Video Games

25 Games 25 Years 20: DoReMi Fantasy

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I included this game, DoReMi Fantasy: Milon no DokiDoki Daibouken (Milon’s Heart-Pounding Adventure) because I mysteriously appeared on Virtual Console in the middle of the Wii’s life. It wasn’t the earliest import title on the service, but it came fairly early in that initiative and seemed like an odd choice. There were definitely more high profile releases that never made the trip to America, like Secret of Mana’s sequel Seiken Densetsu 3, or games that already had an English translation, like Terranigma. Instead we go this little known sequel to a not particularly good or well-remembered NES game. It was a little intriguing and a little baffling, especially given that the limited coverage of it was fairly positive. Playing it for the first time a few weeks ago I was shocked. DoReMi Fantasy is not just a solid little platformer, it is one of the best platform games on the SNES.

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DoReMi Fantasy is the story of a little boy, Milon, whose fairy friend Alis has been kidnapped by the evil wizard Amon. So he sets off on an adventure to rescue her and restore music to his forest home. Milon has to find the five magical instruments and find the magic stars to restore their powers. While Milon himself looks like a cutesy Link from Legend of Zelda, the game is much more in the Mario mold. The game is primarily a run and jump adventure, with Milon eventually getting a small number of other abilities as he goes along, most notably he can make a magical set of stairs out of musical notes. Otherwise, it is largely the same as Mario or Donkey Kong. Milon doesn’t kill enemies by jumping on them, which merely stuns them. Instead he must catch them in a bubble that he blows with what appears to be a straw.

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It starts out fairly easy but by the end the difficulty has ramped up to something approaching hard, though it never gets particularly difficult. It begins at a Kirby level, but ends near late Mario game difficulty. Milon can take 3 hits before dying and life restoring items are plentiful. The level design ranges from devious to delightful, never unfair but sometimes a little frustrating with well-placed enemies.  None of them are particularly hard, but few are cakewalks.

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Really, the game just does everything right. The graphics are bright and clear, with expressive, colorful sprites and some well-designed worlds to go along with standards like forest, ice and lava worlds. The controls are pitch perfect and the music is more environmental than most SNES games but it works really well. It is also just damn charming. The cutscenes are goofy fun. One has Milon choosing between Bombermen to help him get past an obstacle, one of which blows Milon up. One boss isn’t an ally of the enemy, merely a rapscallion blocking the way. It all makes for a game that is just a joy to play.

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While the game breaks no new ground, it does everything it wants with precision. It doesn’t quite stand up to Super Mario World, but I wouldn’t put any other SNES platform game much higher than it. I’ve said it before going through this project, but this is just the sort of game I hoped to find doing this.

Mighty-ish No 9

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I deliberately waited a few months after Mighty No 9 was released before I played it. I wasn’t so much put off by poor reviews, I’m able to form my own opinions even after hearing others. It was more that I didn’t want to participate in the dogpile that was going on. I contributed to Mighty No 9’s Kickstarter, at a low tier, and I consider it money well spent. It was an invaluable look at how the sausage was made, though the process can be messy. It was also a valuable look into the seething black heart that makes up a vocal portion of the gaming internet, the overriding ugliness that was fully revealed in a certain well known blow up of hatred and misogyny that started a few years ago. Mighty No 9 was such a great learning experience that the quality of the game was an afterthought. In the end, Comcept and Keiji Inafune delivered exactly what they promised – an action game made in the model of Mega Man – though it wasn’t quite as good was it could have been.

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There were clearly a lot of problems right from the get go, problems that were built into the Kickstarter. Comcept was in trouble the moment they promised to release the game across so many platforms: PS3, PS4, VIta, Xbox 1, Xbox 360, WiiU, 3DS, PC, Mac, and Linux. Compare that to the highly successful Kickstarter project Shovel Knight, which launched on WiiU, 3DS and PC. Only three platforms, not ten. The testing and porting seems to have been an insurmountable task. Then there was the fact that they started development on Unreal Engine 3 shortly before support for that engine was dropped for UE4. These are things I never really thought about before this Kickstarter.

