MEMBER PROFILE FOR SpaceGhost2K-XBA
Average Overall Score Given: 8.52500 / 10
Total Forum Posts: 3245
Reviews
Prince of Persia
Suggestions: Add NPCs.
Add multi-enemy combat.
Give us a combo-counter. I couldn't tell if I'd gotten one combo or ten, and had no idea how close I might have gotten to 14. I would be more inclined to put in the effort if I knew where I stood.
Add a middle-eastern dialect option to the voices. "Perfect, generic male American" is more offensive to me because it's "lowest common denominator" than having a actual Persian voice would have. Call Sayid and Nadia from "Lost" and see if they're free for PoP2.
And really, god of light and god of dark? There has to be a more clever way of setting up a story dilemma than that.
Overall Score: 8.5 / 10
Fracture
Suggestions: - Save Anywhere. It's the law.
- Take a cue from Mass Effect. Allow players to go back into a log and see what their current mission is. At one point I apparently finished a mission and stood around, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do.
- Change difficulty on the fly. I played through on medium and found myself wanting to toughen it up a bit in spots, and just be done with a spot and move along in others.
- Make the location of the weapons, grenades and data cells a little less obvious, or at least allow the player the option of turning the beacons on or off.
- First person would solve some of the camera problems.
Overall Score: 8.4 / 10
Blue Dragon
Overall: Blue Dragon is a Japanese-styled RPG made by the writer and members of the original team from Chrono Trigger, who are now the developer Mistwalker. That would normally be the good part. And, depending on who you asked, the fact that the characters were designed by the designer of the Dragonball Z characters would be the bad part. However, after almost seventy hours in the game, I can tell you that in this particular instance, they're BOTH the bad part.I want to do the briefest of story summaries so as not to ruin the plot (*snicker - like THAT could happen*). The story starts off with a villiage being terrorized by an unstoppable machine. Three kids have had it with this monster and rig a trap to snag the beast when it drags them out of the village and into their adventure.
In the early part of their travels, they acquire the ability to perform magic, which is revealed in the form of dragons that emerge from their shadows. Yeah, they're blue. They also meet their opponant who promptly wipes the floor with them, learning that the road they have to travel to best him will be a long one.
That, my friends, is the understatement of 2007.
Blue Dragon takes three full, dual layered DVDs to hold all the content. I spend about 25 hours on Disc One amd at the end of it, had yet to be emotionally moved at all by the story or give a @!%#*! about the characters. Where "Eternal Sonata" was a work of p@!%#*!ion (see my review), Blue Dragon seemed very much like it was just going through the motions. In fact, I didn't feel ANY sense of urgency at all until the end of the second disc, or around 50 hours into the game. Only then did I feel like there was a character in peril, or that I CARED that there was a character in peril and I was inclined to want to save said character. That's a lot of game under your belt with nothing to grab you.
I also got a whopping 50 gamerscore or something by playing the game. The achievements are so strangely obscure that one, you'll never get the majority of them through normal gameplay, and two, the ones that are open to you require revisiting the entire map. After having spent more than plenty of time in these areas, returning just for a few points was NOT an appealing option.
I should point out that I spent over 200 hours in Oblivion and did NOT feel the same way, nor am I a hater of JRPG's.
I also want to point out that towards the end of the game, you get @!%#*!istance in your abillity to traverse this large world, and you can visit any location in the game. This leades me to the conclusion that most of the space on the discs are cutscenes and boss battle info, since the entire geography of the game is included completely on the last disc.
At the end of a game, you ask yourself to grade it. My grade usually consists of: What do I feel about the time I gave up to play this game? What do I feel about the characters I just spent all that time with? In most cases, I consider it time well spent and I liked the characters (Eternal Sonata, Halo, Oblivion). In some cases, The time was well spent but the characters didn't really do anything for me (Crackdown, Viva Pinata).
