RPG Madness
My RPG adventures continued this week, as I played the first couple of hours of Lost Odyssey, succumbed to an impulse to assemble a CD wallet collection of classic PC RPG discs, and spent about six hours playing Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Let's review.
The first thing I have to point out is that Mount & Blade is only $7.50 on Steam this weekend. They're having a sale. It's unlikely that this news will reach anybody who cares through this blog post, but whatever: I've had far too much fun with Mount & Blade in the last month to fail to point this bit of news out.
Lost Odyssey is so far better than I expected. It has a solid combat system, the visuals are excellent, and story is surprisingly good even though the characters so far haven't been. I was well aware that Lost Odyssey got better reviews than Blue Dragon, but I somehow expected to prefer Blue Dragon--perhaps because Blue Dragon is a more traditional JRPG, or something like that. To the contrary, Lost Odyssey is fast becoming the most engaging JRPG that I've played since FF XII. I'm still pretty early in, however, and I don't know yet if the pace will start to become drawn out.
The idea to organize a CD wallet full of PC RPGs came to me as I was cleaning out part of my game collection. I had a CD wallet full of various PC game disks (stuff like F.E.A.R., Oblivion, Rome: Total War, and Quake IV) that wasn't doing me much good, and I felt that it would be useful to have a bunch of Blizzard discs in one convenient location. The project started with the install DVDs for World of Warcraft (that is, a trial DVD, the Burning Crusade Collector's Edition install DVD, and a Wrath of the Lich King DVD), as well as the contents of a WarCraft Battle Chest and a Diablo Battle Chest all neatly arranged. (These titles are especially useful for office jobs, by the way.) But this only filled half of the wallet.
For the other half, I organized the following:
- The four discs out of a Game of the Year Edition copy of The Elder Scrolls III, including Morrowind, Tribunal, Bloodmoon, and the construction set tools
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (I don't have The Shivering Isles, though)
- Neverwinter Nights: Diamond DVD (includes both expansions), Neverwinter Nights: Kingmaker (official collection of community content)
- Warlords III: Darklords Rising
- Ultima Collection (that's Ultima I through VIII)
- Quest for Glory Anthology (QfG I through IV)
That's a concentrated dose of classic CRPG goodness, and I've been savoring the collection for the past thirty hours or so. Having so much RPG content in one place makes me euphoric.
The funny thing is that I get nostalgic for many of these games even though I never actually had the time to play some of them. Out of the Ultima series, for instance, I barely touched V, VI, and VIII, which are some of the better ones (my Ultima experience is primarily with III, IV, and VII--and even then I didn't play them heavily). I thoroughly played Quest for Glory I and II back in the day, but barely played III and IV. Sunny did most of the BioWare RPG gaming back when Neverwinter Nights came out; she finished the entire main campaign and both expansion packs, while I didn't even get past Chapter III of the first game. Worst of all, much of the Blizzard content remains untapped (including the expansions for both WarCraft 3 and Diablo II). Finally, although I played enough Oblivion to get familiar with it, I'd only played a few hours worth of Morrowind and never any of the expansion content. For shame.
But, as my buddy Matt once pointed out to me, it's often more useful to have a collection of books (or games, in this case) that you expect to enjoy and haven't read yet than to have a collection that you're already well familiar with. It was in that spirit that I fired up Morrowind to dabble around in, and I quickly found myself drawn in.
There's a bit of a learning curve involved in Morrowind, but my previous experiences trying to play both Morrowind and Oblivion came in handy. Overall I would say that Morrowind is an excellent and classic RPG, but one thing that grates is how sparse the content is. The world of Morrowind is vast but mostly all looks the same and doesn't have a lot going on by today's RPG standards.
What's especially painful is how long it takes to travel from place to place on foot, which is frequently required. It's a shame because I found Morrowind to be both immersive and challenging, and yet I keep getting snapped out of my suspension of disbelief by long stretches of walking in a straight line. Occasionally I just aim in a direction, hit Q (auto-walk), and get up to fetch some water or prepare a snack. There should at least be siltstriders (transport) between each of the towns instead of only between the major cities.
The funny thing is that I remember Oblivion (Morrowind's sequel) being criticized for its travel system being too convenient. In Oblivion, one can simply use the world map to select a destination and effectively "warp" there (in-game time still passes). This removes most of the incentive for the player to explore the land on foot, but having seen how tedious walking in Morrowind gets to be, I have a better understanding of the decision to make travel so quick in Oblivion.
And yet Oblivion still suffers from the problem that walking around in dungeon areas can be quite slow, which makes the player all the more aware of how repetitive many of the areas in-game are. What Elder Scrolls games need, perhaps, is a time acceleration feature like many flight simulators have, so that the player can fast-forward through dull parts of the fantasy experience. Alternatively, the game content could be less spread out--but then The Elder Scrolls might not feel like The Elder Scrolls.
Combined with my recent RPG acquisitions on Steam, I'm now doubly reassured that I have more RPG content at my disposal than I reasonably have time to play, and that's not even counting the numerous handheld titles that I picked up last year. :) It's good to be a gamer.
The Sorry State of JRPGs
Having noticed the price cut that The Last Remnant has gotten both on Amazon and GameStop / EB Games, I went to my local EB Games yesterday with the intention of picking up a copy. In addition to there being $40 copies of The Last Remnant available, there were $40 copies of Infinite Undiscovery and $45 used copies of Lost Odyssey as well. I already have Blue Dragon, but for those paying attention here who don't, it's under $20 for a new copy. Finally, I did notice a used copy of Eternal Sonata, but I didn't check the price.