Nearly everything about Mighty No 9 has been the target of intense criticism. Like the graphics. They do look bad in still screenshots. The models are blocky and the backgrounds are often sparse. The thing is, it is clearly an aesthetic choice. The game looks exactly like it is intended. It is much like Earthbound, a game lambasted for its simple graphics in its day, going for a simple charm instead of flash or detail. Honestly, it looks pretty good in motion. The characters designs are strong, even if they didn’t make the translation to 3D models perfectly. And the sparse backgrounds help make the action more clear.

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The game does a lot of things well. The controls are impeccable. Beck is a lot of fun to move around. The music is good, with enough excellent tracks to offset a few lackluster ones. Most of the stages are solid challenges, though there are a few duds and nearly every stage has a spot that seems unfair rather than hard.

What sinks Mighty No 9 is an astonishing lack of polish. A lack of polish that permeates the entire game. Largely pleasant graphics are undone by some barren backgrounds and garbage effects textures. Cutscenes with dull dialogue and numerous gaffes and typos. Fun levels derailed by rough screens with too many instant death traps or poorly placed enemies. Then there are the loading times, a problem that may be exclusive to the WiiU version, which border on criminal. And I am given to understand that the patch that installed with the game supposedly helped with load times. It is a death by a thousand cuts scenario, where none of these problems are enough to ruin the experience on their own (actually, the level designs ones might be) but together it makes the game feel inordinately ramshackle. While I am far from an expert, I would guess that many of these problems stem from their attempt to launch on so many platforms at once. They were testing for consoles, computers and handhelds (though those last versions have yet to materialize), and too many things fell through the cracks.

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Technical problems aside, there is one big thing that hampers Mighty No 9. For all that the characters look like original flavor Mega Man knock-offs, the game that Inafune and company are trying to recreate here is not Mega Man 2 or even Mega Man 3. This game was made in the mold of Mega Man X4. With its emphasis on dashing, MN9 plays a lot more like a Mega Man X game than a game from the original series. Also, X4 is the game where the story stuff takes something of a front seat, like it does here, to the game’s detriment. I am not opposed, in theory, to MN9’s use of Star Fox like banter mid-level, but the banter needs to be more interesting that what is on display. If I went in expecting Mega Man X, this wouldn’t really be a problem; but I wanted, and thought this was intended to be, more like original flavor Mega Man. That it is what it is is not necessarily a flaw, but it does take a realignment of my expectations.

I am running out of steam here, and don’t really have it in me to go after the asinine elements of gaming culture that coalesced around outright hate over the last few years, with the moronic controversy over a community manager for this project was one of the preludes to all of that contemptible bullshit. I can’t help feel that the fallout from that helped fuel the backlash this game has faced. This post isn’t really about that, but it is hard to ignore that chapter of this game’s development. Someday, I might write out my thoughts on that subject at length, or I would if I thought anybody wanted to read it or thought it might help the people whose lives had been hurt by it.

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In retrospect, the sad fate of Mighty No 9 seems almost inevitable. It was never going to be all the things people wanted it to be. That is how Comcept could deliver exactly what the Kickstarter promised, though admittedly it was not as good a game as people had hoped, and still have people feel ripped off. The Kickstarter promised a game inspired by Mega Man and other old school action games and that is exactly what we got. It turned out to be the Gobots to Mega Man’s Transformers, but it could never be anything else. And aside from just the seeing the sausage get made aspect to it, it also illuminated the startling entitlement that is endemic to the gaming public.

For all of its high profile and long delays, Mighty No 9 feels like the rough draft of a good game, a feeling not dissimilar to the feeling from playing Mega Man 1. A sequel that takes some of the legitimate complaints to heart could have a jump in quality not unlike that between MM1 and MM2.

Pokémon Sun & Moon

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Checking my posts about previous Pokémon games, I am confident say that this game is my favorite in the series since Black & White. Maybe since all the way back to Red and Blue. Pokémon Moon is a phenomenal game. While I found Alpha Sapphire tedious, just like I found Sapphire tedious, I did like X & Y and Black & White 2, they didn’t quite grasp me like the game’s I’ve truly loved have. White grabbed my attention with its collection of all new Pokémon. There was no finding the same old monsters you’ve been seeing since 1998; throughout the main game all that could be found were new monsters. Y, which didn’t grab me the same way, tried to differentiate itself by finally moving the series into 3D polygonal graphics. It was a good and necessary change, but it wasn’t enough on its own to get me to love the game. Moon keeps the graphical improvements from Y, but also shakes of the series usual progression in some fun and interesting ways.

