It was Great!

I loved the very simple story of DMC. DMC stars Negishi, a boy who left his home to Tokyo to make his dream come real. He wants to be a guitarist and singer for a trendy band that plays Swedish pop music. But, to his dismay, he ends up being the frontman for indie death metal band DMC, a band notorious for their commitment to everything demonic and metal. Negishi’s onstage persona, Krauser II, is supposed to be a demonic emperor who claims to have raped, killed, and done everything wrong in the world to anyone who has crossed his way (including his parents). Yeah, this is not for those who like cutesy stuff in their anime. Negishi ends up touring across the country, trying to show his love to Aikawa (his unrequited lover), showing his supremacy as a musician, and prmoting his band as the best thing since sliced bread (since the president/manager forces him to). What was great about much of the story was that Negishi really wants to escape his current life, but whenever he tries to do so, hilarity ends up ensuing that pulls him deeper and deeper into the metal world, earning him thousands of more fans daily. Examples of this include: hanging himself, pseudo-humping everything, screaming curses, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. These funny moments I apprecaited very much, especially since I have been exposed to mostly action-based anime with very little humor these past months.

I must say one of the best parts of DMC was Krauser II (aka Negishi’s stage persona). I loved the fact that he would viscerally scream on and off the stage and would say the most insulting things to people. But as soon as he would say something awful, for example, to his unrequited lover, he would immediately try to cover it by saying something else. This type of situation played itself over and over again and I didn’t stop laughing the whole time. I also loved how he would just scream and try to relate everything that he was doing to the fact that he was supposed to be a demonic king from the underworld. Krauser II was the embodiment of everything I love about metal, and I see myself definitely making his costume in the future. I’m attached to the persona duality of Negishi, and I haven’t really let out my inner metal beast in a long time. Besides, it’ll be fun to learn how to do his facepaint and try to create a metal costume. And if people recognize me, I think it’ll be funny to try to say some of the stuff Krauser does, not to mention shredding the guitar with my teeth.

Another great aspect of DMC was that it featured everything that I enjoy about the metal world. It inculded all of the wonderful language: face melting, shredding guitars, double-bass drumming, swearing, demons, blood, sex, gore – all of these I find quite entertaining as a listener of metal. With an anime twist on this culture, it was even better and made me appreciate my love for metal even more. DMC also had all of the fashion of metal: armor, face paint, gloves, and all of the musical equipment. I wanna go out and buy a whole bunch of metal and goth-like clothing now to celebrate my love for metal and DMC. I’ll put some of that on my Christmas list.

I Need Moar!

The only complaint I have with DMC was that the episodes were very short and quick. Each episode was only around 12-14 minutes in length, much shorter than I am used to (but it did feel great to watch 4-6 episodes per night!). Every time I felt like I was getting into the flow of each episode, it would be over, and that made me sad. But I’ll definitely be going back to this anime – as, if you couldn’t tell – is now one of my favorites.

Overall, though, if you want some great laughs, comedy, and a heaping dose of metal in your anime, I’d definitely recommend this for your viewing time. Even if you aren’t into metal that much, I’d still say give it a time if you’re a fan of randomness helping the main character get through many of his troubles.

What I really enjoyed

In Gungrave, there’s a lot of action. And when I say action, I mean violence and fighting. Almost every episode, there’s people beating up each other (in a similar fashion to Fight Club), shooting tons of bullets, blood over the place, supernatural events, or gangs of mafia looting and killing vast amounts of people. If you like a lot of action, this will be your cup of tea (but be forewarned that you’ll have to wait to get satisfied – see below).

I also thoroughly enjoyed the main character, Grave/Brandon Heat. Brandon is a tough and physically fit man who is only motivated by a couple of simple stimuli: love for his girlfriend and the ability to protect his friends and the ones he loves (e.g. his girlfriend and Big Daddy). He also has the ability to completely decimate any enemy that comes his way with his fists and his pinpoint accuracy with any type of gun – whether that be his modified pistol/shotguns or a minigun. He completely rocks, and since I like to protect the ones I love and care for as much as I can, I have placed Grave on my list to make a costume for when I go to a con in the near future.

