Recent play rundown

Most of the games I've played since finishing The World Ends With You simply haven't done much for me, regrettably. One or two were inspiring, and I'll talk about them at some point when I've had more of an opportunity to digest them, but the majority either disappointed me, or just didn't leave me with much to say about themes or characters. Still, I had some thoughts about these games I wanted to put down. So if you're interested in my opinion of Insecticide, Penny Arcade Adventures Part One, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, or Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates, read on. If you're not, well, screw you; it's my blog.

I didn't finish Insecticide; I may have only barely started it. This was a game I wanted desperately to like, and in fact, except for one incident of what Yahtzee might call "moon logic", I loved the hell out of the adventure portions of it. The ones I worked through weren't anything special in terms of the gameplay, but they were cleverly written and funny, and they successfully evoked happy memories of point-and-click adventure games. However, I loathed the combat portions, to the degree that I ultimately tossed the game aside in frustration. I'm not sure whether the combat segments seemed like a good idea earlier on or what, but at some point someone should have realized that movement was awkward, the controls were sluggish, and they would have a much better game if they skipped all this crap and just put more detective work in. Were the developers really convinced the shooter segments were good? Did they start down a road they couldn't back out of? I can't say. I just wish it had turned out differently.

Continuing with the DS, I followed Insecticide by trying out Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates, a game I finished, but one I also felt fell short of the mark, at least as a single-player experience. The controls weren't so bad, but there were two significant problems. The first was that casting spells was just slow and clumsy. The second was that the only way to get maximum use from the game would be to use your hands for both sets of buttons and the stylus simultaneously, which was awkward and uncomfortable. The AI governing your allies was awful; about all they were good for was wasting your magicite. The platforming was needlessly complicated by your inability to look around the rooms you were passing through. And then there was the story, which worked in a perfunctory way, but strained credulity to the breaking point and ended in an incoherent, unsatisfying mess. If Chelinka really had sacrificed herself, if it had been a bittersweet ending instead of a saccharine one, I would have thought better of it.

Moving from the DS to the Wii, I finally finished Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. I loved the previous entry in this series, the Gamecube's Path of Radiance, but I felt let down by the sequel. Part of this was due to the fragmented nature of the narrative. What I liked most about Path of Radiance was taking the Greil Mercenaries from marginal competence to mastery; here there's no continuous arc. Rather, you get thrown back and forth between sides of a very large conflict, leaving some characters behind for several chapters. When you see them again, you've practically forgotten who they are, or why you care if they get killed. This will happen, because when you see them again they are often absurdly under-leveled. Perhaps to compensate for this, you are frequently given a vast army of high-level warriors, most of whom seem to have been lobotomized with a trebuchet. Due to their large numbers the ally turns take quite a while; their extraordinary stupidity makes these phases seem even longer.

A side effect of the construction is that the cast feels far too large, an impression only exacerbated by the replacement of the charming support conversations that took place in camp in Path of Radiance with boring, generic support conversations that take place in the field. This gives you much less of a handle on the characters' personalities, and excises the side plots of the first game. The story of Soren's lineage in that game was one of my favorite discoveries; there's nothing quite like that here. That's a pity, because the main plot of Radiant Dawn is an insipid mess. In Path of Radiance, Ashnard was crazy, but at least he had a goal and took concrete, sensible steps towards it. The villains of Radiant Dawn are apparently evil just to be evil, without any apparent aim or coherent strategy. This is a narrative sin in any game, but it's especially absurd when the gameplay is built around strategic and tactical thinking. The battles where you don't have too many allies are entertaining, but there's no basis for an emotional connection to the characters or the story. You're better off playing chess.

Well, enough being mean. Let's talk about something I really enjoyed: Penny Arcade's On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness. As writers of some of the excellent blogs in my sidebar and Blägroll have noted, OtRSPoD doesn't really do anything vastly original in terms of story or gameplay. It's a decent fusion of fairly standard RPG mechanics and point-and-click adventure that has two significant virtues. The first is that it does almost everything right, and the second is that it is great fun to play. The game world is populated by hilarious characters and enemies, and unlike many entries in the genre, OtRSPoD doesn't punish you for trying to see all of it. The concepts are funny, the dialogue is entertaining, and the combat is fun, although I found using items to occasionally be something of a drag. The humor probably isn't for everyone (does a creepy, libidinous juicer sound funny to you?), but if you can see the appeal in fighting a dread mime deity from beyond the edge of reality with a magic rake, it's worth giving Episode One a whirl. I'm pretty sure I'll be grabbing Episode Two.

