[Late to the Party] Week of 3/9/08
SabreCat:
I rather enjoy doing these little reviews of games and such, so I'm going to make a "column" out of it. I'll call it "Late to the Party," because the vast majority of stuff I write about on here is months or years old. And the tagline and LJ-cuts will alert the uninterested to skip it without any extra effort, heh.
Jeanne D'Arc (PSP): Tactical RPGs are my bread and butter, so I jumped straight into Jeanne D'Arc after finally persuading myself to quit replaying Fire Emblem. This one takes more after Final Fantasy Tactics than Advance Wars, where the direction a unit's facing matters, and you can replay stages indefinitely to level up and collect items. It's set in a fantastical version of France during the Hundred Years' War, a fact that both lends the title a great deal of its charm and causes its weakest moments. I do not, in principle, mind a retelling of a revered French and Catholic hero's story using anime orcs and whatnot, and the addition of catpeople to a game seldom hurts it in my book. But I found that they played the fantastical elements poorly in this one. The most engaging sequences were those leading up to the kingmaking at Reims, the heresy verdict (which is handled in a very clever and surprising way), etc.--the real stuff--while when the bolted-on storyline of demonic "reapers" and whatnot took the fore, it felt trite and bland. As for the gameplay, it is all-around solid. Various bonuses for troop positioning make battles feel oddly (and favorably) like chess. The difficulty is well-tuned, such that if you do a minimum of grinding, you'll make it through most battles, the hardest forcing a retry or a very narrow margin of victory. If you do get stuck, a bit of leveling up will ease the pressure. Recommended: B+.
Elebits (Wii): This is exactly the sort of thing you want in a launch title for a console with a wacky control scheme: something accessible, unique, and genuinely fun. It's like Katamari Damacy meets the First-Person Shooter genre, producing the weirdest (and most non-violent) FPS ever. You wander through an area--broadly speaking, a house, a neighborhood, and an amusement park--searching for tiny cute creatures called "Elebits" to capture. But they're shy and sneaky, so to find them you need to turn the place inside-out, throwing furniture and objects around to find the "nests" of beasties hiding under things. The more you capture, the bigger the objects you can tug about with your "capture gun," until you're chucking entire buildings across the landscape. It is exactly as fun as that sounds. ^.^ In fact, I so gleefully made a mess of everything that the game awarded me the title "King of Destruction" upon completing it. Hah. The physics is a little weird; even heavy metallic objects carom off each other as if they were made of light plastic or foam. But given this is an animistic universe where little squeaky dudes power your toaster, I can't say it doesn't fit. And the controls work excellently; I'm pretty sure I'm going to wish I had an IR pointer for my shooters from here on out. My only complaint: it could have been considerably longer, as you can complete the ~30 levels in just a few hours, and there's not enough variety in those levels to warrant a great deal of replaying (even though there are lots of neat unlockables). Enthusiastically recommended: A.
StarTropics (NES, Wii Virtual Console): Okay, I have to temper some of my vitriol about Ocarina of Time, because this puppy does all that twice over. Difficulty via fighting the unresponsive controls, more than fighting the monsters? Check. Opaque puzzles? Check (though I think I had to consult walkthroughs just a bit less often with this one, admittedly). Do-overs? Oh Primes yes. StarTropics is a great champion of trial and error: the only way you progress is by throwing your hapless protagonist to his death over, and over, and over again. But as a Nintendo action-adventure title that doesn't involve tired mascots Mario, Link, or Samus, and set in a wacky version of the South Pacific overrun by aliens and towns named ____cola, StarTropics gets redemption points for charm. And I must admit, with as hard as you have to fight for them, victories like rescuing a dolphin or sinking an old pirate ship feel genuinely rewarding. It never got to the point where I broke my Classic Controller, since I seemed to finally succeed the one try before I thought I might. Recommended with reservations: C+
I rather enjoy doing these little reviews of games and such, so I'm going to make a "column" out of it. I'll call it "Late to the Party," because the vast majority of stuff I write about on here is months or years old. And the tagline and LJ-cuts will alert the uninterested to skip it without any extra effort, heh.
Jeanne D'Arc (PSP): Tactical RPGs are my bread and butter, so I jumped straight into Jeanne D'Arc after finally persuading myself to quit replaying Fire Emblem. This one takes more after Final Fantasy Tactics than Advance Wars, where the direction a unit's facing matters, and you can replay stages indefinitely to level up and collect items. It's set in a fantastical version of France during the Hundred Years' War, a fact that both lends the title a great deal of its charm and causes its weakest moments. I do not, in principle, mind a retelling of a revered French and Catholic hero's story using anime orcs and whatnot, and the addition of catpeople to a game seldom hurts it in my book. But I found that they played the fantastical elements poorly in this one. The most engaging sequences were those leading up to the kingmaking at Reims, the heresy verdict (which is handled in a very clever and surprising way), etc.--the real stuff--while when the bolted-on storyline of demonic "reapers" and whatnot took the fore, it felt trite and bland. As for the gameplay, it is all-around solid. Various bonuses for troop positioning make battles feel oddly (and favorably) like chess. The difficulty is well-tuned, such that if you do a minimum of grinding, you'll make it through most battles, the hardest forcing a retry or a very narrow margin of victory. If you do get stuck, a bit of leveling up will ease the pressure. Recommended: B+.
Elebits (Wii): This is exactly the sort of thing you want in a launch title for a console with a wacky control scheme: something accessible, unique, and genuinely fun. It's like Katamari Damacy meets the First-Person Shooter genre, producing the weirdest (and most non-violent) FPS ever. You wander through an area--broadly speaking, a house, a neighborhood, and an amusement park--searching for tiny cute creatures called "Elebits" to capture. But they're shy and sneaky, so to find them you need to turn the place inside-out, throwing furniture and objects around to find the "nests" of beasties hiding under things. The more you capture, the bigger the objects you can tug about with your "capture gun," until you're chucking entire buildings across the landscape. It is exactly as fun as that sounds. ^.^ In fact, I so gleefully made a mess of everything that the game awarded me the title "King of Destruction" upon completing it. Hah. The physics is a little weird; even heavy metallic objects carom off each other as if they were made of light plastic or foam. But given this is an animistic universe where little squeaky dudes power your toaster, I can't say it doesn't fit. And the controls work excellently; I'm pretty sure I'm going to wish I had an IR pointer for my shooters from here on out. My only complaint: it could have been considerably longer, as you can complete the ~30 levels in just a few hours, and there's not enough variety in those levels to warrant a great deal of replaying (even though there are lots of neat unlockables). Enthusiastically recommended: A.
StarTropics (NES, Wii Virtual Console): Okay, I have to temper some of my vitriol about Ocarina of Time, because this puppy does all that twice over. Difficulty via fighting the unresponsive controls, more than fighting the monsters? Check. Opaque puzzles? Check (though I think I had to consult walkthroughs just a bit less often with this one, admittedly). Do-overs? Oh Primes yes. StarTropics is a great champion of trial and error: the only way you progress is by throwing your hapless protagonist to his death over, and over, and over again. But as a Nintendo action-adventure title that doesn't involve tired mascots Mario, Link, or Samus, and set in a wacky version of the South Pacific overrun by aliens and towns named ____cola, StarTropics gets redemption points for charm. And I must admit, with as hard as you have to fight for them, victories like rescuing a dolphin or sinking an old pirate ship feel genuinely rewarding. It never got to the point where I broke my Classic Controller, since I seemed to finally succeed the one try before I thought I might. Recommended with reservations: C+