There were many elements of the main story and its theme that I also enjoyed a lot, too. I enjoyed how Brandon and many of the characters he met ended up changing their lives for the better through the power of protecting the ones you love and the friendship that is created through tight bonds and adversity. Just graduating from grad school and trying to pick up new friends here in Kentucky, and trying to maintain all of my friendships, this theme touched me on a very personal level. I’ll always have a place in my heart for friendship and anime that touch on these powerful themes. I also enjoyed how this anime blended mafia movies, action movies, gunslinging, and a love story (Brandon and Maria, his girlfriend). It was a unique combination that created a new experience every episode, and was interesting to watch and cheer on the main characters.

What I didn’t like as much

As much as loved this anime, which was a lot, there were some parts of this experience that I didn’t enjoy. For me, the biggest part of the anime that I didn’t like was the pacing. The frist episode featured a lot of great action, explosions, destruction, gunfire, and a whole bunch of epic epicness. Then the story did a very long backstory, which I understand why the writers did that, but there wasn’t much action during the revealing of the relationship between Brandon and his friend that would rise to power. At many times, it felt like going through mud, and I didn’t watch as much until the action picked back up within the last 10 episodes.

For me, I didn’t really end up enjoying the music in Gungrave as I thought I would. With a great mafia theme, I would have expected some great 1930s-style jazz or Italian music, but this wasn’t the case. There was mostly down-tempo ambient music with some bass and drums. Occassionally, they’ll slip in some fast drum beats during some of the action scenes, but mostly the music reflected the current flow of the anime: slow and steady, just like the revelation of the backstory. It kept me wanting more from the soundtrack.

Have a great one!

What was Win

The animation and humor also kept me watching the anime. The anime was vivid, and contained tons of color. They also transitioned from traditional drawing to the humorous type of drawing multiple times, which helped to reinforce the humorous aspects of the anime (like the tacos one of the main characters liked to eat, or how they always made the one dude in the club grab all the food). Not only was the animation done well, but they also included special effects like lightning and angel wings, which related to the type of player each character was (e.g. stealthy, attacking, defensive, demonic, etc.). This was pretty darn cool. Oh, and they also did some cool 3D animation of all of the Mahjong tiles when critical times in the game and the story took place.

I could have used less of…

Fanservice. Apparently I’m not the targeted type of viewer for this anime. There was a lot of jiggling. And there were many, many shots of legs and short skirts. Whenever a person was scared, a camera would instantly cut to legs, short skirts, and sweat. Or, when some of the girls would start running, the camera would cut to their short skirts or their anatomy jiggling. Some of the girls would also try to heckle the most endowed character by making her feel bad about her “fat”-ness. Yeah – not needed, in my opinion. There was all of the above to make the anime really fun to watch. But then again, like my friends at work say, I’m not 13, or watching anime for this type of pleasure.

So if you like that type of action as well, then this anime will have everything you’ll ever want. Even still – I’d say go grab this one and enjoy the epic Mahjong action. I’m waiting for season 2 to come out as see what happens next.

A Great Story and Epic Epicness

The Mixed Feelings of the Paradigms and Battle System

Here’s what I didn’t like about the battle system: I didn’t appreciate having to have my characters “locked in” to the different roles (commando, ravager, sentinel, medic, saboteur, synergist) and having to devote time to switching roles with paradigms. There were many times in this game where many of my characters would die because they would get hit during the paradigm switches or right when they were about to save themselves. The last part is sort of expected with gaming, but, at least on the 360, pressing the left-bumper, along with the directional pad, wasn’t very responsive, so I would lose even more time pressing the same buttons over and over again trying to get my team to switch to healing or back to attacking. That is totally aggravating. I also didn’t like how, for every battle, that the first switch of paradigms took forever, but all the rest were quick. This is a classic “cool” thing we get taught in design school: it may be cool to put in for an effect that’ll be used a couple of times, but it quickly loses its charm when it’s repeated thousands of times. And it was repeated at least a thousand times. And then another thousand. While it fits in the realm of Final Fantasy, it does pretty much nothing to help the player, and that’s what I don’t like.

A smaller, yet just as annoying aspect of the battle system, is that you couldn’t tell the characters where to stand during battle. You can help tell them what they should be doing, but pretty much they are glued to the same spot the whole time. And, conveniently for the player, all the characters happen to stand in the same location, making it super-easy for all the enemies to unleash seas of AOE (area or effect) attacks on you, without pretty much any way to defend against them. That causes a lot of unnessecary deaths and a lot of frustration.

