Heavy Rain

I should start with this: there will be slight spoilers for Heavy Rain in this post. It is kind of hard to discuss this game without them, honestly, so beware. I won't reveal who the killer is, though.

The story in Heavy Rain is fantastic! The gameplay is terrible!

That's really all you need to know about Heavy Rain. I get what the developers were going for: an involving experience, utilizing the unique aspects of video games to present basically a murder mystery book that is interactive. And for the most part, they succeed; the game changes pretty much every time you play it, with different outcomes depending on the choices you made throughout the narrative. Which I applaud! These are great things.

But oh, how I wish the gameplay weren't so bad. You see, in Heavy Rain, the entire game controls as such: movement is similar to the first few Resident Evil games - you hold R2 to walk, and use the left stick to turn. That would be awful enough, but the rest of the controls are all played out with Quick Time Events. If you're unfamiliar with these, they are events that the player attempts to beat by pressing the button on the screen. For example, to open the fridge, you go up to the fridge and rotate the right stick clockwise from the right. To pick up an item off the desk, you push the right stick up. And so on.

What sucks about this is that all the activities that would usually be fun in a game (fighting a boss! Driving a car and avoiding traffic! Shooting guns!) are boring at best, and plain frustrating at worst. Sure, the events are kind of intense because you are so scared you'll screw up whatever weird button combo the developers came up with, but that kind of nullifies the point of them - you should be scared because you are playing the character and they are in a tough situation, not because you are scared of the controls.

My only other complaint is a stupid save system. The game is autosave only - you cannot create a save at any point. If you want to restart because you screwed up some retarded QTE - which will happen! - you have to try to reload your previous save before the game saves over it. Awesome!

The story itself, though... So good. You play as multiple characters, each twisting and winding around the same plot points. The Origami Killer is kidnapping little boys and drowning them, and you have to find out who. It is made somewhat clear off the bat that the killer is either one of the characters you play as or someone very close to them, so the game is always throwing you curveballs as far as character development goes. For example, for my playthrough, I was incredibly surprised as to the killer's identity, although it made sense when I went back and thought about what I had been doing with them throughout the game.

Anyway, many characters can die throughout the game, changing the outcome in several ways. I'll probably play through the game again someday, and see what changes as I go through.

I'll just have to suffer through those annoying damn QTEs.

3D Dot Game Heroes: Best Zelda Since Twilight Princess

Let's start with this. Between these two images, which seems more like a Zelda over world?

The answer is the top one, despite not being a Zelda game while the bottom one is! Let's break it down, here. Both pictures do not have much going on in them; the first one has a hero and an enemy in the distance, and that's about it. The bottom one has the hero riding a train, and a vast empty space (with shitty textured grass, but I digress - my point here isn't about graphic fidelity).

At least the top one has something interesting to DO in the over world.

3D Dot Game Heroes is the best Zelda game in a long time. It may not be incredibly original (it cribs from the first Zelda quite a bit) but it is at least fun. I have beaten two dungeons already (and I've even DIED once! When was the last time you've died in a Zelda game?!) and there has not been any tedium whatsoever the entire time. The game is lean - there is not very much exposition, and what is there is pretty barebones. This is a gamers game. If you are playing this game, you're playing it because you like traditional videogames - not some weird FORCED touchscreen minigame that is completely removed from traditional series gameplay - and, most importantly, not fun at ALL.

To be clear, I'm talking about the train in Spirit Tracks.

I've bitched about the train before and I won't do it again. My point here is that I'm really enjoying 3D Dot Game Heroes.

Oh, and if you're wondering how I'm playing this, I now own a PS3. The games I have for it are 3D Dot Game Heroes, Valkyria Chronicles, Demon's Souls, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Heavy Rain, Red Dead Redemption, God of War III, Batman Arkham Asylum, and Resident Evil 5. I plan on trying out all of these soon, and plan on playing a TON of the first three.

Happy 25th Birthday, Mario.

I guess today marks the anniversary of Super Mario Bros. In honor of this pivotal moment in gaming history, I just beat the game. (I used the two warps, so it only took like 5 minutes, but whatever.)

Thanks you so much for letting me to play-a your game!

