Three Reviews
Okay, enough complaining about the upcoming Chrono Trigger port :P Here are some reviews (spoiler-free).
Last Saturday, Jeff and I headed out to the IFC for their free screening of an episode of the Japanese reality show Game Center CX, presented here as Retro Game Master. Not an entire episode, though-just one of the "challenge" sections, where the host Arino attempts to play through some of the hardest classic games ever made. These segments have earned Game Center CX popularity in Japan and a cult following in the West; as such, a company called Stylejam put together a pair of screenings for this year's New York Asian Film Festival, ostensibly to test the waters for possible Region 1 distribution. We came away from Saturday's screening hoping they'd go for it, and even attended another showing on Sunday that featured a second, different episode.
The first episode focused on a Famicom title called The Mystery of Atlantis, an adventure/platformer with a hundred levels, and, as we in the audience would soon see, one of the most devilishly designed games ever. While a dramatic English voiceover gave play-by-play details, Section Chief Arino-simply called "the Kacho" here-went through agonizingly tough levels, learning to navigate through the game, which has some maddeningly rare power-ups and plenty of particularly insane bits of platforming.
The game in Sunday's episode was the notoriously difficult Ghosts N' Goblins. Again, lots of dying, trick learning, and so on, but the Kacho has his work truly cut out for him this time.
Overall, both presentations were very well done. Each episode started off with the same intro, which explained what the show is about and showed how popular it is in Japan, ending with a greeting from Arino himself. The voice over narration was over the top, but entertaining as a play-by-play, and both episodes were filled with edgy moments where you're secretly cheering the Kacho on to make that difficult jump or beat that tricky boss.
I really hope to see more Retro Game Master in the future. In the meantime, fansubs of a handful of episodes can be found at your local torrent sites, and for completists, there's the always awesome Crunk Games' episode guide.
On to the next review, but this'll be a short one. We saw WALL-E on Monday for my birthday, and it's tough to say much more about this film than it's ambitious, touching, magnificent, funny, and simply wonderful.
One thing I noted after we left the theater was that the main characters, robots who could barely speak, were designed and animated largely in a physical way. This is a total reversal from the usual Pixar way of characterization, with dialogue leading the action... well, come to think of it, in their features at least. Their shorts have long relied on the same sort of physical, dialogue-free action that permeates much of WALL-E, which is perhaps the very reason why I loved this film so: it's a Pixar short blown up to feature-length. It has the heart of Red's Dream, the warmth of Luxo Jr., the quirky humor of Tin Toy, the overall richness of Geri's Game, and much more. It is, for this longtime Pixar fan (like, years before Toy Story longtime), their most Pixaresque feature to date.
Alas, the game I finished most recently wasn't nearly as funny nor as masterful as either of the things I reviewed above. Instead, Wild ARMs 5 is chock-full of wasted potential, a merely okay JRPG that could've been quite a bit more. The tenth anniversary edition of the Wild ARMs series, this installment focuses on a teenage boy ready to make his way in the world, his childhood friend sidekick who secretly is in love with him, and the mysterious amnesiac girl who falls out of the sky one day, cradled in the hand of a disembodied golem arm. Yes, it's a cliched story, but one with twists and quirks of its own, and-much to its detriment-a poorly written script, full of redundancies (no, Wild ARMs 5, you don't need to remind us every time there's a cutscene with Volsung and Fereydoon that the latter is loyal to the former... especially when it says so in the manual) and unnatural-sounding, clumsily-worded dialogue.
The graphics are equally sub-par. Pretty much all of the dungeons rely on the same room designs and textures, and the World Map graphics tend to be blurry and plain. On a positive note, the towns are done fairly well, as are the character and monster designs (though Rebecca's outfit is fairly silly). The game's HEX battle system, which solidly combines regular JRPG mechanics with SRPG maneuvering and strategizing, is easily the highlight, though it suffers from a lack of difficulty. Speaking of battles, one thing that surprised me was that all of the regular fights are random, something that I thought had gone out of vogue at the time of the game's publication. Not that I minded too much, but random battles are a bit archaic these days. Another thing worth making mention of are the Sol Nigers, cursed globes that, once the curse has been removed (read: optional boss battle), enable the player to turn battles on and off in a certain area at will, which makes backtracking through previous areas far less tedious.
Other than that, I have some other nitpicky gripes (particularly concerning the placement of many of the game's save points and the inability to save anywhere on the World Map. Oh, and the music, which is mediocre at best. Oh, and a lot of the platforming bits...), as well as some things that I enjoyed (the hidden puzzles), but nothing really worth discussing at length. Wild ARMs 5 isn't a total loss, but there are many other, better RPGs out there worth your time.
