OK, so, I know I’ve been a bit quiet lately. Honestly, I haven’t been up to much. After some hectic times, and a lot of work, I’ve just been watching tons of Doctor Who. This month turned out to have a ton of really excellent game. Three AAA niche titles have been released, and all have either met or exceeded my expectations for them. I decided to write up some impressions, so, yeah! May in review:

Well, I think that I can blame my HDTV on this, but the game doesn’t look as good as I remember it looking at E3 last year. Basically, I remember it looking more natural but the final product feels more like… more edged (like a paper marionette) in a beautiful paper diorama/story book. I blame my initial slight disappointment on the fact that I had my expectations impossibly high, and the longer it was between when I saw that 7 minute video and when the game came out the more my imagination filled the gap.

OK, so the game doesn’t look like a living, breathing, painting like I had initially said (and gotten scolded for by ATLUS for), but it still looks really, really good. After I stopped looking so closely at all the little details and just trying to rip apart my memories, and got into just playing the game, it begins to look gorgeous once again.

So, no, the graphics don’t live up to hype/expectations, and it was a little bit of a let down in the very beginning, but then I kept playing.

I was initially shocked to see that, when I was given the option of setting my own difficulty level, there is actually a hard difficulty level available from the very start of the game. It seems to have become a disturbing trend in games to not offer a “hard” difficulty from the start but only after beating a game. This alone is something that’s been going on for a long time, but the fact that it seems to have become a carrot for beating the game, to the extent of even showing the difficulty level from the start but not allowing you to select it, is what’s been irritating me in the past couple of years (mostly because the game’s too easy in the first place). Also, while I already knew this, it was nice to see an option for the Japanese spoken language. I decided to go with the English option because, well, no one else is going to so I figured I may as well be able to comment on the quality of it.

After my expectations of Super Paper Mario being more like Super Mario with parts like Paper Mario (and then being completely wrong) I was expecting Odin Sphere to end up similarly. Especially with the fact that it’s been commented that the game will easily take 40 hours to complete, I just figured most of the game would be consumed with RPG-esq qualities of general boring-ness. After about four hours with the game I’m happy to announce that there is much more action and combat than I expected. On top of all that it’s actually hard, like the difficulty level. I don’t know how they thought of it either, but they managed to mix the RPG qualities of the game directly into the gameplay.

As a brief example of one of these RPG elements: seeds. When you kill an enemy they release phozons into the air. When you plant a seed it will need to absorb a set amount of these to produce its product. Say you really need a health item, you will need to plan the seed, but you have to do it while you can be attacked, and planting the seed takes time (a few seconds, but it still leaves you open for attack). So you have to plan where to plant it. Then you have to kill enough enemies to produce the product. When it’s ripe you have to cut it down and collect it (easier than it sounds). Then to gain the health and experience from the plant you have to eat it. This may sound simple, but eating takes time, and like almost everything else, you leave yourself open for attack while eating. (also there’s the neat bit that food is not just an eat and forget item all the time. Like a Muggle fruit you can eat it twice, the first half and then the second, each producing the same amount of health and experience, then you can take the pit of the seed and re-plant it). Alternatively, if you don’t want to use the phozons to grow things to eat and gain experience, you can absorb them into your weapon to make it stronger.

The key point is that most of the time you’re doing this while managing enemies. It becomes very challenging to plant food that you’re going to need at the beginning of a boss fight and then survive long enough to cut it down and eat it.

So, this leads me to my initial complaint about the game: the combat is very simplistic (at least with the first character, I imagine that it becomes more complex with later characters). It also seems somewhat random for very powerful attacks. But what the game lacks in complexities of combinations, it makes up for with the battles themselves. You have to spend a good amount of time separating smaller groups from large packs, and if you can’t you need to be able to manage crowd control well (magic attacks help for this). Though, this kind of leads me into my second problem with the game: the camera is a bit too close to the player most of the time. When you’re running around you have to pay attention to a small map on the top frequently because many times if you just wait for the enemy to come into view you might already be attacked.