In the case of Blue Dragon, do I regret spending ALL that time in the game? Well, no. But neither would I feel like I was missing anything had I not played it. The characters were out of my head and heart the second I turned the game off.
Lastly, a cartoon has been launched in Japan, there are two sets of figures/keychains available, and there was a faceplate you could only get in Japan along with the game and the five figures in a LE set. Searches on eBay turn up mousepads and the like.
So on to gameplay...
Gameplay: There are some combination of five party members depending on the place in the story. There's a cutscene where a quest is revealed, and your party members go forth. They run into randomly generated monsters in the wilderness between the actual game locations.
Now, before we get into battle aspecs, let's talk about pre-battle preparation.
There are a number of things you can do to prepare for battle. You can equip your characters with accessories that affect their stats and other things, like the ability to attack twice, resurrect, regenrate, sneak, steal items, go first in battle, etc. You can also decide the order of the line-up of your characters, and their placement in a front row/back row presentation. Finally, you can decide how you want to allocate their power up points to make them stronger in the areas you intend to use in battle. This is a very superficial description of all the things you can do. It's very detailed in the amount of flexibility offered to you.
Now, you're in battle. If you initiate the attack, you generally get to go first. If you attack from the rear, you get extra attack opportunities. If you do a surprise attack, their formation is reversed, and the same goes for your party if they surprise attack you. YOur front row is now the back and your support people are now "the front row."
The characters involved in the battle are laid out in a line at the top of your HUD. As the first person in the line makes its move, it moves to somewhere in the line depending on his stats. He doesn't necessarily go to the end of the line.
You have the option of a physical attack, a magic-@!%#*!isted physical attack, a magical attack, or an item attack. You can also use magic as a healing took or as a support tool (for things like double plays, or increased speed which drops you back into the combat queue closer to the front of the line.)
Boss battles consist of you, them, an arena, and usually pointers like "go for his head!" Duh.
Graphics: The characters aren't particularly attractive. They have limited facial expressions. The environments are spartan and unspectacular. There are nice water effects and that's about it. The magical lighting effects during battle aren't impressive anymore, two years into this gen. I don't recall a single point in the game that looked so cool that I'd like to go back and show it to someone. I guess I should say something good about it. OK, round things look round. Not jagged. Faces. And Zola's boobs, which are totally out of place in the game. And the kids are adorable. They're totally cute.
Audio: Things that annoy:
First offender: The horrible metal screaming music - the SAME SONG - during every extended boss battle, in an excruciatingly short looped 80's flashback. When I heard it in the SECOND boss battle, I could have died, because it sunk in that I'd be hearing it a LOT in the next 60-75 hours.
Second offender: Maromaru's yelling. ALL. THE. TIME.
Third offender: Birds. Birds, performed by one key on a Casio keyboard, on a loop.
Fourth offender: Nene's voice and his sidekick's voice.
Basically, the only thing that I enjoyed that was sound related was the music during the time you could traverse the whole map towards the end of the game.
Suggestions: Don't do a sequel. If you want to port this to the PS3, go with my blessing. Get a new audio guy. Get a new character designer. Hire a writer. Don't do a Chrono game until you get this whole equation fixed. Never offer a bad guy who doesn't give you a chance to at least get in a shot before wiping out your whole team. Don't put a max on your hero's hit points if you're going to have baddies who can generate 50% more damage. I have more but I consider them spoilers, so I'll just be vague and say that you should NOT do stuff that has happened in every other JRPG ever made.
Overall Score: 8.0 / 10
Eternal Sonata
Overall: Eternal Sonata is a Japanese-styled RPG created by developer Tri-Crescendo and published by Namco/Bandi. It was released in Japan as "Trusty Bell" in early 2007, and later in 2007 here in the US. True to their name, Tri-Crescendo has delivered an RPG built on a foundation of music, and not just through a fictitious character like Marl in "Rhapsody," but real-life Polish cl@!%#*!ical composer and pianist Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin. 1849, Chopin slipped into a coma caused by tuberculosis and died shortly thereafter. "Eternal Sonata" is a work of fiction, based on the idea of one's life p@!%#*!ing before their eyes when death is imminent. Since Chopin was not awake and aware, but rather in a deep sleep, his life might have p@!%#*!ed before him as a fantastical dream.