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Pokémon Moon may be the most plot heavy games in the series. There is more than just the usual 8 gym badges interspersed with showdowns with the local Team Rocket equivalent. In fact, there are no gyms at all. The evil team stuff does take a bit of a step forward, but their plans are less world dominating maniacal and more street punks on a rampage. This is mixed with a plot about Pokémon from another dimension crossing over into this one. Replacing the gym leaders are Trial Captains and Kahunas, which are essentially the same thing, except instead of a gym they have trials for the player to complete. This works into the expanded story parts by letting the Captains and Kahunas show up more often on the adventure. Some are just the guys you see in the one scene where you fight them, others are encountered all over the island helping the player out. Each of the game’s four islands has a Kahuna, chosen by the island’s guardian Pokémon, who appoints the Captains to test people before they battle the Kahuna. A big part of the game is the local Pokémon Professor going around trying to set up an elite 4 like in the other regions. All of these different elements come together to make a game that is much more about the story of this area than previous games and a little less about the player’s quest to be the Champion. It isn’t a huge change, but it is a big enough one to make Pokémon Moon seem fresh compared to the previous generation.

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There have also been rather significant to the gameplay. The big one is dumping HMs. Hidden Moves, or HMs, were a gameplay element that let the player use moves on the world map. The series relied on these for environmental puzzles in previous generations. They were also on the whole not terribly useful moves that were impossible to get rid of. It lead to most players carting around one Pokémon whose only skill was the ability to learn 3 or 4 of those moves. Sun & Moon have eliminated them in favor of several Pokémon that can be called to solve those puzzles and are gradually unlocked as the game progresses. I was never a big detractor of HMs. There were occasionally a chore, but the series has scaled them back since Diamond & Pearl and they weren’t much of a hassle. Still, I can’t claim losing them isn’t an improvement. The solution keeps the basic functionality without clogging up the player’s team.

Instead of filling up the Pokedex with tons of new monsters, the highlight of each new generation and something that is quickly becoming untenable as the number of Pokémon approached 1000, Sun & Moon adds a ton of new forms for old Pokémon. It works with an idea that has already exists, region variants that look different from others of the same kind of Pokémon, except now they can have new types. Stuff like adding dark type to Rattata. It essentially takes old Pokémon and makes them new Pokémon, but in a more interesting way than X&Y’s Mega Evolutions.

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I really didn’t care for Mega Evolution. I found them goofy and not especially fun. Most of the Mega Evolutions went to Pokémon who were already strong, making them largely unnecessary. Sun & Moon add Z moves, a similar concept that just works better. They are powered by an item the Pokémon holds, and any Pokémon with the appropriate attack type can use them. Plus, they are accompanied by a goofy dance the trainer does. Instead of making one Pokémon super powerful, it gives a Pokémon on superpowered move. It is better balanced and more easy to customize to the player’s team.

I really liked Pokémon Moon. I enjoyed it enough that I am thinking of spending some significant time with the post-game. Usually I make a token effort before putting the game in my get back to pile and never getting back to it. (The big exception to this was Pokémon Pearl, which I put nearly 400 hours on.) Much like the second generation on the DS, the second 3DS generation really feels like it got things right. I again feel excited to play whatever the series has coming next. Maybe I’ll finally get around to downloading one of the original games on my 3DS.

Now Playing in November 2016

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Beaten

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice – read about it here.

Wild Guns – read about it here.

Strider – I played all the way through this thinking it was Strider 2, thanks to a combination of Capcom’s stupidity and my own. The PS1 version included this with Strider 2, but labeled the CD with Strider 1 on it disc 1. I should have realized what I was playing earlier, but I didn’t. Playing it through the lens of a late 90’s action game makes this one seem primitive. There is a lot of good action here, but it seems to require a high level of play to make it seem like anything other than a somewhat stilted action game. Of course, it is a game from about a decade earlier and I’m not as familiar with the arcade games of that time. I had a decent amount of fun with it, though I can’t say I like it all that much.

