61 Frames Per Second : jrpg

Series That Have Lost All Identity

Bob Mackey — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:05:00 GMT

Grandia was one of my favorite JRPGs on the original Playstation; despite the game's wonky translation and status as a crummy Saturn port, it had a certain air of infectious, Dragon Quest-y, aw-shucks adventuring that made it very refreshing. A few years later, though, I was unexpectedly disappointed by Grandia 2, which featured the evil church-iest of "evil church" plotlines along with a distinct attitude that didn't mesh well with the previous game--it wasn't too fun to play, either. So, I dropped the series in the early days of this decade and never looked back; and since then, both Grandia Xtreme (argh) and Grandia 3 have come into being, each with their own confused take on what Grandia is supposed to be (whatever that is).

The latest news for the series deals with Grandia Online, an MMORPG announced back in 2005 that'll be seeing the light of day--in Japan, anyway--this May. In a way, Grandia's relatively lukewarm popularity makes this game's continued existence a bit baffling, but one thing makes sense: Grandia is a faceless, shapeless concept that's been synonymous with RPGs for over a decade now. Not the most popular name, sure, but branding is still branding.

There's another franchise out there that's a lot like Grandia today, though it's had many more games and a chance to define itself in its early years: Shining Force. The early Shining games were fantastic--though simple--strategy RPGs, and even the spinoffs had a "feel" that kept them tied to the main series, despite their differing takes on the RPG genre. But when Camelot left the series after Shining Force III--which I'll probably never play thanks to the circumstances of the Saturn--the Shining series went in some weird directions that aren't entirely entertaining. And while someone out there is looking to get the series back on track with Shining Force Feather (argh), which takes the franchise back to its traditional SRPG roots on the DS, there's also Shining Force Cross, a four-player arcade brawler that's--um--you should probably just watch this video.

Just like with Grandia, the Shining Force title is nothing more than a generic RPG signifier now. Any other examples of this depressing trend in action? It'd be interesting to see if any other franchises out there have completely lost their identities.

Related Links:

Your JRPG Narrative is Bad and You Should Feel Bad
Roundtable Discussion: The Relevance of Japanese RPGs
Star Ocean and the HD-JRPG Conundrum

Unsolicited Scares: St Eva from Breath of Fire II Loves You Thiiis Much

Nadia Oxford — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:02:00 GMT

Circumstances beyond my control got me thinking the other day about Breath of Fire II, Capcom's SNES RPG for totally buff men (unless the US box art is lying to me). Breath of Fire II was my first experience with a God-slaying JRPG, and it stuck with me for a few reasons. Reason one: it nearly made me crap my pants.

Every good Messiah hunt includes a foray into the Master's den of cultists, and Breath of Fire predictably sends the hero Ryu and his pals into the heart of St Eva's town towards the end of the game. St Eva is God, but he's not benevolent. What a twist!

The story makes it obvious that St Eva stinks of corruption and rancid food (flowing robes are catch-alls for cheese and salsa drippings), so Ryu is a bit put off when he walks into St Eva's town and finds it a bustling, happy place. Revelers comment on the beautiful weather, the lame can walk, the blind can see, and every dog has a wagging tail.

Ryu thinks, “Well, maybe I had this Eva fellow pegged wrong,” and decides he needs to reconsider his options. He exits the town--

--and finds himself back inside the town gates.

Suddenly, the warm air is icy, and the friendly townspeople have transformed into cackling, shambling husks. I'm making the event sound especially chilly because it had a personal effect on me. See, there was this time I was in a death cult, and—just kidding. But there is a specific reason I never, ever forgot my trip to St Eva's Land.

I'm a very vivid dreamer. Said dreams don't always take me to pleasant places, but I'm used to them by now:

“How did you sleep?”

“Had a dream about dead puppies covered in flies, but all right otherwise.”

So I'm used to waking up, saying “Ugh, okay,” and getting on with my life. But there are still specific dreams that I classify as nightmares. Namely, I fight to get out of a terrible place, burst out of the exit into the fresh air—and find myself back in the house, cave, etc, with some kind of unidentifiable horror right behind me. I usually wake up in a cold sweat.

No doubt everyone has experienced the same dream at some point, likely throughout all their lives. I played Breath of Fire II nearly 14 years ago, but even then St Eva's trap was enough to give me the chills.

Then I smashed St Eva with the Kaiser Dragon transformation. That'll teach him for taking advantage of my psychological weaknesses.

Related Links:

Unsolicited Scares: Threed, Zombie Central
Unsolicited Scares: Terranigma and the Desert
The White Whale: Terranigma and Ahab Gaming

Watcha Playing: AWAY: Shuffle Dungeon

Bob Mackey — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The DS has been my platform of choice lately, mostly due to the fact that the limited nature of the technology forces developers to show some self-control. Case in point: 10 minutes into AWAY: Shuffle Dungeon, and I was actually playing the game; compare this to my experience with Persona 4, where I've already sunk in an entire hour without fighting so much as a single demon. When I was a kid, I never thought I'd see the day when interminable prologues would become the norm.

You may have missed AWAY: Shuffle Dungeon because the title had a quiet October release with little fanfare; and considering that the DS is absolutely overrun with RPGs, it's incredibly easy for something from the genre to be forgotten about after release week. Admittedly, AWAY is a little simple, even when compared the old-school DS Dragon Quest remakes--but it's refreshingly fast, fun, and perfect for short bursts of gaming.

As indicated by the game's title, AWAY involves exploring multiple dungeons--though there's a slight twist on the familiar Zelda-y premise; every so often, one of the DS screens will start to rumble, meaning that your hero (the embarrassingly named "Sword") must hoof it to a stable screen or get shuffled off by the changing layout of the affected screen. AWAY is more of a puzzle game than an action-RPG; most of your time will be spent running from screen to screen, discovering and clearing pathways to treasure, items, and little monster helpers as the dungeon shuffles through some prescribed designs. I've never seen anything like it before, and while I don't know how long they can keep the mechanic interesting, it's certainly made for some tense moments as I've escaped being shuffled by mere tenths of a second.

The non-dungeon segments of AWAY manage to make the core mechanic of the game a little more rewarding; essentially, the premise of the game is to rebuild a small town by finding people and items in AWAY's many mazes. I've always been an insane fan of games that let you change the world in some significant way, and the town-building element of AWAY certainly helps flesh out the admittedly-simple gameplay. I'm not sure if AWAY will hold my attention until the end, but it's definitely sunk its hooks into me over the past few days.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, check out the game's trailer below:

Related Links:

Watcha Playing: de Blob
Watcha Playing Xmas Swag Edition: Rune Factory 2
Watcha Playing: Secret of Evermore

Whatcha Playing: Dungeon Maker II

Joe Keiser — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

These days my launch PSP is held together by masking tape, spit, and prayer. But it does work (for now), and I’m trying to get to know it a little bit better before it inevitably decomposes into its constituent parts. The game of the hour is Dungeon Maker II: The Hidden War, a title from last Christmas that was roundly ignored by all humans.

To be fair, it’s a bit of a minor effort. It’s low budget, free of any and all flashiness, and doesn’t have a lick of polish. But it’s also curiously addictive, so it provides a nice contrast to the modern AAA titles that hide their mechanics deep under pixel shaders and mocap animation. Dungeon Maker II is a throwback: like the low-tech games of yore, its mechanics sit exposed and naked under the nose of the player, and so have to be compelling on their own.

A dungeon crawler at heart, you can probably glean the twist that makes the game worth playing from its title. Dungeon Maker II’s conceit is that you are a warrior-architect. Your goal is to build a luxurious dungeon that will attract monsters to its depths, because when monsters are in dungeons they’re not annoying people in the streets. It’s more or less Diablo, except instead of a randomly generated dungeon you’re traversing a constantly repopulating lair of your own design. It’s a trade-off of a sense of exploration for a sense of ownership (though there are still some computer-generated spaces for when your own space makes you stir-crazy), and gives the game a charm all its own.

It’s also a simply implemented twist—dungeons are graph paper dungeons, two-dimensional and all right angles, but that makes them intuitive to set up. The graphics are plain as is technically possible, but are iconic so it’s easy to get on with the building/slaying/loot gathering aspects that will keep you playing. Combat is…clunky and mechanical, but it gets the job done. There’s no excuse for the music, though, so you should mute that.

So the game has lots of edges, and none of them were smoothed off. It gives a lot in return, though. In just a few hours, you’ll have a cavernous self-built play space that you feel a strong connection to. The game drops loot frequently and with significant variety, which you can bring to town (again, a work of minimalism—it’s a single, hand-painted screen) to trade for a constantly growing array of spells, cooking ingredients, and exotic dungeon rooms.

