Another week, another game crossed off my list. Gungrave is beaten. Tsugunai: Atonement still is not, but I did make some progress. I also started playing Growlanser III again. All in all a productive week.
Gungrave is astoundingly short. Given what it is that is not surprising, but it does not change the fact that this game is not long at all. I am not overstating this; I beat the game in less than 3 hours. Gungrave is a shmup by way of the 3D action game. The graphics are rough, the story is barely intelligible (I assume it relies on knowledge of the anime/manga/whatever) but the game is actually fun. It occasionally puts the player in that perfect, zen-like shooter trance, where the controller is forgotten and the player simply reacts. Honestly, though, I would have been upset with the length if I had paid more than 6 bucks on this game.
Tsugunai’s blandness has kept me from making much more progress. If my opinion does not change by next week, the game is getting kicked to the bottom of the list, or even off it.
I also broke out Growlanser Generations back out. GG is Working Designs last release, a compilation of Growlanser II and Growlanser III. I’ve already beaten II and I liked it a lot. I played about halfway through III before I got bored or distracted by something else. Since starting it again, I’ve noticed 2 things. The first is how great the battle system is. It is like a real time Final Fantasy Tactics. More could have been done to improve it from II, all that appears to be changed is a significant bump up in the difficulty, but it is still very good. The second thing is how very anime this game is. That is something that may have appealed to me 5 or 6 years ago, but now it is somewhat off putting.
Next week: more Tsugunai and Growlanser, plus I plan to start Castlevania: Lament of Innocence. In addition, Eve of Extinction, which was found not purchased, is again lost. It has been replaced on the list with the newly purchased Yakuza 2. Which does not play in my PS2, but I am determined to play it.
In the first week of my concentrated effort to clear out my PS2 backlog I have made some good progress. I started the week playing two games: Activision and Neversoft’s Gun and Tsugunai: Atonement developed by Cattle Call and published by Atlus. So far, I would say I enjoyed both of them to at least some degree.
I beat Gun. It is a competently made GTA-clone with an–at the time at least–unique setting, but it definitely has its flaws. For one, its game world is very small. There is a decent variety of missions, but there just aren’t very many of them. There is a variety of locales, but they are all really small. Even with how small they are, they are still sparsely populated. Gun manages to feel both cramped and empty. That doesn’t ruin the game, though. It just leaves the player wishing there were more, and that is not the worst thing to say about a game.
I just really wish they had done a better job with the story. Gun’s story is just a slap-dash collection of western clichés that does a decent job developing the protagonist but leaves everyone else simple caricatures (the gold-hearted hooker, the corrupt mayor, etc.). I would like to see how it stacks up against the recent Red Dead Redemption. Gun is a good, but nowhere near great game.
Tsugunai: Atonement I did not beat. I haven’t quite played quite enough of it to form a full opinion on it; the game is structured into 34 missions and I’ve cleared 9 of them. So far, the game is long on ideas and short on execution. I really like the premise: the main characters spirit has been separated from his body and he must possess people to help them solve their problems. Someone could make a great game around this idea, but Tsugunai does not appear to be that game. The most obvious flaw is in how the game looks. Not only are the graphics bland, which they very much are, but also the screen is very dark. This is not a problem with my TV; I can see every other game just fine. However, Tsugunai is often so dark you cannot even see how bland the graphics are. On the plus side, the soundtrack is by Yasunori Mitsuda at his Chrono Crossiest.
So next week I’m going to continue hacking away at Tsugunai and start up Gungrave. I’ve been told Gungrave is quite short, so if I finish that I may start on Castlevania: Lament of Innocence or start again on Growlanser III. 27 left.
Final Fantasy has a title which is of course ironic now considering the more than dozen sequels and spin-offs in the Final Fantasy series today, but at the time of its release, according to video game legend, Final Fantasy was SquareSoft’s last gasp as an early game studio, so the title was apt. It is a little hard to look at this primitive game now and see the progressive title it was at the time. However, compared to its NES competitors Final Fantasy had some innovative features.