SMT: Strange Journey, part 1

So I picked up Strange Journey again last week, after beating Etrian Odyssey II. I thought I didn't like it before, and while some of those criticisms still stand up (I still think bonus damage based on alignment is stupid) I'm finding myself largely liking the game.

By the end of Etrian Odyssey II I was sick and tired of mapping. I mean usually I like it, but when I'm trying to just get to the final boss as quickly as possible to finish the game I hate it. And when I started playing SJ again, I was glad I didn't have to map myself - I was trying to like the game mechanics, and had to fuss with them first and foremost.

The demon fusing is pretty streamlined, although costly. I really like the password feature - if I find myself stuck later in the game, I'll probably cheese my way through with some password-generated demon I find on the internet.

Does that make me a cheater? Yeah probably. I haven't done it yet, but I'm keeping that trick up my sleeve to prevent endless grinding if I can.

Speaking of which, I think that password thing is pretty damned awesome. Look here and here and here to see how fricking flexible the thing is. Have you fused a demon? Do you like it? Generate a password for it, and share it with your friends/the internet! I mean LOOK at some of Eirikr's demons - reflects all physical and magical attacks, and has Null Light and Dark. The only thing that can even DAMAGE those guys is Almighty damage!

Even if you aren't fusing ridiculous uber-demons who can kill God with their thoughts, the password system is still pretty useful. There are some secret passwords built into the game that Atlus put there for some useful demons (I've actually had a Mara sitting in my PWD hopper at level 86 or something because its a freaking penis monster given to me by the company who made the game!

Anyway, so I'm in the Delphinus sector, the fourth sector in the game, which is basically a trash heap so far. I had stopped in Bootes, the second sector, because I couldn't stand damage floors (still can't, actually!). I beat the boss of that sector, and then flew through Carina, the third sector, yesterday. I'm going to try to slow down, because I think I need to level up quite a bit to continue any farther. And I need to fuse some of these damned demons away - fricking Hathor has been around forever!

I really like how the story is presented in this game, though. Maybe I'm just naive to how the military works, but the way your characters progress through the story is very military-like. You are given orders to go do whatever, and when you do whatever, you are given more orders. This means there is no teenage celebration about victory like in almost every other MegaTen game - not to say I always hate that, but it's nice to not have to encounter it EVERY TIME. Also, all the characters are adults - which is nice, too, because you don't see that too often in RPGs. In fact, the main character looks like he is in his early 30s, MAYBE late 20s. I wish more RPGs were this way.

I'll have more thoughts as I play through it. It is definitely a weird game... It's basically Etrian Odyssey: Shin Megami Tensei. Sounds good, doesn't it? I think it's a little early for me to judge, but I think it brings both the good and bad qualities of those two series to the table. I'll probably talk about that next time if I still feel that way.

Etrian Odyssey II: Complete

I just beat Etrian Odyssey II. I'm glad I did, too, because that last Stratum was quite annoying. Stupid Beamedge's everywhere, annoying layouts, etc.

The last boss probably would have been very tough, had it not been for my RIDICULOUSLY POWERFUL duo of Ronins - Kaitlyn and Shiren were insane. Mideraba is easily my favorite skill in the game.

Before I get to that, though, I changed my party makeup for the last few floors. Once I realized that the level cap is 70 for first time adventurers, I wanted to level them up some more or at least change around their Skills. To do this, you have two options: Rest a character, to allow you to re-spend their Skill Points in exchange for knocking down their level by 5, or Retiring them, which knocks their level down by forty levels, but allows you to both re-spend their Skill Points and earn one more once they level up enough. My complaint about this is that it's only one - I embarked on Retirement for all five of my characters because I thought they'd be able to level up to 75, which would give them 5 more Skill Points total. I was wrong - each time you retire, you only get to level up one more level.

I got those fuckers up to 71, noticed they couldn't level up anymore, and I said screw this, I'm beating the last boss now.

The upside to doing that, though, was that I streamlined the crap out of their skills. I got rid of all the extraneous stuff (like Mining, Taking, and Chopping, which was useless now that I could get a ton of cash easily) and even changed some classes around.

One of the nice parts about Retiring is that you get a level 30 character with 40 initial Skill Points, but you aren't restricted to whatever class that character was. For example, I was sick of my now useless Survivalist (Icarus), so I changed him to Protector, and changed my Landschneckt(Shiren) to another Ronin(Kaitlyn remained a Ronin through the entire game). I bought Shiren another Youtou (the ridiculously expensive Katana Kaitlyn had been using for a while now) and I went back into the forest.