Dungeon Maker II is not shy about its grind cycle. This is a game where every gear is exposed, a game so plain and unpretentious that its closest technical relative might be NetHack. And yet after a game like Star Ocean: The Last Hope, little, obsolete Dungeon Maker II feels refreshingly straightforward.

Related Links:

How Sony Can Save the PSP in 2009
Persona Comes to PSP
Where Is the PSP?

The 61FPS Review: Star Ocean The Last Hope

Joe Keiser — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Star Ocean 4 is a tragic creature. It’s not a great game, nor can it even see greatness from where it is now. Instead, it feels like it was dragged, kicking and clawing, away from greatness by wicked beasts that feed only on the worst excesses of Japanese pop storytelling.

So its story is almost unfathomably bad. Here is one Edge Maverick, who goes against what his parents wanted for him by being neither edgy or a maverick. Born on a post-apocalyptic earth, he is but a cog in the government division tasked with finding a new home world for the remainder of humanity. A coincidental calamity sees him promoted to captain of his own ship, with his mission clear: mankind is choking on fallout, so go find a new planet for them. Preferably one without giant man-murdering insects.

He immediately loses the plot. Long before he finds himself embroiled in a conflict for the fate of the universe, Edge is compiling his ragtag team of horrifying cosplay clichés: there’s a winged girl in there, and an embarrassingly clad catgirl, and at least two different varieties of space elf. He takes this merry band of awfully voice-acted annoyances across a series of nearly non-sequitur adventures, none of which have anything to do with colonizing the galaxy. Perhaps because he has confused being the universe’s most incompetent space captain with being a maverick, he messes up nearly all of these missions, which apparently excuses him to spend hours and hours as a mopey drama queen.

Eventually we do get to the battle for all life, and things get even worse. It’s a turn of events that gets all of the actors talking incessantly about “evolution,” except none of them know what “evolution” is, giving it at least three different definitions but using them interchangeably, to the point where it’s no longer clear what the main villain is doing or what anyone should learn from any of it. So it’s no surprise when all the characters take the wrong lesson away at the end, though it is hilarious.

This complete mess is relayed in a never-ending barrage of excruciating cutscenes, but the real tragedy of Star Ocean: The Last Hope isn’t that it’s a terrible game with a terrible, terribly acted plot. It’s actually quite a good game with a terrible, terribly acted plot. From a technical perspective this is about as good as the JRPG has ever gotten—Tri-Ace’s lovely engine pumps out some lush and colorful vistas while keeping framerates high and load times nearly nonexistent. The super-fast realtime battle system balances chaos and twitch with an incredible amount of tactical depth. The difficulty curve forces you to learn all of its many nuances, so by the end of the game you’ll be juggling quick attack chains with methodical menu-based magic, mixing fully aggressive attacks with slower but more damaging blindside attacks, and switching characters in and out of the party while switching which character is under manual control. There’s even a customizable bonus board, which rewards certain battle actions like critical hits with percentage increases to things like experience and gold acquisition. And the increase persists from battle to battle until you take a critical hit yourself, adding a level of tension to the affair.

This battle system is well integrated into the game’s other subsystems, which include character growth, item creation and data collection. These systems are for the most part well implemented. Character development is primarily handled through the enhancements of skills via scarce skill points, forcing the player to often make difficult decisions about who needs to be better at what right now. Item creation is based on a tangled web of dozens of collectible doodads, with item recipe discovery based primarily on character skills. The data collecting element rewards battling enemies with increased enemy info—battle a specific type of creature enough and you’ll be able to capture their essence into an accessory, providing stat gains based on the nature of that creature. There’re a huge number of interlocking gears for the maximal player to keep in mind, which is good. It’s interesting. And the reward for playing long and well isn’t just better characters and loot, there’s also a wealth of contextual information to read through.

This is all well and good, but Star Ocean: The Last Hope is designed in a way that minimizes its strengths. Combat is fun, but dungeons are long and strenuous affairs with architecture often repeating and save points spread far apart. The sheer number of battles will begin to grate, and then you’re rewarded with…another shrill, nonsensical cutscene.

The reason I spent the beginning of this review on the game’s story is because Star Ocean: The Last Hope is an incredible case. It’s fun, on several levels. But here fun is not enough, because the game’s universe is simply a place that you do not want to visit. If you watch the cinemas and leave on the voice-acting it’s like going to Disneyland except you have to ride the teacups for hours at a time and it’s “Douchebags Get In Free Day”. Turn all of that off (and there are a wealth of options to do that, including turning off character voice individually) and it becomes an empty, more joyless sort of fun.

I requested the review for this game having not played a Star Ocean before because it was made clear to me that Star Ocean: The Last Hope, being a prequel, would be a good way for a JRPG fan to jump into the series. Unless you can watch all of the embedded cutscenes in this review without wincing, I would recommend you do not follow my lead.

Rating: C-

Past Reviews:

Killzone 2
Noby Noby Boy - part 1 & part 2
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

Realize the Futility of Life with The Linear RPG

Bob Mackey — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Being a serious RPG gamer involves a certain amount of lying to yourself--especially if you happen to be a fan of traditional, linear RPGs. I'm currently in the middle of Dragon Quest V (review forthcoming, I swear), and for as much fun as it is, if I were to view the game solely based on its most essential elements, I'd be rather disillusioned. For what is the Japanese RPG but a place to do nothing but sink one's time? Sorry for the formality--my mind has been blown apart by the subject of this post, and all I can do is think back to my high school English classes to form cogent sentences.

The reason my world has been rendered to rubble is primarily because of Sophie Houlden's Flash game, The Linear RPG. As I stated before, there's nothing more shameful for an RPG gamer than to have his (or her) genre revealed to be a total sham, and that's what The Linear RPG is all about. The game breaks the genre down into its most simple components; you control a stick figure who wanders from town to town as the game's story scrolls by in the background, completely dependent on your progress. It's not technically a game, per se, but that's exactly the point it's trying to make; all of your traditional RPGs are essentially The Linear RPG, except dressed up with bells and whistles.

Go here and check it out--and don't be surprised if grinding suddenly becomes a much emptier experience.

Related Links:

Your JRPG Narrative is Bad and You Should Feel Bad
Roundtable Discussion: The Relevance of Japanese RPGs
Star Ocean and the HD-JRPG Conundrum

The One Thing Games Should Take From Star Ocean: The Last Hope

Joe Keiser — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Perhaps you recall that one cutscene that was posted here a week ago from Star Ocean: The Last Hope. It was a beastly thing from the darkest depths of the uncanny valley, writhing grotesquely in vibrant 720p. Well, it’s even worse in English—I have embedded that version after the jump, and if you think that I did that because I hate you that is completely fair.

I’m playing the game for a forthcoming 61FPS Review, and thirty hours in the good news is that so far this wins the battle for the “Worst Cutscene in Star Ocean: The Last Hope Award”. The bad news is that the battle for that award is titanic in scale—this game is packed densely with cutscenes, many of them twenty minutes long., and eventually they all combine into a single Lovecraftian horror of wild gesticulation and ear-wrenching voice acting. The producer of the game recently talked about games surpassing film as a storytelling medium. I hope he was speaking in general terms, because his team sure can’t do it alone.

I’m off topic. “Make sure your cutscenes are consistent in their ability to cause pain” is not the lesson the industry should take from Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Instead, it’s the elegant way the game lets you skip them.

It’s just a little thing, really, but I’m completely amazed I’ve never seen its like before. See, you can skip the cutscenes in The Last Hope. But instead of just leaving you adrift without a story compass like way too many games do, this one replaces the scene with a paragraph of summarization as to what you just chose to miss. As the parts of the game that you don’t watch can actually be rather pleasant, this is the kind of boon I wish I had known about, oh, thirty hours ago (though I’ll still be watching them, actually: due diligence and all that).

I don’t know if Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the first game to do this. It’s a simple idea, so I can’t imagine it is. That’s not what I’m really talking about here. What I am saying is that, for games where story doesn’t want to be there but for some reason has to be (and Star Ocean: The Last Hope is very much one of those games), there’s no reason to not do this. So why isn’t everyone doing it?

Related Links:

Star Ocean: The Last Hope Is Creepy as Hell
Your JRPG Narrative is Bad and You Should Feel Bad
JRPG Stories: Awful

Where is Shadow Hearts?

Bob Mackey — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

The last generation of consoles wasn't exactly kind to JRPGs; for as much as genre shined--or perhaps peaked--in the 32-bit era, the early years of the PS2, XBox and GameCube gave us nothing but a shoddy lineup of lukewarm titles with an endless supply of randomly-generated dungeons. These systems were eventually home to some great RPGs that haven't yet been topped by anything on the current generation of hardware--like Dragon Quest VIII and Final Fantasy XII--but we had to wait until said consoles were on their last legs before we got anything worth playing. But amongst all of those shoddy Shining Force derivates and tri-Ace travesties, a certain trilogy sat quietly in the background, ignored by most who (rightfully) assumed it was just another exercise in inanity. This mystery series I speak of is Shadow Hearts, which may in fact represent the last time a developer actually had fun with the JRPG genre.

