy, mainly because money is very easy to make, and you can pretty much buy all of the strongest equipment right at the start of the game.
So, what's the verdict?
Hmmmm...... 7.2
Painstakingly random rating?
Shut up.No, despite everything, I did find myself enjoying this and I actually WANTED to finish it, but reward is minimal and it doesn't really excell anywhere. Decent enough, but nothing to write home about.
Another Estpolis!
Yes.
Because I liked the original
so much I bought every other instalment of the series as well.
Actually no, the first Estpolis I ever played was Lufia 2 (which is the American name; the Japanese being Estpolis 2 and the European being Lufia 1. Does this make sense yet? Well, don't even get me
started on Final Fantasy then) and it totally RULED. I'm actually very much looking forward to playing that again.
After playing that I decided I also wanted the original (bad move) and the sequel on GBA, which is this one: Estpolis Gaiden: Chinmoku no Iseki, which literally translates as "Estpolis Outside Legend: Sunken Silence of Remaining Remains" (Thanks, Babelfish!)
So far it's a lot better than the original, only because it couldn't possible be any worse. Incidentally, because playing GBA for too long gives me neck cramps and because I have to shift position every 3 seconds to catch the light properly, I'm playing this on an Emulator, which IS perfectly legitimate as long as I own the original game, which I do.
On a Side note, Evergrace is nearing completion, which means that I'm dangerously close to my first Final Fantasy game in this project. My social life is going to end very soon. It's a good thing it wasn't very viable in the first place.
Dutch Quote of the Day:
Professor:"Ik heb een Leerstoel aan de Universiteit van Kyoto"
Ik:"Nou en? Wij hebben thuis wel 6 stoelen, en die zijn ook van Leer."
Evergrace
Evergrace!
Another one of those obscure games noone ever seems to have heard of.
What is it with the letter E and obscure games? Estpolis? Eldorado Gate? Evergrace? Eh?
And let's just say I'm pretty damn happy that Ephemeral Phantasia has the prefix Reiselied in Japanese, otherwise I would also have had to play that right now, and that officially would have made E the worst gaming letter possible, but we'll get to that later. MUCH later.
So, anyway, Evergrace, yeah. This is a very low-profile Action RPG by the Massive Multi-National Corporation known to noone as From Software. What, never heard of 'em you say? I heard they were responsible for
global warming last time I checked. Bastards!
But in any case, in Evergrace you play as either Yuterald (that's a boy's name) or Sharuami (that's a girl's name!) to stop the evil Majin (that's a very original bad guy name right there) from whatever he is trying to do ("I just want to make some tea, what are you people doing in my house!?") and maybe kill some of his henchmen along the way.
And what does this RPG has to offer that hasn't already been done thousands of times before? Well, actually, as the back of the box claims, this is a "Soubi suru RPG" which either means equipment is an integral part of the gameplay, or you can wear the game outside.
Incidentally the box also states in huge Kanji: "Shujinkou ga futari!" which is the stupidity equivalent of saying "This is a Plumber!" on a Mario game.
Nice marketing there From Software! (what the hell kind of name is that anyway?)
Actually, it's pretty cool though. Equipment IS a very important part of the gameplay. Everything you equip is visible in realtime, unlike the majority of RPG's out there where either nothing changes at all, or you only get different looks for weapons. I think only MMORPG's spend this amount of attention to equipment, usually.
And what's more, it's not just eye-candy, it's closely intertwined with puzzle-solving as well! Many a situation in the game depends on the kind of clothing you are wearing, and sometimes even the color. This is a pretty cool idea, and I'm enjoying this game rather well so far. I think I'm almost through Yuterald's side of the story, I'll finish Sharuami's as well and post the review, because, of course, the game is absolutely not without fault.
More on this as it happens. Or probably later.
Screw This Lot!
We had some lovely weather the other day.
So I did what I always do when the weather is nice, I escape from the world of humans and enjoy myself
up on the roof of our house.
That's Right.
So there I was, basking in the glorious sun, when all of a sudden, this thing came CRASHING through the roof from somewhere inside the house, rocketed up into the sky, only to disappear in one of the few fluffy clouds hanging in an otherwise spotless blue firmament.
I immediately turned on the news and only a few minutes later NASA had spotted the object flying through the depths of space. Later on they found out what it was, and the report said that this was, in fact,
the Encount Rate in Estpolis.
FUCK, this game is annoying. I swear, I'm not exaggerating one bit.
Ofttimes you really seriously can't even walk
4 steps before being sucked into yet another random battle, which is annoying as HELL. Only without the comfortable warmth.
What's more, the attack order seems painfully random. The timing of your attack is based on the weight of your equipment, but it seems terribly inconsistent, occasionally enemies will just attack you two times in a row, before you even have time to do anything.
Secondly, and this is REALLY stupid, when there's more than one of the same enemy on screen, YOU CAN'T CHOOSE WHICH ONE TO ATTACK! Let's say we have this situation:
Enemy A x2, Enemy B x1, Enemy A x1. Now you can choose Enemy B, no problem, you can even choose enemy A on the right, but you can't choose between either of the enemies A on the left! Put the cursor on them, and it will start pointing at both at the same time, and the computer will decide randomly which one you will attack, thus completely destroying the whole goddamn principle of strategic battles.
And what's even WORSE, let's say I let two of my characters attack enemy B, but the first one kills him in one hit. No problem, right? In every single RPG to date that would mean the computer automatically selects one of the other enemies to attack with the second character. WRONG! In this game, the second character will.....
wait for it....