Taking a page or more from D&D, Final Fantasy lets the player choose his party from a small stable of available jobs. These jobs are FF most brilliant feature. By tying different combinations of jobs, the player can replay this game numerous times and get a vastly different experience. Those jobs are:
Fighter: the meat shield. One of the most important classes. He can use all the good armor and weapons, but he gets no magic, at least not to start. Because the way game has the enemies attack (50% of the hits go to the party leader, 25% to the number 2 guy and 12% each for the last two spots) having a Fighter or two at the top of your party can let you go for a long time with the pair of meat shields eating the majority of the hits.
BlBelt: like the fighter, the BlBelt is an effective damage dealer. Unlike the Fighter, the BlBelt does not get all that great armor or all those great weapons. Fortunately, he does not need them. He is more than a match for the Fighters damage output, and after the first few levels he will not need and sort of weapon. A very low maintenance character. To offset his great damage output, he looses the ability to take that many hits. He’s not exactly fragile, but he is no match for the fighter.
BlMage: Pure magical damage. This little guy is death on a larger scale than the Fighter or the BlBelt, hampered only by the number of charges he has for his spells. Most of the battles are beaten by blasts of Lit2, the BLMage is the best choice for clearing mobs until you acquire some items that cast Lit2 when used.
WhMage: the healer and undead killer, the WhMage has its uses, but it is not necessary. Yes, the WhMage is unnecessary. S/He is not useless, but the goal for most battles should be to get out as fast as possible, and the WhMage has few good damaging options, as well as being fragile. Some money can be saved with the WhMage’s healing magic, but likely not enough to offset the loss of damage. Still, adding one, but not more, is not a terrible choice.
RdMage: Jack of all trades, master of none. In the first half of the game, the RdMage is great. He deals and absorbs all most as much damage as a Fighter as well as almost matching the casting ability of the BlMage and WhMage. As the game goes on his abilities become less and less impressive; the RdMage does not get access to higher level spells, armor or weapons. He is much better early than late, but is still a good addition.
Thief: He combines the damage and armor limitations of the RdMage with the spell casting ability of the Fighter. The Thief is just not very good. He does get the most significant change in class to Ninja. The Ninja gets some good spell casting and better equipment. The Thief has many disadvantages but no advantages.
There is a class change about halfway through the game, but most of the classes just become slightly stronger versions of the original class. More spells, more equipment, few substantive changes. Except, of course, the Ninja who makes the Thief useful.
The game’s quest is simple, but significantly more involved than Dragon Warrior’s. After you pick your four Warriors of Light, then you must defeat the four elemental fiends who are killing the world to relight the Crystals. By the end, the story morphs into one about a time loop and an infinitely repeating quest. Luckily, the translation is quite good by NES standards, though it is sometimes still hard to figure out exactly what is going on.
Unless you already know the game inside and out, Final Fantasy is also very hard. The most annoying thing is wasted attacks. If you have a character attack an enemy that is already dead, then instead of moving to the next target, like nearly every game sense, it tells you that your attack was “ineffective.” I cannot help but imagine the warriors blindly wailing on imp corpses. Then there are the long dungeons, with tons of both random encounters and triggers that cause battles with every step, plus chests that are designed to be empty. Half the game seems designed to frustrate the player.
Outside of its primitiveness, there are real flaws to Final Fantasy. It was evidently a hastily programmed game, because there are numerous bugs and glitches. Some are interesting and have become a part of the game’s lore, like the Peninsula of Power, a spot on the map that allows a player early in the game to fight some of the strongest enemies. If the player is unaware then this could be a disastrous encounter, though the peninsula is far enough out of the way that most players would not encounter it naturally. A prepared player can use this mythical Peninsula for some dangerous but effective leveling. The truth about this peninsula is that the area box for those enemies was made just a little too large and accidentally caught the piece of land sticking up there. Others are more detrimental. For one the Intelligence stat is broken. It does nothing, so the mages big stat means nothing, so a Black Mage casting Lit2 gets the same result as a Fighter using an item to cast it. Also, many of the spells are useless, or are bugged so they do not work correctly. Many of them are slightly different instant death spells that are ineffective against most late game enemies.
