brandonabley.com

Some of the best video games are the ones that don’t expect anything from anyone.  They’re the forgotten, poorly-marketed or poorly-reviewed titles that find their way onto the aisle endcaps at department stores.  They might have a half-dozen bright orange “CLEARANCE” stickers crudely pasted one-over-the-other, each sticker chronicling a new chapter in an ongoing tale of relentless price markdown.  They might be found in disorganized stacks with last year’s sports titles and returned, open-item headphones whose packaging is held together with staples and clear tape.

Ninja Blade is one of those titles.  Much like Armored Core: For Answer, I bought it for very little and expected just as much entertainment.  Its appeal to me was that it allowed me to play as a ninja, and it was cheap.  It surprised me on all fronts.  I may be persuaded by its bargain price, but Ninja Blade is one of the most fun games I’ve played for months.

Ninja Blade is stupid.  Its story is terrible, and its dialog is even worse; it conveys a bad story even more badly.   It features gigantic monsters who belch up flaming motorcycles and use them as projectile weapons.  Its most exciting scenes are minimally-interactive quick-time events that leave the player wishing that he could make his on-screen ninja do things as awesome as the cutscene director does.  These types of things tend to bother gamers.  They can get under a person’s skin.

However, Ninja Blade’s stupidity is key to its barely-tangible charm.  For example: as a reward for completing the first mission, the player unlocks a zebra-striped ninja suit.  This allows the player to, through every over-blown, stereotypically-Japanese quick time event featuring oversized swords and dramatic character posturing, dress his ninja in a ridiculous outfit.  Ninja Blade’s low-rent storytelling is more entertaining when the main character is dressed like an idiot.

Ninja Blade is not a bad action game, either.  It is not delicate and technical, like Ninja Gaiden or Devil may Cry, but it is violent and challenging enough to maintain player interest.  Its boss fights are old-fashioned in that they have identifiable patterns and single solutions, but they are fun to reason through.  A character upgrade system allows the player to customize which weapon and skill areas his avatar specializes in.  Its rank-based reward system encourages the player to finish each encounter with style to earn as many upgrade points as possible.  The core featureset is old hat - character action games have been structured exactly this way for a ten years - but it’s competent enough to keep someone playing.  It’s eventual climax is worth the trip, puncuating the adventure with exactly the right types of poetic melodrama and misplaced symbolism.

Ninja Blade is not a visionary title.  It’s a decent one, though.  If the customer approaches the title the same way he approaches EA sports titles - regarding it as this year’s annual ninja game - and, of course, finds it in a bargain bin - he might find it just serviceable enough to fall in love for the weekend.

But whatever you do, don’t buy it for full price.

Rating: / 5

Dead Space is a title from summer 2008 that has come back to conversation after the release of Resident Evil 5.  It’s upcoming sequel doesn’t hurt, either.  It captured the hearts of many critics with its finely-tuned serving of cheap scares, disgusting monsters, and improvised future weaponry.  But, while it was heaped with praise, it was criticized for not being original.  Critics said that it was Resident Evil, but in outer space instead of a mansion, and with better controls.  Those same critics generally agreed that there was no problem with that.

The player can move while shooting, after all.

Dead Space is cleanly divided into two modes: adventure and butchery.  There is no blurring between the lines.  When the player is shooting things in Dead Space, it is all he is doing.  When the shooting is over, he will promptly return to exploring and puzzle-solving after picking up the money his adversaries were mysteriously carrying.  In a way, its battles are set up like a turn-based Japanese RPG with random encounters.

The title’s monsters certainly sneak up on the player in a similar way to NES RPGs: a horrible caucophany of dissonant instruments replaces the traditional psychedelic swirl of colors as the onset of a combat scene is announced.  Instead of browsing through command menues, the player defaults to running backwards and aiming at the nearest enemy limb.  When the carnage is over, the floor is littered with loot - including currency - which the player will spend at the next vending machine to buy weapons and armor.  Much of what propels Dead Space forward is rooted in the same things that propel Dragon Quest forward.

The enemy monsters in Dead Space are terrifying, because they never stop coming at the player.  Dismembering an enemy’s head has little effect on it; some of the stronger creatures won’t miss a beat.  Blasting their legs to bits with a rocket is only a minor inconvenience.  Without legs or a head, they can still crawl, and they still have claws.  Dead Space’s monsters need to be completely destroyed before they will stop.  Complicating the issue is that the monsters are cruelly spindly and skinny; the player needs to shoot their arms off, but their arms are hard to hit, and they keep waving around erratically.  As a final, poetic note, there is only one weapon in the game that is actually a military gun.  All of Dead Space’s other weapons are mining and maintenance implements.  They carry with them the quirks of tools not designed for killing.

Dead Space carries its scripted scenarios with meticulous design.  No two fights against the monsters are the same.  The earliest fights are in corridors, where it is easy to shoot the enemies down while they are running straight forward.  The game graduates to corridors with air vents, where, suddenly, the monsters can come from any direction - even straight above - and putting one’s back to the wall does not ensure safety.  There are later battles in massive, zero-gravity hangers in three dimensions, and there are the same battles in outer space, where the player is as threatened by suffocation as he is poisonous barbs or exploding globs of acid.   So, while Dead Space’s action scenes are as obviously-engineered as its sliding block puzzles, they are well-made enough that over-designing works in its favor.

As an added bonus, Dead Space features boss fights, which many modern action games leave out.  Some are better than others, but the best are some of the most exciting battles in action gaming.

My largest issue with Dead Space is its overwhelming sense of hopelessness.  The game takes place in a run-down, slime-soaked space station with dismembered corpses and angry monsters in every direction (there is an obvious parallel to Resident Evil’s famous mansion).  There is no positive imagery in the game.  Almost every other human being in the game world is doing something disturbing, such as shooting herself in the head, or nursing the wound that has impaled him to the ceiling (in the latter example, the player can hear his pathetic moans for twenty-five minutes while exploring a ransacked cargo bay).  The game’s other characters - the people who are there to construct a narrative, and not to make the game gross - are either: villains, insignificant to the story, or are going to die soon.  Dead Space is a truly, unrelentingly depressing game.

As dark as it is, Dead Space is as good as horror-action video games can be.  Even though the game somehow makes the player feel strangely unhappy as he plays it, it rests assured that he won’t be able to resist coming back for more.  Not only are its action sequences phenomenal, but the technology powering it isn’t too bad, and its simple puzzles are pretty creative.  It might be a little bit like Resident Evil, but it’s a little bit better.

Rating: / 5

The enthusiast buzz on Dawn of War II is that it is a sort of streamlined stripped-down Real-Time-Strategy title that introduces new ideas to the RTS genre.  While I will not speak for the multiplayer game, I can say it is not an appropriate description for the game’s single-player mode (note that DoWII single-player and multi-player modes are different genres of game).

Dawn of War II is a squad-based tactical title.  It has much more in common with Silent Storm, Fallout Tactics, or X-Com than it does Starcraft (other than the art style, characters, races, setting, and scenario that Blizzard appropriated from the original line of Warhammer miniatures in the late-90s). In that regard, it is probably similar to the original miniature wargame.

