- Horrible, horrible targeting system. Yes, targeting system, lock on to the person I'm escorting, with no way to stop this from happening. Thank you. That's great. It would be nice if it was an actual lockon system, where you could scroll targets or ... something.
- The final boss fight is an actual fake difficulty moment. It's got the most disorienting background I've ever seen. The floor becomes transparent except for wireframe lines. There's animated stuff going on under the floor/background. Most of the fight is wireframe. Gah. What?
- CAMERA. Yeah, I love enemies shooting me offscreen such that I can only see it right before it's about to hit me. This happened far too often in this game.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Silent Bomber
Another game that could have been really amazing. I'll just laundry list the FFFF aspects:
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Rondo of Swords
This game is hard to review. See, I love SPRGs. As we've been through before, I'll play a bad SRPG for ages because it's an SRPG. They're addicting, to me.
I love some of the aspects of the game. It has a wide cast of characters to choose from (unfortunately only 6 can go into combat with you) and you customize your characters via giving them skills, which is something I love. The game has also managed to innovate - And have mechanics that no other game has (At least, as far as I'm aware, and I've played a damn lot of SRPGs). The prime example of this is that there is no attack option in this game. There is only movement. That sounds weird, I know, but moving through an enemy square is how you attack. Thus, you can attack movement-1 enemies in a turn. This makes defensive walls impossible, kinda. There's another new concept that the game has which makes them possible. See, each character has a 'momentum gauge', which indicates how big of a target they are. This isn't anything new, as all SRPGs have this behind the scenes. However, in this game, it's manipulatable. There are rings that increase or decrease your base MC, killing enemies increases it, there are skills to increase or decrease it... So, you can very easily manipulate who the AI will attack. Combine this with another element the game has, Zone of Control (ZoC), where you can not be moved through. This is a very rare skill, but a character with high defense, manipulated MC, and ZoC can stop an entire attacking force from hitting your weak and squishy casters.
So, this is why I decided to play through the game, despite its very obvious flaws. The game... had bad QA, or something like that. There's a number of glitches that I encountered - Stupid things, like characters managing to end their turn on top of each other, breaking both of them. You also cannot rearrange the starting location of your characters in combat. ... Mostly. If you mess around with who you use and the order of selecting them, you can kind of influence it. Which is really, really stupid.
The way the game utterly fucks up errands... Oof. This is going to be so long it deserves a paragraph. Errands are things your characters can do instead of going into combat. You can train them (Give them small stat boosts), send them on trials (PROMOTION!), send them on Quests, or send them shopping. Shopping is done in a ... really dumb way, unfortunately. You send a person out with money, they come back with item types you specified. There is no way of knowing what they'll come back with. Yeaaaah. Now, quests. There are 3 major types of quests. Card quests, Smith Quests, everything else. Everything else gives you rewards (Promotion items and gold earning items are the noted ones). Each character can only go on a certain number of Card Quests and Smith Quests combined. This is never mentioned. Card Quests, once you've gone on a certain number, bestow each character with a certain bonus. This is never mentioned *nor* does it tell you when you get the bonus. Furthermore, the game gives no indication of characters having said bonus or the amount of Card/Smith quests they've done. If the game is trying to obfuscate its mechanics, it succeeded masterfully.
Some other minor things are just ... annoying. Assigning quests is a pain, as you can't see who is going on what quest once you do and you can't cancel one quest, you have to cancel every quest people are going on. Actions can be very easily messed up - If an enemy counter attacks, you get bounced. There's been a number of times I've had to restart due to that. It's part of the system, I suppose, more than a real flaw.
Fix these problems and you would have a game that really shined. As is? It's... decent. Would I recommend other people to play it? Only if you really like SRPGs and can handle difficulty. It's not an easy game, by a long shot, but it's also easier than Fire Emblem. Characters don't perma-death, after all. If a character dies in combat, they're just Hurt, which means they have halved stats next fight and can't do errands. So... Judge for yourself if you'd like it.
I love some of the aspects of the game. It has a wide cast of characters to choose from (unfortunately only 6 can go into combat with you) and you customize your characters via giving them skills, which is something I love. The game has also managed to innovate - And have mechanics that no other game has (At least, as far as I'm aware, and I've played a damn lot of SRPGs). The prime example of this is that there is no attack option in this game. There is only movement. That sounds weird, I know, but moving through an enemy square is how you attack. Thus, you can attack movement-1 enemies in a turn. This makes defensive walls impossible, kinda. There's another new concept that the game has which makes them possible. See, each character has a 'momentum gauge', which indicates how big of a target they are. This isn't anything new, as all SRPGs have this behind the scenes. However, in this game, it's manipulatable. There are rings that increase or decrease your base MC, killing enemies increases it, there are skills to increase or decrease it... So, you can very easily manipulate who the AI will attack. Combine this with another element the game has, Zone of Control (ZoC), where you can not be moved through. This is a very rare skill, but a character with high defense, manipulated MC, and ZoC can stop an entire attacking force from hitting your weak and squishy casters.
So, this is why I decided to play through the game, despite its very obvious flaws. The game... had bad QA, or something like that. There's a number of glitches that I encountered - Stupid things, like characters managing to end their turn on top of each other, breaking both of them. You also cannot rearrange the starting location of your characters in combat. ... Mostly. If you mess around with who you use and the order of selecting them, you can kind of influence it. Which is really, really stupid.
The way the game utterly fucks up errands... Oof. This is going to be so long it deserves a paragraph. Errands are things your characters can do instead of going into combat. You can train them (Give them small stat boosts), send them on trials (PROMOTION!), send them on Quests, or send them shopping. Shopping is done in a ... really dumb way, unfortunately. You send a person out with money, they come back with item types you specified. There is no way of knowing what they'll come back with. Yeaaaah. Now, quests. There are 3 major types of quests. Card quests, Smith Quests, everything else. Everything else gives you rewards (Promotion items and gold earning items are the noted ones). Each character can only go on a certain number of Card Quests and Smith Quests combined. This is never mentioned. Card Quests, once you've gone on a certain number, bestow each character with a certain bonus. This is never mentioned *nor* does it tell you when you get the bonus. Furthermore, the game gives no indication of characters having said bonus or the amount of Card/Smith quests they've done. If the game is trying to obfuscate its mechanics, it succeeded masterfully.
Some other minor things are just ... annoying. Assigning quests is a pain, as you can't see who is going on what quest once you do and you can't cancel one quest, you have to cancel every quest people are going on. Actions can be very easily messed up - If an enemy counter attacks, you get bounced. There's been a number of times I've had to restart due to that. It's part of the system, I suppose, more than a real flaw.
Fix these problems and you would have a game that really shined. As is? It's... decent. Would I recommend other people to play it? Only if you really like SRPGs and can handle difficulty. It's not an easy game, by a long shot, but it's also easier than Fire Emblem. Characters don't perma-death, after all. If a character dies in combat, they're just Hurt, which means they have halved stats next fight and can't do errands. So... Judge for yourself if you'd like it.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin.