The Metroid Guild was here to kick some ass. And boy, did it.

The final boss went down quick. Icarus spammed Provoke (make the enemy target him more) and Parry (high chance of dodging any attack), Shiren and Kaitlyn spammed the hell out of Mideraba (multiple sword strike for huge damage), Raidou spammed Ricochet (multiple gunshots for good damage), and Yukiko alternated between healing duties and CPR (which allows characters to survive mortal blows with 1 HP like 80% of the time). I beat both forms quickly, with only like three people dying for the first form, and no one dying for the second.

Overall, Etrian Odyssey II is a mixed bag. I really like the interface improvements it brings after the original was lacking a bit - particularly the bigger variety of map icons you have, which makes navigating quite a bit easier. The Force skills aren't quite as useful, but that's okay. I did a few more of the optional Quests this time around, but not too many because once they begin to get really confusing I just give up because I don't feel like running around in circles in the dungeon trying to figure out what to do. I had a lot of fun playing EOII, and even before I broke the game with my two Ronins-o-death, I felt like it was pretty well-balanced. Some of those skills sure are useless, though.

Etrian Odyssey III comes out at the end of this month, and I have it pre-ordered, and the guy said I'd get an art book for the entire series with it, and I damned well better. I'm ready for III - I've heard it is much better than I and II.

Cave Story: Afterthoughts

So on a whim, I downloaded Cave Story for the Wii two nights ago. I beat it last night, and while it wasn't what I expected, it was very, very good.

First of all, before I played it, I thought Cave Story was a regular platformer, with a focus on stomping on guys heads and stuff. But it's not! It's more like a cross of Mario and Gradius (which is odd, then, since I've been playing a few "shmups" lately - Castle of Shikigami III and M.U.S.H.A. in particular). You acquire guns, and then use them to kill whatever enemies stand in your way.

Okay, so it's more like Contra. Having never been particularly fond of Contra, there's a particular reason why I like Cave Story so much:

It's a Metroidvania.

You acquire new items and weapons, and then use them to get to new places. You can find health and missile powerups throughout the game, as well (I didn't find too many, though, but it's possible I missed areas).

Whenever you acquire a new gun, you have to power it up, by collecting the goofy little triangle things enemies drop when they are killed. Collect enough, and your weapon will level up - but be careful! If you take damage, your weapon level may drop. It doesn't take too long to level your gun back up, of course, but this may prove hard while fighting bosses who don't drop the triangle things.

Anyway, I really like this mechanic, and some of the subtleties in this game really blow me away as well. The game never, ever tells you this is possible, but a fully powered up Machine Gun will actually allow your little guy to float if you shoot it down towards the ground! It serves as a sort of jetpack way before you actually get one in the game, and really augments it when you do.

I had heard the story was pretty good before playing the game, and while it certainly wasn't crap, I wasn't that impressed by it. It was told sparingly, sure, so it wasn't like I had much to latch on to, but I never really cared about Sue or any of the other characters. I just wanted to shoot crap and get to the next boss fight.

And man, is that last boss ridiculous. Four fights in a row where you don't get to heal or save in between? It was as if I was playing a Final Fantasy game or something.

Anyway, I hope Pixel makes another game. He probably is, but I really think people should support him by buying Cave Story on Wii. It's one of the best WiiWare titles for sure (right up there with the likes of Mega Man 9!).

Playtime... is over!

Well, I finally wrapped up Hard Mode in Castlevania: Harmony of Despair a few nights ago. Kyle and I, after dying a few times on Dracula, were able to utterly destroy him on our third try.

It was quite awesome, actually.

I've been thinking about this game on a sort of macro level, though. I mean, I may discuss it more specifically at a later time, but I had a thought I'd like to share.

This game is what the single player of Super Smash Bros. Brawl should have been like.

Think about it. You have all these great Castlevania enemies, with level designs (okay, well, graphics, anyway) pulled right out of earlier Castlevania games. You have remixed boss encounters, with some crazy abilities (could you imagine if Gergoth could hit you from anywhere in the castle in Dawn of Sorrow?!) that, due to the nature of the game, fit perfectly. You have all the abilities of these characters from past games (Soma can steal souls, Shanoa can use/inherit glyphs, etc.), so they all remain unique and play differently. You can play it with other people, or go solo.