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Odin Sphere gameplay notes

So I came to a compromise on the review issue. I'm not going to do much discussion of the aspects of a video game that don't relate directly to the theme or the atmosphere, which are the subjects I want to focus on in the critiques. At the same time, there are going to be some instances, like this one, where a game really deserves some additional criticism or discussion for some of the design aspects. In some cases this will be because of exceptionally good choices that were made in the design process, but in others it will be because of the flaws in the process. And the simple fact is that Odin Sphere had several flaws, some of which nearly made me toss the controller down and take the disc out.

Odin Sphere is an example of a rare case in which the coding, rather than the artistic direction or the writing, was the weakest link in the game. Music, graphics, story, and design create the experience for the player. Coding can't create a good experience if these elements are trash. It can, however, work against them by pushing a player's mind out of the world of the game. It's a thankless task to be a programmer, I'm sure. The designers, artists, and musicians get all the print. But it's the people in the trenches writing the game engine that make all the other aspects work together to create art. In this case, unfortunately, the programming (and perhaps the hardware) wasn't equal to the task that the experiential elements demanded.

Although it is graphically beautiful, Odin Sphere doesn't seem to run on very efficient code. Anytime a large number of moving elements are present on screen the framerate drops, sometimes significantly. This isn't just a problem with too many enemies—the frequent slowdown in the Netherworld stages is associated with background elements. Even stages with relatively few enemies can suffer significant drops if too many phozons are left floating in the air. Because several of the boss battles are very complex, with lots of moving elements, they can be especially afflicted. The battles against Odette and Belial get to be very frustrating because of the framerate failures. The feeling that you could punch in a combo and go make a sandwich before the animation stopped really removes you from a fight.

Speaking of going to make a sandwich, Odin Sphere features some truly amazing load times, especially when going between the Pooka Village and the restaurants. No number of charming little animations will hide the time it takes to move between screens and stages. Often there is substantial loading after you enter a stage as well. Slowdown and load screens kill a player's engagement in a game.

Aside from the technical base, a few design elements were notably off. The controls were a bit muddy, and made to feel more so by the fact that cancels were impossible. Once you start a combo your only option is to see it through or stop acting entirely, which was something of a problem in the more complex boss fights. The inventory system also could have been much improved—it seemed like half the time you weren't fighting was spent managing the tightly constrained inventory. Shrinking that down so much didn't feel like it served much of a purpose; there's no need to be "realistic" about the inventory size in a game where each level ends with a gigantic treasure chest falling from the sky. The inventory management was a needless distraction from the game's better elements.

Another flaw was that the revelation of recipes for alchemy and the restaurants didn't match up with the modular nature of the story. You find a recipe for a moderate healing potion in the first book of the story, but the stronger healing potion isn't found until the fourth book. In the meantime, however, you have brought several characters to a point where the "H" potion isn't of any benefit. There was no gameplay or story reason to hold the Elixir back, and doing so forces the players to replay books in order to give their characters a meaningful healing potion for the final stages. Revealing the recipes piecemeal would have been more acceptable if the player was free to experiment and find things on his own. However, you aren't allowed to make any alchemy mix for which you don't have the recipe.

As for the restaurant, the fact that the story is told very much out of order makes its recipe system seem extremely strange. Why can Velvet buy "egg on toast" right away, when in the linear timeline that recipe won't be found until much time has passed? This complaint can also be leveled at the alchemy recipes. In short, the recipe system was illogical and needlessly forced a replay of previous books.

The reason the replay of previous books was a problem was that you literally had to replay them. That is, once you finished all five main books and wanted to buff your characters for the final battle, you had to start each of those books from the beginning, rather than entering each one at a point later on where you had access to all or most of its levels. As a result, you had to play rather a long time to reach a point where you could buy the bags you needed for inventory or get the raw materials necessary to make elixirs. It seems like this could have been avoided.

For the most part, however, Odin Sphere features reasonable design choices. The diversity of fighting styles of the main characters means that the repetition of levels and bosses never gets boring. The character development system is intuitive and still manages to feature an intelligent trade-off. And for the most part, the game is very forgiving about providing you with materials to produce the potions you need in the areas where they're needed (the notable exception being Titania). While most battles allow you to get by just by whacking at your enemies and using special powers, you can usually find additional strategies or tricks for each particular fight that makes it easier. The game is balanced, has a relatively even difficulty progression, and only one really unreasonable enemy (the slimes). The choices are solid but not spectacular; for the most part this is a game where the mechanics try to make themselves as unobtrusive as possible. That's why the smaller failings seemed so glaring.

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I Love Layton

I have just finished playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village, a game I cannot recommend highly enough to anyone who has ever enjoyed thinking. The combination of straight-up puzzle solving and adventure game, charmingly presented in 2D, will leave you wanting more and wondering why nobody did this before. Brain game shovelware may well be doomed. The Professor puts that genre to shame and begs the question: "Why didn't anyone do this before?"

