Reviews

Review: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers

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Presumably, there is a design doc at Square Enix that defines what defines a Crystal Chronicles game.  A character called Cid, cactuars, marlboros, flans, chocobos, airships, trains and magical jewelery are all borrowed from the main series. What makes a Crystal Chronicles game seems to be an obsession with talking about crystals, carrying things above your head, real time combat and a world populated by four different races. What I didn’t know until I hit the Final Fantasy Wiki is that all of the Crystal Chronicles games are set in the same universe but thousands of years apart. Which is nice and explains the obsession with crystals.

In my little world at least, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles titles are always released with little in the way of fanfare, especially when compared to the main series of games, and often received a mixed reception. →  Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the article?

Review – SSX Tricky

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In the early days of the GameCube one of the first games I made sure to get was SSX Tricky. It was awesome and I played it endlessly until I had mastered every single trick of every single character on every single course. Eventually I got bored of it because, well, it stopped being fun after doing the same “über trick” for the umptillionth time. It burned out my brain and I couldn’t take it any longer. From whatever was left of those brain cells lingered a memory of an incredible experience. Sometimes SSX Tricky would wander back into my daydreams and I would reminisce about how much fun I had. So you know what I did? I decided that nine years later it was time to play it again. →  PaReader the Reader

Review – League of Legends: Season One

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Following many months of “live,” but not “ranked” gameplay, League of Legends, published by Riot Games, has gone pro, launching their competitive Season One. Featuring several ranked ladder modes: “solo” (actually solo or duo play) 5v5, full premade 5v5 and full premade 3v3, the ladders will culminate with tournament play and $100,000 of cash and prizes. Although Riot will not release simultaneous usage numbers, they have confirmed through various online sources they have over 3 million registered accounts. With the DOTA community estimated at 7-9 million players built over a decade, Riot should be proud of how quickly their game has caught on and distinguished itself in broad field of incumbents and competitors.

Unsurprisingly, Season One is mostly more of the same. →  This post are sick.

Review – Fragile Dreams

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I had high hopes for Fragile Dreams. It seemed to have an unusual story, focused on post-apocalyptic loneliness and exploring a more or less empty, shattered world. And, even after moderately bad reviews, I looked forward to trying out what I still hoped would be a good game. After all, Opoona and Baroque both got worse reviews, and in my opinion they are a couple of the best third-party titles on the system.

Then I started the game. And therein lies the problem. Fragile Dreams, despite its nifty artwork, decent plot, and great music, purports first and foremost to be a game. And although it does not completely fail at being a game, it does come pretty damn close. It has a decent atmosphere – chilling, occasionally with that edge of tension that only decent survival horror games can manage – and then you get into combat and everything turns awful. →  Ikari Warriors 2: Postery Read

Review – No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle

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No More Heroes was a fine game, but it was one that worked best as a solitary experience. Parodies of gamer, geek, and otaku culture are a tricky business, and the game managed to address this issue well. Going for it a second time around would be pushing it, and having to reconcile the true ending of its predecessor would probably cheapen it in the end.

But really, it was the pessimist inside me that made me most concerned about NMH2. One of the E3 trailers indicated that the protagonist, Travis Touchdown, was going to start fighting as only the 50th ranked assassin. I knew there was a snowball’s chance in hell that Grasshopper Manufacture (or any developer, for that matter) was going to come up with fifty new boss battles to fight. →  SNK Article Classics Vol. 1

Review – Flower, Sun and Rain

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My first thought when I began playing Grasshopper Manufacture’s “Flower, Sun and Rain” was that it reminded me a bit of Killer 7. This isn’t any sort of surprise, considering Grasshopper (and it’s rebellious leader Suda51) was behind both games. It was, however, an informative revelation; Killer 7 is often praised for it’s unique audio and visual design, but as it turns out, these concepts were already being played with in FSR. The game features a well dressed protagonist, a mysterious briefcases, and character voices that sound like garbled computer voices. You could even argue that the the primitive visuals are an attempt at basic cell shading.

Flower, Sun and Rain, then, is indicative of our awkwardly evolving awareness of Japanese entertainment. →  Actraiser Readnaissance

Review – Infinite Space

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As a fan of the occasional science fiction novel, I’ve wanted to see a real sci-fi JRPG for a long time. The Star Ocean series occasionally tantalizes – then I’m reminded once again that the vast majority of each Star Ocean game ends up being the standard medieval fantasy-themed magic-filled claptrap anyway (or super-science with no explanation, which as we know is indistinguishable from the former). The Phantasy Star games have a science-y atmosphere, but they’re more post-apocalyptic in nature and there are only bits and pieces of the sci-fi around. Xenogears and Xenosaga probably come closest, but the former was more fantasy themed and the latter was too focused on inappropriate religious references to bother with much science, despite all the spaceships flying around and weapons research going on. →  2 h4rdc0r3 4 U.

Review – Pixeljunk Shooter

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Q Games’ Pixeljunk project is something that, as a gamer, I have to admire, but as a critic leaves me frustrated.  They exist as a series of small downloadables on the Playstation Network, with their 2d perspective being the only common theme among them (Wikipedia states that a “Pixeljunk Series 2” may explore early 3d visuals).  This loose sense of organization gives Q Games the freedom to be as experimental or traditional as they want to be, which in turn gives the series the potential for interesting developments.  On the other hand, the lack of consistency and predictability is tricky at a time when many of us make up our opinion on a game solely based on our experiences with its predecessors.  →  Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, ‘Game Over.’

Review – SaGa 2 DS

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Akitoshi Kawazu has sort of a shaky reputation among RPG fanatics.  He gets the occasional hit – if you can indeed call them that – with games like Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.  More often he makes games that have only a niche following at best.  He’s best known for his work on the SaGa series, which hasn’t had a great game in a long time.  I suppose you might be able to find a few people who liked SaGa Frontier or Unlimited SaGa, but then some people like pain and insurmountable learning curves.

There’s one game, however, for which I have to really give him credit.  Among the first creations that were wholly Kawazu’s was SaGa2 on Game Boy, which we saw as Final Fantasy Legend 2.  →  Eh, I’ve got nothing better to do.

Review – Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes

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As my friend drove us out to eat the other night I kept envisioning our car crashing into the one in front of it and that one following suit so that we had three aligned cars that could presumably then cross some screen gap threshold in order to attack some other cars. This phenomenon is usually discussed in terms of seeing giant Tetris blocks everywhere you look but I have also experienced it in the desire to continuously roll up objects. That Clash of Heroes has begun to project itself into my real life is a sign of something – this is the best damn DS game America has ever made. So much so that it was made in Canada.

Clash of Heroes is a variant of the match three puzzle game on the surface, but deeper down it doesn’t kind of suck like Puzzle Quest. →  Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this post!