None of these flaws really makes the game unplayable, and many of them are fixed in later versions, but it does make Final Fantasy a significantly flawed game. For people with no nostalgia for FF on the NES or for NES RPGs I would recommend the GBA or PSP versions of the game. If you did play this game back in its day, then I recommend giving it a replay in its original form; its well worth the repeat experience.
I am tired of playing my PS2. My PS2 has certainly seen better days. It no longer plays DVDs, it has trouble with some games despite their pristine conditions. It won’t recognize the lid is closed unless there are several games sitting on top of the system. The system in definitely on its last legs. As much as I love the old guy, I am ready to move on. Honestly, for much of the last 2 years I have been done with it. I have played my Wii and DS and recently my brother’s PS3. But that PS2 stayed hooked up right next to others, waiting for me to finally come and finish off my PS2 library. Well, that time is now.
Here is the list of PS2 games that I own but haven‘t beaten:
Unlimited Saga
Mark of the Kri
Okage: The Shadow King
ChoroQ
Phantom Brave
Chaos Legion
Forever Kingdom
Silent Hill 2
Darkwatch
Gungrave
Shining Force Neo
Genji
Maximo
Marvel Ultimate Alliance
Front Mission 4
Grim Grimoire
Killer 7
Star Ocean 3
SMT Devil Summoner 2
Shining Tears
Growlanser 3
Drakengard 2
Castlevania: Lament of Innocence
Gun
Tsugunai: Atonement
Wild Arms 3
SMT: Nocturne
Rogue Galaxy
Steambot Chronicles
Bully
The Thing
Eve of Extinction
32 games. My goal is to beat or just remove every game on the list. I intend to beat most of them, but I am sure there are some on the list I will never be able to. I’m not just going to exclude games so that I can say I cleared the list, but neither am I going to spend a lot of time playing a game that I hate.
It is quite a list, but I can already thin it. I beat Bully and Steambot Chronicles in the last week or so, so that removes them from the list. And there are a couple to simply remove. I have tried on at least 4 separate occasions to play Unlimited Saga, and every time quit frustrated. It may be a worthwhile game once you get the hang of it, but I have wasted enough time on it already. It is off. And Phantom Brave, while a perfectly fine game is off as well. I am removing Phantom Brave because I already played almost 2 thirds the way through it only to lose my save. The day may come that I decide to replay Phantom Brave, but I did not like it well enough to play it through again. So that is 4 games off the list, with 28 left to go.
I hope to have this list finished before the end of summer. While there are quite a few RPGs on that list, I have played most of them extensively, so that is not an outrageous goal. Right now I am playing Gun, a decent western GTA clone and Tsugunai: Atonement, an RPG from early in the PS2’s life from Atlus that is, through the first hour, completely mediocre. Here I go.
I want to fully recommend OkamiDen to anyone who owns a DS, but I can’t. Not because OkamiDen is not a great game, it is, but because it too similar to its prequel Okami.
The original Okami, whether on the Wii or PS2 version, is one of the best games of the last ten years. It is one of the few games that not only uses the Zelda action/adventure formula, but also uses it as well as the Zelda games do. Aside from playing perfectly, Okami also looked and sounded wonderful. It looked like a Japanese watercolor painting come to life. Okami was just a joy to play and even to watch. Video game consumers upheld their reputation for ignoring wonderful things by ignoring Okami. Twice.
OkamiDen, part sequel, part remake, part port, is just the same as its predecessor. Capcom did a terrific job fitting the game on the DS. But in the first 5 hours or so, I have seen nothing that was not present in the first game. It is arguably the best Zelda-like game on the DS; the only actual complaint I have with the game is that the first few dungeons are a bit too simple. However, if the original Okami is available you should play it instead. But that little wolf pup (Chibiterasu, the main character) is just so damn cute. I can’t help but love him. Play OkamiDen. Buy it right now and play it. Just don’t expect the same mind blowing experience as the original Okami.