I'll admit that I don't know much about the first Shadow Hearts; I played it at a time when my disappointment with Final Fantasy X chased me away from JRPGs for a while. But the game's gothic horror atmosphere was certainly original, and would soon be tempered by a distinct sense of wackiness that belongs purely Shadow Hearts. Usually, the story in any JRPG consists of eye-rollingly bad cliches presented with utter sincerity by a development team who should really know better. But from the second Shadow Hearts game onwards (and perhaps a little in the first), developer Sacnoth seemingly realized the general ridiculousness of JRPG plots in general and decided to make the most insane, poorly-researched historical tales imaginable full of absolutely crazy and anachronistic characters.

The games mostly take place around the first quarter of the 20th Century, though through a poorly-informed and possibly-on-shrooms lens. The second game--which inspired this Penny Arcade comic--is a romp around Europe during those feelgood days of World War I, and throws famous fictional and non-fictional characters in your party like Gepetto (yes, from Pinocchio) and Princess Anastasia as you cross paths with historical baddies like Rasputin. The third game takes place mostly in America, and provides an alternative take on organized crime (Al Capone's loving sister gets changed into a mutant hellbeast), with a very special appearance by author H.P. Lovecraft. Of course, these are only the zaniest highlights that I can still remember; the games are chock-full of off-the-wall takes on world history and JRPG tropes, and happen to be one of the few RPG series I've played just to see what happens next. It also helps that the gameplay itself, with an involving combo battle system and oodles off interesting sidequests, is involving outside of the sheer insanity of the Shadow Hearts narrative.

At this point in time, the fate of the Shadow Hearts series is pretty grim; developer Sacnoth (which reorganized into a team called Nautilus after the first game) recently transformed into feelplus Inc., which now works on decidedly-inferior games like Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon Plus. Looking at the development costs necessary to make an RPG these days, it seems extremely unlikely that we'll see anything as goofy as Shadow Hearts for a long time. But until then, there's always a chance to revisit the series through eBay. I can't think of a better way to spend all of that time I'll be unemployed in the not-too-distant future!

Related Links:

Where is Victor Ireland?
Where is… Oh Wait, Hydrophobia’s Right Here!
Where is Doug TenNapel?

JRPG Stories: Awful

Cole Stryker — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

I have to watch my step around these parts, as I am surrounded by JRPG devotees. That won't stop me from making fun of them occasionally, or praising my fellow journalists when they do so. Paul Ryan at Games Radar has crafted a list of JRPG tropes out of which even superfans should get a chuckle.

Starting with the beginning, you've overslept and upon waking an old lady needs your help. While helping her you meet your best friend and someone gives you a weapon.You listen to the villages rumors about an encroaching evil, so you explore the surrounding area, only to uncover a government conspiracy/religious cult. Your village gets burned down, so you and your friends go on an epic adventure that ends with you discovering an ancient evil that can only be defeated with the power of an ancient race. There's a lot more, but I won't ruin the rest. It's worth reading in its entirety, so go do that.

This list reminds me of something I read years ago called "The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches". With nearly 200 items, it remains the definitive statement on the unoriginality of Japanese RPG writers. Come to think of it, reading this list almost makes the Games Radar list look like a complete ripoff. My favorite:

Wait! That Was A Load-Bearing Boss!
Defeating a dungeon's boss creature will frequently cause the dungeon to collapse, which is nonsensical but does make for thrilling escape scenes.

Your JRPG Narrative is Bad and You Should Feel Bad

Whatcha Listening To?: Ebben Flow Soundtrack

Star Ocean: The Last Hope Is Creepy as Hell

Bob Mackey — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Whenever I see media for Square-Enix's Star Ocean: The Last Hope (out this week if you didn't know), I can't help but feel a deep, troubling sickness in my soul as my skin literally tries to crawl off of my body to a safe place where the game's creepy anime RealDoll versions of human beings do not exist. Of course, I could just be feeling residual effects from having suffered through Star Ocean: Till the End of Time oh so many years ago, but that doesn't mean something is not very wrong about Star Ocean 4's creepy puppet people--especially when you consider the fact that the director harbors a desire to make "adult" games. I don't know if you can picture dead-eyed automatons like the one above bumping uglies, but I imagine the rape scene in Silent Hill 2 is far more arousing.

The Last Hope developer tri-Ace seems to have a serious problem with making human characters that don't want to make you jump through the nearest window; just check out their work on Infinite Undiscovery--the 1:55 mark is when you should start screaming.

There seems to be a strange set of mixed priorities at work here; namely, how developers like tri-Ace motion-capture actors who over-gesticulate like costumed theme park characters, but pay absolutely no attention to how everyone in their games have the facial expressions of corpses. I'm not sure if Japanese developers turn a blind eye to The Uncanny Valley, but the effect seems to be at work more often in Eastern games--which is odd when you think about how willingly the Japanese audience accepts a more cartoony aesthetic. I guess the only way to teach them a lesson is to not buy Star Ocean: The Last Hope, unless you feel safe about a loved one or family member possibly walking into your living room and seeing something like this:

Related Links:

Star Ocean and the HD-JRPG Conundrum
Looks Are Everything
Turning Japanese: Microsoft’s Latest Ditch Effort to Win the East

The Things We Do For Levels

Bob Mackey — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

It all started about 10 years ago with a little game called Final Fantasy VII--actually, it started many years before that, but in my head the origin of this particular issue starts with Square's world-changing blockbuster. You see, as a teenager with a lot of time on his hands and no real income to speak of, I felt obligated to get the most out of every game I purchased; and with Final Fantasy VII, this meant I eventually invested hours and hours in the delightful field of Chocobo breeding. But there was just one problem: the racing necessary to beef up your breeding Chocobo's stats was extremely boring, and, if I remember correctly, only required the mashing of a single button.

My solution to combat this boredom? Whenever a race started, I would entertain myself by hitting "play" on the nearest VCR remote control--usually with a recent episode of The Simpsons--and come back to my game minutes later, already in progress. But the problem of needing backup entertainment to entertain me when my regular entertainment wasn't cutting the mustard didn't really dawn on me until later in life. Let's just say that I'm happy I never played video games on a picture-in-picture set; it probably would have corrupted my gaming habits permanently.

Since I still play RPGs, the problem of grinding (for levels, money, or anything) hasn't really gone away--though most modern developers are far more generous in this area than they have been in the past. Still, even remakes of old RPGs can pose a problem; I'm currently going through the bonus content of Dragon Quest IV, and I need about five more levels before I can take on some overpowered optional bosses--the only problem is that, at this point in the game, it takes about 45 minutes (my estimation) to gain a single level. So what have I been doing to combat the endless joy of hammering on the A button? You name it: listening to podcasts and audio commentaries, browsing the Internet on my laptop, catching up on old TV shows over at Hulu--anything, really, to keep me distracted from the task at hand. If I were to explain my mad multi-tasking to someone unfamiliar with RPGs, they'd probably think I was crazy--and I just may be.

So, what does everyone else out there do when grinding becomes a necessity? I can't imagine that I'm the only one who keeps multiple sources of entertainment at hand in case of boredom-based emergencies. Ah, the privileges of first-world living.

Related Links:

Roundtable Discussion: The Relevance of Japanese RPGs
Star Ocean and the HD-JRPG Conundrum
The 61FPS Review: Dragon Quest IV – Chapters of the Chosen

Roundtable Discussion: The Relevance of Japanese RPGs

Bob Mackey — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Roundtable Discussion takes the intrepid 61FPS blogging team and pits it against itself in the search for deeper truth. The moderator for today is Bob Mackey.

This week’s conversation deals with the mythical and possibly endangered beast known as the Japanese RPG. The genre really seems to be suffering during this generation, for two major reasons: 1.) escalating development costs due to the new necessity of high-polygon, HD resources and 2.) developers’ inability to combat the most damning problems of the genre. Over the past few years, we’ve seen quite a few JRPGs hitting the shelves that feel half-finished at best; and even when a fully-realized JRPG comes along, I worry that the absolutely abysmal pacing the genre is infamous for will end up sucking all the fun out of what could be a fantastic game. To start us off, I have two basic questions: 1.) What does the genre need to do to become interesting again, and 2.) what do you think it will do?

On a side note, the only RPGs I’ve been interested in lately have been ports of remakes of classics. Is this a sign that the genre is becoming antiquated and only accessible to those (admittedly, quite a few at this point) with an understanding of its unique grammar?