Dawn of War II focuses on tactics in a sequence of combat scenarios, not overall strategy during a large-scale conflict.  A typical mission places the player on a map where he must maneuver to an objective and capture it.  Along the way, the player will encounter countless enemy encampments he must fight through.  The catch, as it is in all tactical games, is that the player does not have access to many new resources. He can not, for example, build a base to generate more troops.  The focus thus shifts from killing the enemy, to keeping one’s own troops alive.  While lost squadmates can be replenished at occasional checkpoints, and fallen troop leaders can be nursed back to health, there is very little margin for error in the heat of combat.  Dawn of War II also features defensive missions, where the player’s small troupe is dug in and defending against waves of enemies.  Again, it is paramount to keep one’s squadmates alive in this scenario, as reinforcements are not easy to access.

Dawn of War II plays more like a traditional RTS in multiplayer mode.

RPG-like character progression, reminiscent of other tactical games (mentioned earlier: Silent Storm, et al), provides a strong thrust to the game.  Each squad leader has an array of areas to specialize in, special abilities to unlock, and equipment to shuffle around.  The focus of speciality, as well as equipment load-out, can completely change the role of a squad in combat.  For example, the scout leader can be equipped with a shotgun and focus on high movement ability to function as a shock troop, or alternatively the same squad leader can be equipped with a sniper rifle and cloaking ability to function as a sniper.  As in other games with character progression systems, Dawn of War II provides a feeling of ownership and accomplishment as the player’s squadmates are powered-up customized.

The statregic map view in-between missions allows the player to choose which missions he would like to go on, and in which order.  Game progress is ultimately linear, but the feeling of relative freedom is welcome.  Dawn of War II frequently presents optional missions and optional secondary objectives as well.

While I like Dawn of War II’s gameplay, I do not like its personality.  I am not compelled by its steroided, too-masculine cast of heroes.  I am unsurprised by its generic, insect-like alien race, or its other generic, orc-like alien race.  I don’t like my stay in its bleak, bombed-out urban battlefields.  There is not much to its canned science fiction story that is told without the slightest hint of irony or self-awareness (warfare is the solution to every problem).  I am neither grossed-out, nor thrilled, by its particular brand of staid violence; be prepared for the same chainsaw swords and fountains of blood gamers are now well-accustomed to.   I may have found these things compelling when I was a teenager.  It is easy to look past Dawn of War II’s unlikeable exterior, though, because there is a good game underneath.

Dawn of War II is engineered in such a way as to ensure people have some reason to explode when they are killed.

While Dawn of War II presents a boring personality, it does so excellently.  A powerful game engine fuels the action, and applies all the right shaders and post-processing to give the title an expensive-looking sheen.  It ran well on my PC when it was a mid-range system, but ran even better at high settings after an upgrade.  Dawn of War II has music, but nobody is likely to remember it.

Dawn of War II is an excellent squad-based real-time tactical game.  It is well-designed and rewards subtlety and planning.  Even though its art style and story will disappoint anyone outside of the hormone-powered 12 to 16-year-old boy demographic, the game plays well enough that it’s a well-advised purchase for tactical fans.

As a footnote, Dawn of War II requires both Steam Activation and Games for Windows Live.  These services require internet access upon initial installation.  Both are excellent services, and I am personally more than obliged to participate.  However, not everyone wants to install third party software, and Games for Windows Live does not always work as intended (for example, I could not get Dawn of War II to load my profile in Windows 7 due to conflicts with my wireless card, so I could not play the game).  Note that Steam Activation extends all the benefits of Steam games (save backup, ability to download the full game at any time, etc) to the retail CD version of the game.

Rating: / 5

Video Game Review, XBox 360: Armored Core: For Answer
Brandon Abley, Mar 06 2009

The Armored Core series is characterized by two disparate elements that aren’t often seen in the same game: lists of numbers with layers of statistic, and tight action characterized by exploding buildings and enormous laser cannons.  Most players typically look for either a statistics game or an action game, and are not often interested in both at the same time.  The Armored Core fanbase is thus understandably limited.

Armored Core is not so much an action video game about piloting gigantic, humanoid battle robots, but a simulation of the experience of being an owner-operator of such a robot.  It, more or less, seems exactly how a mercenary might spend his time about 1000 years into the future.  During missions, the player wrestles complicated controls to perform spectacular maneuvers, fires batteries of missiles at aggressors, and takes down enormous walking battle tanks.  In between missions, the player shops for replacement parts, applies new paint or decals, and tunes the power output of tiny correctional rocket boosters on the knees or elbows of the mech to optimize its turning radius.

This is the least complicated of several dozens of charts and menus players will have to navigate.

There is no story in Armored Core.  There is some establishment of setting, but it doesn’t have any tangible impact.  There are mission briefings, but they are extremely formal.  There is some radio chatter during missions, reminding the player there are human beings in that enormous futuristic fortress, and they are burning to death.  However, there are no characters - there are only people.  The life of a dystopian far-future mercenary-for-hire does not have room for friendships and rivalries.  It may be the game’s presentation, but there is something eerily and intangibly non-violent about Armored Core, even though it is a game about never-ending wars in which millions die.

The amount of number-crunching and detail is engaging to people of a certain personality.  Some may delight in rationing their bullets during missions, because the player has to spend money on ammunition once the mission is over.  Even during the most intense firefights, the player must diligently crunch numbers, running cost estimates, lest the current mission ends up incurring more fees than its bounty can pay.  It is easy to win in Armored Core, but it is challenging to win with style.

That is the problem with Armored Core - it is too cerebral.  The game’s packaging shows a giant robot, with an equally giant gun.  This promises explosions.  While Armored Core delivers in that regard, it demands that as much time is spent preparing to make explosions as is spent creating them.  It makes few concessions to the player, also.  While a lengthy tutorial thoroughly tutors the player in the fairly complicated controls, it does little to teach him the nuances of the game’s economy.

Armored Core’s mission design is not always perfect, either.  There are just as many scenarios that can be cheaply ended with a single precise laser sword strike as there are extended, hair-raising  robot duels.  Its fits and starts are not consistently satisfying.  While some missions are exhillerating and brilliantly-designed, other missions are are tedious, and a few are frustrating.

There are, indeed, battles pitting enormous robots against each other.

The graphics look well enough, and the sound listens well enough.  Armored Core’s media is strictly serviceable.  The environments are completely destructible, however, and it is a thrill to see an enormous complex fall to pieces as errant rockets smash into them.  A few missions demand that the player does everything he can not to harm the environment - these are a pleasant diversion.

I personally like Armored Core: For Answer.  I like brutally violent action games as much as I like turn-based construction simulators, and I feel like Armored Core has enough aspects of either gametype.  I bought Armored Core at a significant discount, and I feel that is a key factor - I would probably not be satisfied if I had paid full price.

Rating ( /5):

I need to insert a plug for www.kiva.org because it is the greatest idea ever.  I am very much interested in the haves helping the have-nots, but I’ve been pretty disappointed by most aid organizations such as the Christian Children’s Fund.  A lot of that money goes to cover overhead, because they are massive organizations with television commercials to pay for and helicopter pilots to employ.  Furthermore, they center around giving food and shelter to individuals, which is a fundamentally flawed way to rebuild a broken society.   I’d like to invoke an old saying about teaching a man how to fish.  www.kiva.org differs from other aid organizations in basic way:

The organization does not center around giving.

The money that you give to www.kiva.org is a loan.  It is not a donation– whatever money you give will eventually be returned.  Whether or not individual lenders collect interest is not something I am clear on, but I’m assuming that interest earned is either collect by kiva or by the banking partner in the region, and not by individual lenders like me.  Furthermore, the money is provided to entrepreneurs and not individuals and the money is to be used as business capital rather than used to buy food or meet some other basic biological need.  Building economies in third-world countries is much more effective than simply feeding hungry people, because a functioning economy can feed its own people without needing any outside input.  In this way, the money that is given to www.kiva.org goes a bit further than money given to aid organizations that simply feed people.

