The Last Remnant

Every time I get an RPG to play, I’m usually excited. There’s always a good story to look forward to, a battle system to learn and get used to, and a wide range of characters to know and find some favorites. That’s at least what I was thinking when my copy of The Last Remnant came to my mailbox last week, but I was quite saddened and annoyed after playing it (title screen on the upper-left and a cutscene on the upper-right).

A Possibly Good Story

I’ll be upfront with this: I sent the game back after playing around 5 hours of this game. It started off with a good premise: Rush, the main character, is quickly swept into an epic war between two large armies as he is trying to find the evildoers who have kidnapped his sister. In this world, remnants are capable of being used to wield a wide variety of magics, with Rush being special to be able to control them all (at least that’s my guess). There are possibly hundreds of other different characters to learn about and level up. One of the coolest was Lord David (Da-veed pronounced in this game), who wore some cool armor and wielded a gun that could send large blasts of magic down from the sky and wipe out anything that moves. The game most likely followed Rush’s tale across the large 2 disc world to find his sister, complete with twists and turns, but I didn’t get to see those.

Loading Screens Galore

The aspect of this game that broke the experience of a possibly-great RPG. Now, RPGs are normally built with having multiple loading screens, as cutscenes, towns, and other aspects of the world need to be rendered when appropriate. But this game took this aspect a little too far (general loading screen on the far left and battle loading screen on the left). There were loading screens for every town. For every time the map was brought up and I wanted to go to a different part of the world (or town I was in). For every time I started a battle (and there were many, many battles – about 6-7 per submission, but no respawning enemies). So, that might not make the case for you, as you may be used to playing RPGs that have this many loading screens. It wasn’t bad at first, but each time there was a loading screen, it took anywhere from 5-10s to load and let me continue playing. In the gaming world, that’s a really long time. The loading screens also weren’t too helpful in determining how long the loading time was going to be either. I would either receive a tip I knew many times over, or receive a pulsing, glowing screen before every battle. With this happening all of the time, as the game is based upon battling to level and finding new towns and locales, I could not see myself staying for the duration of two discs. Sorry, Square Enix, but this was one of your games that I won’t play (even though it was released in 2008).

Other Let-Downs

And to top all of this off, whenever there were more than 5 people on the screen, the game’s frame rate slowed down to a crawl, so you would just see an explosion/a player’s action take about 3x longer than it should have (or explosions that would clutter the screen and just become pixellated or just be smoky).

The battle system was also quite different than I’m used to and didn’t make too much sense to me either. You control up to 25 people on the field, arranged in different units of 5 people. The unit is measured in terms of HP and AP (hit points and action points for health and magic/actions, respectively). Whenever the unit runs out of HP, the whole unit dies, regardless of whether one of the 5 received all of the damage or all 5 took a little bit of damage equal to the unit’s health. This is something I have never, ever seen before and still confounds me even while writing about this. Another aspect of the battle system which annoyed me was that at completely random times, if I can press a button within a time window presented to me on the screen (this events were critical attacks and critical defenses), I can be able to do some really, really cool stuff. But, these events went by usually way to fast, or came at a point where I wasn’t paying attention (which happens a lot when I play mindless battles in RPGs) – even though the game presented a short window of time for me to press the right button: it would show the controller, and highlight the button it wanted pressed, indicating when the critical event would execute. The designers were cool enough to let me know there was an auto-critical feature, but I could never find it in any of the menus.

If you would like to play this game, by all means go ahead, but just beware of the things I’ve mentioned here. You may be sitting there in front of your TV like I did, sleeping while waiting for action to start.

The Darkness

Here’s another game I just finished playing (I did beat the game) from Gamefly. This game, The Darkness, I really, really wanted to play from the commericals I saw a couple of years ago. I’d like to share my thoughts in a review-like format here, focusing on its strengths and areas for improvement.

The Fun Aspects

The Darkness did have a couple of fun aspects to it. The basic premise was interesting and did provide a couple of moments. You are Jackie Estacado, an orphan turned professional hitman. One day, things go sour and the other goons turn a hit on you (the traditional setup). Jackie finds his way out of his fix when the Darkness, a mythical demon, bonds with Jackie. Jackie then turns his sights to avenge not only himself but his loved ones as well (without any spoiler, there was a brutal sequence with the final bad guy and Jackie’s girlfriend). That was pretty cool. In addition, Jackie gains power from standing in the darkness and can then use the powers of the Darkness (tentacles, guns, black holes, and summoning demons) to take down the thousands of hitmen and stereotypical thugs that come Jackie’s way. I actually spent more time (and had more fun) finding the bonus phone numbers in the game to call the random people of NYC and listen to their answering machines (this was linked to “Bonus Content”) – there were about 100 of them to find, but I didn’t find them all. This was something I enjoyed and looked forward to while playing this game. Unfortunately, that was about it.

A Broken Experience

There were many different aspects of this game that ended up breaking the experience. While this may look like it is in rant form, it is in the best way for me to remember and chronicle these parts of the game which made me not enjoy it. The story had a couple of “random” aspects which made me scratch my head and pulled me out of the experience. While the overarching themes of revenge and love kept me wanting to know more, Jackie ends up getting pulled between the past (in the Darkness’s mind) and present-day NYC. It happened frequently (and you even shoot zombie Nazis) and didn’t give me a chance to adjust to what was going on; I turned into a player that would keep going until the next animated sequence, which I think shouldn’t be the experience to strive for.