Joe Keiser: I assume we're talking about current-gen console JRPGs here, as I feel the handheld JRPG field is perhaps the most vibrant it's ever been. To answer your questions:

1. Lots of JRPG ground has been broken on the PS2 in its twilight days. Final Fantasy XII, Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria, and the Persona series all did fascinating new things with the genre that begged to be explored further. That's why it was very strange to me to see such regressive RPG design in the likes of Lost Odyssey and its brethren. There's so much excellent recent prior work to look at! So why do some of these games look back so far?

This is not a very creative answer, but JRPG developers don't seem to be particularly bold these days and I'm trying to be realistic with my expectations.

2. Fortunately, men who are much more creative than me have been given years to come up with ways to make things interesting again. I think they will. I think the real problem developers have been running into this generation (besides the general Japanese console development malaise) is that there hasn't been a leading title to come out and show the little guys that actually, there is a market for JRPGs on Xbox 360 or Wii. All we've seen so far is supposedly "exciting" titles like Lost Odyssey meet general apathy at retail, which couldn't have been heartening to anyone holding any sort of purse strings. When the Level-5s or Square Enix internal teams of the world release something that cannot under circumstances afford to fail (does the game I'm thinking of have a large roman numeral in the title? Maybe.) I think you'll see the floodgates open again. Heck, maybe Tri-Ace will do it!

Maybe.

John Constantine: Hear, hear on the handheld JRPG scene. How’s that saying go? Where Dragon Quest goes, so goes the genre! What’s most telling about the preponderance of remakes on the DS and PSP (the lion’s share of them coming from Square-Enix) is that it indicates the birth of a brand new audience being inculcated with the genres unique grammar. These re-releases pull in both lapsed gamers as well as sell to those new gamers just getting reared on what’s available for the system. For every Final Fantasy, Tales, DQ, Star Ocean, etc rehash that hits the DS and PSP, there’s two brand new JRPGs with decidedly fresh mechanics waiting in the wings. Just look at stuff like Riz-zoawd, Atlus’ just-released My World, My Way, Yuusha no Kuse ni Namaiki da on PSP, and Yuusha 30. And how could I not mention that game we all love so dearly, The World Ends With You? Even Hironobu Sakaguchi’s DS debut, ASH, took some risks, as opposed to the stale traditionalism of his Xbox 360 games. ASH sucked, but it was different, right?

But this is the biggest Japanese genre in history, so what about the big, big systems. Given how reluctant the vast majority of Japanese developers have been to make anything for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 (even the Wii really), it’s none too surprising that the few JRPGs to show up on those systems have been stale as week-old bread. Especially Mistwalker’s games. The Gooch made the type of games that made him famous, games that are just about two decades old now. It’s ironic then that Lost Odyssey was co-developed by the team behind the Shadow Hearts series, some of the freshest RPGs to grace the Playstation 2. Joe’s right: close to a decade old, and the PS2 is still seeing exciting new ideas in the genre. In addition to the examples mentioned, I think the most exciting evolution of the JRPG on the PS2 is also the exact franchise that has the best chance of bringing life to the genre on current home consoles. Yakuza, baby. The Yakuza games flat-out are JRPGs, just with a different kind of battle system. They’re fast, detailed games that succeed by foregoing some of classic JRPG design’s most tiresome tropes, i.e. having to talk to every single NPC, menu-based fighting, needlessly grueling level grinds. I sincerely believe that Yakuza 3 is going to be the game that finally pushes more devs into the next-JRPG-gen.

Yakuza also does precisely what I think needs to be done to make every other JRPG interesting again. It has legitimately good writing and plotting. Not okay writing. Not good-for-a-game writing. Just good writing. For a genre that’s sold itself on affecting narrative, the vast majority of writing in JRPGs is crap. But it has to be married to faster play, like you see in Yakuza, TWEWY, and FFXII to really make JRPGs great. Lost Odyssey had good writing but the game, what you played, was sllllllllloooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwww. I genuinely think that’s what’s going to happen too. I’m an optimist. Like you said, Bob, that Final Fantasy XIII trailer, against all odds, was exciting. The old way of things will stick around too. Gotta re-release something, right?

Cole Stryker: Before I even begin I must request that everyone read this, one of the best pieces of game criticism I've ever read. JRPG fans should prepare to be offended. It contains the following money quotes:

Western CRPGs have kept evolving because there has always existed consciousness of a direction towards which to evolve; JRPGs, meanwhile, have been going round in circles ever since their inception -- Fallout is worlds away from Akalabeth; not so Rogue Galaxy from Final Fantasy.

The only kind of evolution JRPGs have undergone is of a cosmetic nature: Final Fantasy was no Ultima, and its endless sequels had to be justifed in some way -- and so they were. CG or anime-style cutscenes and countless hours' worth of voice-acting and orchestral soundtracks were the justification, piled up, stacked and shoved inside cartridges...

Now then. It's no secret that I'm not a fan of JRPG's. It seems to me that the things holding JRPG's back are the very characteristics that define the genre. So I guess this is another way of saying that the best way to make a good JRPG is to not make a JRPG.

Firstly, expensive poly counts have to go in order for this genre to mean anything to me. I'm happy to see that recent portable JRPG's have done this, though I haven't played any of them. They practically had to, with the limited graphical capabilities. It's interesting how a dearth of technology can actually amount to a better game because it allows developers to cut the fat.

Secondly, we've got to lose the cutscenes. Kierkegaard tells it like it is in an epic burn, calling Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, "a groundbreaking JRPG comprised of a single 106-minute-long cutscene, whose only flaw was that it didn't give players the option to skip it." Oh snap, son. The cult of celebrity that JRPG composers enjoy also brings the genre down. Focus on what's under the hood, please.

In order to push the genre into new territory, JRPG's should decide whether they want to be actual role playing games or strategy games rather than a mediocre mixture of both. I'd much rather play a proper RPG like Planescape Torment or a proper strategy game like Advance Wars than a JRPG which offers an hamstrung version of each. Even my favorite JRPG franchise, Earthbound, is super guilty of this. The combat system, even the rhythm based one in Mother 3 is pretty mindless. Developers need ways to mix up the combat mechanics. Use Ice Power to kill Fire Demons. Fight Night Wraiths with the Heavenly Light Arrows. Yawn. Chrono Trigger made these weaksauce mechanics obsolete well over a decade ago.

Make them shorter. I just don't feel like investing 70+ hours on a JRPG. The last one I played was Baten Kaitos, a reasonably fun card-based RPG. I burned out halfway through and haven't played one since (except for the nostalgic Mother 3, for which I made an exception).

Now that I've covered where I think JRPG's should go, I'll talk about where they will go: Nowhere. There are too many people out there content to play bad games. The continued existence of the Final Fantasy franchise is proof enough.

Bob Mackey: Well, there you have it; another week, another great discussion. Feel free to weigh in with your own thoughts in the comments.

Related Links:

Roundtable Discussion: Where is the Handheld Version of Console Wars?
Roundtable Discussion: The Fandom Phenomenon Part 1
Roundtable Discussion: The Fandom Phenomenon Part 2
Roundtable Discussion: The Fandom Phenomenon Part 3

Whatcha Playing: Tales of Phantasia (PSX)

Bob Mackey — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

I've just sent my unfinished copy of Tales of Vesperia back to that big GameFly distribution center in the sky (or possibly Pittsburgh), which makes it the fourth Tales of title since Symphonia that I've been completely bored with--the others (in chronological order) were Legendia, The Abyss, and Dawn of the New World. As much as I wanted Vesperia to grab me, it was loaded down with the same problems that make me feel like a jackass for still showing interest in the JRPG genre; hell, even I can't tell you what keeps me coming back.

Around the same time I started playing through Vesperia, I picked up my first laptop, which unexpectedly became a portable Playstation--through completely legal means, I assure you. And since I'd been holding onto the new-ish translation of the PSX Tales of Phantasia remake (unreleased here), I figured I'd give it a spin to see if my interest in the franchise was always so ill-fated. Would you be surprised if I told you I ended up sinking more time into Phantasia than its much younger sibling?

No, I guess you wouldn't.

I think my love of the early Tales games (Phantasia, Destiny, and Eternia--released here as Destiny 2) stem from the fact that they feel like such labors of love. Arguably, Wolfteam was on firm ground from Destiny onwards, but the first three games of the franchise feel like they were handled with much more care than the factory-processed Tales games Namco now poops out twice yearly.The entirely-2D nature of the older titles may have a lot to do with it; the Tales series always had a reputation for really crisp, detailed sprites, but in the move to 3D, things got much more spartan and boring. Phantasia also has a refreshingly simple battle system in comparison to the cluttered controls of Vesperia, which asks you to push up and a button at the same time for a simple action like jumping. I dunno; it seems that the older I get, the more I start to realize that the limited framework of the traditional JRPG can only be stretched too far before it breaks.