Though, I’m not trying to say that the combat is bad, don’t get me wrong here. It really is the focus of the game for me, so I’m paying a lot of attention to it. I also have a feeling that if you’re playing on an easier difficulty that the game could end up as just a button mashing fest. The game is honestly challenging. It really shines in boss battles where you have to be managing in a few things at once like multiple enemies, and one of them takes up more than the whole screen and likes to swallow you whole.

After a while the game started to make a bit more sense and I realized that there is far more strategy to how you need to play than initially meets the eye. You can’t just hope for enough money to buy health items: you have to grow them. But you can only grow them if you can kill enough enemies. And you have to manage killing the enemies (not ignoring them) so that you can harvest the plant and actually get the health points. So you have to be very careful when fighting so that you can kill enough enemies that you can get the health to take on the boss. Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned Alchemy.

Ok, story/acting/writing; none are bad overall, but they can take a dip occasionally. The (English) voice acting ranges from good to terrible, and is usually in the bearable range. The writing is a bit above par for RPG quality writing. The main issue I have with this section is the amount of time that is spent on the story. It’s an interesting story so far because there’s a lot of secrets being revealed and it has demon lords and inner torment. But honestly, it’s not that good, and they spend a lot of time on the cut scenes.

And, honestly, the game is gorgeous. I am honestly shocked that the game looks so good for, not only being non-HD, but also not even progressive scan. It’s flooringly stunning at times, and at worst just good looking. I’m constantly finding myself amazed at how good it really looks. I read in an interview in Play magazine that they could have made the game HD if they had just scanned everything in at a higher resolution, but I think that would have had a negative effect on the game. As it stands it’s standing on a fine line between gorgeous, living, swelling, animated art, and the best quality flash-game possible to make. I think at a higher resolution that the soft blur would be lost that is just enough for the brain to bridge the gap with a hint of imagination.

And again, I’ve just started the game. This is going to be a long process.

Before I started Odin Sphere I’ve been playing quite a bit of Etrian Odyssey. I only got it because I found out that Nich Maragos was the project lead and editor for the game and that it was “hard” so I decided to give it a shot. When Odin Sphere came out I was a bit upset because I knew I would put this game to the side, even though I was enjoying it way too much against hating pretty much every other RPG in this genre of RPGs. Honestly, the only thing that connects this to the “j” lines of RPGs is the art style. The rest is very non-”j” in both its delivery and progress. Reminds me of what I hear other people talk about in relating to Ultima Underworlds.

I feel like I must be missing something because the game is so difficult (well, not so-o difficult, but more difficult that it seems like it should be) and I end up exploring in very short bursts before returning to town. I have a full team of 5 people (the most you can take out at once), and I’m at level 10, and I’ve hardly explored more than 1/3 of the second floor and most of the first.

Currently I feel like I own the first floor, but when I go down to the second I have to sneak around because there are FOEs (mid bosses) everywhere and they are good at killing whole parties of explorers. There’s a lot of tension, and the map making is quite well implemented, but I feel like I’m being forced to spend too much time in one area (or that I may just suck at these kinds of games, or that I’m missing something). Luckily the encounter rate is appropriately spaced out so the explore/combat ratio is well balanced.

The way that money and items work in this game is possibly the best implementation of money and items I’ve seen in a long time. You can get certain items from killing enemies (hard shell from killing a Giantkrab, and Bug Wings from killing Woodmoths) and then you can bring them back and sell them to the store for (small amounts of ) money. On top of that, the more supplies that you get to the shop keeper the more weapons/armor/items they can create. This makes it feel progressive and cohesive to your progress.

One of my favorite touches is the DM like aspect of the game. If you check in certain areas you’ll get messages like:

“You’ve come into a clearing where the wind rustles your hair and you can smell flowers in the air.
You see a fruit on the tree in front of you and it looks like it might taste good.
Do you want to try the fruit? Yes/No
Kage takes the fruit and bites into it but it’s color and appearance are deceptive.
As Kage swallows the fruit burns his throat.
-5 HP”

I don’t know exactly what reason the game does this (if it’s trying to channel text adventures and table top RPGs, or if it’s a budget restraint, or a lack of good art/design/modeling teams) but I love that it does. I enjoy going back to the check points of the labyrinth and getting new messages, and it’s always a treat to enter a new area and get a description of the atmosphere.