So, I think I'm done with the game for a little while, so I can write my thoughts about it down. This isn't going to be a long entry, I don't think. Shows what I know.
So... Portrait of Ruin. Gameplaywise, it's Castlevania. If you've played one in the last decade, you've got the main idea. Explore maps, kill things, level up, get new equipment. The major addition is that you have two main characters. In both the main mode and Richter mode, you have both a melee person (Jonathon/Richter) and a caster (Charlotte/Maria). In Normal mode, Charlotte's spells replace subweapons. They have a casting time, so after hitting the subweapon activation, a charge bar appears. You can charge up to spell going off or a stronger version going off and cancel out of at any time.
You can swap between both characters, summon one to just attack, or have both out so the AI controls one. This almost gives you two very different ways to play. ... Almost.
The game seems designed for you to play as Jonathon. And, stupidly, actively penalizes you for not. See, any enemy that you hurt with a subweapon gives points to the subweapon that level it up. This means that Charlotte tends to be forced into the spot of being secondary character, which is a pity, as she was much more fun to play through the game as. (I ended up grinding up a few of the better subweapons near the end of the game, after buying 2 rings that double the rate you get skill points, via a glitch. A very acceptable use of a glitch, in this case, methinks).
So, the game is incredibly short. I beat the game, my first time through, in roughly 6 hours. I then beat the optional portrait (read: area) and got 1000% map completion and did all the quests (There's a person that gives you quests. You achieve some goal (Usually grinding to kill enemies for their drops) and you get a reward) in another 4 hours. This ... is pretty bad.
The shortness is due to the weirdness of design of the castle, that I didn't particularly like. You explore the castle to find Portraits, which you have to go in to and defeat a boss. You find 4 of these as you explore the castle... Then all of the sudden, you end up having access to 4. The castle is very small and lacking in variety. The portraits aren't bad, though. I'd prefer a single larger castle, methinks. There are an amusingly high number of shortcuts you can unlock, though, that you will never use. There are teleporters in the castle everywhere and you never revisit half the places you go to (... yeah, which kinda sucks), so I wonder why they're there.
However, the game does have a saving grace: A multitude of hard modes and optional modes!
The Hard modes come in 3 major varieties: Max level of 50, 25, and 1. Yes. You can choose to put the game on Hard mode (Where you deal less damage and ... enemeis deal weird damage. I want to say the damage that enemies do is something like just add 100 to it, as beginning of the game enemies did about 100-110 damage and end game enemies did like 140-150, with the same equipment) and not be able to level up. Of course, you do NG+ in Hard Mode, so you start with the best equipment in the game, and, inportantly, all the HP Max Up and MP Max Up items you find. Doing these modes gets you a stat boost that applies to any NG+ you do from that game on. The bonuses are Luck, Int, and Str, respectively. Hard Max Level 1 is ... hard, but doable. With heavy abuse of glitches and armor only useful in that mode(Every hit deals 10% max HP), at any rate. So, the big glitch of the game is that you can get quest rewards infinitely. This includes Max HP/MP Up (Limited to 32 of them, total) and things you can sell for money. There's a ring you get that boosts your attack by 1 per 100,000 gold you have. It's 20 minutes of boredom to get 900k gold to get +90 attack power. For reference, the best sword in the game gives you about +40 attack power and being level 50 gives you about 80 attack power. The game is pretty glitchy, but in this case, it takes away the fact that Metroidvanias have the shittiest money situation ever. So, awesome!
Richter Mode, you play as Richter and Maria. They can sequence break galore, but the mode seems a bit ... odd. See, you don't have equipment or items (Hell, you can't even go to the menu screen. Which is utterly stupid, as there are things like maps of all areas, the bestiary, the button config, in the menu.), which means you scale entirely on level and HP/MP Ups and you cannot heal. That I went through the normal game at what seemed to be way under level did not bode well for this mode. I beat Normal mode at 38. I got to Drac in Richter mode at 32. My horribly underleveled ass got schooled by Dracula repeatedly. I tried to the optional area, got about halfway through, got to level 36. Still can barely touch Drac. Geh. GFAQs, by the by, seems to recommend 45-50 for Drac. ... Whaaaa? So, I never beat Richter mode, as even learning Drac's patterns only goes so far. I'm not ninja enough to avoid every one of the attacks.
Still my second and third run through of the game did give me another good 10-15 hours out of the game, putting us at about 20-25 hours, which is much more respectable. It also does an amusing shift on the difficulty focus. Both Hard Mode and Richter mode tend to be a fight from save point to save point, hoping you don't die to the random enemies, but the bosses (Which are the much harder part in Normal) are a breeze, as you tend to have something in your repertoire that can easily defeat them.
Heh... I've entirely talked about gameplay. What of story, what of graphics, what of sound? THIS IS A CASTLEVANIA, FOLKS. Which means the story is throwaway (Drac is reviving! Wait, twist! Bad ending unless you do something specific! Wait, another twist! Kill Dracula! End.), the graphics are spritebased 2D (And, hey, pretty good), and the music was good (Which is a bad outing for the series).
Overall, a decent outing for the series. Not the best Metroidvania. I don't think I can call it the worst, though.
So... Portrait of Ruin. Gameplaywise, it's Castlevania. If you've played one in the last decade, you've got the main idea. Explore maps, kill things, level up, get new equipment. The major addition is that you have two main characters. In both the main mode and Richter mode, you have both a melee person (Jonathon/Richter) and a caster (Charlotte/Maria). In Normal mode, Charlotte's spells replace subweapons. They have a casting time, so after hitting the subweapon activation, a charge bar appears. You can charge up to spell going off or a stronger version going off and cancel out of at any time.
You can swap between both characters, summon one to just attack, or have both out so the AI controls one. This almost gives you two very different ways to play. ... Almost.
The game seems designed for you to play as Jonathon. And, stupidly, actively penalizes you for not. See, any enemy that you hurt with a subweapon gives points to the subweapon that level it up. This means that Charlotte tends to be forced into the spot of being secondary character, which is a pity, as she was much more fun to play through the game as. (I ended up grinding up a few of the better subweapons near the end of the game, after buying 2 rings that double the rate you get skill points, via a glitch. A very acceptable use of a glitch, in this case, methinks).
So, the game is incredibly short. I beat the game, my first time through, in roughly 6 hours. I then beat the optional portrait (read: area) and got 1000% map completion and did all the quests (There's a person that gives you quests. You achieve some goal (Usually grinding to kill enemies for their drops) and you get a reward) in another 4 hours. This ... is pretty bad.
The shortness is due to the weirdness of design of the castle, that I didn't particularly like. You explore the castle to find Portraits, which you have to go in to and defeat a boss. You find 4 of these as you explore the castle... Then all of the sudden, you end up having access to 4. The castle is very small and lacking in variety. The portraits aren't bad, though. I'd prefer a single larger castle, methinks. There are an amusingly high number of shortcuts you can unlock, though, that you will never use. There are teleporters in the castle everywhere and you never revisit half the places you go to (... yeah, which kinda sucks), so I wonder why they're there.