Chopin lived a life in frailty, a voluntary exile from Poland after an attempted revolution that failed. Elements of "Eternal Sonata" parallel his personal turmoils, including the heroine Polka, who is an optimistic young girl and who is also terminally ill. In this world, a terminal illness begets the ability to perform magic, and Polka is shunned by many townsfolk who fear that a terminal disease could be communicable. She meets up with two young men who all seem to be on a similar mission: stop the leader of a hostile foreign country from turning their entire population into an army of mindless warriors.
(Oh, and a cheap plug for Faceplate Addict: A faceplate was given away free in Japan with preorders of "Trusty Bell" and a whopping five faceplates featuring the main characters of "Eternal Sonata" were given out randomly in the US to people who preordered the game here.)
Gameplay: The gameplay is cl@!%#*!ic Japanese turnbased (stop groaning), but with a twist. As you proceed through the fantasy locations, and the areas that connect them, you stumble into various enemies; smaller ones in the general areas, and usually a larger boss enemy right before you reach the next location.
Contact with an enemy results in a screen morph into a larger arena area with similarities to the last environment. These areas are partilly lit by some source of light and partially shrouded in darkness. You - and your enemies - have different powers available to you depending on whether you are in shadow or light. Striking an enemy from behind is more powerful a frontal attack, but in some cases the location of the light/dark areas are more important.
During each characters' turn, you have a short amount of time to prepare your plan, and then implement your attack. As the game progresses, the limitations on your time are tightened, taking away your time for planning.
Bosses can be easily underestimated, and there are a number of bosses that you will probably have to abandon, level up, and then confront again later.
Graphics: Visually, there isn't a more beautiful game. Period. By "beautiful," I mean the true meaning of the word. Colors are bright, environments are lush, man-made locations are elaborately detailed. Even the title screen that announces the name of each new location glistenes and unfolds elegantly before you. The game graphics are remeniscent of bright, Japanese animation. They are more interesting (to me, anyway) than pseudo-realistic graphics in games like Gears or Halo.
If I have an issues with the graphics, it is the limited animations and facial expressions of the main characters, and the somewhat ridiculous character design of the enemies. I LOVE the character designs of the main human cast, both heroes and villains, but battling a fat, walking onion leaves something to be desired.
Audio: The in-game audio is standard game fare, but it's the interstitials where the game shines. Between the main chapters, there is a "story break." Game graphics are replaced by a slide-show reflecting Chopin's real-life life, with his most famous musical pieces performed int he background. The stories tie in with what he may have been feeling that resulted in the composition of the song being played. I found the mini song bio's fascinating and rather than being a bore, I found them an interesting addition to the presentation of the game.
I don't remember a large amount of ambient sounds - which is probably a good thing, since those Casio-performed bird sounds in Blue Dragon drove me nuts.
The voice acting was fine. If anything, they all sounded a little too much like "professional voice actors" instead of people, and Salsa's suthin' twang was laid on a little strong. But I enjoyed Polka's cheer, Chopin's introspection, and Jazz' seriousness.
Suggestions: My only hope is that Tri-Crescendo has enough success with Eternal Sonata to put out a similar effort with one or more other famous composers. I visited their marketing website, "Endless Nocturne" during the launch period (and was given a free copy of the game for doing so). I was given a chance to offer feedback directly to Namco/Bandi and Tri-Crescendo for future stories. I begged for them to consider a similar game concept for other composers (who may have just been dreaming and not necessarily in a coma, lol). I suggested Mozart, Bach, Beethoven and even Scott Joplin, possibly in a racial conflict-centered story rather than a political one.
Overall Score: 9.2 / 10
