RPG

Review – Chrono Trigger

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Chrono Trigger is an embarrassment for the gaming industry. Straight up embarrassment. It’s embarrassing that a game that is over ten years old can be so well made as to put many current games to shame. It’s like the Roman Empire, without all of the strange pedophiliac tendencies but all of the impressive works of art.

Chrono Trigger is the latest in a series of Square-Enix remakes designed to milk old titles for every last dollar and yen. Like Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger is a game that I somehow missed (though I did play the under appreciated Chrono Cross at some point).

Chrono Trigger is, simply put, a pleasure to play. The casual gaming experience (by which I mean, the fights, going from A to B, etc) completely trumps a game like Dragon Quest. The characters have diverse skill sets and magic, individual elemental affinities, and attacks that allow them to team up in pairs or trios depending on who is in your party. →  I’d buy that for a dollar.

Review – Dragon Quest IV

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For many, the Dragon Warrior/Quest franchise has a great deal of meaning, nostalgia and history. I remember playing Dragon Warrior on the NES when I was a young whippersnapper. I also remember that when faced with a choice at the end of joining the last boss or killing him, I decided to join him. The screen acquired an orange glow and my Nintendo froze. Was that what was supposed to happen? After my orange experience, I never touched a Dragon Warrior game again.

Dragon Quest IV, a Square Enix port of the original to the DS, presented an opportunity to reacquaint myself with the franchise. Having just run through the remake of Final Fantasy IV, I had high hopes that Square Enix would have scrubbed through the original and done away with any lingering issues to create a superior RPG experience, as they had in FFIV. While the makeover was not as extreme as FFIV received, the original game experience has enough strengths to compete with today’s DS RPG options. →  All the lonely gamers, where do they all belong?

Review – Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World

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Tales of Symphonia is one of the Gamecube’s greatest RPGs. I only got around to finishing it a couple of months ago at the urging of several friends. I was further encouraged to play through it by the impending release of its sequel, Dawn of the New World. Unfortunately, DotNW does not live up to its predecessor’s legacy and instead spends much of the time in its shadow.

Some of this is inevitable. Tales of Symphonia ends with the merger of two worlds, and much of the sequel deals with what happens afterward. The two lands of Sylvarant and Tethe’alla do not really get along, and bizarre weather events trouble the entire world. A lot of blame is naturally cast at the heroes of the first game. Lloyd, in particular, seems to have gone off the deep end as he instigates a massacre of a town during the game’s beginning.

Much of DotNW is spent traveling the world, usually with one or two of the original ToS heroes. →  This post are sick.

Dragon Questing

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Before they even released their next iteration, Square Enix has announced that Dragon Quest 10 will see the light of day on the Wii. The announcement comes as a surprise to no one (which is different than the angry genre fans that bet and lost on the PS3 carrying the jRPG torch). The question still remains as to what this will actually mean for the console.

While it is true that Dragon Quest has always appeared on the most popular console of the time, the reasons for this have always varied. For DQ 1-6, Nintendo was so dominant that there was no question as to where to put the series. For 7 and 8, Enix took a “wait and see” approach before choosing Sony, and released them many years after either Playstation had established their own dominance. They took the same approach with 9 and 10, but acted on their move to Nintendo much earlier.

If there is one truly common thread in the series, it would be that Dragon Quest has always been on the console with the best software support. →  It might come in handy if you, the master of reading, take it with you.

Review – Fallout 3

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Writer’s note: At the time of this writing, Fallout 3 is a bit buggy on all platforms, and extra buggy on the PS3. I do not wish to neglect these issues, but for the time being they are not featured in the review. If the first patch for the game does not fix many of these issues, I will bring them up in a future piece, but I wish to avoid talking about bugs at the moment as it takes away some of the timelessness of a review. Fallout 2 was broken in many ways upon release, and no one talks about that these days.