However, the game does have a saving grace: A multitude of hard modes and optional modes!
The Hard modes come in 3 major varieties: Max level of 50, 25, and 1. Yes. You can choose to put the game on Hard mode (Where you deal less damage and ... enemeis deal weird damage. I want to say the damage that enemies do is something like just add 100 to it, as beginning of the game enemies did about 100-110 damage and end game enemies did like 140-150, with the same equipment) and not be able to level up. Of course, you do NG+ in Hard Mode, so you start with the best equipment in the game, and, inportantly, all the HP Max Up and MP Max Up items you find. Doing these modes gets you a stat boost that applies to any NG+ you do from that game on. The bonuses are Luck, Int, and Str, respectively. Hard Max Level 1 is ... hard, but doable. With heavy abuse of glitches and armor only useful in that mode(Every hit deals 10% max HP), at any rate. So, the big glitch of the game is that you can get quest rewards infinitely. This includes Max HP/MP Up (Limited to 32 of them, total) and things you can sell for money. There's a ring you get that boosts your attack by 1 per 100,000 gold you have. It's 20 minutes of boredom to get 900k gold to get +90 attack power. For reference, the best sword in the game gives you about +40 attack power and being level 50 gives you about 80 attack power. The game is pretty glitchy, but in this case, it takes away the fact that Metroidvanias have the shittiest money situation ever. So, awesome!
Richter Mode, you play as Richter and Maria. They can sequence break galore, but the mode seems a bit ... odd. See, you don't have equipment or items (Hell, you can't even go to the menu screen. Which is utterly stupid, as there are things like maps of all areas, the bestiary, the button config, in the menu.), which means you scale entirely on level and HP/MP Ups and you cannot heal. That I went through the normal game at what seemed to be way under level did not bode well for this mode. I beat Normal mode at 38. I got to Drac in Richter mode at 32. My horribly underleveled ass got schooled by Dracula repeatedly. I tried to the optional area, got about halfway through, got to level 36. Still can barely touch Drac. Geh. GFAQs, by the by, seems to recommend 45-50 for Drac. ... Whaaaa? So, I never beat Richter mode, as even learning Drac's patterns only goes so far. I'm not ninja enough to avoid every one of the attacks.
Still my second and third run through of the game did give me another good 10-15 hours out of the game, putting us at about 20-25 hours, which is much more respectable. It also does an amusing shift on the difficulty focus. Both Hard Mode and Richter mode tend to be a fight from save point to save point, hoping you don't die to the random enemies, but the bosses (Which are the much harder part in Normal) are a breeze, as you tend to have something in your repertoire that can easily defeat them.
Heh... I've entirely talked about gameplay. What of story, what of graphics, what of sound? THIS IS A CASTLEVANIA, FOLKS. Which means the story is throwaway (Drac is reviving! Wait, twist! Bad ending unless you do something specific! Wait, another twist! Kill Dracula! End.), the graphics are spritebased 2D (And, hey, pretty good), and the music was good (Which is a bad outing for the series).
Overall, a decent outing for the series. Not the best Metroidvania. I don't think I can call it the worst, though.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II
So, I just beat Dawn of War 2's campaign. I got the game on Friday, and I've been putting in a few hours each day since. It... was both good and bad. It could have used a lot of improvement, but I have to say I had a lot of fun. The biggest disappointments, really, were the unfulfilled promises.
So, the good:
So, the campaign for the game was advertised as a non-linear one, where all your choices matter, where what missions you do and what choices you make in missions will affect the outcome of the game. You're protecting a set of planets from invasion by Orks, Eldar, and eventually Tyranids., playing as the Space Marines, protecting the citizens of the Imperium of Man.
The campaign, once it got started (As it had a terribly slow start), was sorta awesome. It was a lot more fun once I got my squads leveled up and the story went in to swing. Slaughtering nyds/orks/eldars by the dozens was pretty cool. The character development was kinda neat, too, actually. The squad commanders would talk about the various events and reveal their character in their interactions. Wasn't something I expected. The game *does* look amazing, I do have to give it that. And the cover system is pretty cool, even if your units do do some retarded things by trying to find cover. Like a melee squad sitting in cover, plinking away at enemy units ... with pistols. Though, the first time you see a vehicle just Koolaid Man 'OH YEAH!' through a wall, you won't help but go "... That was awesome".
The Bad: What happened to the grand RTS they promised? Where the campaign would be full of choices that actually mattered? Oh, right, that was all marketing talk. This actually equates to: Having optional missions (That don't make a lick of difference except for points (Which are entirely arbitrary) and leveling up.) and secondary objectives in missions. Yeah. Good job with the spin, there, guys.
You know how the beta only had 6 maps? ... Yeah, that's all the *game* shipped with. Really, guys? Come on. One of those 1v1 maps sucked and I've played so many times on the other one to get used to the game that I'm bored as hell of it. Eeeesh.
The wargear obtaining process, also, felt sorta... bad. Being that it is entirely random, you can get the shaft and never have good weapons for a squad. eg, I never used the Dreadnought character because I never found weapon upgrades for him. Ever.
The Different: I'm still not sure if DoW2 is better than DoW1. It's just different. Sure, it looks prettier, but it really feels like an entirely different game. The smaller number of squads, the smaller number of units per race, the no base building, the removal of morale, no reinforcing squads in the field ... It feels very, very different. Honestly, I think I would have liked a New and Improved DoW1 a bit more. Ah well.
Overall, I think it wowed me a lot less than DoW1 because it doesn't feel different enough from all the RTSes I've played before, so my feelings for the game aren't WHOA! like they were for DoW1 It's a solid game though, and will only get better as the promised DLC campaigns and maps (free!) are released.
So, the good:
So, the campaign for the game was advertised as a non-linear one, where all your choices matter, where what missions you do and what choices you make in missions will affect the outcome of the game. You're protecting a set of planets from invasion by Orks, Eldar, and eventually Tyranids., playing as the Space Marines, protecting the citizens of the Imperium of Man.
The campaign, once it got started (As it had a terribly slow start), was sorta awesome. It was a lot more fun once I got my squads leveled up and the story went in to swing. Slaughtering nyds/orks/eldars by the dozens was pretty cool. The character development was kinda neat, too, actually. The squad commanders would talk about the various events and reveal their character in their interactions. Wasn't something I expected. The game *does* look amazing, I do have to give it that. And the cover system is pretty cool, even if your units do do some retarded things by trying to find cover. Like a melee squad sitting in cover, plinking away at enemy units ... with pistols. Though, the first time you see a vehicle just Koolaid Man 'OH YEAH!' through a wall, you won't help but go "... That was awesome".
