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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.

So, the new layout is at a basic conceptual stage now!  It’s not done, as you can see, but this is more or less how the new site will look.  This is basically a heavily modified WordPress template.  Certain features of theirs, like the width of the readable area, are retarded in really strange ways.  I had to get familiar with a new programming language just to tweak the site!

Anyway, there’s a big announcement about my independent game design career coming up soon!  I won’t really talk about it now, but anyone reading this who either does not know what it is or cannot guess is probably a sillihead.  I just don’t want to make a big deal about it until I have screenshots.  Look forward to that.

There is also some music on the way.  I am working on two comissions right now — one is some basic sound engineering to render a batch of MIDI compositions to audio.  Another is a soundtrack, for which I am being well-compensated!  I don’t know how big it will be, since the project is pretty low-budget, but there will be a few tunes anyway.

Being that I am in contact with Kazukeri again, I’ll be working on Dragoon Legends as well.  That one’s a freebie — I’m not getting paid.  It’s also the last freebie I’m willing to do.  Depending on my output level, there may or may not be a lot of music.

I’ll work to get the other sections of my site together as I can.  It took me a long time just to get this much done, because I had to edit a bunch of CSS scripts to get my site looking how I wanted.  Since, when I woke up today, I couldn’t understand a single line’s worth of CSS script, it was more work than it should have been.

As for the video game blog

I realize that I do not update as much as I promised I would!  The problem is, as my few loyal readers might know, that my articles are entirely too long.  It takes days to write them, and I don’t write them often.  From now on, I’ll try to write about one game at a time.  That way, not only will there be more consistent content, but it will be a digestible amount of text.

Any advice or comments on the new site are appreciated!  You can send me an email at brandonabley@hotmail.com, or, alternatively, you can now comment on the article.  How cool is that!?

But, you know, the sad thing is: Enabling support for comments is the single only reason I went to all the trouble of redoing my entire website.  Shameful!

Regards,
Brandon Abley
brandonabley@hotmail.com