Strider 2 – This was more of what I was expecting.  Not that this is necessarily a better game than the first Strider, but it definitely looks more like a PS1 game, with higher resolution sprites and 3D backgrounds.  It is still a style over substance action game that seems to be more about looking cool than providing a smooth gameplay experience.  It is a game for mastery, and that isn’t really how I play.

DoReMI Fantasy – My post about this game should be going up soon, but for now I’ll just say that this might be the best game I’ve played in my exploration of the SNES’s second tier. Right now I would call this one of my favorite 2D platformers, ever.

Ongoing

Yakuza 5 – npy5

It just kind of dawned on me that I bought this game at the end of last year and never really played it. Since I was hiding from my family during Thanksgiving, I thought I’ve fire it up. It is really, really good. This time the game lets you start as Kiryu, who everyone wants to play as anyway. It opens a full city up to him and lets the player just go free almost immediately. I ended up spending a lot of time doing Kiryu’s ridiculous taxi missions, a combination of driving challenges that force the player to follow the rules of the road, conversations where you have to entertain or inform the customers and races. Yes, somehow being a taxi driver gets Kiryu involved with a group of underground street racers that just so happens to include his coworkers at the taxi service and their tragic backstories. They are a delight, especially with the purely aesthetic modifications you can make to the taxi. That is about all I did for the day or two after Thanksgiving. I don’t think I will be so relaxed on my way through the rest of the game.

Secret of Evermore – I think this game might be better than Secret of Mana. I’m not done with it, and that might be sacrilege, but it is more compact and solid game. It lacks Secret of Mana’s highs, but also lacks the lows. At least through the first two time periods, anyway. I will hopefully have it finished up before too much longer, but I’ve been saying that for months.

Jotun –npjo

I’ve been distracted with 3DS and SNES games, but the little of this I’ve played have been a delight. It feels a little slow at times, but it looks great and the slowness seems deliberate rather than a failure somewhere. Hopefully I’ll have more to say when I get further in.

SMT IV: Apocalypse – nps4

I’m really just not in the right mood for this game right now. It is essentially more SMT IV, a game I really liked, but for some reason it just isn’t doing anything for me right now. I’ll likely give it another go once I finish with Pokémon, but I’ve learned that trying to force my way through SMT games is a recipe for having a bad time. When they are the game you are looking for they work like nothing else, but when it isn’t the right flavor there is just no breaking through the series aesthetic. Still, through the first five hours everything seems mechanically sound at the very least.

Pokémon Moon – I am nearing the end of this and it is the most fun I’ve had with a Pokémon game since White, I think. That game kept things fresh by only letting the player’s use the new Pokémon through the main game. Moon does it by changing up the rhythm of the game, eliminating formal gyms and gym leaders for a more free form set of challenges. I also like a lot of the new forms of Pokémon, which are largely interesting twists on the originals, though some are just goofy, like the super tall Eggxecutor and the Garfield-ass looking Persian. Still, electric Geodude is neat and I like the Ice Vulpix. The game also just looks really good. The graphics have never really been a big part of Pokémon’s formula, but this is a pretty good looking 3DS game. I’ll have more complete thoughts coming soon.

Upcoming

Lufia 2, Terranigma, Robotrek, Actraiser – These are the last four of my SNES games I intended to beat this year. I won’t manage to finish more than maybe two of them before the year ends, but I will do my best to get as much played as I can over these last few weeks. Hopefully I can get a least one of these posted.

Back to the Future – I played the first episode of this game a year or so back, but now I’ve downloaded all the games that I’ve bought on PSN, including the last 4 episodes of this, as well as the Telltale Monkey Island game and the third collection of Sam & Max. Come to think of it, I still need to play the second volume of Sam & Max. I’m going to have to have a Telltale marathon.

Shantae: Half-Genie Hero – This should be coming out soon and I will play it immediately. The previous Shantae games have been varying degrees of excellent; I expect this one to be no different.