The premise of the game is simple enough—well-known puzzle-solver Professor Layton is summoned to a village to solve the riddle of a hidden inheritance. With his assistant Luke in tow, he heads off to the town of St. Mystere (sigh), where it rapidly becomes obvious that the missing "Golden Apple" is the least of the mysteries confronting him. The townspeople have a strange penchant for posing puzzles and riddles (which can get annoying), and soon enough crimes ranging from a murder to a "doze-and-dash" are plaguing St. Mystere, demanding Layton's attention. The story is pretty entertaining, even though you'll probably figure out most of the mystery about the time you finish the easiest of the bonus puzzles.

Resolving most of these mysteries, and sometimes even moving around the town, requires you to solve several riddles. The simplest one is to the right—some of the puzzles, like this one, require nothing more than clear tracing of lines. Others require some pretty subtle thinking. I have seen some complaints about the difficulty, and I cannot entirely give these credit. The puzzles of the game generally don't require any more knowledge than typically possessed by a fifth grader. The difficulty comes from a requirement for creativity and mental discipline. A child playing this game may need assistance from adults in spots, but then again, an adult playing this game may need a childlike outlook to achieve some of the necessary lateral thinking. In short, if you have kids, play this game with them. You will all have a great time. And don't worry; if you don't have a 10 year old to help you, a limited number of hints are available.

The tale of Professor Layton is conveyed through 2D animations and drawn backgrounds. The character design is excellent, with endearingly wacky villagers that are full of personality. The game features a substantial amount of voice acting, which actually works out quite well, though I suspect it cut down on the amount of music available. The soundtrack is passable, and works to help set the tone, though having some more variety would have been nice.

The game isn't perfect. Although the touch control is essentially seamless, the movement system seems unnecessarily elaborate. The village mostly runs out of puzzles before the game runs out of story. As I mentioned the mystery itself is a little easy to get (though it requires a little leap), and also more or less solves itself. A little more involvement from the player in solving the larger riddles would have been great. The game is also a little short—the 15 bonus puzzles and additional downloadable content should provide your fix until Level 5 delivers the sequel that the bonuses page promises is coming. There are already 3 Professor Layton games out in Japan so this will mostly be a matter of localization. A longer story might also have helped get the player a little more emotionally involved; as is the story ends just as you're really starting to fall in love with the characters.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a pleasant little game with a story and characters just wacky enough to make the numerous brain-teasers seem a natural part of the world. The puzzles themselves aren't crushingly difficult, though a few can get a little frustrating. The story and presentation makes it much more engaging than the standard brain-game shovelware. Cute enough to engage a child, smart enough to stump an adult, Professor Layton is charming fun anyone who loves thinking can enjoy.

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FFXII: Superficially Epic

As I started writing that review of FFXII: Revenant Wings, I realized that I'd never taken out my notes on its predecessor and arranged them into a review. So, I decided I would go ahead and do that. I've played through the game twice now, and I feel it likely that I'll play it again at some point in the future. Final Fantasy XII walks an interesting line: compared to recent entries in the series it seems very much like a new direction. I felt, however, that it actually hearkened back to older entries in many ways. This synthesis had many strengths, but the game did not play to them as well as it could have. For all its epic grandeur, FFXII never really connects emotionally, in the end producing a superficial experience.

The battle system garnered the most attention, because it was the largest departure from Final Fantasy X. A turn-based system with a separate battle screen was replaced by "real-time" encounters in the field. However, the "real-time" system is something of an illusion, and in fact is a throwback, because it is essentially a partially-automated version of the active time battle system that series veterans are familiar with. The real difference here was the elimination of the battle screen, a move that made sense in terms of firmly rooting the action in the world, but which highlighted the oddity of having only half your party involved in a fight. The advantage of the change is most evident in terms of scaling. Giant enemies seem truly enormous in this system, and it also accommodates swarms of enemies that can be a drag in a turn-based system, as anyone who has sat through a Dragon Quest battle with 8 or more slimes can attest.

The removal of discontinuities and transitions between the overworld and battle screen adds a greater sense of immediacy as well, and creates some interesting moments—your characters might end up running through the desert with an enormous dinosaur on their heels, for instance. This engagement is adversely affected by the "Quickenings", rather inexplicable special attacks that seem to take place on some other plane. It would have been better, and achieved more to differentiate the characters, if these had been replaced by in-field special techniques.

The price of all this is the control afforded by a turn-based system. While it is possible to manually direct all your characters, it is more efficient to use the rudimentary AI system (gambits) so that they control themselves. There was some grousing about this, and also the "license" system that forced you, in the early stages of the game at least, to pick and choose what weapons and abilities your character could use. In the end though, these aspects of the system, however controversial, were secondary, because the real selling point of the Final Fantasy games has been presentation and story.