The best thing about Kiva is that, eventually, you’ll get your money back, because it is a loan and not a gift.  You are free to lend the money to someone else or put it back in your pocket, but the basic idea is that individual lenders do not actually lose any money.  There is always the risk of a loan going into default, approximately less than 1% of the loans on Kiva ever do — that’s a much better rate than the average loan in the United States.

None of the money given to Kiva funds the organization.  The group asks for a donation, apart from the loan that you give, in order to cover their operating costs.  Whether or not you want to give up the extra money is your decision, but it’s good to know that they aren’t skimming anything off the top to pay their own salaries (again, I want to compare it to the Christian Children’s Fund).  The average loan given to Kiva is about $25, but you can give whatever you want.  Keep in mind that $25 goes a long way in Guatemala.

I’ve only made one loan to www.kiva.org, and it was to a man in South America that wanted to buy an extra dairy cow as well as a calf for breeding.  He had owned one cow previously, but could not afford another one, and I think he wanted to mate some of his animals and eventually raise a herd and sell beef – which is an extremely profitable business in his region.  He’s made three repayments so far, and all of them have been on time.  I get my money back, he gets some cows, and his village gets some cheese or whatever.  The money I lent to this entrepreneur will produce much more food than it would have if it had simply been used to buy the wheat gruel that third-world children are so familiar with.  Who knows: some day, that farmer might raise an impressive herd of beef cattle and need to employ a few ranch-hands!  Creating jobs in the third world is really the only way that we can make the world a more comfortable place for everyone.

I think everyone should sign up at www.kiva.org and lend whatever they can.

This sounds a lot like an advertisement or something, and I think it’s really too bad that it isn’t.  But I guess what separates Kiva from other aid organizations is that they don’t waste their money on ads!

Anyway, this is a blog, so:

It’s really depressing that I get about 5 comments per day advertising penis enlargement pills, free fetish porn videos, and secret deals that promise to reward each of my visitors with a free XBox360.  They all get eaten up by the spam filter (AKA I delete them before they get posted), but it still makes me die a little bit inside each time I see them.  I wish that spambots were programmed with some sort of basic intelligence that could determine when it would be a good idea to stop generation spam because it’s getting deleted constantly.

In other news, my life is much better now than it ever has been in the past.  I have a bit of money in the bank, an internship that I really do like very much, and an apartment with enough space in it that it is actually possible for one to hide somewhere and not be immediately found.  I also have a healthy supply of sweaters that I look absolutely gorgeous in, and, as everyone knows, I very much value the way I look in a sweater.  College makes me want to quit, sometimes, because it’s asking for a little bit more than I have to give, but I think that’s true for just about everyone in college these days.

Sometimes I have a hard time falling asleep, because I have money in the bank, and I worry that, if I am not careful, I will someday not have money in the bank.  This is a completely irrational thought because I do have a job that pays my bills (barely), and I earn enough interest that my pleasure purchases are basically gifts from the bank.  And even if I were to try and squander the money I have available I’d have a really hard time doing it because I already have everything I could ever want — this list is limited entirely to three video game consoles, a nice TV, and lots of tight jeans.  It’s a weird experience, really, to realize that my base materialistic personality type has been completely sated and that, until the next wave of video game consoles are released, I have everything I would ever want.

As for video games, I haven’t been playing as many as I would normally hope to.  The most significant recent additions to my collection are Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, Super Mario Galaxy, and Mass Effect.  All three are probably the best games I’ve ever played for each of the consoles they were released for.  Since I’ve played through most of DQ:J, I’ll write about it a bit.

Because of Square-Enix as well as the original Metal Gear Solid, I’ve come to associate sparse, white box-art with quality.

Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker for Nintendo DS is a Pokemon clone set in the Dragon Quest universe.  The basic mechanics of a monster-collecting Japanese RPGs are all in place, including exploration of sprawling fields and damp caves, turn-based battles pitting one team against another, lots of statistics and healing potions to juggle, and a game world whose sole concerns revolve around an annual monster gladiator tournament.  You’ve probably played at least one game like this before, such as Pokemon, Digimon, Jewel Summoner, or whatever else, so you’re probably familiar with the basic idea.  What sets this game apart is that, in its niche genre, it’s probably the best game available.

This game plays a lot like Dragon Quest 8; you spend a lot of time outdoors, running around open fields and over rolling hills and such, with the camera positioned squarely a few yards above your main character.  The environments are varied, and each area comes with a unique theme, and the graphics are pretty good.  The draw distance is enormous, and I don’t think I once saw any pop-in or fogging on the environments.  There are countless treasure chests hidden around, and because battles are activated by touching monsters on the map rather than by taking a certain number of steps, it’s a lot of fun to run around and explore.  Once you’ve cleared an area of monsters you can explore without harassment for awhile, which is a definite plus.

Being a Dragon Quest game, there are a number of dungeons.  These are reasonably well-designed, with little puzzles to solve, switches to push, and everything else one would expect from a Dragon Quest game.  They aren’t the fantastic dungeons you’d find in a Zelda title, but at the same time they’re a lot more interesting than the ubiquitous mazes of Brave Story.  Because the outdoor environments themselves are compartmentalized (DQM: Joker takes place on an archipelago of small islands), they, too, feel like dungeons themselves, and the separate dungeons almost feel like the final floor of some larger dungeon scenario.  It’s an unusual game rhythm that feels a little more fresh than I was expecting from this title when I bought it.

Expansive outdoor 3D environments.  Also, this screenshot is hilarious because it has TWO watermarks.  It’s obvious that Gamewatch nabbed it from Square-Enix’s press kit, so why do they even bother?

Being a Pokemon clone (which was oddly a Dragon Quest clone) monster breeding is a big part of DQM: Joker.  Any monster you meet in the wild or fight in a competition can be recruited to your team.  This is achieved by trying to impress the monster; basically, the game checks the attack power of all the monsters in your team, compares that to the power level of the monster, converts that to a percentage, and then rolls a check to see if you are successful.  Generally, you’ll have a 20% chance of catching a monster outright if it is the same power level as you, but if you use buffs that make your characters have higher attack power, you can increase that number considerably.  You don’t need a high percentage to capture a monster, but it definitely helps — while I captured a level 20 She-Slime with only a 2% chance of success, I once failed to capture a Mimic when I had over 80%.

Once you’ve captured a monster, your main goal is probably to get it to level 10 or higher (very early in the game every monster you meet is at least level 10 so you will skip this step), and fuse it with another monster.  When levelling up, your monster will acquire skill points that are used as currency to buy skills.  Once you fuse two monsters together, you choose from three of the available skill categories from the two parent monsters, and you’ll get the result — a new monster at level 1 with the combined abilities of the two monsters you had just fused.  Since you can get the monster’s level back to up to snuff extremely quickly, it’s fun and easy to quickly powerlevel, if you feel so inclined.  It’s possible to get through the entire game with a team of basic monsters or by capturing monsters from each area as you go along, but fusing monsters is where the game starts to get extremely fun; this game gives me feelings that remind me a bit of all the strange combinations of abilities in Final Fantasy Tactics.  Really, when you think of monsters as character classes, the system is much more similar than you would first think.