After finishing the first stratum (five levels) the game has really shown what it’s about. It’s fantastic, minimalist, and compelling against all odds. I found out that the director/creator of the game, Kazuya Niinou, the very same as from Trauma Center DS (and a couple Hamtaro games). I think that Niinou is going to be someone to keep an eye on, as both his games so far have been better than I initially expected, and both would be near the top my “best of ds” list.

Last, and possibly most obscure, is Wartech AKA Senko No Ronde, the VS shooter (shmup/stg) for arcades and now 360. I have no idea what the original name translates to, but the US name and cover are fairly bad choices on Ubisoft’s part. Top that with a price that most Americans are going to scoff at, well, I have a bad feeling for the success of this game.

The game is great though. It has surpassed my expectations, though I admit that they were mixed expectations. In case you don’t know, the game was developed by G.Rev: a mix of old Taito employees and some other hardcore guys. Their past games include two of the greatest shooters: Border Down and Under Defeat. Before playing the game I knew that SNR was basically a bullet hell shooter, mixed with Psychic Force-esque combat arena, giant boss formations, and it was really-really confusing. I had seen a handful of videos and wasn’t really sure what to expect. From all hands on reports of people in the past two years, the game was underplayed, under documented, and it would either get moved to dingy corners of arcades shortly after its arrival or removed completely.

Had I been playing this game at 100yen per try I would probably not have played very long.

It’s a bizarre combination of games really. It’s as much about defense as it is about offense. Perhaps even more about defense. The controls are very, very simple. At the same time the combinations of attacks can get very, very deep. Not deep in the same manner that something like Street Fighter Three is deep (frame counting or gigantic chain combos), but more in the manner of strategy. Though, I guess on one level, that it all boils down to one and the same.

Anyways, the game is really solidly built as expected. Out side of a couple of character, everyone has a very different play style. The basic progress of the game goes like: attack/defend, special attack, reload, B.O.S.S. attack, repeat.

Hmm, that’s probably a bad description. That makes it sound rigid and simple. I’ll just say that transforming into the BOSS mode is really, frigging, awesome. Seriously.

I’m at a bit of a loss of where to go from here with talking about the game because it’s fairly intricate. One of the nice things about the game is that when your life bar runs out you go into “vanish” mode. This will turn the game into something much more similar to a modern shooter: you have a tiny hitbox now and it will even flash. This makes your ship much more difficult to hit and it will also allow you (if you can) to transform into a more powerful BOSS with stronger crazier attack patterns. It’s really satisfying to make a comeback with a desperation BOSS attack.

The translation of the game seems to be handled with the niche and hardcore in mind. It seems as though Ubisoft made a trade off of leaving the game 99% alone internally, yet completely destroying the box/name. The game retains all of the spoken Japanese, and the art is the same as the original (which frequently makes me feel like a bit of a pervert). The spoken Japanese is all subtitled, even in battle. This creates a bit of a problem because there is a lot of talking going on during the battle. Basically the characters will frequently (in story mode) discourse throughout most of the battle making it very to figure out what’s going on, but if you want to know you’ll probably get killed because you’re reading subtitles.

Outside of that, there’s a lot to say, but not much that I can really comment on yet. I’ve only spent a few hours with it and I’m still figuring out which ship is my character. The game is a joy to play, and I can’t wait to get online for versus matches. The only problem with it goes back to the beginning: price. I know I’m not the norm, and I know that this game isn’t going to sell well in the US, so why doesn’t Ubisoft know this? Earth Defense Force for the 360 came out at $40 and it was a perfect price. It’s selling decently and it’s getting a lot of word-of-mouth press because of the price. Even as someone who has imported both of G.Rev’s other games, I still found the price tag a bit hard to swallow. I want to recommend it to other people, but I would feel a little guilty if I did since it’s for such a specific taste. At $40, or hell even $50, I would be much more willing to say take the dive and jump in. I hope that some people here end up renting it at least. If you do shoot me an email at shapermcATgmailDOTcom and I’ll meet you online for some combat.