I also beat Steambot Chronicles this week. I need to write a big long love letter to this game, but I can’t. Not right now. Maybe it’s the fact that I played most of the game more than 2 years ago and it’s a little fuzzy. Or maybe that fuzziness comes from the fact that I just had my wisdom teeth removed and am currently taking Vicodin. Either way, I don’t have it in me right now. But Steambot Chronicles is a very good game. Made by Irem and published in America by Atlus, Steambot Chronicles is a somewhat clunky sandbox game (GTA) with a great hook: you control a mech (called a Trotmobile in the game) through a Miyazaki-esque world. About half of the game is played by piloting a mech. The controls take a little getting used to; one control stick controls the left leg, the other the right, L1 and R1 attack with the left and right hand respectively. But once you master them, stomping around in a giant mech is just delightful. Your mech originally called the Earl Grey II but you can change it to whatever you want, is highly customizable. There are all kinds of weapons/arms, legs and bodies, as well as different headlights and roof attachments. In it, you can do all sorts of things: fight in arenas, transport people and goods, go mining, etc.
There are plenty of things to do outside the mech. You can choose the amnesiac main character‘s, named Vanilla Beans, dialogue. You can play him as a cocky jerk, a shy hero or anything in between. It can make each playthrough slightly different. One of the first things the player does is join a band with the people who found him on the beach. By playing a Guitar Hero-esque mini-game, you can play a dozen or so instruments. The songs are cheesy, but they fit the general tone of the game. That tone is earnestness. This is a very earnest game. It is somewhat sloppy, somewhat unfocused, but very earnest. It is not a game for everyone; someone could easily be put off by the somewhat clunky nature of everything in the game. But the world and tone make it a game that is easy to love in spite of its flaws.
I recently beat Rockstar’s Bully and surprised myself by thoroughly enjoying it. My enjoyment is a surprise because I don’t really like Rockstar’s big franchise Grand Theft Auto and Bully does not stray from its famous brother’s legacy. But Bully does fix one of the two big problems with GTA, which allows me to more easily ignore the other one.
As mentioned above, I have 2 major problems with GTA. The first is that while GTA has tons of different things to do, it does not do any of them particularly well. You shoot people, if you can manage the crappy targeting and controls. The same goes for driving, though it is better than the shooting. I would rather play a game that does one or two things well than a game that does lots of things badly. For most players the sheer variety of gameplay options seems to outweigh their relative quality, but I don’t like it. The other problem I have with GTA is the overall tone. Sure the game is rated M for Mature, but Grand Theft Auto is mature in the same way that a 14-year-old is mature. It has a fondness for dirty words and sex jokes but lack anything resembling actual maturity. This juvenile vulgarity permeates the world of the game and makes the experience largely unenjoyable for me. I do see why most gamers love GTA, but I have concluded that it is just not for me.
I could easily have assumed that Bully was the same thing, like the moronic people who protested the games release did. (I do like that they assumed that since the title was “Bully” the game would be about the main character bullying other students when it is really the opposite.) But the setting seemed interesting enough for me to try it out, though it did put it on the shelf for about 2 years after I purchased it.
Bully is just like GTA in its variety of gameplay options. It is maybe just a bit more focused, but in large part, it is the same. There are tons of missions with all sorts of objectives, but none of it is really outstanding. Where it does greatly improve on GTA in the setting. Not that the juvenile humor is gone or has added a layer of sophistication; the big change is that it feels more right in this game. The crude “maturity” fits right in with a pack of rabid High Schoolers. I would say that the characters are still drawn much more broadly than they could be, but the simple school stereotypes work. The switch from outright crime to schoolyard pranks replaces the feeling of general menace from GTA with something more playful, which I would call an improvement.
Honestly, the game fully won me over with the last boss. (Spoilers I guess) When your fight through the various gangs of students culminates in a fight on top of the school I can’t help but see the whole thing as a tribute to the greatest of greats River City Ransom. There is nothing a game can do to make me enjoy it more than echo River City Ransom.
Skociomatic 