A Lot More of the Same

While I do enjoy the ability to jump into a game and the battle system, I have to say there’s a lot of the same. The same grinding experience. Over. And over. And over again. I was able to clear the game in a little over 70 hours, which is about par for a long RPG (it’s 3 discs, after all). But, for more than half of them, I was sitting in the same parts of the world, whether on Grand Pulse, in the mountains, on flying ships, or in fantastical realities just walking around and waiting for monsters to respawn. That’s because the characters I control didn’t have enough abilities/HP/attack to be able to take down a good proportion of the monsters. I got killed – a lot – because either they would 1-shot me, debuff me completely, or just have too much HP and outlast me. And I take care to max out my characters whenever I can, and when this happens, I know that the balance is tipped against the player; this is especially true when most of the monsters have 6 and 7 digits worth of HP. And don’t get me started about the final boss run – it was the first Final Fantasy bosses that actually gave me trouble, even when I was as maxed out as I could be; the designers did a very, very good job at knowing how to make the end as tough and as infuriating as possible.

I also am still contemplating about trying to 100% the game. Evaluating how much I have left to do – maxing out the crystarium (which is about 30 million or so points left to go for me), getting the best weapons and leveling them up to maximum level, and going after all of the hunts on Grand Pulse – will take me, at a conservative estimate, around 70 or so more hours. Before grad school and being at work for most of the day, I could be able to do this in around 2 weeks. Now, with the ability to play about an hour or so a day, and wanting to invest my time in other activities, I’ll probably get to this in about half a year when I’m really bored. Sorry, Square, but that is just a huge wall to complete, and the experience of the battles in this game and the extras is compelling enough for me to come back. I’d come back to make Hope’s costume, but that’s about it.

And this game used the typical bad guy motivation I’ve seen over and over again in many RPGs to destroy the world. While not writing this down to spoil the game for you, I’m really getting tired of this same motivation. Whatever happened to psycho bad guys, homocidal maniacs, or just the most evil people that we have ever seen? I’m hoping those return soon, as I don’t want to be able to guess how the story ends from the moment the final bad guy appears one-third through the game. I think this is one of the elements of many games that pulls me out of the experience of being absorbed in a great game and story and into just a regular game with different characters in it.

I may be a tough gamer, but I really want to help push the medium and the design of games forward. They rely upon building and delivering great experiences, but many times fail to deliver. I would hope they try and use more human-centric means to help build these experiences, and not what technology and sales say games should be.

Even with this in mind, the overall experience of FF13 was quite enjoyable, and I’d recommend it to you. Just make sure you have the time to put into the game, as I’d say you should be able to devote at least 2 hrs per session to get the most out of this game. That’s both its greatest power and weakness. And how to make this game even better? I’ve put hints at what I would have liked to do to help the player: take advantage of how the player wants to play through the battle system, help the player utilize their time better in a game full of grinding, and provide more cues to the player to help him/her not die as much.

So who/what is Bayonetta?

The Good Parts

The Annoyances and Frustration

In simple terms, this game is not for those who want something that is fun and mostly doable from the get-go. Just like Devil May Cry, this game is very, very punishing. If you don’t learn how to put yourself in and out of danger, you’ll find yourself dying every 5 minutes (which happened to me a lot, for many of the reasons that follow). This comes to my first critique: the inconsistent cuing for Witch Time. The game teaches you how to do Witch Time relatively easily in the first few levels: they put guards that come right up to you and swing relatively slowly. Then the framerate will drop for about a half-second. It’s at this point the player needs to press right-trigger (I’m on a 360) to evade and activate Witch Time. As the game goes on, this doesn’t always happen: with large projectiles like buildings and meteors that get thrown at Bayonneta, this camera cuing will happen, but pretty much ceases to happen against most of the regular enemies that she has to kill. Later on, though, to obfuscate this issue even more, Bayonetta gets the ability to negate damage by pressing right-trigger at the exact moment of getting damaged. Why is this frustrating? Because normally before this point I’ve already pressed right-trigger to evade the attack, but can’t really see that I’ve already gotten damaged. So this basically turns into a controlled evade-spam on the controller, which isn’t the most of fun.

And on another note, there’s a lot of button spamming during these challenges, especially to get to the best rankings. I also really, really don’t like having to press a lot of buttons over and over again, especially when I have to repeat the same challenges multiple times over.