For a more in-depth discussion on the JRPG, I'm afraid you'll have to wait for this Friday's 61FPS Roundtable Discussion on the topic. But please weigh in with your thoughts on the Tales series; I'm interested in knowing if it's lost anyone besides me.

Related Links:

Bad Games With Good Music: Tales of Legendia
Pay-Per-Grind: Tales of Vesperia Lets You Level With Cash
Star Ocean and the HD-JRPG Conundrum

On the Importance of World Maps

Bob Mackey — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

One of the major reasons JRPGs lost me a little during the last generation was the stripping away of one of the genre's most defining features: the explorable world map, which was taken out of many games in favor of less resource-intensive travel options. Now, I'm still a little conflicted about this; on one hand, I do like the intuitive menu-based exploration of games like Persona, and I've repeatedly learned (especially this fall with Opoona) that making a player traverse large expanses of land is an excellent way to pointlessly stretch out a game for dozens of hours. On the other hand, including a Super Mario World-ish map in an RPG always felt a little cheap and cop-outey to me; when I saw this choice show up in Final Fantasy X, I assumed that Square had signed some sort of contract with The Devil himself (little did I know they had done this a few months prior with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within). It seems that the whole world map issue is entirely about fooling players into thinking your game world is more than a bunch of "rooms" stuck together, all while making sure not to bore them with interminable traveling.

It's a tricky balance.

My preferred take on the RPG world map--and one you don't see very often--is when the "outside world" of the game is on the exact same scale as the rest of the areas you explore (towns, caves, towers, etc.). Obviously, if you're trying to make your game world a complete, explorable "planet," which is the choice with 99% of all RPGs, this is quite a tall order. Some of the more successful examples of this school of design are Earthbound, a game that felt much more colossal than the standard, epic, medieval RPGs of its era, and Dragon Quest VIII, which to this day feels like the only fully-realized RPG of the PS2 generation--and the fact that everything in the game is on the same "scale," so to speak, may have something to do with that. In fact, the game sort of brags about its epic scope with an early mission where a character asks you to retrieve something from under a red tree off in the distance; he doesn't tell you how to get there, and the entire trip involves careful exploration with nary a loading screen to be found. Very effective.

So, what's the verdict from the rest of you guys on world maps: an important element of the JRPG, or yet another thing I'm blowing way out of proportion?

Related Links:

Your JRPG Narrative is Bad and You Should Feel Bad
Star Ocean and the HD-JRPG Conundrum
Hey, RPG Hero: Go Home and Be a Family Man

Whatcha Listening To?: Ebben Flow Soundtrack

Cole Stryker — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Behold, the Spinal Tap of JRPG music! Ebben Flow is a nonexistent Japanese role playing game that serves to provide a conceptual backdrop for the music of one Michael Chadwick. Here's a synopsis of the game, which I repeat, doesn't actually exist:

Join Olos, Claire, and Senegal as they try to make sense of a world now mostly underwater, save for a few dry patches of land known as The New United Islands which they each call home. Vast cityscapes loom in the murky depths and hidden treasures pocket the sea floor which has now become dangerously low to visitors.

Each of the characters you will meet and control have their own agenda in the land of Ebben Flow. Their paths may cross and diverge at will, leading to exciting new tangents and side stories. Several factions desire to rule their local and remote islands, as well as the depths below, and they're not above treachery or chaos to achieve it.

I don't think that Chadwick intended this to parody JRPG composers, but I think it does a fine job of illustrating how staid and unsurprising the music has become over the years. Furthermore, his character description is clever satire of common JRPG cliches. Consider "Claire":

A quiet feeling of dread permeates her soul, however. Despite the high bounds of her optimism she knows it could all be a lie. Left for dead by parents massacred in a great war two decades ago, Claire has found her moral and ethical compass composed of the world aroud her. Scrappy, yet kind, she's sure opportunity is out there somewhere, as long as she keeps looking for it.

It's just as good as most JRPG soundtracks, and though you can probably tell I don't think much of that whole genre, it's a fun project and worth a listen for giggles. Download a zip file of the entire soundtrack and immerse yourself in the epic marine adventure.

(via Kotaku)

Bad Games With Good Music: Eternal Sonata

Bob Mackey — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:15:00 GMT

Fun fact: I'm such a video game music nerd that I'll usually slog through the worst of experiences if the tunes happen to tickle my fancy. This should serve to explain why I spend so much time with mediocre titles better left unplayed--and also why I keep the contents of my iTunes library far, far away from people who respect me. One game this past summer is a perfect example of this phenomenon: Namco's Eternal Sonata, a pretty-yet-underdeveloped JRPG with one of the more embarrassing plots I've ever had to sit through. Because I've played many Tales of games, I was familiar with composer Motoi Sakuraba's previous work; though most of the time I found his soundtracks to be a little too droning and bombastic for my tastes. I guess it shouldn't be too shocking to find out that a game about one of history greatest composers would have such a fantastic soundtrack, but I was definitely surprised and highly impressed by Sakuraba's work on Eternal Sonata. It's kind of a shame that this soundtrack might get overlooked in the future, what with it not being in Sakuraba's top-tier Tales of and Star Ocean soundtracks, but it's definitely worth a listen.

Here's a little sampler of the music from the first disc of the Eternal Sonata soundtrack. If you'd like to find more, you'll probably get more results by search for the game's Japanese name, Trusty Bell.

Related Links:

OST: Mother
OST: Chrono Cross
OST: Everyday Shooter

Whatcha Playing: Persona, Fallout, and the Trans-Pacific RPG Ideal

John Constantine — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Somewhere, probably not too far from Hawaii, the perfect role-playing game is waiting to be discovered. A volatile, volcanic outcropping boiling over with an expert blend of relatable, colorful characters, deep, directed narrative, and open, exploration-rich adventuring, alongside intimidatingly deep avatar customization. Its game world is both fantastic and hyper-real, vast yet structured enough to inexplicitly guide the player along scaling challenges.

Alright, I’m kidding. I know this game isn’t real. Of course it isn’t. But after the past couple of weeks, I sincerely wish it was.

It’s been a very long time since I last took a two week vacation, and even longer since I took one where I played so few games. It was strange that I spent so few hours with a controller in hand, especially considering what I was playing when I fired up one of the boxes. Coupling Persona 4 and Fallout 3 as your outlets for digital shenanigans might seem like a recipe for life-threatening anti-social tendencies, but I managed to keep things in check, a couple of hours here and there for each game. But now that my vacation’s over and I’ve barely dented either, I almost wish they could be a single game. I wish they could be that mythical mid-Pacific island I just described.

This is the first time I’ve ever played a Japanese RPG and a Western, D&D-style RPG simultaneously. Detailing the differences between the two styles of game is a like pointing at the moon. They’re flat-out different genres. Heather Campbell of Play said it best: JRPGs are a story that’s told to you, whereas WRPGs are a world that you investigate. But why is it that, with East and West borrowing and imitating one another so frequently in the past decade of game design, no game has successfully made an RPG that marries the best bits of both into a single game? Why can’t I have the freedom of Fallout 3 but also the cast of characters with rich personalities and stories of their own that I get in Persona?

There are great games that have come very close to pulling this off. Bioware RPGs, particularly Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, effectively marry the directed narrative of JRPGs with the customizability and freedom of your average Elder Scrolls adventure, but even those suffer from extreme linearity. You can choose whatever you want to do next, but eventually you have to go to the one planet/town to go any further, and there’s no masking the inevitability of that choice. (The same can be said of Peter Molynuex’s Fable and its sequel, but those games are concerned with their own sort of freedom and narrative.)

Strangely enough, I think the makings of a model blend of Eastern-aesthetic and Western-mechanic can be found in Quest for Glory II and III. Those games are less classic adventure than they are role-playing games, asking you to constantly solve moral quandaries that will affect a plethora of very well-defined characters in unreal yet familiar landscapes. Maybe some development team will look at those games again and see an opportunity to offer RPG fans something altogether new. In the meantime, I’m off for some more post-apocalyptic roaming and high school classes. See y’all in a couple of months when I re-emerge.

Related links:

Whatcha Not Playing: Persona 4
Persona 4: Harrowing, True Pre-Order Tales! With Prizes, Prizes, Priz-izes!
Too Soon? No Nukes for Japanese Fallout 3
For Love of the Game: Quest for Glory II
Screen Test: Fallout 3

WTFriday: Bob's Game Is a Big Ol' Slice of Psycho

Bob Mackey — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Note to readers: WTFriday is a weekly feature where I find something stupid about video games and get you to laugh until it goes away. Please try to forget this is what I normally do every day of the week.