What I do notlike about DQM: Joker is that the interface is ridiculously bad.  Every menu is clunky and slow, and it’s a huge pain in the ass to perform basic actions such as swapping equipment from one monster in my reserve to a monster in my front line.  I have to scroll through pages of menus to look at all of my monster’s basic abilities, and there are some statistics, like “Trait”, which are extremely important, but have their explanation listed about 14 button presses away.  I can guess how traits such as Health Professional benefit the monster’s ability, but I still have no idea what benefit the Psychotrait provides — and it’s a unique trait possessed only by the main character!  I believe that commands and information are all spread out so far because the game offers stylus support.  But, it’s really impossible to play the game using the stylus, so the end result is that there are button-navigated menus that are simply very bad.

The interface is pretty bad.  As an aside, I think it’s interesting that this game’s team put as much effort into the monster menu portraits as the Pokemon team put into the monster’s entire graphics set.

DQM: Joker is pretty short.  I haven’t finished it, but I’m barely over 20 hours in, have wasted plenty of time and therefore could have gotten to this point much faster, and I’m fairly certain that I’m currently enjoying the end-game.  This may or may not be a problem for some gamers.  In my opinion, this game would get pretty dull if it were any longer, and starts to wrap up just around the point that the gamer is having the most fun.  I’m not sure which sorts of high-level challenges await high-level monster breeders, but being that this is a Dragon Quest title, I doubt that there are very many sidequests or optional bosses.

It’s also important to note that DQM: Joker will probably start to get very very easy by the end of the game for savvy players.  It’s pretty easy to fuse monsters together until you have monsters much more powerful than anything you would normally acquire at that point in the game, which then gives you an enormous advantage in battle.  The backwards difficulty curve, where the game becomes progressively more easy as time goes on because of an exploitable character-growth, reminds me much more of a Final Fantasy title than of a Dragon Quest title.  Nevertheless, the only reason the game becomes progressively easier is because the player is directly responsible for making good choices when customizing their characters, so it’s still pretty rewarding.  It’s a nice feeling when your prize monster team, whom you’ve put a lot of thought into developing into a powerhouse, is able to wipe out the competition.

I like the music in DQM: Joker, but just a little bit.  Sugiyama is my favorite composer in gaming, and maybe my favorite living composer overall.  It sounds like he totally mailed this one in, though.  There are only five or six tracks in the game, and while some of them are excellent (such as the overworld theme, which you’ll hear the most), some of them are decidedly bad.  The boss music is so bad that I have to turn the volume off for fear of being embarrassed.  The boss music in this title, with its awful MIDI electric guitar and nonsensical melodies, has drawn the line and then promptly crossed it.  I’m pretty sure that this is the worst Dragon Quest soundtrack yet, but it’s still a cut above your average handheld video game track.  That overworld theme sure is catchy!

There’s one small thing about this game that I noticed that might please any Dragon Quest 7 fans.  If any of you played DQ7, you’ll remember that the player had to collect dozens of magical shards in order to complete the game.  These were always in very weird places, and it was really easy to miss one of them.  The problem was that the player might not even know they had missed a shard until thirty hours later, when they needed it, and with no real clues as to where the overlooked shard was hidden, it was easy to get stuck.  DQM: Joker has a similar setup where the player needs to collect 10 pieces of a type of crystal throughout the game in order to advance to the monster finals (e.g., the end of the game).  These are often in very weird places and are easy to miss.  However, there are more than 10 pieces of crystal in the game — I found 11, and I saw another one on the world map somewhere that I never figured out how to reach.  So, while it’s easy to miss a few pieces of crystal in DQM: Joker, since there are more pieces in the game than the game requires the player to collect, it’s unlikely that the player will find themselves at the end of the game without a lot of crystal.  I thought that this was an extremely classy move.

One small gripe I have with this game is that there is some conspicuously bad grammar in parts.  It’s inconsistent — for the most part, the translation is perfectly average and readable  Occasionally, though, and especially during battle sequences, messages will have in correct grammar, and it is usually associated with pronoun use.  I think this has something to do with British English its tendency to refer to a group as a plural (I.E., Brandon’s team have won the battle! rather than Brandon’s team has won the battle!), which I’m not sure is a colloquialism or is just technically correct in the alternate dialect.  Either way, it pops up occasionally and makes the game seem a little amateurish.

I had written quite a lot comparing this game to Pokemon and explaining why I think it’s the better game, but I think I’ll leave all that out.  It is a hot question, of course, so I still feel obligated to answer it.  Basically, all of the annoying things about Pokemon games – static sprites in battle, boring dungeons and boring overworld exploration, limited strategic options in combat, limited feeling of control over development of statistics — are handled a little differently, and a little more competently, in this title.

I think that he’s just scored a critical hit or something, but it’s hard to tell.  Also, it would probably be impossible to emulate the conditions in this screenshot without cheating for certain reasons relating to that dog on the right.  I always think it’s interesting when official screenshots depict events in a game that can never occur during normal play. 

If I were to rate DQM: Joker out of 5, I’d give it a perfect score, but since I’m not IGN or whatever I’ll just say that I absolutely recommend this game and you need to buy it if you like RPGs at all.  It’s a really good game that nails the core elements of an RPG really well (exploration, dungeons, battle system, protracted boss fights), but also happens to be a Pokemon clone that is quite a bit better than the real thing.  In my opinion, Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker is the best Nintendo DS game available.

EPILOGUE

So, I’ll upload some music sometime.  I still insist on putting up a complete soundtrack before anything else, but since the Dragoon Legends soundtrack is finished and just requires minor editing at this point, I don’t think that will be too far off.

Also I think Wilfred the Hero is cancelled again because of issues with the development team.  Ahem.  I need to find a new artist or do the art myself, but I don’t want to worry about that right now.  Sorry guys.  I’m still committed to the project, though, and haven’t given up.

Note 08/30/2007 8:36 PM:  I forgot to run a spellcheck earlier.  I’ve since done so and cleaned up the typos.

At a forum or two, I mentioned yesterday that I would buy Blue Dragon and was asked to give my impressions on it.  Most jRPG nuts haven’t invested in a hi-def console yet, afterall, but most of them are interested in Blue Dragon.  Rather than write separate posts at several different forums, I thought it would be more efficient to write a blog entry instead!  So, I’m going to write a whole bunch about this game, but note that this is not a review, because I’ve only played a few hours of it.

If you haven’t heard of it, Blue Dragon is the best-selling XBox360 game in Japan, having successfully sold nine or so copies.  It is the first US release by Mistwalker Studios, comprised mostly of people of people who were fired from Squaresoft after Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within destroyed the company financially.  I am fairly confident that the studio is funded entirely on handouts from Microsoft and Nintendo.  Hironobu Sakaguchi, the director of the film and creator of the Final Fantasy series, is the founder of Mistwalker Studios and the creative mind behind Blue Dragon.  Being credited on the game for direction, production, and story, he had the sort of control over this project that he hasn’t had since 1990 (Final Fantasy III on the NES, if I recall).  Other notable figures include Nobuo Uematsu, capitally overrated composer for Final Fantasy I-X, and Akira Toriyama, famous character designer and artist for Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Quest.  The internet is quick to tell you that the last time these three worked together was on Chrono Trigger for SNES, which was a pretty good game.  So, for japfags like me, Blue Dragon is a big deal.