The other main critique that I have is that this game transitions to other types of games at the drop of the hat, for many times of no apparent reason other than the game designers wanted it to be difficult or what they think is cool. There are: motorcycle events, jumping challenges, gunning events, and Ikaruga-like challenges, all of which inherit the same annoyances and challenges of the main Bayonetta experience. There was even a rafting challenge, and out of all of these random challenges (it was a boss battle), it was the easiest and most naturally-controlled out of all of them. During motorcycle events, thousands of things keep coming at you from in front, all of which you must destroy and avoid at the same time (all the while, to get the best rating, you should evade right at the point where it is about to hit you, which the game makes hard to time). This wouldn’t be too hard, except that Bayonetta’s awesome hat and hair covers everything in front of her: so by the time you see something you need to avoid, it’s already too late. I had to drive like a drunkard while holding down the shooting button to get any idea as to where I was supposed to be going. This was the same for the Ikaruga-like challenges, except throwing in the fact that the game doesn’t auto-invert the axes for you, so you’ll probably die or get hurt many times before actually getting adjusted to the new control set. The same also goes for the Angel Attack gunning challenges, but those weren’t too bad, as I ended up getting slightly used to having normal axes for this FPS challenge. There were also a couple of challenges were the designers had Bayonetta in a turret, where she has to kill not only the giant boss in front of her, but the thousands of missiles that the boss throws at her. Miss one, which happens a lot because the turret covers some of them (and also the explosions do too), and your life will pretty much instantly go down to zero. And no idea on how to activate Witch Time during this, even though sometimes it would randomly turn on as I would leave the turret. Good job, designers – more like fail.

Basically what this boils down to is that the gameplay especially reinforces the character design: what many male players might deem as complete perfection in a woman. And that type of play style leads to a game that is utterly compelling in its story, but leaves the player utterly destroyed if they don’t know how to understand what the game is telling them. At the end of the day, I had a good time with this game, but it left me shaking my head in frustration at how I can be able to play this game on any of the harder levels.

I’d recommend this if you loved Devil May Cry, or want a really, really powerful story involving the themes of love and protection. If you’re in it for the story, I’d recommend playing it on the easier levels unless you’re wanting to get punished, like I did. It’s not just a fanservice game like I originally thought, but a game about a protective mother who is fast and can take out legions of enemy angels.

The Premise

You get to play Isaac, a space commander sent out into the depths of space when reports of a planet-sized spaceship have gone awry. When Isaac and his crew get to the spaceship (more like a space station), his crew gets sucked into the spaceship, which is conveniently wrecked. Once you gain control of Isaac, you have to find out what has been happening on the ship, to the crew, and most importantly, get yourself off of the ship and back to safety.

Sounds pretty cool, right? You even get to see how this game takes on the dimensions of the Alien universe, bad B-rated horror movies, and how the occult in outer space merge together in this very fun and interesting third-person shooter.

The High-Points and Fun Aspects

There was a lot of really good stuff in Dead Space. From an interface and control aspect, the designers put in many tools to help the gamer get through the ordeals they set up for you. First, they gave you the “mystical blue line that tells me where to go”. By tapping on the right control stick, Isaac puts out his hand and a blue line appears, telling you the direction you have to go. This is very handy because the environments are quite large and dark, and can also help in preparation for many of the ambushes the designers have set up in advance. Another cool aspect is that all of the necessary information from a gaming standpoint (i.e. health, ammo, stasis (the ability to slow enemies down)) was all on the body of Isaac: his spine was his health, his stasis was on his back, and his ammo was displayed whenever one is readying the trigger. Isaac also had some pretty cool telekinetic powers, too.

The designers also did a very good job setting up the mise-en-scene for the game. The lush environments are very reminiscent of the Alien movies, and all of the setups that come from that universe (e.g. scariness and cheap scares). The sounds and the music made me feel like I was actually in the derelict spaceship and I felt a little tense, even though I knew I was playing a game with many cheap B-horror movie scares in it (it got close to the feel of playing Silent Hill, but didn’t get all the way there in terms of scary/creepy). Each chapter (read “level”) was also a convenient section of the spaceship, which you had to explore because new things would go wrong with the ship and Isaac was in the convenient section of the ship to take care of the problems.