Another aspect of this game that really didn’t work out was that it tried to be a mixture of a traditional mafia movie, FPS game, and RPG. I had to constantly run around the subways and streets of NYC to find other people to help (because they have no means to protect themselves), enduring lots and lots of load screens (which were cool at first – it featured Jackie ranting or giving aspects of his background – but then got super-super-repetitive), and trying to shoot many, many stereotypical mafia goons. People named Paulie and such were used all the time, making me not care at all about the people I was helping (or shooting). In addition, the game was loaded with (I think) unnecessary ice cream scoopfuls of f-bombs and other epithets, reminding me of the many bad b-movies I’ve seen (especially the ones on the SyFy channel), and making me care even less about the people in the game. With these elements, I was such removed from the game and caring about the people in the game that I just shot pretty much at anything (or used the tentacle powers) that moved.

Some of the major mechanics of this game also really irritated me and made it more clear I was playing a game that could have been executed better – much better. Everywhere I went, in order to use the powers of the Darkness, Jackie has to be in the dark. But, there’s lights on EVERYWHERE. I had to shoot every single light bulb I would see, lest I couldn’t use any of my powers to keep me alive. The light bulbs didn’t take away me health, but another reason why I did this was because Jackie had pretty much no life whatsoever. Any more than 4-6 shots and Jackie would die (but he is supposed to be stronger and can come back from the dead with the power of the Darkness – some superpowers :( ). James Bond from Goldeneye would last 8 shots on 00 Agent, and he didn’t have any supernatural help. One of the last aspects of the game which could have been improved was the aiming. I like to aim, but if the game presents an auto-aim, which it did, I don’t mind using it. It was especially handy (sometimes) to take out the lights in this game. But, about 80% of the time, the auto-aim would take over while I was setting up my shot, and then revert back to manual aim while I was pressing the trigger. I ended up losing a lot of ammo trying to shoot at lights that the game was trying to aim at. I ended up extremely annoyed at this any would actually talk to the game, asking it why it would do such annoying things.

Overall, though this game is better than some I’ve played, but far, far worse from many of the other FPS games I’ve played. If you’re bored, I’d say go for it, but if you’re looking for a compelling FPS and a story to keep you shooting, I’d say go look for something else.

The New Type of Dance?

Even though I’m not at E3, I’ve still been keeping up through Google Reader on the latest and coolest action there. One of the things that has been getting my eyes and ears ready for some epic epicness is the new game coming out for the Connect from Harmonix. It’s called Dance Central, and I’m pretty excited (as you can already tell).

Coming from the perspective of a long-time DDR and ITG player (check out the link to DDRecall at the bottom page if you would like proof), I’m excited for the opportunity to be able to exercise to some good music, but to also get other parts of my body involved in the action. While there’s nothing wrong with playing all of the 10s, 11s, 12s, and 13s in the normal arcade setting, the play does end up getting a little boring by oneself and just playing to test one’s own skills. Being able to incorporate the other limbs (I’ve gotten to play ParaPara Paradise before and really thought that it was cool to get the arms and legs involved!) presents a great opportunity for fun, the chance to incorporate other people into the fun, and also a way for players and families to push themselves for exercise. I think exergaming is a great way to have fun, get into shape, and provide the basis for a healthier life, and I would love to help design these games, as I’ve lost 60 pounds playing DDR and ITG (in the groove if you’re unsure of this acronym). I also hope that there will be awesome DLC to continue keeping the game fresh, along with combining multiple players through XBOX Live (as I wouldn’t mind encouraging any other players out there to exercise!). Even having the ability to record one’s own routine and possibly incorporating homemade music into the mix may also bring about an opportunity to bring people together through dance, gaming, and exercise.

With the advent of another music game, I still have some reservations about how the gameplay will be like. From my experience, “easy” and “medium” are pretty good exercise routines, mapping pretty well to the music, but “hard” and “expert” really challenge the player and put much more moves/steps in the chart than what most people expect/can handle. With this in mind, I hope there is a lot of playtesting to make sure that all of the moves map well to the music and don’t place many arbitrary “things” into the mix just to make things hard. Examples of these are: making notes not match the music (see “Two Weeks”, Drums Expert, Rock Band), making the scroll rate multiples faster/slower than what the actual music is rated (see any of the Maxes, DDR), or assuming that all music placed into the game will be in 4/4 (that’s a common time signature – see any songs by Rush/Soundgarden in Rock Band to see that asymmetric time signatures don’t work so well). These are the biggest aspects of the game that I think pull the player out of the experience of having fun and exercise, forcing the player to concentrate on the game aspect of the game, rather than enjoying the music and becoming a part of the experience for the audience and other performers (granted, for the hardcore, this is what the experience they want, but as someone who can play the tough stuff, it irks me to no end). That’s the type of play I’m hoping for in this game, and you can find me at the end of this year most likely playing it. I look forward to it, and exergaming with you, the reader, if you are up for some epic music and exercise.

I would also love the opportunity to be able to playtest it, but that doesn’t seem to be likely any time in the future. In the meantime, I’ll keep exercising in the gym and in the arcade to keep my weight down and tone my body for the next costumes I am making :D .

Have a great one!

(images from joystiq and destructoid)

Video Games Live!

Last week, I had the luxury of being invited to go on a road trip to Cincinnati to see Video Games Live (Wikipedia Link). They play orchestrated versions of popular video game music. It took around 3 hours to get there, and we also had the luxury of stopping at a Skyline on the way there (they have good chili if you like chili). The trip was a little long for me, as I was a little scrunched in the back of a Mini-Cooper, and there wasn’t anything exciting for me to watch on the way to and from the pavilion which was hosting the show.

The show was fantastic, and I recommend going if you like either video games or orchestras playing music (or both). Most of the set was from the big names in the industry (like Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Halo, etc.), and was quite entertaining. The show lasted for around 3 hours, and I had the chance to go backstage and see the performers and the host up close and personal. They even gave a double encore, which was even more worth the trip there. It was just that awesome. The pictures posted tell even more of the story.