The Bad: What happened to the grand RTS they promised? Where the campaign would be full of choices that actually mattered? Oh, right, that was all marketing talk. This actually equates to: Having optional missions (That don't make a lick of difference except for points (Which are entirely arbitrary) and leveling up.) and secondary objectives in missions. Yeah. Good job with the spin, there, guys.
You know how the beta only had 6 maps? ... Yeah, that's all the *game* shipped with. Really, guys? Come on. One of those 1v1 maps sucked and I've played so many times on the other one to get used to the game that I'm bored as hell of it. Eeeesh.
The wargear obtaining process, also, felt sorta... bad. Being that it is entirely random, you can get the shaft and never have good weapons for a squad. eg, I never used the Dreadnought character because I never found weapon upgrades for him. Ever.
The Different: I'm still not sure if DoW2 is better than DoW1. It's just different. Sure, it looks prettier, but it really feels like an entirely different game. The smaller number of squads, the smaller number of units per race, the no base building, the removal of morale, no reinforcing squads in the field ... It feels very, very different. Honestly, I think I would have liked a New and Improved DoW1 a bit more. Ah well.
Overall, I think it wowed me a lot less than DoW1 because it doesn't feel different enough from all the RTSes I've played before, so my feelings for the game aren't WHOA! like they were for DoW1 It's a solid game though, and will only get better as the promised DLC campaigns and maps (free!) are released.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Final Fantasy 4: DS
This is going to be a review of FF4 and a comparison of the versions.
So. FF4 is my favorite Final Fantasy. I have memories of playing it when I was scared to go into the basement alone. So, a good 15 years ago. I've played every version of it with the exception of WSC and PSX. However, as far as I know, those versions do not have significant changes. To enumerate these versions:
FF2 Easytype (What was released here on SNES)
FF4 Hardtype (The SNES game as released in Japan, but with a translation patch by J2E)
FF4 Advance (Released on GBA. Has all the features/difficulty of Hardtype. Adds in 2 new dungeons and the ability to switch party members)
FF4 DS
FF4 DS! First, the game is graphically beautiful. Okay, admittedly, for a portable game. I was impressed at the summon cutscenes and the quality of the pre-rendered scenes. There's noticeable jaggies and such, but it's pretty clean for a DS game. Cecil looks a bit ... bishounenish to me, but considering he was originally drawn by Amano (A man whose artstyle I've never liked) ... Well, I suppose it had to happen some time.
The music sounds very close to the original. For those that haven't played the original, that's a great compliment. FF4 had a, quite literally, epic soundtrack. It does a great job of conveying scenes, and when something big is happening, you know. The sound effects are a bit off, which disappointed me in a cursory way. And, I like the VAing the game has. The voices fit ... Though, the pronunciations make me ... cringe a bit. Not that they're bad, just different from how I said the things in my head. "Ceh-cul"? Really? "See-cil" is much better sounding to me. But, this is nitpicking.
The story has been spruced up from the original. There's a few scenes that have been added in, mostly to link the game to FF4: The After, a Japanese Cell Phone game that takes place a number of years after the original. They give a bit more backstory and don't feel forced, though. Another nice addition is that when you go to the menu, it has a thought bubble for the current lead character. This gives each character's perspective on the events that have been happening. It's small, but a cool detail none the less. The plot itself, well, is hard for me to describe without nostalgia clouding my accuracy. I think it has a great plot, if a bit simple. There's no heavy-handed doses of philosophy (If that's a good or bad thing is up to you), but there is a decent amount of depth. It's one of the few FFs that's ... actually fantasy. The only technology are a couple appearances of airships and tanks, and those are more the token bit of technology in a magic land. The game is about magic and monsters and such. The events are big and a bit yellow, but that's not really a bad thing in my mind.
The gameplay. Aah, back in the day when there was no standard party size and a party of 3 characters as is the standard now would seem down right anemic. FF4 had a party size of 5, and I really liked that. Your party also heavily switches around, from a pool of 12 people, though this is entirely determined by plot events, not you. Each party member has their own unique set of abilities and set of growths for magic. I like customization, but the FF series has sort of done it heavy-handedly, so I rather prefer the FF games with no customization. Either you have no/little control over how your characters grow, as they have a set list of spells, or each character can become any other. So, in a way, I prefer how FF4 has done things.
Now, FF4DS has made the most changes to Gameplay. Added are augments. They're items you can find that allow you to give new abilities to characters. Also, if you give augments to certain characters, you can get other augments based on their abilities. This does give you a fair amount of customization. Each person can equip 4 abilities, from Attack, default skills, and Augments you put on them. This includes even passive augments. Item has to be included, but you can swap out any other built in ability.
The game has been made much more difficult. Even FF4Hardtype only had a few moments of difficulty to me, but FF4DS has had a number of boss fights that have forced me to fight them multiple times. Admittedly, twice has tended to be enough. Once you learn a boss's trick, they tend to be effectively neutered. And if you keep status effects in mind - as they actually work on bosses, even crippling ones like silence or hold - you can get through hard fights with ease. I've died a few times to random battles, but those have felt more like "... Wow, really? Dealing [large damage] to my entire party before I could react? Yeah, that's fair" than anything more my fault. So, that's a definite fault. Hell, I even seem overleveled, due to very rarely running and being a terrible completionist. Overall, though, the extra difficulty is welcomed. Keeps you on your toes.
Another added thing was a bonus for viewing 100% of a map in a dungeon. This has caused me to do a bit of excessive running around, hence the overleveling >_>. actually useful, bit it's still neat. The story is the same as it was on the SNES and the script isn't as good Still, it's a solid version of the game.
FF4 DS is the other solid contender. Personally, I prefer the 2D graphics of the original, and the script is better than FF4 Advance's script, due to being a bit of a rewrite. The augments are neat, and the new plot bits are neat. The difficulty is a bit of a mixed bag. There is, actually, a bit of epilogue type content, in New Game Plus and 2 extra bosses, but this isn't really that much.
So... It's really a hard pick. My personal bias is toward FF4 Hardtype, but FF4 DS has been a great runthrough of the game.
Well, regardless of which version you play, you should play the game. Get to it.
So. FF4 is my favorite Final Fantasy. I have memories of playing it when I was scared to go into the basement alone. So, a good 15 years ago. I've played every version of it with the exception of WSC and PSX. However, as far as I know, those versions do not have significant changes. To enumerate these versions:
FF2 Easytype (What was released here on SNES)
FF4 Hardtype (The SNES game as released in Japan, but with a translation patch by J2E)
FF4 Advance (Released on GBA. Has all the features/difficulty of Hardtype. Adds in 2 new dungeons and the ability to switch party members)
FF4 DS
FF4 DS! First, the game is graphically beautiful. Okay, admittedly, for a portable game. I was impressed at the summon cutscenes and the quality of the pre-rendered scenes. There's noticeable jaggies and such, but it's pretty clean for a DS game. Cecil looks a bit ... bishounenish to me, but considering he was originally drawn by Amano (A man whose artstyle I've never liked) ... Well, I suppose it had to happen some time.