I got Blue Dragon for my birthday, which was yesterday, the store date for Blue Dragon.  By the I got home from work with the purchased, wrapped game in hand, it was pretty late.  Regardless, I was able to play enough of the game (actually, probably more than website editors get to play when they do a preview article) to get an idea of the overall flow of the game.

So, how good is Blue Dragon?

I can confidently say that Blue Dragon is pretty good.  It’s by far the best hi-def jRPG currently out and probably the best that will be out this year.  It isn’t the best game I’ve ever played, but it really hits the spot in a certain way.  I’ll break it down section by section:

The graphics are just fantastic.  At some points, it really does look like a Pixar movie.  Some of the wide-open environments are a little sparse, but I can’t discredit a game for having a boring-looking desert or grassy plain.  Maybe I should criticize the designer for choosing a boring setting?  The character design is pretty much what you expect from Toriyama, but as one review put it, it’s unfortunately much more Dragon Ball Z than it is Dragon Quest (this means that everyone seriously looks like they have down syndrome).  The models are extremely well-rendered, though, and look shockingly crisp.  The game has this filter that puts distant objects out-of-focus, which is a neat effect, but it tends to blur distant objects that you want to see more often than distant objects that you are not paying attention to.  I have only encountered a few monsters, but their visual creativity is generally high so far.  It’s obvious here that you are playing a Toriyama game.

The music is of starkly varying appeal.  Let’s be clear: this is Final Fantasy music.  I have even recognized several melodies and chord progressions from Final Fantasy soundtracks!  Specifically, the “panic music” has the same melody as the same track for Final Fantasy VI.  You’ll be able to tell, and I am not making it up.  Composer Nobuo Uematsu is a superstar in Japan because of his work on many classic Final Fantasy games, and is the second most famous video game composer alive.  Some of the tunes in Blue Dragon are really great; I’m a big fan of the title theme and particular, and the world map music is great.  The problem with the Blue Dragon soundtrack is that Uematsu wanted to show off his versatility, but he is regrettably not very versatile as a songwriter.  I have come across some Folk and Techno pieces that were really irritating, and the boss music is so bad that it prompted me to burn a Dragon Quest VIII mp3 to CD, rip it to my XBox 360 playlist, and turn on custom soundtracks exclusively during boss battles.  As long as the game is playing orchestral music, which it usually does, the music is spot-on.  If the game is playing anything else, which it will, you’ll probably want to turn the volume down.

The game is extremely fun to play.  There are outdoor environments a lot like Final Fantasy XII’s, except they have a lot more treasure, and the treasures are useful.  There are no random battles, which is more than a little welcome (even the newest Dragon Quest will abandon random battles!).  You can initiate encounters with multiple enemy groups at once, and it’s easy to pit different groups of enemies against each other.  The balance is pretty solid so far, but I can definitely see a game like this becoming extremely easy in the long run.  Blue Dragon features a pretty solid character customization system where you assign a character class to each party member, learn special abilities, and choose your favorites to equip when you switch to a different class.  Blue Dragon also features a “swing” meter, like the one seen in golf games, for certain abilities (magic attacks and, if you are a Monk, charge-up physical attacks).  It allows you to tweak your attacks to either carry a longer wait period and be more powerful, or be weaker and fire off more quickly.  You can skip past this, if you want to.  If you like turn-based RPGs like Dragon Quest, you will love everything about Blue Dragon’s basic gameplay mechanics.

Blue Dragon is really cheesy.  The dialogue is stale and canned, the voice acting is half-assed, and in general, the game feels like a Saturday-morning cartoon.  It doesn’t feel like anime as much as it feels like a cartoon, which is a plus in my opinion.  The style is working, for me, and so far, but I’ve seen a lot of critics get put off by the one-dimensional characters and less-than-compelling dialogue.  We’ll see what happens three discs later!  It’s a very “kiddy” game, but the game is very reverent about the whole thing.  To me, it comes across as a cute game rather than a game for children.

Blue Dragon has a lot of poop jokes.  I’m not even kidding.  There are more poop and fart jokes in Blue Dragon than I have seen in a video game since playing Beavis and Butthead and Boogerman on my Sega Genesis.  Blue Dragon has more poop jokes than any other game ever made that isn’t about poop jokes.  I hope you like poop jokes, because you are in store for hundreds of them.

So, overall, I really like Blue Dragon a lot.  It’s the first game in a long time that I played in the morning before I went to work (which required me to shun the live-saving snooze button).  I grin pretty much the entire time I play it.  The graphics are excellent, the music is usually pretty good, and the core gameplay mechanics are very solid.  I think it’s strange that reviews criticize it for not moving the genre forward, because I’ve played a lot of turn-based jRPGs, and Blue Dragon is one of the most innovative traditional RPGs I’ve ever played!  It’s a little strange that a game can be, at once, very traditional as well as very innovative, but Blue Dragon’s managed to do it.  As long as you have the sensitivity to tell one jRPG apart from another, you’ll find that Blue Dragon is unlike anything you have ever played and that it is one of the best games in the genre.  I am certain that this qualifier is mostly responsible for the incredibly mixed review scores (anywhere from 5/10 to 10/10 from major game media outlets).

I really recommend Blue Dragon if you like jRPGs at all!  I’ll be sure to let you guys know what I think once I finish it.

I absolutely love Lost Labyrinth and I am going to tell you why you should play it.

I was at www.rpgmaker.net writing about Lost Labyrinth today, and I thought that I’d mirror the post, and expound upon it, at my blog.  It’s a really cool homebrew game and I highly recommend it to anyone that is interested a light (as in, much more forgiving and actually fun) Graphical Roguelike.

If you aren’t familiar with Roguelikes, it’s a game format based on the classic PC ascii-graphics game Rogue.  It’s an ancient game from a time period when using ascii text for graphics was not out of style.  Since the graphics were so basic, the developers had a lot of flexibility in terms of offering different abilities, situations, and character classes — as long as you had a bit of imagination.  Your hero, after all, would be represented with a ” @ ” symbol.  Depending on the variant, you would have literally hundreds of races, character classes, and items to choose from.  The writing was generally pretty good, so if you were imaginative, Rogue and Roguelike worlds were pretty interesting. 

The theme in Roguelikes is that dying is much more fun than surviving, and substantially more likely to happen.  Rogue was the sort of game where you could decapitate a Medusa, carry its head in your bag, and accidentally petrify yourself hours later when reaching for a sword in your item bag.   Current Roguelikes continue this trend, and it’s a popular style of game to make for novice game programmers and retro PC gaming fetishists.  In Roguelikes, you will die constantly and you will probably never win — people who have ever completed a game of the original Rogue are few.  I was told at the www.rpgmaker.net forums that the creator of the original Rogue has only beaten the game 8 times.

A screenshot of Ancient Domains of Mystery.  Years of Roguelike enthusiasm have introduced subtle and continuous innovations, and this is the culmination of those decades of hard work.  Note that these graphics are much, much better than the original Rogue.

The thing is, I appreciate Roguelikes, but I do not like them.  The serious, hardcore stuff, like the original Rogue, is intimidating and I don’t think it is very fun!  Who would?  You have no chance of winning, you don’t have even the most basic of graphics (very few gamers can legitimately look back on text adventures and ascii graphics with nostalgia), and if you happen to die — which you assuredly will – it will be very sudden and unfair.  Some people think this is novel.  I don’t.