25 Years 25 Games 19: Wild Guns

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I’m not finishing this series this year, that is becoming increasingly obvious, but that is not going to stop me from trying. So on with Wild Guns, a simple and delightful game from Natsume. Wild Guns is a shooting gallery game. Your character stands at the front of the screen and shoots enemies in the background. That is just about all there is to it. Still, Wild Guns remains a delight, as much due to its simplicity as despite it.

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The game gives the player two characters to choose from, Annie or Clint, obviously named for Annie Oakley and Clint Eastwood. The story is that Annie hires space cowboy Clint to help her get revenge on the bad guy (who I am sure has a name but I can’t find it for the life of me) for the death of her family. The characters look initially like they came straight out of a western, but the world is full of robots and other science fiction stuff. The setting is one of the game’s greatest strengths. The Western and Sci-Fi themes mesh surprisingly well. The big, colorful graphics that flesh out this old west filled with killer robots is the stuff that all 16-bit games aspire to.

While the game is exceedingly difficult, it is rather simple to control. The d-pad controls both the character and the shooting reticule. The character moves around the foreground, shooting at targets in the background. You start with a pea shooter, but that can be upgraded to a shotgun or machine gun, as well as a few others. There is also a secondary weapon of a lasso that momentarily stuns the enemies you with it. You also have a screen clearing bomb and a melee attack for the handful of enemies that come into the foreground. At times bad guys will also toss dynamite at the player which can be tossed back at the bad guys. There is quite a bit the player can do for being stuck on a flat plane, but it all comes intuitively. Which is good, considering how ridiculously hard this game is.

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I played this game on the WiiU VC, with its rudimentary save state. Even with that considerable crutch, I found the game nearly impossible to complete. On easy difficulty. While the game is only about an hour or so long, it is not a game designed to be beaten in just an hour. Wild Guns requires the player to learn the game. There are a lot of enemies and a lot of bullets coming at the player. Knowing where to move and where to shoot is vitally important. I guess it is technically possible to react fast enough to clear many of the games hurdles, that is essentially what I did with my save state aides to get me through when my reflexes failed me, but this is a game that requires some learning if not explicit memorization. But that learning is how you play this sort of game, it is no different from Star Fox or Contra 3.

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Wild Guns is the definition of cult classic. It isn’t a great game, not is it a game designed to pull in a large number of devoted followers. It does what it does exceptionally well, but this kind of shooting gallery game is always going to be something of a niche interest.

Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice

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The sixth Ace Attorney game hit the 3DS a couple of months ago and once Dragon Quest VII was finished I jumped right into it. I greatly enjoyed the previous game, Dual Destinies, but while it was a joy to just have the series back after a few years, it didn’t quite capture the magic of the original trilogy. With Spirit of Justice, the series has finally returned to its original heights.

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There are still some problems for the series to work through. For one, there are too many characters that are important enough that that all feel like they need to be given their due. There is Phoenix, Apollo and Athena, the three attorneys that work at Wright Agency. And then there is Trucy Wright and investigator Emma Skye. There must also be appearances by previous prosecutors like Miles Edgeworth and Simon Blackquill. Then the game also returns Maya Fey, with a cameo for her cousin Pearl. I’ve enjoyed this whole series and am more than happy to see each of these familiar faces, but the sheer number of returning characters makes it hard to find room for new ones.

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That weakness plays into Spirit of Justice’s greatest strength. This game is the most focused game in the series. All of the cases, save one, are laser focused on the game’s central story. Most of the time there are one or two that play it out, with the player gaining greater understanding of the characters in the more disconnected chapters. In this one, 4 of the 6 cases tried feature one of the protagonists in a compromised position and one of the other two is the first chapter that introduces the country of Khura’in. Each of the other four are all building to the central storyline of Khura’in.

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It makes that central story possibly the strongest in the series, with the possible exception of Trials and Tribulations. The situation in the foreign country gradually becomes clear to the player, as does the connections some major characters share with it. It gradually builds and deepens as it is goes along, letting the player really get to know the story. Spirit of Justice does have one of the smallest casts in the series.  The same faces show up over and over. It lets those characters get more development, but it also limits the world a little bit. I like it with this game, but if there is a sequel, fingers crossed, I hope it widens the scope a little bit again.