The music sounds very close to the original. For those that haven't played the original, that's a great compliment. FF4 had a, quite literally, epic soundtrack. It does a great job of conveying scenes, and when something big is happening, you know. The sound effects are a bit off, which disappointed me in a cursory way. And, I like the VAing the game has. The voices fit ... Though, the pronunciations make me ... cringe a bit. Not that they're bad, just different from how I said the things in my head. "Ceh-cul"? Really? "See-cil" is much better sounding to me. But, this is nitpicking.
The story has been spruced up from the original. There's a few scenes that have been added in, mostly to link the game to FF4: The After, a Japanese Cell Phone game that takes place a number of years after the original. They give a bit more backstory and don't feel forced, though. Another nice addition is that when you go to the menu, it has a thought bubble for the current lead character. This gives each character's perspective on the events that have been happening. It's small, but a cool detail none the less. The plot itself, well, is hard for me to describe without nostalgia clouding my accuracy. I think it has a great plot, if a bit simple. There's no heavy-handed doses of philosophy (If that's a good or bad thing is up to you), but there is a decent amount of depth. It's one of the few FFs that's ... actually fantasy. The only technology are a couple appearances of airships and tanks, and those are more the token bit of technology in a magic land. The game is about magic and monsters and such. The events are big and a bit yellow, but that's not really a bad thing in my mind.
The gameplay. Aah, back in the day when there was no standard party size and a party of 3 characters as is the standard now would seem down right anemic. FF4 had a party size of 5, and I really liked that. Your party also heavily switches around, from a pool of 12 people, though this is entirely determined by plot events, not you. Each party member has their own unique set of abilities and set of growths for magic. I like customization, but the FF series has sort of done it heavy-handedly, so I rather prefer the FF games with no customization. Either you have no/little control over how your characters grow, as they have a set list of spells, or each character can become any other. So, in a way, I prefer how FF4 has done things.
Now, FF4DS has made the most changes to Gameplay. Added are augments. They're items you can find that allow you to give new abilities to characters. Also, if you give augments to certain characters, you can get other augments based on their abilities. This does give you a fair amount of customization. Each person can equip 4 abilities, from Attack, default skills, and Augments you put on them. This includes even passive augments. Item has to be included, but you can swap out any other built in ability.
The game has been made much more difficult. Even FF4Hardtype only had a few moments of difficulty to me, but FF4DS has had a number of boss fights that have forced me to fight them multiple times. Admittedly, twice has tended to be enough. Once you learn a boss's trick, they tend to be effectively neutered. And if you keep status effects in mind - as they actually work on bosses, even crippling ones like silence or hold - you can get through hard fights with ease. I've died a few times to random battles, but those have felt more like "... Wow, really? Dealing [large damage] to my entire party before I could react? Yeah, that's fair" than anything more my fault. So, that's a definite fault. Hell, I even seem overleveled, due to very rarely running and being a terrible completionist. Overall, though, the extra difficulty is welcomed. Keeps you on your toes.
Another added thing was a bonus for viewing 100% of a map in a dungeon. This has caused me to do a bit of excessive running around, hence the overleveling >_>. actually useful, bit it's still neat. The story is the same as it was on the SNES and the script isn't as good Still, it's a solid version of the game.
FF4 DS is the other solid contender. Personally, I prefer the 2D graphics of the original, and the script is better than FF4 Advance's script, due to being a bit of a rewrite. The augments are neat, and the new plot bits are neat. The difficulty is a bit of a mixed bag. There is, actually, a bit of epilogue type content, in New Game Plus and 2 extra bosses, but this isn't really that much.
So... It's really a hard pick. My personal bias is toward FF4 Hardtype, but FF4 DS has been a great runthrough of the game.
Well, regardless of which version you play, you should play the game. Get to it.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Paper Mario
Overall, sorta meh.
That entirely sums up my feelings about the game. The combat was incredibly repetitive, the out of combat was pretty boring (It impressed me ... well, once comes to mind. The dungeon in the ice world with the mirror bits was cool), and the game was over all way too easy. The roommate whose VC I'm playing this on would blame me for it being easy, as he says I powergamed - But, really, I just made smart choices. I didn't ever grind, I just fought the enemies I ended up running into. Hell, I tried to get away from most fights. I ended up at level 23 at the end of the game, out of 27. The badge system for power ups was pretty cool, I have to admit. However, the amount of customization is kinda... lamely small. You pretty much have to use most of your BP just to increase defense and attack power, which are really just sorta lame uses for the BP. The story, what of it there was, was bad. Meh.
SMRPG was pretty much better in every aspect. Of course, Square had a hand in making SMRPG, and that was when Square was pumping out great RPGs. So... There you go. Of course, Intelligent Systems was the devs for this game, and they make Fire Emblem. So, what the hell, guys? What the hell.
That entirely sums up my feelings about the game. The combat was incredibly repetitive, the out of combat was pretty boring (It impressed me ... well, once comes to mind. The dungeon in the ice world with the mirror bits was cool), and the game was over all way too easy. The roommate whose VC I'm playing this on would blame me for it being easy, as he says I powergamed - But, really, I just made smart choices. I didn't ever grind, I just fought the enemies I ended up running into. Hell, I tried to get away from most fights. I ended up at level 23 at the end of the game, out of 27. The badge system for power ups was pretty cool, I have to admit. However, the amount of customization is kinda... lamely small. You pretty much have to use most of your BP just to increase defense and attack power, which are really just sorta lame uses for the BP. The story, what of it there was, was bad. Meh.
SMRPG was pretty much better in every aspect. Of course, Square had a hand in making SMRPG, and that was when Square was pumping out great RPGs. So... There you go. Of course, Intelligent Systems was the devs for this game, and they make Fire Emblem. So, what the hell, guys? What the hell.
Friday, January 02, 2009
Persona 3: FES, part 1.
So. I got this game 2 weeks ago, to the day. Since then, I've played for 70 hours. Yeah. That's averaging 5 hours a day, ignoring that there's been a handful of days that I haven't played it. And the number of hours I've lost due to wipes. Oh, the hours I've lost due to wipes... But, I wanted to put down some of my impressions of it.
First, I think I have to say that this is the best RPG that I've played in years. No, really. That I could play 70 hours over that time period says a lot. I've not been able to do that for awhile. The blend of customization, difficulty, and good writing has pulled me into this game like I haven't been for awhile.
For those that have no clue about how Persona 3 works (like me, before playing it!), the game is played day by day. Each day you have activities that you do after school - hanging out with people, attending clubs, etc. (I have to say, when I first started playing, I felt a tad overwhelmed with how many different things I could do. Too many things to do, so few days! Sorta felt like real life.) At night you can either do more activities or go to Tartarus. Tartarus is the dungeon that you adventure in. In the day stuff, you go to school, make friends, date, etc. This is done via a system called Social Links. The more you hang out with people, the higher a Social Link rank you have with the person. The scenes are well done and I found them to be very interesting. I tend to want to watch these more than explore the dungeon, most of the time. The higher Social Link you have, the better the Personas you fuse will be. Personas being the spirits(?) that help you in combat.