All of these great aspects of the game, including relatively simple and straightforward puzzles, kept me interested in this game and I rarely put it down. These great aspects covered some of the parts of the game that ruined many parts of the game for me and turned a great movie/game into utter frustration and horror.

The Let-Downs

While these may be an equal amount of let-downs to the greater aspects of this game, these flaws are pretty obvious and should be brought forward to help other games improve upon them. Isaac’s controls weren’t the best. I found myself fumbling through their controls (but thank goodness I was able to invert the y-axis) and using up my stasis power at times where I wanted to use the telekinesis (pressing left-trigger and X was stasis, and left-trigger and B was telekinesis – their locations were so close and not expected that I would fumble through them and take damage often from this confusion). Isaac was also ridiculously slow – he can stomp enemies and swing at them, but would take an eternity for him to wind up and swing. This was horrible, because there would be many times I would run out of ammo, and the game mentioned to use these tactics if necessary (they mentioned to save ammo, which also means it’s a valuable means to deal damage as well). Also, the mechanism to hold the gun and shoot was horrible as well: using left trigger to aim and the right trigger to fire. Yeah, you read that right – double trigger. If anything, since this game looks like Resident Evil 4 and 5, except that Isaac is on the other side of the camera, I should be able to use the right-trigger to aim and then A to fire, which is certainly more natural and responsive in desperate situations than the double trigger approach (there are A LOT of ambushes in this game where quick timing is necessary for survival).

So, it may look like I may be ranting more about some small details about the game, they are indeed quite large ones that I feel are still prevalent in the gaming industry. Maybe I’m just blowing things out of proportion, but these small things are the things I look for in the gaming experiences to make me enjoy them even more.

I’ll have more thoughts on Bayonetta, which I just finished, too. And that game has a large reflection waiting for it too.

I just finished watching an anime which gave me a really powerful viewing experience. Elfen Lied was the anime I just finished and would like to share my thoughts on the experience.

An Interesting Story

This anime had a really cool premise. There’s this girl, Nyuu (also named Lucy), who escapes from a government facility after being experimented on. In the process of escaping, she uses her natural powers (called vectors, which look like a ton of hands) to rip apart anyone who came along her way. Almost free, she gets taken out by a sniper and finds herself on a beach where our main hero, Kouta, and heroine, Yuka, find Nyuu naked and take her back to their home. Kouta and Yuka then spend their time caring for Nyuu, all the while slowly becoming entangled in the search to find Nyuu, as she is a special type of “mutant” (called a Diclonius) destined to destroy the current human race through genetic superiority. Kouta and Yuka also find a little homeless girl and take her in, after learning about the horrible abuse she has endured through her whole life. The story also features many flashbacks to when Nyuu, Yuka, and Kouta were little and the festival that ended up having a large impact on their current relationship. The search to find Nyuu also embroils another Diclonius, Nana, who tries to bring Nyuu back to those who originally experimented on her, but ends up nearly dying – her arms and legs get ripped off. Nana also ends up finding her way to Kouta’s home as well and even more interesting situations tend to happen there as well. There are many, many battles that end up ensuing to bring Nyuu back, and I’ll leave it there for you to watch if you’re intrigued and want to see for yourself.

Fun and Some Not-So-Fun Aspects of the Anime

This anime is definitely geared towards those who like destruction, blood, and fanservice (I really, liked the story, destruction, and blood). For me, the fanservice kept getting in the way of the main story and its progression. There were times where Nyuu would do sketchy things, like make Kouta grab her, or there would be times where important information for the story would happen while she and other characters would be taking a bath. If that’s what you’re looking for, then you’re in luck. I liked the sound design and the pure and utter destruction that happened. The sounds of the violence and the results of it reminded me of the many video games I like to play that have funny sound effects linked to death (e.g. squishing sounds or screaming). This was one aspect that kept me watching – to see what other acts of destruction and insanity Nyuu would be doing next. And there was no sparing of blood. Lots and lots of it. I also did enjoy the relationship that evolved between Kouta and Nyuu, as it was born out of respect and friendship. But on the flip side, the relationship between Yuka (who ended becoming the most insecure person I have ever seen – every 5 minutes she was contemplating her status in life as a function of her unrequited love of Kouta) and Kouta. I also appreciated how Nana and the homeless girl ended up bonding and becoming close friends throughout all of the rough experiences they’ve had.