Now read this old post of mine and tell me it doesn't seem as if they took all my complaints about Smash Bros. and made a multiplayer Castlevania out of them.

I mean, shit is almost uncanny. This quote in particular proves noteworthy: "...for Christsakes, use graphics from the old games (whether ripped right from them or redone)!" So what does this all prove?

Well, it may not have been for Smash Bros., but dammit, I was right. These basic elements form the basis for a really great, fun game. Now, admittedly, it's not as though I described Harmony of Despair 1:1, and I would never claim I did, but some pretty important points are in there. Konami, being actual game designers (and not some blogger writing to about 2 people) certainly made something much better and more interesting than the barebones structure I laid out.

I'm not going to turn this into a Smash Bros. post, so I won't go into any more detail than that. I know it's a bit of an odd juxtaposition, but it made a lot of sense to me when I thought of it.

Now back to grinding spells with Charlotte - which is very, very tedious, so we'll see how long it lasts.

I have no use for children. Be gone!

It's Castlevania week over here, it seems. I recently picked up and started playing Castlevania: Circle of the Moon today. I've put about 45 minutes in, and I've already noticed some things worth talking about:

Nathan Graves moves insanely fast. He drops really fast, and (when you get the dash item) runs pretty fast too. Playing Harmony of Despair as I have made CotM seem like it's on speed.

The music is much better than I remember. This was a Game Boy Advance launch title and while the music definitely sounds "Game Boy Advance-y," it still sounds really good. The early themes are awesome, such as Catacombs, the Abyss, etc.

I've fought two bosses so far, I believe they were called Cerberus and The Necromancer. Both were really easy, yet enjoyably challenging. I know the bosses ramp up in difficulty pretty fast in this game, but that's okay because I don't know if I'll play through all the way to the end.

Speaking of the end, I've still been playing Harmony of Despair. I'm on Level 3, The End of Chaos (woo segue) in Hard Mode. I'm sure if I really tried, I could beat it fairly handily. It's just that this level is absolutely terrible, and easily the worst in the game. Let's enumerate its flaws:

Most of the level is this giant empty hole in the middle in which the boss sits. But wait, you say, there are enemies and platforms in there that you have to traverse to at least get to the boss! Ah, but there is no point to them, because there certainly are not treasure chests in there, nor are there any unique enemies, or really any interesting level design. It's just a bunch of random blocks that are put there to be destroyed by the boss when he wakes up.

The level was clearly designed around the boss. It's as if Konami said "Let's put a huge boss that takes up like two or three full screens in Harmony of Despair! Put that screen real estate to use! But... how do we design a level around it?" And some other guy went "Eh, fuck it. Just make it a big giant hole, throw some enemies in there, and call it good. People will eat that shit right up!"

Well, Konami Dude #2, fuck you. Your level is stupid. You also saw fit to put in two treasure chests only Shanoa can get to without waking the boss, and they're purple - which indicates they contain rarer (thus, better) items. Now, I'm all for character diversity and even areas that are only accessible by certain characters, but two purple chests for Shanoa only? Really? Thank you for making one player on this level completely and utterly pointless if you aren't Shanoa(not to mention boring and time consuming because of the huge stupid boss).

But, the rest of the game has really good levels. In fact, I enjoy all of them besides #3. Thinking about it now, I only beat level 3 that one time on Normal, because its a stupid level.

Anyway, back to CotM. Possibly more about that game later, if I don't get frustrated with it.

This long slumber has given me strength...

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair has been taking up a lot of my time this past week.

I have largely enjoyed it; I just gained the ability to play in Hard Mode last night. I've gotten to the second boss, and I can definitely beat him, but have been screwed over by circumstances the few times I've tried him (like when he moved to a iron maiden that was too far away for me to reach him in time to destroy the puppet). But that's another post entirely.

The game certainly has its ups and downs. The good part is that it is largely a blast to play - it really controls well, and Soma, the character I use, plays pretty much exactly like he did in Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow, my two favorite Castlevania games. He can both acquire new weapons and armor, but also obtain souls for every single enemy in the game, like in his original games (that is, except the third boss, but whatever). You can even power his souls up by collecting 9 of each! I love this aspect of the game, and have now collected all the souls but a few of the bosses (the 4th boss, and Dracula, to be exact). Several souls are fully powered up, as well.