As I approached the counter and handed the copy of The Last Remnant that I was holding to him, I asked the EB Games employee if he recommended it. He had been talking about Final Fantasy XIII's release date and obviously cared about JRPGs. In response to my query, the clerk made a minor production of throwing The Last Remnant to the floor in disgust, announcing that it had utterly wasted valuable hours of his life. He then handed me Infinite Undiscovery, saying that it wasn't great either, but it was certainly better than The Last Remnant.
I haven't been keeping up on JRPGs as I ought to have. For the last couple of years, I've been strangely resistant to their lures--with the one big exception of PSP and NDS games. Even then, while I've collected a few portable JRPG titles, I haven't spent much time with them. Yesterday I found myself wondering how things got this way.
World of Warcraft has been a factor, no doubt. As I've mentioned in previous posts--and as my friend Ace-High commented on--Blizzard RPGs really are great productions. I've never been able to really stomach BioWare RPGs en-masse; I can only appreciate them in doses. Blizzard is really the only North American RPG company whose games I find genuinely enthralling, and that wasn't even until a few years ago. But I only really turned to Blizzard games in the first place because the JRPGs of recent times weren't able to properly hook me.
A couple of bizarre and potentially disturbing trends emerge if you look at the major console JRPG releases of the past two years: this includes Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata from 2007, and Lost Odyssey, Infinite Undiscovery, and The Last Remnant from 2008. I've been neglectful of these games and have only played Blue Dragon and (as of yesterday) Infinite Undiscovery, but there are still two clear trends that haven't slipped my attention:
The first trend is that all of these games, with the sole exception of Eternal Sonata, have been Xbox 360 exclusives. It seems to me that the majority of JRPG fans on both sides of the Pacific would naturally be Sony fanboys, since the Playstation brand has dominated the JRPG market ever since the last days of the SNES, starting with Wild Arms and Suikoden, with the release of Final Fantasy VII as its grand coronation. I have been well aware these past two years that Sony is largely losing the console war, but if the PS3 is a viable platform for anything, it ought to be viable for JRPGs, right? This line of reasoning is consistent with the profiles of the various PS3 owners that I personally know.
The second trend is that all of these games have Metacritic scores in the 70s (except that the PS3 version of Eternal Sonata, for whatever reason, scores an 80). My own experience having watched video reviews of these games and played a couple of them is that they're all fairly lukewarm, with some of them (The Last Remnant, for instance) clearly being more tepid than others (Blue Dragon). I think it's fair to say that none of these games has really lit a fire under the fan base out there. How can it be that for two long years we haven't seen any JRPG excellence?
I'm planning to pick up Lost Odyssey in the not too distant future, and The Last Remnant at some point much later--the line of reasoning here being that this early price drop on The Last Remnant is possibly the first of several price drops, and that I'll eventually be able to snag it for $20. I'll probably have to get Eternal Sonata eventually as well, but as much as I'm able to handle anime-style artwork, that one looks so kiddie and cartoonish that I'm afraid to merely touch it. It is supposed to be good, somehow...
In the meanwhile, I'll quickly compare my Blue Dragon experience (roughly 12 hours of playtime) with my Infinite Undiscovery experience (roughly 2 hours playtime). In a nutshell, Blue Dragon is like a weak-sauce version of Dragon Quest VIII, and Infinite Undiscovery is like a weak-sauce version of Final Fantasy XII. Each one clearly benefits from being a next-gen title and is capable of producing some gorgeous screenshots, but at times they don't look much better than their PS2 counterparts.
Blue Dragon's biggest failing to me is its generic characters and uninteresting plot. When I play Blue Dragon, it's as an RPG combat game with an Akira Toriyama art style. Over the course of 12 hours, what little plot and character development I was treated to in the beginning has rapidly atrophied into nothing important. Even given this major failing, there's enough appeal left to make Blue Dragon a decent JRPG. It's just a shame that it doesn't truly excel at much, apart from some of the visuals.
Infinite Undiscovery's biggest failing is the awkward gameplay. The are certain design decisions here that I can't reconcile at all, like spacing out save points too far apart and not providing the player with an opportunity to save before some boss battles. Much of the game is clearly FF XII in style, yet FF XII's excellent combat system has been replaced with fairly weak action combat that strips out a lot of the RPG appeal. Fritzkrieg had a look at the game, and he commented that action combat systems are a hallmark of Tri-Ace games (Tri-Ace being the developers of Infinite Undiscovery). It's too early to tell whether or not there's enough appeal in Infinite Undiscovery that I'll be able to muddle through the game in spite of its mediocrity, but early signs are promising.
In the meanwhile, I continue to pour hours a week into World of Warcraft. I hardly played at all over the Christmas break, so my character is still only level 75, but I should hit level 76 today. I still haven't rolled a Death Knight yet, so there's plenty left to do in Northrend.
The Secret to Enjoying Bionic Commando: Rearmed
...is to play it multiplayer. I've known for a while that Bionic Commando: Rearmed has a 2-player co-op mode, but it wasn't until today that I realized there's an arena battle mode as well (which includes play modes such as Deathmatch). It supports up to four players at once, which makes for a decent party game.
The 2-player co-op mode does a lot to make the game more palpable. There's so much about Bionic Commando: Rearmed that I like, such as the visual style and the old-school challenge, but I'm rarely in the mood to play it because it's somewhat
too challenging. The co-op mode does a lot to make the game less tedious and more exciting, assuming both players are able to get the hang of the game and stick together.
Now if there was only some way to make 1943: Joint Strike worthwhile. :(