So, combat in this game actually involves strategy and real threat. I've Game Over'd more times to random combats than bosses. Difficulty in an RPG? I don't think I've encountered that in a non-SRPG in years. It's amazing. The good majority of those deaths have been because I screwed up and not cheese. Of course, there's a bit of cheese, but that happens. With better prep and not letting the enemy get advantage on me, I'd have not game over'd nearly as many times. In combat, if you hit an enemy with their weakness (Or a critical hit) it knocks them over and you get another action. This applies to you and the enemy. I've had the enemy get advantage on me, take advantage of my weaknesses, and take me out. It's painful, but... That's how it goes. Also, this is one of the games that I find Instant Death and Status Effects not insanely BS. Mostly because they have the same odds to work on you as to work on enemies ... and in the case of status effects, BOSSES. Yeah. I've seen bosses get charmed. THat's an amazing sight that would warm any cynical RPGer's heart. Instant Death is a legit way to get rid of enemy groups, too.
The Main Character in the game can swap Personas from a group you can take with you. This means he can take any role, as all of your stats, skils, and weaknesses/resistances come from your Persona. Need a healer? Switch Persona (in combat, even) to a persona with healing spells. Bam, healer. Need to be resistant to an element, need to cast a certain spell? Hope you have the right persona with you. You ... did prepare your Personas beforehand, right? You can fuse Personas to get new, stronger ones. They take some of the traits of their parents, so you get a great amount of customization, between what Persona you take with you and what their traits are. Now, all your party members have a set Persona, so they're static in how their skills etc. work.
Audio/Visualwise, the game is top notch. I like the songs that play - They don't annoy me after hearing them for hours on end, though the other people in the house have been bothered... <_< (Heh. I've caught my sister and niece humming along with the battle theme). I like the visual style - It looks nice and it's clean.
Of course, I do have some complaints about the game. It's not perfect. I have had a few cheese deaths - Enemy critical hits the Main Character, knocks him down, hits him again and ... All of the sudden I go from full HP to none. Oops. And that's Game Over. The second the MC dies, you're done. Even if you have a persona that can cast a resurrection spell in your party. Which doesn't make much sense to me. Speaking of in your party, it's entirely AI controlled. Uggggh. Do I really need to say more? And, with the way the game handles party members and being in your party, there's no easy way to handle equipping your party members. You have to talk to them and handle equipment individually, not via a nice organized way. Bleh.
And the Social Links... The system results in a lot of good things, with you being able to choose who you talk to, when you do so, how your relationships with people grow, and so on. However, in dialogue, it seems like the entire point is sucking up to the person you're talking with. =/ That, and then once you max out their social link with a person, you can safely never talk to them again with no negative effects. Mechanicswise, sure, this makes sense. It just feels sorta lame and I laugh at how it kinda clunks. This has resulted in me and my niece laughing a number of times at the mechanics as we watched it play out. I was dating a girl and then working on dating another chick. The MC is the master of Hit it and Quit it. =P
The difficulty, while something I laud, also tends to have brick wall moments. Those are annoying, but not really a deal breaker. They require you to go back, level up and fuse Personas to find a certain skill, etc. The game does have grinding, but it's not really excessive.
This wraps up this bit. I'll do a second post after I've put another 70 hours into the game, heh.
First, I think I have to say that this is the best RPG that I've played in years. No, really. That I could play 70 hours over that time period says a lot. I've not been able to do that for awhile. The blend of customization, difficulty, and good writing has pulled me into this game like I haven't been for awhile.
For those that have no clue about how Persona 3 works (like me, before playing it!), the game is played day by day. Each day you have activities that you do after school - hanging out with people, attending clubs, etc. (I have to say, when I first started playing, I felt a tad overwhelmed with how many different things I could do. Too many things to do, so few days! Sorta felt like real life.) At night you can either do more activities or go to Tartarus. Tartarus is the dungeon that you adventure in. In the day stuff, you go to school, make friends, date, etc. This is done via a system called Social Links. The more you hang out with people, the higher a Social Link rank you have with the person. The scenes are well done and I found them to be very interesting. I tend to want to watch these more than explore the dungeon, most of the time. The higher Social Link you have, the better the Personas you fuse will be. Personas being the spirits(?) that help you in combat.
So, combat in this game actually involves strategy and real threat. I've Game Over'd more times to random combats than bosses. Difficulty in an RPG? I don't think I've encountered that in a non-SRPG in years. It's amazing. The good majority of those deaths have been because I screwed up and not cheese. Of course, there's a bit of cheese, but that happens. With better prep and not letting the enemy get advantage on me, I'd have not game over'd nearly as many times. In combat, if you hit an enemy with their weakness (Or a critical hit) it knocks them over and you get another action. This applies to you and the enemy. I've had the enemy get advantage on me, take advantage of my weaknesses, and take me out. It's painful, but... That's how it goes. Also, this is one of the games that I find Instant Death and Status Effects not insanely BS. Mostly because they have the same odds to work on you as to work on enemies ... and in the case of status effects, BOSSES. Yeah. I've seen bosses get charmed. THat's an amazing sight that would warm any cynical RPGer's heart. Instant Death is a legit way to get rid of enemy groups, too.
The Main Character in the game can swap Personas from a group you can take with you. This means he can take any role, as all of your stats, skils, and weaknesses/resistances come from your Persona. Need a healer? Switch Persona (in combat, even) to a persona with healing spells. Bam, healer. Need to be resistant to an element, need to cast a certain spell? Hope you have the right persona with you. You ... did prepare your Personas beforehand, right? You can fuse Personas to get new, stronger ones. They take some of the traits of their parents, so you get a great amount of customization, between what Persona you take with you and what their traits are. Now, all your party members have a set Persona, so they're static in how their skills etc. work.
Audio/Visualwise, the game is top notch. I like the songs that play - They don't annoy me after hearing them for hours on end, though the other people in the house have been bothered... <_< (Heh. I've caught my sister and niece humming along with the battle theme). I like the visual style - It looks nice and it's clean.
Of course, I do have some complaints about the game. It's not perfect. I have had a few cheese deaths - Enemy critical hits the Main Character, knocks him down, hits him again and ... All of the sudden I go from full HP to none. Oops. And that's Game Over. The second the MC dies, you're done. Even if you have a persona that can cast a resurrection spell in your party. Which doesn't make much sense to me. Speaking of in your party, it's entirely AI controlled. Uggggh. Do I really need to say more? And, with the way the game handles party members and being in your party, there's no easy way to handle equipping your party members. You have to talk to them and handle equipment individually, not via a nice organized way. Bleh.