The story was quite a departure. While many of the popular FF entries were highly personal stories intertwined with a traditional fantasy epic, FFXII is much more distant from its characters. In FFX, Tidus repeatedly states "This is my story," but FFXII is emphatically not the (supposedly) main character Vaan's story, nor even Princess Ashe's. The player's characters are all very small relative to the conflict being played out, and for the most part they are unable to affect its course. Only at the very last do the efforts of the characters amount to a thrust against the march of their history. Even then, they affect only the superficial aspects of the moment (i.e. who wins the battle); the great task, the toppling of the Occuria, has already been achieved.

The presentation matched the epic focus in several ways. Full-video cutscenes seemed slightly less textured than they were for FFX—compare Tidus' skin and hair to Vaan's, for instance. Full-video also seems to be used somewhat more extensively for establishing shots than in FFX, and the main characters get rather less screen time in the action shots. Thus, in general, the full-video cinematics feel more remote from the characters. Similarly, the soundtrack is very grand and highly orchestrated. Horn and string ensembles take the lead here, rather than the solo instruments that dominated most tracks of FFX. As a side effect, the music is less intimate, and at times feels almost superficial, like it came out of a fighting game. Although some themes get repeated, the music has nothing like the coherence of FFX. These features work with the nature of the story presented.

So too does the general vastness of the landscapes involved. Entire regions of FFX could fit into single screens of FFXII, and the exterior landscapes are generally quite distinct. Interiors are something of a problem for the game, however; the differences between the various mines in the game mostly amounts to pallette work. Also, in some instances the scale seems very odd—particularly in the corridors of Imperial ships, which are too wide, too purposeless, and have improbably high ceilings. In general, however, the scaling of the environment works to the advantage of the game's approach, emphasizing how large the world is relative to the characters and their story.

This is not to say that there is no personal conflict motivating the story, but it does not play out nearly as intimately as in some other entries. Vaan (the protagonist) and Vayne (the principal antagonist) see each other briefly at the beginning of the game and do not meet again until a few brief moments before the end, but the story tracks their movements and the development of their opposing ideals. Curiously, both wish to be free of oppression: Vaan from the Empire that Vayne represents, and Vayne from the godlike Occuria who try to control history. That Vayne and the Occuria both view their respective rule as benevolent does not impress those who endure it. Despite their key similarity, Vaan and Vayne are presented as physical and emotional opposites, with very different reactions to the resented oppression. Vaan wishes only to be free, and his own master, while Vayne wishes to take the godhead himself, by manufacturing his own version of the magical stones that the Occuria use to distribute power (and with it, control). The problem with this dichotomy is that while Vayne is the unquestioned leader of his side of the argument, Vaan is not a leader nor seemingly even essential to his.

As the story progresses it sounds two main thematic notes: a suspicion of power and the powerful, and the futility of revenge. Criticism of current events could easily be read into either of these if one wished, though the tale of small nations caught in a conflict between two great empires seems more directly analogous to the Cold War. Intertwined with the theme of vengeance is the resolution of loyalties—familial and political. In general the characters choose to be loyal to the future rather than to memory, which could also be read as a political statement.

One interesting feature of the story is that Vayne and Doctor Cid both have a habit of talking to thin air, seeming to be insane. Yet the "Venat" they speak to, a renegade Occurian god, is actually present (invisibly). The obvious note sounded about the ease of confusing religion and insanity may obscure larger questions about how we can distinguish a good God from an evil one, and whether any God that relates to the world purely through power can be truly benevolent. Is Venat good or evil, or both?

These threads are interesting, but through them we ultimately learn very little about the characters. FFXII spends so much time building up the enormous supporting cast that we never get to connect very completely with or truly understand the putative main players. At the end of the tale, we know that they have done certain things, but we understand very little about why. Nor does the story end with any resolution of tensions or personal transformations. Most of the characters (except Penelo, who is practically a non-character) reconcile with their past, but the significant transformations that Yuna and Tidus underwent in FFX find no echo here. Vaan, Ashe, and Basch are somewhat less bitter at the end of the story, but otherwise not significantly changed. The relationships between the characters of the party never seem to develop or change—at times it's not at all clear why they're even still travelling together. Rather, it is the secondary characters, Larsa especially, who are transformed by events of the story, and their relationships that develop and change. In that respect, FFXII resembled some of the earlier FF games to its detriment.

The only remedy to this weakness would be a change in the narrative. A narrowed focus would have helped—Penelo and Fran could have been excised or relegated to supporting-cast status without much of a loss. Fran and the Viera in general felt like an indulgence of puerile sexuality—the village full of scantily-clad bunny girls was almost fatal to the tone. Vaan should either have been excised or built up significantly—for long stretches of the story he seems like a supporting character who got stuck to the main plot by accident, which is not a problem unless (as here) the events of the story seem as insignficant to him as he is to them. Trimming some of the fat and refocusing the story could draw out Vaan's developing leadership and responsibility, and Ashe's resolution with her past, to a much greater degree. It would also allow more space to play on Ashe's relationships with Vaan and Balthier. At several points the Occuria seem interested in using Vaan somehow, or pushing Ashe towards him. Again, allowing more space for this to play out would also have been wise.