I also really enjoyed the music in this anime. It featured many different Roman and Germanic influences. The opening theme was sung in Latin, which was great (since I took Latin in high school), and was also used as a vital element of the story that tightened the relationship between Yuka and Kouta and Nyuu and Kouta. Something that I have grown to learn in watching anime is that when there is Latin and German involved, crazy and occult things will surely be going down. I haven’t watched enough to prove this yet, but I’ll certainly be keeping this theory developing.

If the Anime Were to Continue…

I was pretty let down by the conclusion of the anime. Without spoiling the ending for those who haven’t seen it, there was a screeching halt in the last episode, where some of the main questions were answered (e.g. which characters were saved and which were dead), but there was still an opening for more of the story to be written. For example, they showed the motivation for the bad guy (the typical destroying the world to save it excuse used in many games and anime), but the writers didn’t really do anything with it. They just left that out there and chose to end it on the battle of the different Diclonii.

I would want to know more about Nyuu/Lucy and Nana and how they would rebuild their lives after the battles they have endured, and also would like to see them stop the ultimate bad guy (sorry, forgot the name), because I don’t want to see madmen running companies that try to learn how to harness the powers of biology for evil. I would also just like to see Lucy fight some more, as bodies start to fly whenever she’s around, and the anime did a very good job at showcasing her ability to leave carnage wherever she went. I would also want to see Nana develop more as a character who could stand up for herself, and also take care of the friends she ended up having at the end of the anime.

Here’s hoping for a continuation of the story. Ultimately, though, I would recommend this to you if you don’t mind blood and fanservice.

I just finished watching another cool anime. This was one of the better ones I have seen in a while and I hope my thoughts will suggest that its worth watching for you as well. This time, I finished a series I randomly picked from my anime hard drive, Scryed.

A Cool Story

This may be one long paragraph – just letting you know in advance. Scryed is a story set in a world where there are people born with special powers that can manipulate matter and bend it/recreate in specific ways. This type of special person is called an alter. Alters are born naturally in a special area of Japan separated from the mainland after an incident 20 years ago. Now, the world is in chaos, as a special group of “policemen” in a group called HOLY are specially trained to control the “native alters” to make sure they don’t cause any trouble to those on the mainland. Our hero, Kazuma, is a native alter who is trying to work to make money to feed himself and the little girl whom he protects, Kanami. One day, after finishing a job, Kazuma gets roped into a battle where HOLY is rounding up some of the native alters. Kazuma wipes out a whole bunch of them until one of the toughest members of HOLY (who are all alter users), Rouhou, showcases his power and completely defeats Kazuma. After this point, Kazuma is taken to HOLY but completely destroys most of the place and escapes. After this point, without too many spoilers, many of the episodes feature the ongoing and escalating rivalry between Kazuma and Rouhou, with every landscape and building being destroyed in their path. The series also gets interesting when they reveal another person interested in the powers of alter users and starts to round them up to perform experiments on them. Rouhou and Kazuma then form a temporary alliance and do some major damage on him and his henchmen, for a wonderful viewing experience. I also thoroughly enjoyed the parallels between this story and the events that happened after 9/11, especially in how HOLY and the big bad guy round up people (for no reason reported to them) and the discrimination that happened in the story against the alters from the people in the mainland. It’s either irony or a pure coincidence, especially since the anime was released in late 2001 and ran through 2002. Or it could be that my mind formed a pure coincidence, but it was a good analogy that kept me interested on top of the action and characters in the story.

This is one I recommend watching for its epic characters, action, and story.

Kazuma and Cosplay

I have added Kazuma on to my list of characters I would love to make a costume and cosplay for. I deeply loved his persistence, strength, and commitment to protect Kanami and those who have been attacked by HOLY. I also liked that he wasn’t the perfect type of hero who has his own weaknesses, making him much more of a human and lovable kind of guy. In choosing Kazuma, I’ll have to stick to my exercise regimen I have picked up from a colleague of mine, which is already starting to show results. Also, when I get my Lilypad Arduino skills up even more, I can think about making the back rotator part of the costume actually work when I pose for the camera. I would also like to see, while at the con, if there any others who have seen this anime and strum up a conversation with them in a ridiculously cool Kazuma cosplay. I’m already looking forward to it.

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 Possible 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 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.