My favorite Roguelike is Lost Labyrinth, a German-developed homebrew game that is fairly popular.  It has an active forum community of a few hundred players, so it can be safely assumed that a few thousand play the game regularly.  I am one of them, though I don’t play the game as much as I used to.  At one point, I had a leaderboard ranking that was not entirely embarassing!

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Most of the graphics from this game are stolen from RPG Maker 95 and an anatomy textbook.

The object of Lost Labyrinth is to assemble some Staff of Judgment or something like that.  If I recall, there are nine pieces of the staff, and you have finished the game once you have collected all of the pieces.  These pieces are located on special dungeon floors that are substantially more dangerous than other floors of the labyrinth, and until your character is pretty tough, you might want to avoid your first few opportunities to snag the staff pieces.  Since the dungeons are randomly generated, you never know when you’ll have the opportunity to go to a special floor, and when you’ll get your next opportunity.

One of the things that I really like about Lost Labyrinth is that the graphics don’t suck.  The music is pretty catchy, too, but I’m not too sure if it’s original or not (come to think of it, I think I’ll send the author an email today and offer to write a new theme free of charge).  Very few of tiles or sprites are original and there isn’t much animation, but you can get a picture for what’s going on, and the creator has good taste for what looks good and where.  Most of the graphics are stolen from RPG Maker 95, which brings me back to middle school, but that’s okay.  This is probably the best game that I’ve ever seen them used in!

A major theme in Lost Labyrinth is that you will always be trying to conserve light and food — if you don’t create a character that has a reliable way of generating light (is able to move great distances before torches burn out, is good at sniffing out merchants, or can generate magical light) or food (can conjure food or butcher animals), you’ll be in a lot of trouble.  

Generally, you will get through a game of Lost Labyrinth in under a half hour, and if you beat it — in the Roguelike world, it is called “Ascending” — you will probably have done so in three or four modest play sessions.  You can save and quit, but you cannot save and continue in the normal mode, so you start the game over if you die.  This is one of the primary features that makes it a Roguelike.  Normally, this would make for a terrible game by conventional metrics, and that’s why people do not generally like to play Roguelikes.  The difference with Lost Labyrinth is straight-up competent design.

This is one of the primary reason why Lost labyrinth is a better game than most Roguelikes.

Roguelike games’ primary feature is that they are poorly designed.  You can argue this point, but the majority agrees that a good game design does the following: It establishes a clear goal; it establishes clear rules, it presents a clear process to achieve the goal; and it provides obstacles to achieving the goal that are engaging, interesting, and can be surmounted.  In a typical Roguelike, you can die because a seemingly harmless object can suddenly become lethal.  In Lost Labyrinth, you can only die because there is something that you did not account for or have underestimated.  The terms of the contest are much clearer in Lost Labyrinth.

The first thing you’ll notice when booting up Lost Labyrinth is one of two things: That there are a dizzying array of options for character-building (seriously, that screenshot above does not even show half of the traits), or that there are many fewer options than other Roguelikes.  Lost Labyrinth strives to achieve a balance between flexibility and function.  While you have a million abilities, all of them can be incredibly useful under the right circumstances.  These options are stripped down from those of other Roguelikes, where you have 100 million abilities, and only one million of them are worth specializing in.  It’s important that the game does this right, because the character you create is the major variable to your success.  For the most part, it does.

As far as building a character goes, you have the typical assortment of warrior skills, magic skills, stealth skills, and miscellaneous skills.  One thing that makes this interesting is that you do not normally gain experience points or level up from killing enemies, but only from completing a floor.  This allows you to specialize in survival and stealth skills without penalty.  I know many players who never kill a single monster, and instead walk right through them with a very high sneak skill.  This can be awesome if you get teleported into the middle of a monster closet — this is a devastating situation for even the toughest warrior, who cannot fight 20 monsters at once, but for a nimble agent, it’s no different from sneaking through a hallway of them.  However, if you would like, you can invest in skills that give you credit for killing enemies; some of them give you straight up level boosts and thus higher stats, while others might allow you to butcher enemy corpses for precious resources.  This is a very useful tactic for securing food.  Other skills might also give you blessings from gods for killing certain enemies, which may or may not provide surprising bonuses.  If you want it to worthwhile to kill monsters, you have to specialize in it.  This is really, really awesome.

Another variable in character creation is that you can choose various weaknesses in order to get more points to invest in strengths.  For example, I have made a number of illiterate characters.  While they cannot use magical scrolls or learn magic, I can focus their talents on other things that they *do* specialize in.  You are free to make a completely illiterate magic-user, even, which is not a bad idea; who needs spells scrolls when one can conjure those effects himself?  Other weaknesses include poor vision, poor physical strength, bad luck, scholiosis, and other interesting quirks that have predictable results.  They allow you to freely narrow or focus the skillset of your character as you like.  Oftentimes, a minor character flaw is the difference between an inept adventurer and a virtuoso one.

Generally, the pattern of Lost Labyrinth is that you create a character, you die, and you go back and tweak your character to make him a little better.  There are numerous tactics for getting through the game, and you can play it differently every time.  One time, I stockpiled massive amounts of resources by slaughtering and butchering the respawning insects on the first floor (which should take you all of thirty seconds to complete) for about half an hour.  This equipped me with everything I needed to get pretty deep into the dungeon.  Another time, I made a stealthy character who snuck through five floors in less than five minutes.

It goes without saying (though I have already said it) that Lost Labyrinth is a randomly generated dungeons game archetype.  The algorithm is pretty good, though, and the floors are always fun to play through.  They are almost always mazes of narrow corridors one-tile wide, full of traps, monsters, and treasure.  There are secret doors, doors that go only one way, tiles that will teleport you around the dungeon, and many, many other standard dungeon-crawling features.  One of Lost Labyrinth’s quirks is the special rooms, which are actually a lot like the closets in Final Fantasy II.

This was my first experience with a Monster Closet in Lost Labyrinth.  It was one of the most important events in my life, and is a great example of how things can quickly go wrong in this game.

In a special room, you will be teleported to the center of a large room.  This room will either be filled with treasure or monsters.  When it is filled with monsters, you’d best hoped you’ve packed a Scroll of Flood or have a high sneak skill, because you probably won’t be able to just hack-and-slash your way through.  You need to account for these situations when designing your character, because they do happen, and they will probably be the reason why your first few adventures end at level 6 or so.  Normally, this is a huge setback for a character — unless you specialize in killing monsters, in which case, it’s like finding a room full of sirloin steaks neatly arranged in a grid.  If the room is not a monster closet, it will fall under various categories of treasure room.  Sometimes you will find a merchant, or a magical weapon, or a library full of magical books and scrolls, or a well where you can fill up your waterskins.  Obviously, sometimes the contents of treasure rooms will be of no use to your character build, but that’s part of the fun. 

Lost Labyrinth is my favorite Roguelike because it has decent homebrew-quality graphics, snappy controls (works great with a joypad), and is fairly forgiving once you’ve figured the game out.  It’s pretty fun to tweak one or two features of the character you’ve created each time you die until you feel like you’ve made the perfect character.  Also, since many character skills aren’t useful until you get very far into the dungeon, you’ll find that as you get better at the game, you’ll find more use for obscure abilities, and thus a more interesting character.

Apparently, this is what your character actually looks like as he is slogging through hallways full of nasties.  Gross!