As an epic, FFXII mostly works, and the vastness of the landscape, the massiveness of many of the enemies, and the sweeping score help reinforce this property. However, while the political and military tale is compelling, the personal story is not: the main characters are never developed adequately, their relationships do not seem to evolve, and for all their epic scope the events of the story do not seem to greatly change them. The automation of your allies, the vastness of the world, the remoteness of the score, and the two-dimensionality of the characters creates a fundamentally alienating and impersonal environment only partly ameliorated by the engagement of the continuous-field battle system, and this only weakens the emotional impact further. Ultimately, FFXII is grand but not touching—all glorious gilding, and no lily.

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Revenant Wings doesn't play up to its presentation

Final Fantasy XII : Revenant Wings for the DS opens with some really beautiful video sequences, accompanied by lovely music. Immediately, the top-notch presentation that Final Fantasy games are known for asserts itself. Yet, as is so often the case with FF spinoffs, the actual game doesn't live up to the polish. Despite its production values, Revenant Wings is an uninspired game with merely passable mechanics.

The box promises a version of the FFXII battle system, and Revenant Wings more or less delivers that with its real-time action and skill charging, though the context is quite different. Each of the characters commands a group of monsters in most parts of the game, making it more of an RTS, though there really isn't any resource management going on. This isn't to say that there's no micromanagement—you'll be doing plenty of that, because the AI does not make good decisions and cannot be stopped from making bad ones.

You have no option with the AI other than setting a single "gambit" (automatically used skill). So you cannot, for instance, tell a group of creatures to stand their ground. Ranged creatures especially have a tendency of getting into trouble this way, but any of your creatures might chase after an enemy against your orders. It's also difficult to respond quickly to problems, in part because your creatures move so slowly, but also in part because your units have a hard time moving around one another. In fact, it will not be at all uncommon to see melee and flying units wandering aimlessly through the ranks long after you have ordered them to move to a particular spot, especially when you have lots of relatively stationary ranged units. As you might guess, units have no AI that commands them to stay together, which will occasionally result in a lone member of a platoon charging hopelessly into the mouth of death while his comrades mill stupidly about in your lines.

Other than the traffic jam problem, the touch control works pretty well. Unit selection is straightforward, and never caused a significant problem. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to get units to do what you want—your units and the terrain can obscure opposing units, preventing you from ordering an attack. Also, especially on screens where there is significant variation in altitude, it's not always clear where you are telling your units to go, or even where you can tell them to go. Once you successfully order them, they'll take a while to actually get moving; your commands always seem to take a backseat to whatever the units are doing at that moment.

As a strategy game, Revenant Wings is run-of-the-mill. There's a standard revolving set of weaknesses (flying creatures weak to ranged creatures weak to melee creatures weak to flying creatures) and the requisite elemental strength/weakness setup. It's generally more important to exploit the former than the latter when you choose what creatures and leaders you'll take into battle, but here too you are overly limited. For much of the game you have no real choice about what attack mode your leaders will use. Later on, you have somewhat more flexibility, but in the end you will have only one healing leader (Penelo) and four ranged combat leaders (with two each of flying and melee leaders).

Despite all the limitations, however, the game is not terribly difficult or strategically challenging. Most maps can be solved with a tenacious advance or simple distract and destroy tactics. The exceptions are one ill-advised stealth mission, a few missions involving allies (who apparently long for death) and the final mission, which is somewhat insulting in that you are essentially confronted with a gun that can only be destroyed by attacking the mouth of the barrel. It is doable, but tedious and frustrating, and made more so by the tendency of characters whom you have told to remain in a safe area to wander into the path of the shot (due to the aforementioned AI issues). Naturally, enemy troops are never damaged by the enormous laser blast. In short, difficulty is added in lazy ways—useless allies, massive enemy respawns, over-leveled opponents, and silly terrain effects—rather than more subtle approaches like truly coordinated enemy attacks or realistic competition of strategic goals. This feeling of laziness is accentuated by the interminable recurrence of bosses, especially the Judge of Wings and Ba'Gamnan's crew.

The presentation, as I mentioned, is top-notch. The music is especially notable. Although almost all of it is cribbed directly from the original, it was ported to the DS without a significant loss of sound quality. The result is a really enjoyable audio experience, though some of the sound effects are obnoxious. The in-game graphics of course don't match the detail and beauty of the pre-rendered cutscenes. However, they're perfectly serviceable in most instances. The environments are nice, and the map of Lemures is very pretty (this is less true of the Ivalice map). The monster designs have a lot of personality for their size, though I feel that the art department stretched themselves a bit too far on some of the larger espers—these are sometimes too detailed, resulting in an complex yet uninteresting blob.