Last Saturday, Jeff and I headed out to the IFC for their free screening of an episode of the Japanese reality show Game Center CX, presented here as Retro Game Master. Not an entire episode, though-just one of the "challenge" sections, where the host Arino attempts to play through some of the hardest classic games ever made. These segments have earned Game Center CX popularity in Japan and a cult following in the West; as such, a company called Stylejam put together a pair of screenings for this year's New York Asian Film Festival, ostensibly to test the waters for possible Region 1 distribution. We came away from Saturday's screening hoping they'd go for it, and even attended another showing on Sunday that featured a second, different episode.
The first episode focused on a Famicom title called The Mystery of Atlantis, an adventure/platformer with a hundred levels, and, as we in the audience would soon see, one of the most devilishly designed games ever. While a dramatic English voiceover gave play-by-play details, Section Chief Arino-simply called "the Kacho" here-went through agonizingly tough levels, learning to navigate through the game, which has some maddeningly rare power-ups and plenty of particularly insane bits of platforming.
The game in Sunday's episode was the notoriously difficult Ghosts N' Goblins. Again, lots of dying, trick learning, and so on, but the Kacho has his work truly cut out for him this time.
Overall, both presentations were very well done. Each episode started off with the same intro, which explained what the show is about and showed how popular it is in Japan, ending with a greeting from Arino himself. The voice over narration was over the top, but entertaining as a play-by-play, and both episodes were filled with edgy moments where you're secretly cheering the Kacho on to make that difficult jump or beat that tricky boss.
I really hope to see more Retro Game Master in the future. In the meantime, fansubs of a handful of episodes can be found at your local torrent sites, and for completists, there's the always awesome Crunk Games' episode guide.
On to the next review, but this'll be a short one. We saw WALL-E on Monday for my birthday, and it's tough to say much more about this film than it's ambitious, touching, magnificent, funny, and simply wonderful.
One thing I noted after we left the theater was that the main characters, robots who could barely speak, were designed and animated largely in a physical way. This is a total reversal from the usual Pixar way of characterization, with dialogue leading the action... well, come to think of it, in their features at least. Their shorts have long relied on the same sort of physical, dialogue-free action that permeates much of WALL-E, which is perhaps the very reason why I loved this film so: it's a Pixar short blown up to feature-length. It has the heart of Red's Dream, the warmth of Luxo Jr., the quirky humor of Tin Toy, the overall richness of Geri's Game, and much more. It is, for this longtime Pixar fan (like, years before Toy Story longtime), their most Pixaresque feature to date.
Alas, the game I finished most recently wasn't nearly as funny nor as masterful as either of the things I reviewed above. Instead, Wild ARMs 5 is chock-full of wasted potential, a merely okay JRPG that could've been quite a bit more. The tenth anniversary edition of the Wild ARMs series, this installment focuses on a teenage boy ready to make his way in the world, his childhood friend sidekick who secretly is in love with him, and the mysterious amnesiac girl who falls out of the sky one day, cradled in the hand of a disembodied golem arm. Yes, it's a cliched story, but one with twists and quirks of its own, and-much to its detriment-a poorly written script, full of redundancies (no, Wild ARMs 5, you don't need to remind us every time there's a cutscene with Volsung and Fereydoon that the latter is loyal to the former... especially when it says so in the manual) and unnatural-sounding, clumsily-worded dialogue.
The graphics are equally sub-par. Pretty much all of the dungeons rely on the same room designs and textures, and the World Map graphics tend to be blurry and plain. On a positive note, the towns are done fairly well, as are the character and monster designs (though Rebecca's outfit is fairly silly). The game's HEX battle system, which solidly combines regular JRPG mechanics with SRPG maneuvering and strategizing, is easily the highlight, though it suffers from a lack of difficulty. Speaking of battles, one thing that surprised me was that all of the regular fights are random, something that I thought had gone out of vogue at the time of the game's publication. Not that I minded too much, but random battles are a bit archaic these days. Another thing worth making mention of are the Sol Nigers, cursed globes that, once the curse has been removed (read: optional boss battle), enable the player to turn battles on and off in a certain area at will, which makes backtracking through previous areas far less tedious.
Other than that, I have some other nitpicky gripes (particularly concerning the placement of many of the game's save points and the inability to save anywhere on the World Map. Oh, and the music, which is mediocre at best. Oh, and a lot of the platforming bits...), as well as some things that I enjoyed (the hidden puzzles), but nothing really worth discussing at length. Wild ARMs 5 isn't a total loss, but there are many other, better RPGs out there worth your time.