One thing I love this game for is bringing Maya back. I didn’t realize just how much I missed the interplay between her and Phoenix until they were together again in this game, however briefly it was. I like Apollo, Athena and Trucy, but these games have always been at their best when it’s been Phoenix and Maya doing the work. I’ll play these games forever for just the scraps of those two. While even on her return Maya spends a lot of the game kidnapped or accused of murder, but just bringing her back at all after two games with her absent was enough for me.

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Ace Attorney Spirit of Justice is just more of the same for the series. That is more than enough for me. The more the gaming landscape changes, leaving less and less coming out that I am truly interested in, the more I have grown to savor familiar comforts like Ace Attorney. This is a series that got it right the first time out, there really isn’t anywhere for it to grow. Each game lives or dies on the writing; on the plots and characters. In that area, Spirit of Justice excels.

Now Playing October 2016

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Beaten

Skyblazer – read about it here.

Legend of the Mystical Ninja – read about it here.

Dragon Quest 7 – read about it here.

Ongoing

Ace Attorney Spirit of Justice –

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I liked Dual Destinies when it came out, but after having played through the first three games again it was apparent how lacking that game was in comparison. This one, at least through the first two and a half cases, seems razor focused and really gets what makes this series so enjoyable. I think they might have cracked how to handle having both Apollo and Phoenix available to lead cases. Ideally they would each get their own games, but as that is an impossibility putting them in separate locations working on somewhat connected cases is working so far. The game lives and dies by the writing, and in the first two cases it has been very good.

SMT 4: Apocalypse – I’ve barely gotten started, but this is certainly more Shin Megami Tensei 4. I really liked the original game, and this one seems to have fixed some of the game’s minor problems and exacerbated others. Still, SMT games come around infrequently enough that I am more than happy with what I’ve played, though that is only the first couple of hours or so.

Secret of Evermore – Slow progress here, but I am enjoying the game. It is an odd one, feeling like Secret of Mana in some ways, but also very clearly an American game in others. It definitely doesn’t deserve the hate it gets from those who wanted Seiken Densetsu 3, but I don’t know that it deserves the praise I’ve seen elsewhere.

Robotrek – I’ve played through the opening here and this game is something special, even if it isn’t especially great. So far it isn’t great, merely pretty good, but it is doing a lot of interesting and original things.

Upcoming

Pokémon Moon – I am liking what I’m seeing from this game and I’m really looking forward to a somewhat remixed take on the usual formula. It will certainly still play like Pokémon, but I wonder what the campaign will be like without gyms. Nintendo and Game Freak really haven’t failed yet with this series.

Jotun – I paid for it, but I haven’t made time to play it yet. I really want to, but I’ve felt obliged to spend a lot of my gaming time playing SNES games, which is a certain way to make them feel like work instead of fun. If I start to feel that way, this is what I will break up that up with.

Wild Guns – I am not giving up on the 24 SNES games, even though it is looking less and less likely that I will manage to finish any time before March. If that is what it takes, that is what I’ll do. Until then, I’ll keeping playing the games, with Wild Arms next on the docket and one of the last non-RPGs that I have to play.

Lufia 2 – Next up after I finish one of those SNES RPGs I’m already playing. Hopefully this one goes better than the first Lufia game.

25 Years 25 Games 18: Skyblazer

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Sony Imagesoft’s game output isn’t exactly well regarded. Most of the games they put out during their brief existence, which lasted from 1989 to 1995, were tepid movie tie-ins. The did make Solstice and Equinox, as well as publish Super Dodge Ball and Game Freak’s (of Pokémon fame) Smart Ball, but mostly it was a lot of junk. Near the end of their existence they put out Skyblazer, a surprisingly good action platformer.

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Skyblazer bears similarities to classic games like Castlevania, Mega Man and Demon’s Crest. It especially shares a lot with the last two. The protagonist, Sky, can cling to walls and climb around levels that way. It gives the player a lot of mobility, especially in the tight confines of the fortress stages. He is just a fun character move around. The game also looks good, with big colorful sprites and sounds good, with some classic SNES tunes. It is all an around well-made game, though not a flawless one.