I give Lost Labyrinth my recommendation to anyone that appreciates Roguelikes but finds them a little too hardcore, anyone that actually LIKES Roguelikes (weirdo), or really anyone in general.  It’s free, it plays quick, runs on just about any computer, and doesn’t take up too much hard drive space.  Since there’s so little investment involved with playing, why not try it?  If you *do* download the game, and like it, I encourage you to donate.  The author really deserves your support, and I’m certain it costs a lot to maintain a server hosting a game with over 40,000 downloads.

Lost Labyrinth official site: http://www.lostlabyrinth.com

Lost Labyrinth download page: http://www.lostlabyrinth.com/index.php?p=download 

Lost Labyrinth download link (windows): http://www.lostlabyrinth.com/download_it.php?id=1&file=lostlabyrinth_2.9.0.zip

Lost Labyrinth elitist jerk download link (linux): http://www.lostlabyrinth.com/download_it.php?id=2&file=lostlabyrinth_2.9.0.tar.gz

Well-designed RPG combat with colorful graphics and dramatic camera angles are what Brave Story is all about.

Brave Story: New Traveler is unlike other Playstation Portable RPGs.  It is an original RPG specifically for PSP, and not a port of a decent PSOne RPG.  It isn’t (for the most part) an entry in or spin-off from a well-established franchise like Final Fantasy.  It’s also a pretty good game.

I’m a big fan of the Playstation Portable.  It’s a marvelous piece of engineering.  When considering the sheer amount of technology packed into the unit and the fact that it all more or less works, it’s hard not to be impressed.  The only real problem with the PSP is that while it’s had a lot of decent 8/10-scoring games that are basically worth playing, most of them are action or racing titles.  Burnout, Wipeout, Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto, Ratchet and Clank, and Siphon Filter come to mind.  These are landmark games because they are just like PS2 action games.  This is fine, but when I’m on the bus or riding in a car or taking a dump, I don’t always have time a 3-lap go around a racetrack or a 20-minute-long sneaking session through a terrorist stronghold.  Sometimes, I just have time for a random battle or two.  From the first day I had a PSP, I’ve really wanted a high-quality, old-fashioned RPG, complete with fetch-quests and lots of random battles — preferably without insane load times (I really, really wanted to like PoPoLoCrois).  Unfortunately, the PSP RPG scene has been completely dominated by half-hearted, laggy ports of old Japanese titles for PSOne or PC that were never good enough to make the localization cut back in the early 2000s.

Enter Brave Story: New Traveler.  This is a game that really came out of nowhere!  I follow video game news and gossip pretty closely (I load up on game podcasts for my daily hour-long double commutes), and the only place that had ever mentioned Brave Story was www.rpgamer.com.  Their hype was lukewarm at best, and their early review was less than enthusiastic — I chalk it up to the game not having enough emo.  Other review outlets, however, are receiving the game extremely well.  1Up’s critic went so far as to call it the best RPG currently available on PSP.  Following that review, I picked the game up on release day, and after a thorough scolding from an overweight Gamestop employee who must have assumed that I cared about his unsolicited advice, I had this curious title in my hot little mits!

This particular sexy catgirl is supposed to be 11 years old, but she has certain assets that convince me otherwise.  She is your sidekick and you will be seeing a whole lot of her throughout the game.  Fortunately, she does not have a tail.

So, Brave Story: New Traveler is a Dragon Quest clone.  If you’ve ever played a Dragon Quest game, you can skip this paragraph, but if you haven’t, I’ll rundown the mechanics.  Brave Story is an RPG.  It’s camera is static and placed at about 70 degrees above the player.  It features random battles, which are, as always, just a bit too frequent.  When battling, you select commands from a menu for each of three characters, and the members of each side, which are standing in orderly paralell rows, take turns hitting each other. After each brief battle scene, you gain experience points, you might level up, and if you do level up, you might learn a new skill.  Battles as award you with loot drops and currency, which you spend on new equipment.  Gameplay generally progresses in a really straightforward pattern:  town phase — cutscene — dungeon phase — boss — cutscene — overworld phase — repeat.  The game is full of contrived plot lines whose conflicts are always swiftly resolved by your silent hero and his motley crew.  It’s a serialized format that can be really repetive if you play the game all day, and is probably best digested one or two episodes at a time.  This game is traditional RPG through and through, and if you don’t like traditional RPGs, you’ll completely hate this game.  If you are the sort to tolerate a healthy layer of dust on your game design, however, you might feel right at home.

Where Brave Story shines, like its Dragon Quest inspiration, is in its tight implementation of its very familiar featureset.  Even though its basic game design is very archetypical, it features a host of small innovations that are very exciting to the fickle and insular RPG crowd.  Almost all of these small innovations revolve around its combat system.

A running theme in Brave Story’s battles is that you have a lot of special character skills and you are encouraged to use them.  Each character in Brave Story learns a set of pre-set special abilities as they gain levels of experience.  Each character has a general theme: You have a heavy hitter, a healer who still hits pretty hard, a wizard, a nimble roguish cat-girl, a character with very, very high defense, and your main character who excels in all areas and learns utility skills.  The ability sets are exactly what you would expect them to be for each character, and you’ll be throwing fireballs and stealing items just like you have in every other game.  This twist here, and it’s pretty significant, is that your skill points are a renewable resource and you will never run out of them.

This is because each time a character takes an action, they regain a number of skill points.  As the battle rages on, or if the situation is looking desperate (such as your party HP is very low), you’ll gain progressively larger chunks of skill points.  In a typical random battle, every character in your party will regain half of their entire reserve of skill points.  Because of this, you will use special abilities far more often than you will basic abilities such as a normal attack.  This allows you to take greater advantage of the traditional mechanics of RPGs than you normally would, such as weaknesses to certain classes of magic or the ability to cast buffs and debuffs.  It breathes a little life into those 600 or so random battles you’ll fight during your adventure.

Brave Story also features a type of special ability called a unity skill, which is just like the unity skills in the Suikoden series or Chrono Trigger.  Basically, these are abilities that require the contribution of more than one character, such as a mage throwing a fireball at a warrior, who subsequently attacks with his now-enchanted sword.  These require that both characters have enough skill points to execute the skill.  This feature makes the decision of which party members you want to use more interesting, and gives otherwise less useful characters, like the nimble rogue, more interest.  I might be mistaken, but all of these unity skills are executed with the hero and one teammate, and not two teammates.  Some of the particularly devastating skills will involve all thre members of your party.  There are also various other small innovations during battles, but they don’t need to be spelled out.

As you fight battles in Brave Story, you’ll amass an enormous pile of loot similar to the piles of loot you would amass in an MMORPG or Final Fantasy XII.  Each enemy will probably drop at least one body part.  You combine these pieces of loot to make accessories that complement your characters’ stats and give you some degree of customization.  All accessory effects are taken from the compendium of How to Make a Generic RPG (bonuses are almost entirely limited to boosting specific statistics or providing immunity to debuffs or elemental attacks), so none of them are particularly interesting.  But, they certainly are useful, and it’s fun to assemble items and deck out your party with custom jewelry.

A turn-based RPG like this can live or die on its pacing.  If a player is going to be asked to fight up to 600 random battles, he should expect to spend most of that time to be spent playing, and not watching superfuous animations and long load times.  Brave Story gracefully delivers in this regard.  Attack animations are stylish and brief, complete with motion blur, bright flashes, and dramatic posing.  Curiously, every landed ability will prompt a BAAAM or SWIZAAASH to flash across the screen (I think this is related to Brave Story’s roots as an obscure Japanese comicbook, but either way, I think it is totally awesome).  Most basic abilities, which you’ll be seeing a lot of, will have several different sets of camera panning or actual animation; I think the main character has six or so basic attack animations.  Brave Story’s combat is visceral and fast-moving, and it’s a real blessing to be able to fly through battles when you’ll be fighting so many of them.