This description could also apply to the plot, which hits many of the same notes as the original FFXII and adds some Kingdom Hearts-style rambling about hearts (anima). It's interesting to know what happened to some of the minor characters of FFXII, but it's striking that the main characters appear to be totally unimproved by previous events. Penelo is sent to video-game writing purgatory with stock jokes about her bad cooking, and at one point devolves into a sobbing useless wimp. This isn't anything original: I note it only because Penelo's backbone and sass were her only distinguishing characteristics in the previous game and here they are eviscerated for no apparent reason. None of the other characters do much to distinguish themselves—oh wait, one is an emotionally closed-off pretty boy, a novel concept for SquareEnix writers. Cameos by the several of the original FFXII cast amount to just that: cameos, with no additional character development.

Pretty cutscenes and pretty music achieve nothing if they're applied to a run-of-the-mill game with a lame plot. Regrettably, that's exactly what happened here. Revenant Wings' uninspired mechanics, oversimplified strategy, and limp story waste the value applied in the graphical and audio departments. It's not a terrible game, but those who expect a play experience as vivid as the opening videos will come away disappointed.

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Marking time on the Phantom Hourglass

Last night, as Hillary accepted the zero delegates she won from Florida, I finished the latest entry in the Legend of Zelda series, Phantom Hourglass. I found it to be a fun, lightweight romp.

Phantom Hourglass is a sequel to the Gamecube game Wind Waker. It inherits cel-shaded rendering, a general character aesthetic, and an oceanic setting from its predecessor, while the terraced look of the islands (once you are on them) is more closely related to Zelda games from the SNES days (see left). Motion and combat are touch-driven, as are all of the tools—boomerang and bombchu routes are drawn on the screen. So too is your steamship's route through the seas (below, right). You can annotate the map (shown in these shots on the upper screen), circling important points or noting safe routes through treacherous areas. The controls generally work well and make most of the tools and weapons very intuitive. There were a couple of hiccups, however.

The first was that the touch control is not quite as sensitive as I might like. I had difficulty executing roll attacks consistently, and to be honest I was never quite able to pin down the motion that would produce one regularly. Also, I found stopping time in the final battle to be a bit of a crapshoot—I typically needed to draw five of the required hourglass shapes before one took. The other problem is that there just isn't a very good way to make Link run left (or the right, if you're left-handed). Unless you use an odd grip on the stylus your hand tends to block one screen or the other.

These minor issues aside, the gameplay is not very challenging, especially if you quickly catch on to how the various tools can be used. The eponymous hourglass serves as a time limit on one of the dungeons, in which a modest kind of stealth is required. This, not a serious challenge, is the most difficult part of the game except for one of the boss battles.

The gameplay fits the classic Zelda mold with the same additions as Wind Waker: you travel around the sea, visiting various islands and breaking into their dungeons. The dungeons themselves are pathfinding environmental puzzles—each dungeon contains a tool that is needed to traverse it and a bafmodad you are supposed to retrieve. Though the islands seem a little closer together than they were in Wind Waker you still spend a lot of time in transit, and the occasional appearances by enemies and pursuers are more annoying than entertaining. On the other hand, the addition of a minigame has much improved the dullest task in Wind Waker, i.e. the retrieval of sunken treasure.

Mini-games and sidequests are abundant, as is typical for these games. Seeking out all the various power-ups and perfecting your scores in these accessory games can add plenty of time to the game. However, your actual rewards are somewhat paltry, and mostly come in the form of parts for your ship. You can customize your ship in various ways, but the result is almost entirely aesthetic. Your ship gains greater stamina if all its parts come from the same set, but with one exception there's no reason to choose one set over another. Even a few minor effects would have made this more interesting—if, for instance, the stone hull decreased your speed but added stamina, or the restful cabin healed Link at a slow rate while he was on the ship. Effects of this kind would have added interesting dimensions without taking up much space on the card.

The role of guide and assistant is once more played by a fairy. Fortunately Ciela is much more helpful (and much less annoying) than Navi. She has a story, and it's somewhat interesting, but in general the story of Phantom Hourglass is very lightweight and silly. This was true of Wind Waker as well, but that game did a better job of winking at its own silliness, and also gained a sense of gravitas from the helplessness and regret expressed by the various spirits you encountered. Phantom Hourglass lacks both sensibilities, and as a result no real theme ever emerges.

In the end, the light story and easy gameplay make Phantom Hourglass seem like a slight little breeze of a game. It's easy to pick up and easy to forget once you put it down. The adventure sandwiched in between is fun, and retains much of the charm of its predecessor. Despite a few interesting variations on the way some items are used, however, it just doesn't leave much of an impression.