And the Social Links... The system results in a lot of good things, with you being able to choose who you talk to, when you do so, how your relationships with people grow, and so on. However, in dialogue, it seems like the entire point is sucking up to the person you're talking with. =/ That, and then once you max out their social link with a person, you can safely never talk to them again with no negative effects. Mechanicswise, sure, this makes sense. It just feels sorta lame and I laugh at how it kinda clunks. This has resulted in me and my niece laughing a number of times at the mechanics as we watched it play out. I was dating a girl and then working on dating another chick. The MC is the master of Hit it and Quit it. =P
The difficulty, while something I laud, also tends to have brick wall moments. Those are annoying, but not really a deal breaker. They require you to go back, level up and fuse Personas to find a certain skill, etc. The game does have grinding, but it's not really excessive.
This wraps up this bit. I'll do a second post after I've put another 70 hours into the game, heh.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
God of War
So... It's overall a fun game. There's really not too much to say about it, though. It's decently hard, even on normal. The QTEs are damned annoying, and I'm glad you can skip them the majority of the time. When you can't skip them, though, arg. They were a unique idea... for the first few times you did them. But, beyond that... Meh. The story is cool, killing everything in mythology and breaking standard mythology over your knee. And I did enjoy how you restored HP/MP, with the boxes letting you choose which one you got. The puzzles, too, were fun. Slightly challenging, but not ARG BASH HEAD INTO WALL CHECK THINGS ON GFAQS hard.
It was fun, but there was a lot of things that could have been done much better. The camera, especially, oh god. The camera killed me as many times as the enemies did. Overall... Fun, but I don't think I'll play through it again.
It was fun, but there was a lot of things that could have been done much better. The camera, especially, oh god. The camera killed me as many times as the enemies did. Overall... Fun, but I don't think I'll play through it again.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
FFTA2 pt 2
Yeah, part two. The game deserves a second entry now that I'm closer to the end. I might even write a third one when I beat the game.
But, I was thinking earlier. The game had so much potential - The story has all the elements of a good story. However, it ends up dumbed down or never developed. Let elaborate in a spoiley manner,but, don't worry. The plot is insipid and you aren't missing much if you read this.
There's an evil organization, Khamja, in the game. How do they show they're evil? They shoot one of the main characters. Twice. (He gets better. Twice.) and fail an assassination attempt. Also, they do something like insidier trading and poaching. Yeah. That's... about it.
Compare: How are people in FFT shown to be evil? They stab/poison people. They start/inflame wars. They sell their souls to demons. FFTA2, however, is rated E. Now, I don't have a problem with games being rated E, if they pull good things off. FFTA2 didn't.
Now, furthermore, the number of missions that deal with this group? Maybe 10 or 15. HAlf of those are "oh. Hay. It's Khamja. Let's beat them up." There is main plot integration, but not nearly enough. It's diappointing.
Another botch - The group that invades the continent you're on, Duelhorn. They end up fighting Khamja. Like the idiotic JRPG hero you are, you of course have to fight them both. I just started a mission where Duelhorn is attempting to destroy Khamja. What do you do? Stop them! ... what. Yeah... Doesn't make sense to me, either. But - Maybe let us choose how we go about things? Help one group or choose to not interfere in their war. Split the game, maybe. Of course not, that would be too much effort.
There's all the moral ambiguity of a brick in this game. Every time you do a quest, you have to follow the quest to the dot. There's been quests where you've done some stupid things, but the Hero just goes "Oh. Well. But the quest says we do this, so we do it!" ... No choices. Ever. Wait, sorry. There was one. --
The description for the quest: "I love someone whom I can never have. The very thought haunts me each moment I draw breath. It is more than I can bear. And so I wish to quit this mortal life. There is a substance known as zombie powder which may grant me the relief I so desperately seek. Please, find this and bring it to me. End my suffering."
You then go talk to a powerful witch, who tells you where to find the substance, and tells you about it. That the powder will turn the person into a zombie over a span of time, and their memories will fade away shortly after. As you arrive at the location of the enemies to kill to get zombie powder, you encounter an alchemist. He tells you about another potion, Lethean Draught that will make the person forget. You have the option to do either one to end the quest. But? Whichever you do? It doesn't actually change anything. There's no follow up on the quest. Great.
Sigh. FFT, why are your successors so terrible?
But, I was thinking earlier. The game had so much potential - The story has all the elements of a good story. However, it ends up dumbed down or never developed. Let elaborate in a spoiley manner,but, don't worry. The plot is insipid and you aren't missing much if you read this.
There's an evil organization, Khamja, in the game. How do they show they're evil? They shoot one of the main characters. Twice. (He gets better. Twice.) and fail an assassination attempt. Also, they do something like insidier trading and poaching. Yeah. That's... about it.
Compare: How are people in FFT shown to be evil? They stab/poison people. They start/inflame wars. They sell their souls to demons. FFTA2, however, is rated E. Now, I don't have a problem with games being rated E, if they pull good things off. FFTA2 didn't.
Now, furthermore, the number of missions that deal with this group? Maybe 10 or 15. HAlf of those are "oh. Hay. It's Khamja. Let's beat them up." There is main plot integration, but not nearly enough. It's diappointing.
Another botch - The group that invades the continent you're on, Duelhorn. They end up fighting Khamja. Like the idiotic JRPG hero you are, you of course have to fight them both. I just started a mission where Duelhorn is attempting to destroy Khamja. What do you do? Stop them! ... what. Yeah... Doesn't make sense to me, either. But - Maybe let us choose how we go about things? Help one group or choose to not interfere in their war. Split the game, maybe. Of course not, that would be too much effort.
There's all the moral ambiguity of a brick in this game. Every time you do a quest, you have to follow the quest to the dot. There's been quests where you've done some stupid things, but the Hero just goes "Oh. Well. But the quest says we do this, so we do it!" ... No choices. Ever. Wait, sorry. There was one. --
The description for the quest: "I love someone whom I can never have. The very thought haunts me each moment I draw breath. It is more than I can bear. And so I wish to quit this mortal life. There is a substance known as zombie powder which may grant me the relief I so desperately seek. Please, find this and bring it to me. End my suffering."
You then go talk to a powerful witch, who tells you where to find the substance, and tells you about it. That the powder will turn the person into a zombie over a span of time, and their memories will fade away shortly after. As you arrive at the location of the enemies to kill to get zombie powder, you encounter an alchemist. He tells you about another potion, Lethean Draught that will make the person forget. You have the option to do either one to end the quest. But? Whichever you do? It doesn't actually change anything. There's no follow up on the quest. Great.
Sigh. FFT, why are your successors so terrible?
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Princess Maker 2
Ok, so... It's, on the whole, a Japaaaaaan! sort of game. You raise a daughter from 10 to 18 and how you raise her gives you a different ending, with the endings being how she lives the rest of her life. It's best described as Harvest Moon + RPG + Very minor Hgame elements. You can put your daughter into skimpy clothing and buy pills to increase her bust size. Yeaaaah. I skipped on that.