If you do something for long enough--no matter how trivial it is--you start to develop an unhealthy sense of entitlement and the inability to see the flaws in your labor of love. And if this "something" happens to be creating an entire game single-handedly over the course of five years, you can add syphilis-grade insanity to the list of unfortunate side effects. This information serves as a fitting introduction to Bob's Game, a Japanese style RPG named after its creator, who isn't exactly on speaking terms with Nintendo. You see, Bob (no relation) needs to be recognized as a Nintendo developer in order to publish his game on a Nintendo platform--never mind the fact that there are several other ways for indie developers to sell their games to the public. Nintendo has been awfully uncooperative--quite possibly because the guy is a total loon--so Bob has decided to lock himself in his room for 100 days of protest that will probably end with him dying of a blood clot.

Surely, his game must be amazing to cause so much drama, right?

Okay, it's not awful, but it doesn't look much different than something made with RPG Maker back in 1998. And I'd go as far to say that Nintendo may want to consider appeasing a psycho who wasted his life by letting the damn thing go up as WiiWare (though I think for Bob it's a DS release or nothing) and cutting off all Bob contact indefinitely. But the fact that Bob is now threatening to attack Nintendo with piracy tells me he's one tantrum away from showing up at Reggie Fils-Aimé's house in the middle of the night with a very sharp knife. When you're bargaining with an all-powerful corporate behemoth, you don't want to say things like this:

If I cannot legitimately publish my game, the only option left to fulfill this goal is to bundle a KILLER APP with a DSi enabled "homebrew device."There has never been a true KILLER APP released for this kind of device, especially as a launch title for a brand new console. "bob's game" is being translated into many languages, including Japanese, and will be released worldwide. Unfortunately, this has the potential to significantly cut into Nintendo's bottom line.

In other words- because of what may be the decision of a single NOA executive for a personal reason- Nintendo of Japan may now be at risk of some very serious consequences.

Bob's unwavering efforts to dig himself deeper and deeper probably means you'll never get to play Bob's Game, but at least you can watch the guy slowly kill himself. That's always mildly entertaining.

Related Links:

WTFriday: PuLiRuLa
WTFriday: "This Place Is All About Your Balls."
WTFriday: Mario Versus Air Man

Whatcha Not Playing: Persona 4

Bob Mackey — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Persona 4 may not actually be out, but I'm still making an effort to actively avoid it. This is more than a little depressing, because I'm sure it's a fantastic RPG, and, quite possibly, the last good Playstation 2 release--unless the series decides to stay on Sony's eight year-old console. I'm not one to have a restraining order on good JRPGs, as they are kind of rare these days, but playing Persona 4 could be very hazardous to my health. It's not all of the demons and Satanic imagery that has me scared; it's the fact that this game could very well take over my upcoming (and desperately-needed) break from work, school, and life.

Typically, it's extremely rare for me to play a game for me than 100 hours--and hell, most games don't have that much content to spread around. But the last Persona game, Persona 3: FES, can be found in the handful of games where I've actually spent hours in the triple digits. Before you think that I'm a loser with too much time on my hands, please let me explain: Persona 3: FES was released at a time that I could take advantage of the most: the end of a long, tortuous semester, with 12 weeks of absolute freedom in front of me. Grad school doesn't give you much to do in the way of jobs or work during the summer.

Essentially, I had a Summer of George. And Persona 3 was the catalyst that kicked it off.

In retrospect, I can't actually be sure if FES was actually a good game; it was hella repetitive (moreso than most JRPGs), looked like a Dreamcast game, and had an irritating, repetitive soundtrack. Yet I could not stop playing. This game consumed the first half of my summer in a way that I hadn't seen since the original Tales of Symphonia; in fact, my daily ritual started with playing a solid three hours of FES every morning while trying to forget about how many new experiences I could have if not for investing so many damn hours into the game. And, even after all of these marathon sessions, the bonus content of the game is calling to me from a little, black memory card. But I must stay strong.

This post is by no means an attack on the quality of the Persona series--it's an attack on my obsessive nature, if anything. But Persona is something I'm not going to be able to go back to until there's a major overhaul of the franchise; at this point in my life, I really can't justify sinking 100 hours into what seems to be a nearly-identical experience. Still, it would be fun.

No. No. Must stay strong.

Related Links:

And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Love: Atlus Reprints Persona 2
Yeah, But Is It Art?: Persona 3 FES
The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 3

Your JRPG Narrative is Bad and You Should Feel Bad

Bob Mackey — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

I recently gave up on Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World a scant four hours into my experience for one reason alone: the game was literally stabbing me in the brain with its narrative. It's not that DotNW's story was exceptionally bad; actually, it was delightfully mediocre, which is really all I can ask for from a JRPG these days. The biggest problem, you see, is that DotNW's stopped to show me its accursed story about every 5 seconds, like an attention-starved child waving a macaroni art project in my face.

"Yes, I see. Very nice. Daddy's trying to play his game now."

Listen up, JRPG developers: the stories you're trying to tell? They aren't necessarily worth telling. In fact, I can really only name two RPGs in the past decade that've had stories which ranked far above "serviceable:" Final Fantasy XII, and Mother 3--note that the latter of these two was written by an actual writer. I may come off as kind of snobbish with this post, though I think that just comes with age; there was a point in my life when I thought RPG plots were totally tubular, but that was back when I was in high school. Turning into a cranky old man has given me the benefit of perspective; through experiencing a number of excellent narratives (across various media), I've obtained standards that I can't quite drop. (Also, I need some way to justify my expensive BA.)

The problem of lousy narrative is a pretty big hurdle for JRPG developers, but I've taken the liberty of coming up with some easy-to-follow and unsolicited solutions:

- Keep it simple. This involves recognizing your own limitations. You're not the next Tolkien, so don't try to be. Some of the most fun and charming RPGs--like Chrono Trigger--had simple, storybook tales that steered clear from pretention. Do your neologisms number in the dozens? Have you name-dropped at least two German philosophers? Then you've gone too far and must be stopped.

- Showing us your story means we're not playing your game. We want to play your game; that's why we bought it. Could something in a proposed story scene actually be played by us? Then let us play!

- Your story is not as good as you think it is. Seriously. Odds are, you've just assembled a collection of stereotypes from the popcorn entertainment you've been immersed in for your entire life. Go to someone who can recognize quality writing. Get them to hit you, if necessary.

That wasn't so hard, was it? Now, if we could only get you guys to stop committing deicide so often, we'd have a real revolution on our hands.

Related Links:

The 61FPS Review: Dragon Quest IV – Chapters of the Chosen
Hey, RPG Hero: Go Home and Be a Family Man
Watcha Playing: Opoona

Hey, RPG Hero: Go Home and Be a Family Man

Nadia Oxford — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:35:00 GMT

So on Saturday I indulged in my weekly Mother 3 play session--

("Oh God, she's talking about Mother 3 again, you sneak up behind her with this piano wire while I slip this cyanide into Mackey's coffee.")

Please let me live. I don't know when I'm going to be so motivated to pick a game's brain ever again. Mother 3 is unlike any RPG I've ever played--and for the simplest reasons. This, more than anything, is what fascinates me about the game. Shigesato Itoi realises that the easiest way to get people to love your characters is to treat them like human beings. For some reason, woefully few of his fellow RPG designers have picked that up.

It's rare to find an RPG cast that everyone can relate to on a human level. Mother 3's world-saving brigade casts ground-shaking magic and racks up experience points and throws giant staples at enemies like any other JRPG (okay, the staples, not so much), but Itoi wants us to feel close to them. So he draws us in by being realstic about the one thing that unites even Superman with the common Earthling: family.

Here there be spoilers.

(Oh and don't feed Mackey any cyanide. Thank you. His parents appreciate your restraint.)

Parents don't mean much in JRPGs. They usually exist as target practise for bad guys, a catalyst to turn fresh-made orphans into Super Saiyans. In instances where they do survive, they stand blankly in front of the kitchen sink all day, every bit the same plastic "house" accessory as the ever-ticking clock, the endlessly-burning fire and the assembly line coffee table with the book nailed to it.

Or, sometimes a parent exists as a shadowy legend that the hero is destined to chase (sidenote: DragonQuest V did a wonderful, wonderful thing by casting you as an aspiring hero who travels along with his Pop, then grows up and makes more traveling/slime-fighting babies). In short, mom and dad are a springboard to get the main character out of the house and on the road. The standard shonen game hero is usually fine with this, even though he's a little punk who's barely off the tit and has probably never spent a night away from home. In fact, he's rarin' to go without a backwards glance.

JRPGs never grew up, much as fans like to think they went through a growth spurt with Final Fantasy VII. Realistically, they share a lot in common with young adult fiction. The story isn't supposed to be about parents, right? It's supposed to be about the kid, the adventurer the audience is supposed to relate somehow. Parents are old and slow. They're uncool.