ATTACK THE EMPTY SPACE!!!!!!!!
This is so retarded, not even Sony executives can understand it.
Combine that with boring, eventless maze dungeons (did I mention recently how much I
adore mazes? No? Well, that's because I COULD EAT THEIR GUTS.
And then there's the fact that Boss battles are too cumbersome; you will die a lot.
And it seems the creators are aware of this, because you can't actually go game over!
When your party expires, they will be sent back to the last town they entered, keeping all the experience they gained, and even remembering all events that have happened in the mean time. I once died on the way back from a dungeon, which actually saved me a lot of time backtracking! So this would be positive, BUT!, only your main character is revived, the others remain dead. Oh, did I already mention you can't buy any reviving items in this game? Well, at least, not in the first bunch of towns anyway, I haven't bothered to go further. The only alternative way to revive a character is to take him to a priest and have him healed, which costs a LOT of money. And not even every town has a priest. So that would mean having to go to another town ON YOUR OWN. Which you won't survive. Great hunh?
So after ploughing through several hours of this nonsense, I suddenly had one of those Satori moments, and I thought, why the Hell am I even bothering? I'm not enjoying this game ONE BIT, I am actually literally playing against my own will, and this is not what gaming should be about is it? Why should I waste my precious time
and money on something that is only annoying the crap out of me? Right? Right! I have my study for that, thank you very much!
So, I decided I will BLOW this game off. Yes. I will skip it, like the piece of oozing faeces that it is. I give it a nice round 3, and I will feed it to my mutant warthogs. No more of this! Onto the next! Which is.....another Estpolis....
D'oh!
End of the Gate
No more Eldorado Gate.
Man, it's a good thing I didn't get ALL those 7 volumes, cos I was getting
pretty fed up with them.
Volume after Volume of incredibly similar (and very boring) dungeons and battles, I'd hate to think of having to work through 3 volumes more.
You see, although the build up of the story is good, and the fact that it is divided into chapters aimed specifically at each character means you get some good character development and background stories, the game itself is really really dull.
Every chapter is an approximate 2 to 3 hours, where all you do is walk from A to B in very empty dungeons and fields, occasionally bothered by random battles with static enemies.
And you don't get ANYTHING for fighting, that's the most frustrating part. No money, no experience, NOTHING! well, not nothing, you frequently get Magic.
There is no MP in this game, magic can only be cast by using Magic Items, and more powerful magic can be achieved by combining these items. Also, sometimes you get lousy accessories, which is the only thing you can exchange for money at shops.
If you get stuck at a hard boss, which is not uncommon, there is really no way to increase your chances, just try and try again.
Having the best equipment increases your chances, but for that you need money, and money is far too thin on the ground. The fact that you don't get anything means it's okay to run away a lot though, and if you squeeze yourself through a tough battle, with only 1 of 5 party members standing, you don't have to worry about anyone missing any experience points, but not being able to improve your skills is just annoying.
Thus, there is no element of fun in this game at all. Fighting is useless, dungeons are boring. It's only slightly tolerable because the games are so short, but if you play through all of them in a row you WILL get sick of it.
So, with that said, the separate games get a 6+ each, as a whole though, they get a 5. Don't bother, I say.
Estpolis
"What?"
That's right, Estpolis.
"What the Hell is an Estpolis?"
That's the Japanese name for the Lufia series.
"Lu....what?"
Die.
So, yeah, Estpolis, or Estpolis Denki as is the full title, which has little or nothing to do with electricity. This series was released under the name of Lufia in the west, but since I'm playing my games by the names on their boxes/cartridges/CD's this comes miles before my Western copy of Lufia 2.
I think these games, released by small-hit wonder Taito, were relatively popular in their time, and I think the sequel actually got some very good reviews. Dunno about this one though, but that's what I'm here for, right!?
Right.
Nothing else to report, so Ingen go sleep now.
Quote of the day:"I haven't seen so many drugs in a wang since I ran a Chinese Opium Den."- Mr. Burns examining Homer's urine sample.
No more Monkey Business
Donkey Kong 64 is finished.
GoodThis means the end of the letter D. Yay!
Despite my previous post, I'm not completely dissatisfied with DK64. Yes, there is a lot of Rare Trademark frustration, and it can amount to exceptionally high levels, but most, if not all, of the frustration comes from the terrible, awful, horrendous mini-games and Bonus Stages, which are all theoretically optional.
If you want to finish the game with the full 101% you have to struggle through everything the game throws at you, but if you just want to finish the game, which is what this project is about anyway, it is no problem to just ignore a golden banana or two.
Basically, what you need to get to the final boss is: All 8 Level keys, meaning you have to beat the bosses for the 7 normal levels, which only requires a certain amount of normal bananas, and the final 8th key which is hidden in K.Rool's hideout.
To get there, you need to find all 40 blueprints, at least 4 Battle Arena Crowns, and the special Rare and N64 coin, which can be won by playing Jetpac and the original Donkey Kong Arcade game. I was amazed by the way, at how well the old DK still holds up in this day and age. A classic if ever I saw one.
To reach the 8th and final level you need 100 golden bananas out of a total of 200, meaning you can skip half of the game and still finish it.
So Rare have provided a way of avoiding a lot of the frustration, although of course it would have been better if they hadn't put it in there in the first place.
Still, it's very professionally made, and really big (maybe a bit too big), so I'll give this an....8! Exciting!