The general gameplay balance is battles is pretty good.  The game starts out easy, and gradually gets more difficult.  As long as you play your cards right and buy good equipment, you should be able to always avoid the Game Over screen (I’ve never seen it).  The hero learns an ability that repels weaker enemies — AKA cancels random battles that are too easy for you – and if you use it, you should be able to avoid overlevelling.  It’s important that the enemies in a game like this are capable of killing you, and they certainly are in Brave Story.

Also neat is that each enemy group will tend to have a unique personality.  Many of the monsters of very memorable, and have a lasting impression.  Each monster, for example, has various conditions under which they’ll go crazy and get super-powered, but these are unique to each beast; you’ll learn that you’ll make a certain monster angry if you kill its buddy, or a different monster angry if you hit it with magic.  Some monsters are calculating, and will prey on weaker members, while other monsters are stupid, and will attack randomly.  Monsters have unity attacks, and when they are available, they will use them to great effect.  You’ll face turtle monsters that will hide in their shells when they get hurt, lazy monsters that do nothing unless they have been attacked earlier that round, and mandragora monsters that hide underground and pop out when you “pick” them (attack them).  It’s very refreshing to see so many monsters that do a lot more than soak up damage and do basic attacks on randomly-selected party members.

Brave Story breaks new ground in another area; the following feature is groundbreaking not only for PSP RPGs, but truly, for PSP games as a whole: there are no noticeable load times.  You’ll move in and out of battle without so much as a hitch, and pop into every city from the overworld view instantly.  I recall being unable to finish PoPoLoCrois at all because of its need to stop and load even normal attack animations, so this is a really, really big deal.  Other developers should look to Brave Story’s excellent loadtimes as an example of why it’s important to let your customers play videogames on the bus instead of waiting for a chance to play videogames to play videogames on the bus.

Brave Story has excellent graphics.  In terms of technology, it looks like a low-budget PS2 game, which is fine by me!  The character and monster designs are decent, and are pretty reminiscent of the not-Disney portions of Kingdom Hearts 2 (the main hero, in fact, could have very easily replaced Roxas or Sora).  The world is vibrant and colorful, and is nice to look at.  Zoomed textures look really muddy, but the camera zoomed in enough for me to notice only three or four times in the entire game.  Its music is okay.  It’s not terrible, but it’s very average, and very generic.  You’ll hear the same bombastic melodies and subtle jazz influences that you’ve heard in 100 other japanese RPG soundtracks.  The battle and boss music really stand out, but because I usually play my PSP muted, and because I generally get really tired of even the most awesome RPG battle themes, I didn’t spend much time listening to them.  The sound effects are unremarkable and not annoying at all.  The voice acting is appropriately terrible and you’ll want to turn it off (you can’t).

The battles are a lot of fun, and the graphics are pretty good, too.  Incidentally, this is probably the most effective and well-rounded party in the game, and one that you’ll be likely to use most of the time.

Contrary to just about everything I have already said, not everything is great about Brave Story.  Specifically, the dungeons, which most of the game is spent inside of, are terribly designed.  Every dungeon in the game is of the maze design type.  While it’s sort of fun to run along every right-hand wall once or twice, it’s absolutely no fun when you’ve entered the tenth major dungeon and you realize that it’s exactly the same as the first major dungeon — except it has patches of poison puddles which damage you when you run through them (you can’t go around them by the way).  There are almost zero puzzles or gimmicks whatsoever.  Not even basic level designs are incorporated, such as the classic scenario: a door, which is held fast by a mechanism, which can be released by a flipping a switch, which is located somewhere else.  A worse game, such as one with slow-moving battles or poor balancing or something, would be completely ruined by such terrible dungeon design.  Sine Brave Story is a pretty good game, you’ll probably tolerate the dungeons, but only because the battles are fun.

Like most RPGs, Brave Story has cutscenes and a story and a lot of dialogue, but it’s mostly pretty bad.  The game’s premise is interesting enough; the hero, upon making a wish, is transported to a fantasy world where wish-makers are called upon to earn their wishes by journeying and collecting a number of what are essentially badges of honor.  Naturally, there are plot twists along the way, and the game becomes much more complicated than that.  Much to the player’s chagrin, these plot twists are pretty stupid.  The game’s cast isn’t very interesting, and every character falls neatly into pre-established stereotypes.  And worse, the dialogue ranges from bad to really really awful.  One character, named Ropple, has what I believe is the most obnoxious dialogue I have ever read in an RPG.  The primary villain is pretty bad, both in his heavy-handed character design and in his canned, Saturday-morning dialogue.

Brave Story has one major minigame, but it isn’t much fun, nor are the rewards it offers very useful.  In certain out-of-the-way areas of the world map, you’ll find small habitats full of colorful birds.  You catch these birds with a giant net, and can do two things with them.  Principally, you enter these birds into fights with other birdcatchers, and watch the two teams of birds duke it out AI-style.  It’s pretty boring.  If you win, you can collect feathers from rival trainers which, I assume, are probably traded for some sort of ultimate weapon at the end of the game.  I was never interested enough to investigate!  Secondly, you can trade rare birds for upgraded weapons and armor in towns.  Unfortunately, the game is not clear what the conditions for collecting rare birds are, and I was ever able to partake.  In general, I was not impressed with the bird-catching minigame; it wasn’t very fun, it wasn’t very useful, and it wasn’t very clear.

Sex-kitten Yuno spends most of the game indignantly pouting until she gets her way.  When she does get her way, it will invariably place the party’s lives at danger and lead to further adventure.  Out of all the contrived and lame nonesense in Brave Story, Yuno is probably the best part.  She is also the only character that the editor at IGN bothered to take many screenshots of!  Since I leech all of my images exclusively from www.IGN.com, I guess that sticks me with a lot of screenshots featuring sex-kitten Yuno.

So, what does Brave Story have to offer?  

Brave Story is one of the most competent by-the-books handheld RPGs I’ve seen in years.  This is the sort of title, like Golden Sun for Gameboy Advance, that a lot of people could fall in love with just because it’s reasonably good and it’s portable.  Though it fails miserably in quite a few ways, it excels in all of the most important areas.  Even though you’ll be slogging through boring dungeons and yawning through bad dialogue, the excellent graphics and extremely tight battle design will keep you going.  As far as I know, there is not a single original RPG of this style for PSP that has the same swift load times, nice graphics, and excellent design. 

That said, if you do not like japanese RPGs in general, you absolutely will not like this game.  Even then, if you do like japanese RPGs, but you prefer flashier games with better writing like Final Fantasy, or games with more exciting and less tactical gameplay like Tales Of, this still might not be the game for you.  Brave Story’s gameplay went out of style in 1997, and you will not like the game unless you appreciate decidedly old-school game design conventions.

Sogreth’s dialogue was styled to make him look like an unsophisticated person for about the first few hours of the game, but after that, it seems like the game’s writers forgot what his personality type was, as he suddenly becomes very suave and level-headed.

I recommend Brave Story for PSP to anyone that likes japanese RPGs like Dragon Quest.  It isn’t the best RPG ever created, but it just might be the best original RPG available on PSP.