We here at videolamer strive to provide timely reviews for major releases. The bad news is that juggling real life responsibilities and funding our own gaming budgets makes this a challenge. The good news is that each year the industry makes meeting this challenge less and less critical, since every year it becomes plagued with an even stronger case of Hype Fever. →  Assassin’s Read

RPGs are bad “games”

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The JRPG genre is filled to the brim with games that are so ridiculously easy they are bad “games” – in the sense that a game is something you should have to play optimally to achieve success. The Suikoden series, my favorite of the past two generations, has gone from being “somewhat tricky in one or two battles” to “a breeze at its hardest, with pretty much no thought involved.”

Part of this is a plague of the genre – the phenomenon of grinding. For those who don’t want to think about what they’re doing, grinding is an easy way out. There’s no need to play perfectly when you can spend a few hours killing baddies and come back able to beat the tar out of the bigger baddies. It takes time, but then JRPGs are filled with fluff already (mostly grinding, actually), so spending a bit of time leveling up doesn’t sound too bad.

But strategy is largely lost in RPGs. →  An article approaches.
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Short RPGs for fun and profit

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Almost a month ago, Persona 3: FES was released. It not only contains the definitive version of my favorite RPG, but it has an extra “epilogue” chapter as well.

This is a cause for much rejoicing. I started playing it immediately, and so far I’d say I would pay the $30 just for the improved first game. But herein lies the problem, and the crux of this article: It has been a month and I am still playing it. Not only that, I’m still in the first section; the remake.

I love RPGs. I love playing lots of RPGs. But I also like having time for other, trivial things, like working, sleeping, eating, and the occasional shower. Most games in the genre are long; sometimes the length necessary for fleshing out the story, but more often it is just padding. Over the past couple of years alone, I’ve completed more than a few RPGs that clocked in at 60 or more hours. →  Postsona 3 FES

Review – Mass Effect Downloadable Content: Pack #1

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Mass Effect is one of the best games I’ve played in recent years. The intricate character development, the beauty of the various worlds, the epic music, the quality voice work … fantastic. I’ve already played through the game twice and I can’t wait for the sequel (which was just made official). So naturally I leapt at the chance to get some filler content with the first DLC pack “Bring Down the Sky”: a 400 point ($5) roughly ninety minute add-on with an additional fifty achievement points thrown in.

Before I get to talking about what I thought went wrong with the pack, I just want to say that I loved playing it as much as the rest of the game. If you were a fan of the original it’s exactly the quality you’d expect from BioWare, but this side quest is given the same cinematic treatment that only the main plot missions had the first time. Not to mention that for $5 you get an hour and a half of entertainment that’s far better than most current movies (I’m looking at you Witless Protection). →  Ys: The Article of Napishtim

Random Old Game – Drakkhen

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There are few games that can inspire a sense of true exploration – a feeling of awe at how large or detailed they are. Fewer still are the games that can bring out that feeling even after you’ve beaten them. For some reason, despite being only a so-so game in nearly every other respect, Drakkhen (of a few systems, though most notably the SNES) still holds uncounted mysteries in my mind.

Seems fair.

The most likely source of this awe is simply that the game is so abominably random. I never owned the instruction book, and the introduction only gives vagaries as to the plot (blah blah, 4 elements, 2 poles of power). Fact is, you create a party and start in the middle of the Earth area with little direction. You’re told that you have to collect 8 Tears of Power, and that you should check at the nearby castle first. Oh, the introductory information tells you a decent amount about the game’s system. →  Rayman Reading Rabbids

Review – Mass Effect

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I am an RPG player. It is worth mentioning this up front as something relevant to the review which is to follow. I enjoy the genre of RPG’s enough to call it my favorite. Now, I say this because I realize that not everyone is like me. One of my best friends confessed to me recently that while he used to be an ardent RPG player in his younger days (when his life generally consisted of boredom and peer hatred in high school instead of daily responsibilities and peer hatred at work) now he simply has no time for serious gaming commitments that last for more than a few hours. Well, apparently, despite having a full and satisfying life, not much has changed for me. Somehow, I am still able to get into, enjoy and complete plot heavy games. Perhaps such a predisposition toward narrative games has skewed my critical perception. If you are inclined to think so, then consider this a caveat for the following sentence, but as it is I shall offer no more personal context for what I am about to say. →  Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the article?