And now, a definition:

bafmodad (baf mō dad) - In a video game, an object which is not of any intrinsic use but which must be obtained in order to advance the plot. The Medallions from Ocarina of Time are a classic example. The bafmodad is conceptually related to the cinematic MacGuffin. Term invented by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik as a corruption of the name of an actual item from Starfox Adventures.

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Persona 3

The MegaTen games have always taken a sort of gleefully perverse approach to the RPG format. Some have been centrally based on the idea of cannibalism, and others represent a sort of bizzaro Pokemon where the cute, cuddly creatures are replaced by soul-swallowing demons. By comparison, the most provocative feature of the latest entry in the Persona series practically seems tame. The controversy over "evokers" aside, Persona 3 is a very good game.

The conceit of the game is that manifestations of human emotion, called shadows, appear during a "Dark Hour" that occurs at midnight. During this time most people are encapsulated in weird coffins, but occasionally a person lacks this protection and his soul is at least temporarily consumed by the shadows. Fortunately, some teenagers have a special ability to release their own emotions in the form of "personas" (using the evokers) that can combat the shadows. Most of the characters in the game have only one persona, but the (unnamed) main character can carry and release up to twelve at a time, with a total variety of about 200. Some of his personas are acquired after battles, and additional ones can be made by "fusing" them with the assistance of a creepy old man in a secret room.

The powers and abilities of the personas the user is carrying are advanced by experience, as is typical for RPGs. However, the abilities of newly-fused personas are determined by "Social Links" or friendships between the main character and other characters in the game. Developing and maintaining these links is a significant part of the gameplay and a major factor in your combat ability: by maximizing these links you can create increasingly powerful personas to use in combat.

The social link system is very robust, and one of the best game features I have seen in years. Most games that feature a friendship system rely very heavily on the giving of gifts and such, but in Persona 3 most of the effort of developing a friendship lies in spending time with your friends and saying the right things to them at critical junctures. The difficulty involved varies greatly and appropriately -- an old couple running a bookstore are generally just happy to see a friendly young man like yourself, while the teenage girls of the school are conversation minefields, easy to offend or just put off. The numerous social links and extensive scripting to go with them provides an immense quantity of gameplay. The main character can also devote time to improving his intelligence, bravery, and charisma; bringing these to certain levels is necessary to initiate some social links.

And then there's the combat. Because it was the location of a secret lab that caused the shadows to appear, the high school is transformed at night into a devilish tower called "Tartarus". In the spirit of roguelikes, the many floors of this tower are randomly generated on each visit, which means that in most cases if you go to the same floor twice in one night it will not look the same. These floors are densely populated by the shadows, and your primary task is to prepare yourself for significant monthly confrontations with "boss" shadows by training inside Tartarus.

The combat has a number of features that will feel familiar to MegaTen fans. Although it does not feature the devilish and unforgiving "Press Turn" system of Nocturne or DDS, combat in Persona 3 is dominated by elemental strengths and weaknesses. If an enemy strikes at your character's weakness, you will be knocked down and your defenses weakened. To add insult to injury, the enemy who successfully struck your weak point gets an additional turn. This is true for the characters too, of course, and if they are lucky enough to knock down all their enemies, your party can carry out a punishing "all-out assault" that significantly damages your foes. Thus, it is imperative to learn and remember the weaknesses of all the enemies you encounter.

The major problem with the combat is that your allies are not under your control. I understand why this was done -- a major theme of the game is that you cannot control others but grow stronger from understanding them. Unfortunately, the conceit of this theme relies on a successful illusion that your allies are people, and this illusion is shattered by the fact that they are dumb, dumb, DUMB. Their choices are frequently inscrutable, they waste energy on pointless spells, and they will repeatedly attack downed enemies (knocking them back onto their feet) rather than trying to knock down those that are standing in order to carry out a punishing assault. The player has limited control over the AI, and can tell them to prioritize knocking down enemies, but the AI setting is not carried over from battle to battle, and must therefore be reset every time. Even when the priorities are successfully set your allies will sometimes ignore them, and the priorities sometimes result in paralysis, with an ally opting to skip its turn even when a profitable action is available. Allies are also prone to casting buff or debuff spells when offense is in order, and curiously failing to use buffs or debuffs when offense is impossible. More subtle AI options were desperately needed here.

The other downside to this choice is that the combat amounts to a round-based system, which disengages the player. Early in each month, when new floors of Tartarus become available and the shadows are relatively strong and novel, this is not a serious problem. As each month progresses, however, the relative strength of the shadows falls so that no combat is a serious danger. At this point combat is still necessary, but becomes fairly dull and repetitive. The choice to disengage the player for the majority of the combat round then becomes an obstruction to enjoying the game.