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The biggest problem with the game is that the levels only barely seem designed rather than just haphazardly assembled. There are a lot of stages and they are usually very short. With a protagonist as mobile as Sky it can be easy to skip the vast majority of obstacles with judicious use of his special skills. There are lots of little short cuts that don’t seem to be there intentionally, that only seem to exist because the level designers didn’t take into account just how acrobatic that player can be. It doesn’t help that a lot of the stages are super short while the fortress stages can be rather long. It makes for an uneven experience at times.

Still, that doesn’t derail what is otherwise a great experience. The bosses are big and good looking, as well as being a solid mix of challenge and fun. While some of the stages are bit awkwardly set up, they are still mostly fun to play through. There is a story, but only barely. The evil Ashura kidnaps the Princess Arianna, so the valiant young Sky must rescue her. That’s about it.

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I don’t really have a lot to say about this game. It is an above average action game. I wouldn’t quite put it up there with the other game’s I’ve already mentioned, Mega Man X, Castlevania or Demon’s Crest, but it is definitely well made. Nothing it does, however, inspires much comment in me. It’s good, but that’s about it. Maybe I’m just making these games seem like work by forcing myself to play them. If that was the case it wasn’t enough to derail this experience completely. I’m still going to finish the last seven games, even if there is not chance I do so before February. I’ll have another one ready in a week or two on Wild Guns or Secret of Evermore.

Dragon Quest VII

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Dragon Quest VII has had a long road to recognition in the West. The Dragon Quest series in general hasn’t had too great of success, but Dragon Quest 7’s struggle has seemed even tougher than some of the games that weren’t initially released in America. This game was released for the Playstation, as Dragon Warrior VII, but that was in 2001, a scant couple of months before Final Fantasy X hit. That original version has its strengths, but the disparity in visuals between those two games effectively illustrates why the game was so poorly received. That seemed to kill the series in America for a while, before its revival with Dragon Quest VIII and the subsequent run of DS games. But even that petered out before the 3DS came along, with a DQVII remake. (As well as a Rocket Slime sequel that will sadly remain Japan only) It long looked like this game would never come over from Japan, not reaching Western shores for more than three and a half years since it originally came out. It is such an improvement in many ways from the PS version, giving its stronger qualities a chance to shine in a way that it didn’t before. While it isn’t the strongest game in the series, it is certainly a must play 3DS game.

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Dragon Quest VII strongly follows the series vignette based story telling style. It follows it to a fault. Games like DQV and DQIX used the structure to great effect, letting smaller stories flesh out the world and the greater conflict. The main story is unfolds by the player collecting tablet fragments that, when combined, unlock new islands, each with a town or two. Each little town was its own story, though there was a greater narrative building behind them. Dragon Quest VII does this, but that greater narrative never really materializes in a significant way or more precisely doesn’t seem to really grow out of the smaller vignettes. All the details you get about the greater conflict are laid out relatively quickly and flatly, all of the vignettes merely tell their own stories. Those little stories are much more interesting that bigger story, which is as rote as rote can be. Those little stories are the draw and they deliver. Each town freed from the darkness has some sort of story. Few of them are particularly happy affairs. The game is suffused with a sense of tragedy. There are moments like in the past forcing a reclusive inventor, who lost is one love years ago, to help you defeat an army of killer robots by having him make his own robot, only to find in the present that that lonely robot is still attempting to attend to the needs of the inventor, who died long before. It is tragic and heartbreaking and a little absurd. That goes for much of this game.

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It does have some great characters, though the game doesn’t put them to the best use. You spend a lot of time alone, or just with reckless young prince Keifer before the spoiled young Maribel joins. It is that trio for several hours before you finally get a forth party member and a full party. The game then, of course, yanks a character away a good long while before dropping the last two party members on the player. That last one especially joins too late to make a strong impact. Still, the characters are a lot of fun. Ruff, a small boy who rides around on a wolf, is only ever concerned with food or smells. His one track mind gets a lot of great reactions. Maribel is the game’s breakout character, being delightfully awful the whole time. She constantly berates the hero, suggest various princesses and queens abdicate in her favor and is just generally kind of terrible. Mervyn, the old hero, and Aishe are fine, but join too late to be all that memorable.