As far as the process one uses to "level up"... Well, it's honestly a mixed bag for me. I like that most people are around the same stat level unless they have the best weapons in the game, but I really don't like that stat boosts you get from food are not permanent. I understand that this would mean that people would just farm food points, but why not take out "food points" all together and make food a dropped item only? Then if people level their stats up that way, at least they earned it.

I mean, I don't know. In the end, it's probably best that stat boosts aren't permanent. The only other way to level up, though, is by getting better equipment. Which is fine, and of course, the best equipment is obtained by drops only. I'm okay with that - it's just what you're able to buy in the Shop is woefully inadequate when you're playing normal mode. Hard Mode does not give you much more, and certainly in the defense department it is sorely lacking. I get hit way too hard by enemies (30 damage from a ghost? ...Really?). But, I suppose that's why they call it Hard Mode.

I like that the bosses aren't pushovers, either - Dracula remains very difficult in Normal Mode, and the Puppet Master in Hard Mode requires perfection to beat, it seems.

The multiplayer is a blast, though. I've played both with random people, and one of my Xbox Live Friends or whatever stupid term you use for people you know. Konami didn't leave too much room to be a dick to random people in this game, either. Everyone shares treasure chests. When someone opens a chest, every player gets an item at random, so there is no possible way to bitch or fight over a chest. You cannot harm each other either, or affect each others movement, thus preventing you being knocked into spikes by some online douchebag.

As in every online game though, rage quitting/dropping out early has no penalty. Whatever items you got up to that point you keep, so people drop out all the time. For example, the first time I beat Dracula, I did so online - but as soon as I got to his room, the one player left quit on me, forcing me to fight Dracula alone, while he had health fit for two players. Suffice it to say, I was quite proud of myself for winning that fight, considering how much trouble I had been having with him.

Overall, I'm really enjoying the game. I want to at least beat Hard Mode, and maybe even make my Soma a ridiculous badass with awesome weapons. We'll see how that goes once I see how difficult Dracula is in Hard Mode. I hear he has the best weapon drops.

As an aside: Braid

So, for whatever reason I do not know, I booted up Braid last night, and beat the last few puzzles I hadn't completed from like two years ago when I first got my Xbox.

I'm not sure what the deal was, but I was like in puzzle genius mode last night. Puzzles that I could not for the life of me figure out made sense all of a sudden, and I beat the game. This nets all the achievements, of course, besides the Time Attack one. I have no desire to get that one because I don't care about achievements, but yeah. Neat, I guess.

I really, really liked that last level, though. I had not read any spoilers about Braid, and (MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD)I really like what they did with it. The last world you play is called World 1, and it details what happened in the beginning of the tale; namely, when Tim had originally "met" the Princess. You play through the last level of the world backwards, all the way to the point where the Princess is sleeping - the level returns to normal time when Tim is perched outside the Princess' window. What this essentially means is that Tim is a freaking stalker and had been following the Princess ever since the beginning of the game, and became increasingly crazy and delusional as time went on.

Now, is this a critique of gamers? Certainly this is a video game about a guy who is madly in love with a woman from afar, and he creeps her out so bad a literal "knight in shining armor" takes her away. Could this be a metaphor for the lonely nerd? Well, maybe a lonely nerd who takes his feelings way too far, anyway.

The way Braid's story was told, though, is inherently, and irrevocably videogamey. That's what has struck me so much about its presentation. If it were a movie, it would be nonsensical and boring, really. The impact of the "ending" would be minimal surprise, at best. But as a game, as the player plays through these levels and reads the increasingly desperate text about this Tim guy, they become attached to this little avatar and hope he succeeds in finding his princess.

But when he does... The fact that you, the player, are a willing accomplice to this creepy bastard really hits home, and makes you feel as though you were a bad guy this whole time. It's an experience that cannot be duplicated in books or movies; the player has a role in the story of a game because they are actively involved, which isn't possible in those mediums.

Now, I sort of see why people point to Braid when they are asked if games are art. I don't know if Braid is proof they are, but I know it is at least a step in the right direction.