As you might gather from this description, the combat in this game is "extremely easy" by MegaTen standards, which means it is "moderately difficult" by the standards of any normal game. You'll probably only die 6-7 times unless you're extremely careless and/or unlucky. By contrast, I died 10 times on a single boss battle in DDS 2. Some of the joint attacks that become available to the main character late in the game make the final battles extremely easy, if you wish them to be.

Other gameplay problems include the fact that the player has very few things to do during the "evening" period of the game "day". The options, especially early on, are basically just three -- fight, raise attributes, or go to sleep. Later on, one gains the option to develop a social link on certain evenings, but by this time the player may have raised his attributes to their max, further constraining the actions that are worthwhile. The result is that the player either fights, which has a tendency to lead to in-combat boredom and over-leveling, or sends his character straight to bed, which is dull. This will probably be exacerbated in a second play-through, as the academics, courage, and charm attributes are carried over. Sundays are a little hinky in terms of the day progression. The available social links are severely constrained in the period just before an exam at the school.

Equipping your characters and checking their status is also a bit of a hassle: you must speak to them to find out what equipment they have or how close they are to leveling. This is actually fairly necessary, because the experience derived from combat is extremely dependent on the character level and the number of characters in the party. The number shown after combat applies only to the main character himself, and is not the experience received either by the party members or even his own persona. This can make it somewhat difficult to determine if the experience yield from combat is actually sufficient to balance the time investment.

The other main weakness (for me) is that the game is too long. One could easily spend 100 hours on it in a normal playthrough. That's something I don't mind when I'm making a serious push for a complete game, but if I spend that amount of time just experiencing the main events then it becomes a pretty major investment. On the other hand, some people really are looking for that length from a game. This is a matter of personal taste, but you should be aware of it. On the upside, because the game time is so discretized, it's easy to pick up Persona 3 and play it for just an hour or so, and then go do something else. You don't have to invest a lot of time in any single play session, even though the cumulative length of the game is significant.

Graphically, the game is nice, though nothing special. Most of it is presented in a 3-D cel-shaded look, and character interactions are accompanied by well-drawn 2-D images. The character designs are done well, though some costume options were odd. The environments are attractive and sufficiently variable to remain interesting over the great length of the game -- a nifty feat given that there are probably only 40 or so different "rooms" outside of Tartarus, of which maybe 15 are regularly visited. Tartarus itself is something of a disappointment. Although the different "regions" of the tower all have distinct looks, they all have the distinct feel of a building, which doesn't seem quite appropriate for an enormous hell-tower. The artbook also suggests that the journey into Tartarus is intended to symbolize a trip into the human psyche, but this does not come across in the design at all. More could have been done, though I understand why it was not, given the constraints of keeping this all on a single disk.

Most of the personas the main character can get are essentially recycled artwork from previous MegaTen games, although the personas of the secondary characters all have excellent designs, as do the novel personas for the main character. The shadows are new artwork, but these designs are internally recycled quite a bit. In some cases there is a noticeable redesign to go with the repetition, but a number of the enemies are clear palette-swaps. The unique bosses have intriguing designs, however, and the final 'real' boss manages to twist a friendly character's face into an interestingly ghastly rictus of evil.

The cutscenes that are not in the game engine are presented in anime format. The art in these scenes is passable, but has nothing to especially recommend it. The story they are used to convey is powerful in spots, and the mini-narratives that are built into the social links are heartwarming in most cases, and in some are really moving. There are some genuinely funny moments, but the script does not pussy-foot around. One of your friends is facing a terminal illness, several are dealing with divorce or family trouble, and alcoholism and student-teacher affairs appear as well. The problems presented in these narratives feel very real and have realistically ambivalent outcomes. Unfortunately, the main story is much more standard, featuring the by-now-obligatory "twist", and characters who realize, "All this time I was just running away!". Now there's a phrase I'm tired of seeing in video game scripts. The central narrative could have used some work, but this game deserves a favorable rating on the basis of the social link stories.

The audio in the game is alright, but nothing to particularly rejoice at. The voice-acting is a little rough and sometimes doesn't flow well from sentence to sentence, but the voices are mostly appropriate. The music is mostly appropriate and pleasing, but unfortunately you hear all of it a little too much over the course of the game. Most of the sound-effects are good, but frightened shadows running away from you make a terrible noise that will have you reaching for the mute button.

All in all Persona 3 is an excellent game that deserves major kudos for its robust social link system and the accompanying narratives, and for being the only MegaTen game that a normal person is likely to finish without destroying a controller. It's a little long, and the central story is a little weak, but it's mostly engaging and well worth your while, especially if what you're looking for is a long RPG that's long but can nonetheless be played in short sessions.

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