But moms and dads are cool. All right, so "cool" might not be a great descriptor, but as you grow older, you start to appreciate the dedication your mom and dad have towards one another. The bond between two people is a deep and ancient thing that has held society together since the dawn of humanity. If you're lucky enough to have two parents who still love each other after years of living together, you're witness to something special. It's not as exciting as a rampaging dragon that only you can stop, but it's still one of the most powerful forces on Earth.

It's Itoi's exploration of this bond that makes Mother 3 special. In the game's first chapter, Lucas vacations with his grandfather, mother and brother in the mountains. Mom (Hinawa) sends a carrier pigeon to tell Dad (Flint, stuck at home) that they'll all be coming home that evening. A forest fire begins a chain of bad juju that prevent Hinawa, Lucas and Claus from coming home. There's one brief scene where Flint, unsure about his Hinawa's whereabouts even after the fire is put out, retreats inside their house and reads over the note she sent. Even with mere sprite graphics and Flint's silence, you can clearly feel what he's thinking.

Eventually, Flint gets the inevitable bad news: Hinawa died to save Lucas and Claus from a nasty creature altered in an experiment and set loose in the mountains. Flint loses it completely, seizing a burning stick from the fire pit his sons are warming themselves next to and pummelling fellow villagers who try to comfort him. He breaks down further when Claus goes missing, and as the game progresses over three years, Tazmily's villagers remark that Flint does nothing except visit Hinawa's grave and search for Claus.

People freak out when their significant other is killed. They maintain fruitless searches for children long after others have given up and moved on. The loss of Hinawa and Claus irrevocably changed Flint the way it would change any human being--so why is this the first time a JRPG has conveyed such a sad but common occurence so powerfully? Why is this the first time, in my recollection, that a JRPG husband has had such a strong reaction to the death of his companion?

I'm holding hope that more game developers will begin to look at their family for inspiration instead of bothering with more corrupt Churches and Governments.

Related Links:

The Reason Why Mother 3 Never Came to America
Mother 3 Makes Me Feel Human Again
OST: Mother

Whatcha Playing: Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World

Bob Mackey — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

I've probably blathered about this before on 61FPS, but the original Tales of Symphonia marks the most time I spent with a game during the last generation of consoles. I spent over 100 hours milking that game for all it was worth, and I don't regret it at all--though, to be fair, at the time I was living at home and only marginally employed. So when a semi-sequel to one of my favorite games snuck up on me, I had to check it out; and while common sense told me the my disappointment in Tales of Legendia and The Abyss may indicate Dawn of the New World's quality, I decided to pick it up anyway. (I'm a weak, weak man.)

As a sequel to Symphonia, Dawn of the New World is a pretty shameless cash-in full of recycled assets with a decidedly last-gen look. But, in coping with its shamelessness, New World has some interesting qualities; namely, its status as a direct successor to a previous RPG. Outside of stuff like FFX-2, you don't find games like this too often--most RPG sequels usually end up taking place 100 or 1000 years before/after their previously-released games. Not so with New World; the events of Symphonia are in the not-too-distant past, which actually explains the state of the in-game world. Turns out that 100-hour quest from Symphonia actually made things worse, and managed to turn Symphonia-protagonist Lloyd into a ruthless killer. Go fig.

And, in keeping with the connection to the previous game, importing your complete Symphonia save rewards you with a meager set of items (with a few very rare ones thrown in) to start your quest. It's a nice extra, and quite possibly the only example of cross-generational save imports outside of Suikoden III.

In the hour-or-so that I played New World last night, I only made it to three different battles--all of which were "YOU CAN'T LOSE" tutorials, so that should give you some insight into the pacing of this game. As with most modern JRPGs, the introduction of New World is completely weighed down with pointless exposition that could have been integrated in a less passive way--say, by starting the game with the player actually doing something and working in some quick flashbacks while he or she moves along. Seasoned JRPGers may be used to lousy pacing, but one element of New World may actually turn off the most battle-hardened Tales vet: our hero Emil, who starts off as one of the most pathetic, simpering, and browbeaten heroes in JRPG history. Case in point: your first mission in the game involves building up the courage to thank someone. I think Emil starts of with a dignity level of zero to make his change throughout the game more significant, but that doesn't make him a less-annoying character.

The most fun part of the Tales games--the battle system--seems to have been left intact, so that makes me happy; I was known to grind for levels in Symphonia for the sheer joy of it. I'm just looking forward to the point where New World actually lets me play it. Hopefully that's not more than a few hours in.

Related Links:

Pay-Per-Grind: Tales of Vesperia Lets You Level With Cash
Turning Japanese: Microsoft’s Latest Ditch Effort to Win the East
Watcha Playing: Opoona

Game Length Versus Quality: The Debate Continues

Bob Mackey — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

When it comes to game length, how long is too long? This is a question I've personally pondered for quite some time; thankfully, GameSetWatch's Mister Raroo has done an excellent job of detailing this dilemma in a recent article. So, what exactly is wrong with the bloated, modern game?

Nobody wants to pay $60 for an experience that is over in an evening. Thus, games are usually stuffed with enough content keep players busy for weeks or even months. That said, too often the length of games is artificially lengthened in order to provide players with the perception of a longer experience. I’ve done enough backtracking and fetch quests in games to know filler when I see it.

It's true; there's a certain dollar-to-content ratio that we've all come to expect over the years. But just how much of that content are we actually going to play? Personally, I tend to check out of a game when it's stopped giving me anything new to care about. As much as I liked Odin Sphere, the mechanics--essentially unchanged throughout the game's entirety--were so repetitive that I didn't feel bad checking out shortly after finishing the first chapter. In my eyes, I had "finished" the game. The "seen about enough of you" defense has been a huge help in getting me to stop playing through games I'm no longer enjoying; though this new healthy lifestyle has only developed recently in my adult life.

So where has everyone else either drawn the line, or continued to suffer through a game for the purpose of finishing it? My most egregious cases of the latter always happened with JRPGs--and sometimes continue to happen, despite my awareness of bad gaming habits. There's just something about seeing all of those numbers onscreen that makes it impossible to look away.

Related Links:

Time Investment
Too Many Crayons
Question of the Day: How Do You Make a Horror Game Horrifying?

Low-Rent RPGs: A Good Idea

Bob Mackey — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Tales of Symphonia was how I spent the summer of 2004, and, along with Dragon Warrior VII and Persona 3: FES, is one of the very few games I've spent more than 100 hours playing. I've known for a long time that a sequel to Symphonia would eventually be hitting the Wii--but I must've not been paying attention, because Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World comes out next friggin' month. While I figure out how to take a leave of absence from graduate school, wet your whistle (or any woodwind instruments you have lying around the house) with the official English trailer:

I'll say right now that the Tales games have a pretty low batting average; on the whole, about a third of them are worth playing--and out of that third, only a few are truly excellent. I've actually been a bit disappointed with the series since Symphonia; Legendia--despite having what may be the world's greatest RPG soundtrack--was a major step down, and Abyss was fun until my experience was throttled by constant, inescapable load times. I'm still not certain if DotNW will suck on toast, but at least one thing is clear: I dig Namco's approach.

Yes, they're being cheap: DotNW is made partially out of materials recycled from Symphonia. But this eco-friendly approach makes the RPG--a genre known for its depth of content and 50+ hours of play per game--much less of an overwhelming financial risk. Persona 4 is taking the same approach, and (sadly) may be the last PS2 game of note released in this country. It's always been my belief that developers could continue making RPGs with the tech of last-gen, and fans of the genre really wouldn't care; maybe this idealistic dream would have been possible if the backwards compatibility of the 360 and the PS3 wasn't such a mess. But as things stand, the hefty price of now-gen entry means that quite a few franchises aren't going to come back. Case in point: I'd love to see another entry in the underappreciated Shadow Hearts series, but the developer is now working on projects backed by deep, deep coffers, like Lost Odyssey.

I never thought I'd be congratulating a company on their shameless frugality, but it looks like Namco has the right idea--and even Mega Man 9 took advantage of re-used and low-intensity assets to give people the game they've been wanting for over a decade. Can the deliberately old-school (both in tech and design) RPG be far behind? It's been done before, but never out of necessity.