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Gameplay wise it is classic Dragon Quest, with the classic Dragon Quest butchering of a class system. It has such a system, but it doesn’t unlock until more than halfway through the game. For stretches near the end it also locks the player out of being able to change classes, so hopefully you didn’t get stuck with some crappy ones. It does give the player a wide variety of options for tackling the games challenges, but nothing, so long as you don’t do something stupid like make the whole party mages, poses enough of a challenge for your choices to matter. Everything else is standard Dragon Quest, which means standard JRPG. Very solidly made, but also quite simple.

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In the end, Dragon Quest VII doesn’t stack up against the best games in the series. It is no IV or V, but it is certainly better than VI. This 3DS version is a visual delight and a very enjoyable 45 hour game that just so happens to take 60 hours to beat. Dragon Quest VII’s flaws are all very forgivable, since they come from the game trying to do and be too much. It starts small, but it eventually gets very big. It doesn’t manage to nail that turn, but most of the game is a lot of fun to play.

25 Years 25 Games 17: Legend of the Mystical Ninja

/ skoce / 1 Comment

Legend of the Mystical Ninja is a weird little game that I have been somewhat fascinated with for a long time. My cousin had the game, but I rarely had the chance to play. I saw it played, I spent twenty of thirty minutes with it, but I never really got to dig in and enjoy it. Still, its strange sense of humor was evident even from my brief encounters with it. I heard of N64 sequels and ones that were Japan only of the SNES, but again they kind of evaded me. The virtual console gave a method to finally play this game, even if I didn’t exercise it until recently.

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Legend of the Mystical Ninja is not quite the game I thought it was. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I built it up in my mind as something akin to River City Ransom, which is among my favorite games of all time, but while it has some superficial similarities, it is not the same. The stages are kind of a free roaming brawler with enemies that drop coins when defeated. But River City Ransom has some strong RPG elements, where the money is used to build up the player character’s skills and abilities. The food you buy increases you stats and the books give permanent abilities. In Legend of the Mystical Ninja, power ups are temporary and food merely refills health. The free roaming parts of stages give way to straight platformer levels at the end. And there are actually stages. River City Ransom allows the player to travel freely around its rather small world, Legend of the Mystical Ninja is much larger but more restrictive, with hard breaks between levels.

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While it isn’t exactly what I thought it would be, Legend of the Mystical Ninja is still a lot of fun. The action is straightforward, with tight controls and clear objectives. Each level starts with a goal and the player (or players) explore the level to find the location of the boss, then deal with it. There are a good variety of enemies and a decent array of attacks. There are some annoyances. Goemon (or Kid Ying) as three levels of weapon: a small pipe, a bigger pipe, and a yoyo looking weapon. Collecting small cats that some enemies drop level the weapon up, but each hit the player takes drops it a level. The same goes for sandals the player can buy. They speed the player up, but disappear with each hit. It makes enemies that have ranged attacks, particularly attacks with odd angles, especially annoying to deal with. The biggest struggle in the game (at least when you are abusing save states like me) comes from getting to the boss with a decent method of attack. Still, there is a money consuming sub-weapon. The player can toss coins at bad guys for an effective, if expensive, ranged attack. In all, it is a lot of fun.

Then there is the game’s off kilter sense of humor. It is a sense of humor that survives a hatchet job of a localization. Goemon is something of a Japanese Robin Hood, with his own cast of merry men. In bringing the game to America, Konami changed just about everything. Goemon became Kid Ying, his buddy Ebisumaru Dr. Yang. I guess it is in keeping with the games wacky tone, but they are no more American than Goemon. It is not like the game can hide the humor. Most of the houses you find in the free roaming areas are filled with goofy minigames. One is a quiz game with an opponent that likes to answer before the question is complete, though he is usually wrong. Others are straight up levels of other Konami games or first person mazes. A lot of it is just a waste of time, but some of them are quite a bit of fun.

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Legend of the Mystical Ninja is a near classic. It does everything so well that the spots where is gets annoying stand out all the more. Still, despite the annoyances the game is a lot of fun to play.