Related Links:

Pay-Per-Grind: Tales of Vesperia Lets You Level With Cash
Turning Japanese: Microsoft’s Latest Ditch Effort to Win the East
Watcha Playing: Opoona

The 61FPS Review: Dragon Quest IV – Chapters of the Chosen

John Constantine — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT

I’m not going to lie to you. Dragon Quest and I have history. It goes back some twenty years at this point, but our relationship today isn’t one based on nostalgia. Back in 2005, you could say that Dragon Quest and I were in, to put it delicately, an unhealthily codependent situation. Dragon Quest VIII had just come out in the United States, fresh faced and full of gorgeous cel-shaded graphics, newly minted menus and music, and voice work of unprecedented quality. But Dragon Quest has never had much clout on this side of the Pacific, and this was its first time going by its real name instead of Dragon Warrior. It needed someone, anyone to play it. Me, I was a recovering role-playing addict, coming off of a decade of Squaresoft devotion, trying my best to stay off the ability trees, the melodrama, and the menus. I lapsed occasionally into turn-based adventures to save the world. I’d been doing good up until that November, hadn’t touched a JRPG since Shadow Hearts: Covenant the previous winter, but I could feel myself weakening. I just wasn’t strong enough. So Dragon Quest VIII and I found each other at our weakest.

Between November 15th and December 1st, I clocked just under ninety-six hours playing Dragon Quest VIII. Yeah, that’s right. Four days of my life.

And I loved it.

Each Dragon Quest, since the first game sprung from Yuuji Horii’s succulent brain in 1986, is an exercise in purity, a defining marquee in a genre known today for its decadence, bombast, and tedium. Dragon Quest is more often noted for its resistance to change rather than its consistent quality across the years. It’s true, Dragon Quest has remained, across its sequels, spin-offs, and numerous remakes, largely the same game it was two decades ago. The essential play – explore a large fantasy world, fight monsters in a first person perspective, collect items, talk to every single person you meet – has never changed in the core titles. But every iteration finds its elegant formula incrementally refined, and to great effect. Dragon Quest II introduced multi-character parties, III a job system that went on to become a genre staple, and so on and so forth. Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen, a DS remake of a Playstation remake of the NES original, could be viewed as a step back from the lavishly produced (though still familiar) Dragon Quest VIII, a retreat meant to acclimate players to the series’ transition from home consoles to portables. Surprisingly, Chapters of the Chosen isn’t a retreat at all. It is instead a perfect model of the JRPG as Horii envisioned it, immediately accessible, streamlined from the menu-juggling, command-selecting rigor moral, and trimmed of the excess narrative fat that’s typified the genre since Hironobu Sakaguchi began emphasizing drama over play in Final Fantasy.

That said, Chapters of the Chosen’s story shouldn’t be undersold. While it isn’t full of lengthy dialogues, it isn’t without dramatic instance. The original Dragon Quest IV’s variation on the DQ theme was its narrative structure: following a brief prologue wherein you play as the classic silent-protagonist of your choosing, the game is broken into the titular chapters, each one devoted to the seven other party characters that ultimately make up your adventuring party. These chapters allow you to play and experience the inciting incidents that introduce these characters into the game’s arching save-the-world narrative. Despite the limited characterization, this allows you to form deeper attachments to these characters than you would if the game followed the JRPG formula of the protagonist being the inciting incident that draws these characters into the adventure. It’s both a unique take on JRPG storytelling as well as a way to better facilitate play; since you are playing these characters individually during the game’s first half, you aren’t tied to “level grinding” them later (or having their levels superficially bumped up to match your protagonist’s.) Even after entering the game’s fifth chapter and having gathered the disparate characters together, Chapters of the Chosen is never structured to serve the story. The story is developed just enough to encourage more play, more exploration, more fights, more collection. This is why Dragon Quest IV, and its parent series, is the model of Japanese role-playing. It is, first and foremost, a game, rather than an interactive anime or fantasy novel with a lot of fighting thrown on top of it. There aren’t enough kind words to give to its presentation, from Koichi Sugiyama’s re-mastered score to Akira Toriyama’s endearing art, not to mention Square-Enix’s remarkable colloquialism-laden localization. But they’re all just icing on the proverbial cake.

I stopped carrying the Nintendo DS on my morning commute recently, worried that I was becoming illiterate after playing videogames during every literal moment of my free time throughout the day. I knew Dragon Quest was coming though. I’m not a strong man. We fell back into our old routine in the past week since its release. To be honest, it’s remarkable I was even able to stop playing long enough to write this. It’s wrong, really, to let a game, even one as great as Chapters of the Chosen, take you over.

But it feels so, so right.

Grade: A

Previous 61FPS Reviews:

Metal Gear Solid IV
Ninja Gaiden 2
Grand Theft Auto IV
Wii Fit

Watcha Playing: Opoona

Bob Mackey — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

As a self-confessed JRPG addict who should have quit using half a decade ago, I tend to try just about anything and everything in the genre--thanks to the work of my inner demons. Sometimes this works out in my favor, with games like Persona 3: FES, but more often than not I'm trudging through something like Eternal Sonata with no means of escape. I'm not quite sure where Opoona falls on the cream-to-crap spectrum, but after about three hours, I can at least tell you that it's different.

Allow me to explain:

The Good: That dude on the right is your protagonist, so that should give you a good indication of what you're in for; Opoona isn't your typical Japanese gingerbread version of Tolkien. Instead, it's a quirky little space RPG about a family of aliens stranded on a distant planet. What also separates Opoona from your typical JRPG is the control setup; you only use the Wiimost Nunchuck, which--aside from some problems moving the camera--feels like the optimal configuration for this kind of game. It makes me think of how great the short-lived one-handed PSX controller from Ascii could have been--it wasn't just a suggestive piece of fiction joked about during the release of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. Anyhow, the simple, action-y battle system--based entirely around throwing the "bonbon" on Opoona's head--works great with the limited controls available on the Nunchuck.

As a relatively loading-free experience, Opoona gets right what a lot of RPGs get wrong. For a genre known for its fragmented gameplay, there's nothing worse than constant, awkward pauses breaking up what would be an otherwise good game. A flash of black between rooms and battles is all you'll notice in Opoona--if you do notice it.

The game also has a surprising soundtrack by hotshot composer Hitoshi Sakimoto (Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy Tactics, Odin Sphere) that does have its moments of bombast, but manages to play around with the Opoona's lighthearted theme in a way that feels very different than his usual work.

The Bad: For starters, the game looks very low-budget; we're talking low-level PS2/mid-level Dreamcast, here. There's a sense that the developer could have tried a little harder.

And while Opoona does manage to be quirky and unique, it suffer from a common JRPG problem by starting off the game with quite a few interminable hours' worth of exposition and not-much-happening. Any Final Fantasy worth its salt knows that immediately throwing the player into an action setpiece is a great way to grab a gamer's attention.

Adding to the boredom of Opoona's rocky start is the game's main town (for now), which is really too big and confusingly designed for its own good. Getting anything accomplished requires a lot of walking and walking and walking and walking until you realize you're headed in the completely wrong direction. In some cases, I like when developers cut the bullshit and give us a menu-driven town and map system, as seen in the Persona series. I don't think pointlessly jogging around Opoona's world is really doing anything for me.

Wrap-Up: Opoona has quite a few problems, but its unique atmosphere and addictive mission system has made me decide to stick around for a few more hours. I'll report back in if anything interesting happens.

Related Links:

Watcha Playing: Geometry Wars Galaxies
Watcha Playing: Fantastic Contraption
Whatcha Playing: Cleaning House, Finding Roots

Trailer Review: Riz-Zoawd

John Constantine — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

I like me a good Japanese RPG. Actually, let me rephrase: I love Japanese JRPGs. Like many a youth twenty years back, I received a free copy of Dragon Warrior with my Nintendo Power subscription. I didn’t actually play Dragon Warrior myself, I played it with my older brother, start to finish. It was, as I believe was the point of the game, epic. The experience from level one to defeating the nefarious Dragon Lord really did feel like a vast journey, a true hero quest. But I never got around to playing another JRPG until I was fourteen. That game was Chrono Trigger and it turned me into a slavering addict. These days, I only get to play one JRPG a year. They typically require a massive investment of time and, so, I’m forced to pick and choose. I’m not sure if it’s going to come to the US at this point, but if it does, I might have to make Ris-Zoawd the JRPG I play next year. Media.Vision, creators of the I’m-shocked-it’s-still-going Wild Arms franchise, are behind it. Riz-Zoawd is 3D DS RPG that might just be the most beautiful polygonal game on the system. The music in this trailer is gorgeous, the first person battle system is delightfully old school, and the Wizard of Oz premise is a novel stroke of, well, not quite genius, but it’s certainly inspired. I can’t wait.

Previous Trailer Reviews:

Idolm@ster PSP
The Last Guy
Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff
Captain Rainbow
The Past and Future With Mega Man 9 and Chrono Trigger DS
Densetsu no Stafi 5
Sonic Unleashed
Infinite Undiscovery
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
Street Fighter 4
The Conduit
Mirror’s Edge

Related links:

Play It Again, Sam
The Chrono Trigger Port: Are You Excited or Disappointed
OST: Chrono Cross
Final Fantasy IV DS: Love, Hope and Betrayal For the Busy Commuter