The game is divided up into months, and you schedule your daughter's activities each month. There's School, Work, Adventuring, and Time Off. School increases stats and skills the quickest, but the cost of each one is kinda prohibitively expensive. Work gets you money and increases stats/skills, but also tends to decrease another stat/skill. Time Off is how you lower your daughter's stress, which accumulates over time from working and school. If her stress raises too high, she'll slack off during work, spend your money without permission, and run away. This is bad.
Adventuring is the most fun element of the game, by far. Adventuring is what triggers all the special events. There are 4 places to adventure to, each with a different set of random encounters and triggerable events. You can play with fairies and elves, talk with the devil, and even kill the God of War and then talk to the God that created everything.
The game does have a few sexist/that's just wrong elements. Your daughter can work at a bar/sleazy bar/cabaret at various ages (IIRC, 14/15/16). She can be 'too fat' to fit into dresses/lingerie ... Where too fat to fit into a dress in my game was 105 lbs and 4'10. ... Wha? And then, finally, there are various spirits that will help you out if you're focusing in a single area of improvement. A spirit that embodies housework came to compliment my daughter on how well her housework was improving. My daughter says she's just doing what 'comes naturally', and the kitchen spirit said that 'not many girls do what comes naturally anymore.' ... Doing housework and cooking is what a girl is naturally supposed to do, eh? ... Riiiiiiiiiight.
It's a quick game to play through, only took me maybe 5 hours or so, and is readily available from Home of the Underdogs. Though, on XP, it has to be played with DOSBox. Pretty fun, if you discount the weirder elements.
Oh! My daughter, by the way, ended up being Commander of the Royal Guard. :3
The game is divided up into months, and you schedule your daughter's activities each month. There's School, Work, Adventuring, and Time Off. School increases stats and skills the quickest, but the cost of each one is kinda prohibitively expensive. Work gets you money and increases stats/skills, but also tends to decrease another stat/skill. Time Off is how you lower your daughter's stress, which accumulates over time from working and school. If her stress raises too high, she'll slack off during work, spend your money without permission, and run away. This is bad.
Adventuring is the most fun element of the game, by far. Adventuring is what triggers all the special events. There are 4 places to adventure to, each with a different set of random encounters and triggerable events. You can play with fairies and elves, talk with the devil, and even kill the God of War and then talk to the God that created everything.
The game does have a few sexist/that's just wrong elements. Your daughter can work at a bar/sleazy bar/cabaret at various ages (IIRC, 14/15/16). She can be 'too fat' to fit into dresses/lingerie ... Where too fat to fit into a dress in my game was 105 lbs and 4'10. ... Wha? And then, finally, there are various spirits that will help you out if you're focusing in a single area of improvement. A spirit that embodies housework came to compliment my daughter on how well her housework was improving. My daughter says she's just doing what 'comes naturally', and the kitchen spirit said that 'not many girls do what comes naturally anymore.' ... Doing housework and cooking is what a girl is naturally supposed to do, eh? ... Riiiiiiiiiight.
It's a quick game to play through, only took me maybe 5 hours or so, and is readily available from Home of the Underdogs. Though, on XP, it has to be played with DOSBox. Pretty fun, if you discount the weirder elements.
Oh! My daughter, by the way, ended up being Commander of the Royal Guard. :3
Friday, November 14, 2008
Final Fantasy Tactics A2
I'm an addict for SRPGs - I've had the game for about 3 weeks and I've racked up about 35 hours of play between Fallout3, class, and etc. I've not yet beat the game, however. I'm about halfway done with both the plot (Which is roughly 25 missions) and all the quests in the game (Which is 300). So... If that ratio of sidequest to mainquest seems off to you, I'd agree. Now, I think the big question about this game - Does it live up to the name Tactics or the name Tactics Advance? Well...
So, the game is much better than the original TA, I'll give it that. They fixed a lot of things that the original had wrong -- The lack of classes, the laws, how fucking annoying owning a territory was, all the random combat, the absurd easiness. However, it still gets a lot of things wrong.
First, Laws. No more RED CARD, shit, my character is now in jail. What replaces that system is a system where you pick a perk that helps you in the battle that goes away if you break the law. If you manage to not break the law in the fight, then you also get a few bonus items at the end of the fight. Also, if you break the law, you can't revive someone. A minor annoyance, but nothing terribly bad or good about the system. I almost prefer the first game's system, if only because the laws were more ... Hm. Made me switch things up more? I guess.
Second, the classes. In my opinion, the class scale for this game sorta does it wrong. Classes are broad, not deep, like in FFT/most SRPGs. I have 6 people ... And there's a bunch of classes that I don't use, as I don't have the right race or what have you. I really dislike their race and making classes based on those choice, but... I can see why they do it.
Now, as for level scaling/quests. There are too many quests or you level up too fast. No matter what you do, there will always be quests that the enemies are just 20 levels lower than you and you'll stomp on the enemies like it's nothing. If you rush through the plot, you'll have a bunch of sidequests you stomp. If you do a bunch of sidequests... You'll have a bunch of sidequests and plot you'll stomp. I appreciate things not scaling, as sometimes you just want to go "... :3" and beat faces in. However, there's a sidequest line, where you're supposed to be fighting the toughest guys from another continent. I'm 10 levels higher than their generals. The fights are pathetic. Those, at least, should scale to you. Always be a level or two higher than you, so you can't just destroy them. It'd be nice to worry about something, to think the fight wasn't in the bag at the beginning every time.
As to owning territory - Instead of fighting for it ... And fighting again every 20 days or however absurdly short the time span in FFTA was, you auction for territory. It works pretty well, actually. Once you own the world, you can use the auctions to get rare items. Neat.
Finally, the difficulty scaling. In FFTA, I thought the game was easy from roughly hour two. This game, at least, had me thinking it might be not too easy for the first 10 or so. I've at least... thought a fight might be hard. (Exception: When I fought a group of level 90 monsters. At level 45. Who automatically get 2 turns before your group to cast about 5 buffs on their entire group. And even then? I think I could take them in roughly 5-10 levels). So... This might just be that, compared to FFT being my first SRPG, I've played a good 30 of them since. Am I getting better, or is FFTA/FFTA2 easy? Good question.
Final summary: FFT > FFTA2 > FFTA. It's gotten better, but it's not astounding. I like it, it's a solid game, tho. But, again, grain of salt might be good, considering my love for all things SRPG.
So, the game is much better than the original TA, I'll give it that. They fixed a lot of things that the original had wrong -- The lack of classes, the laws, how fucking annoying owning a territory was, all the random combat, the absurd easiness. However, it still gets a lot of things wrong.
First, Laws. No more RED CARD, shit, my character is now in jail. What replaces that system is a system where you pick a perk that helps you in the battle that goes away if you break the law. If you manage to not break the law in the fight, then you also get a few bonus items at the end of the fight. Also, if you break the law, you can't revive someone. A minor annoyance, but nothing terribly bad or good about the system. I almost prefer the first game's system, if only because the laws were more ... Hm. Made me switch things up more? I guess.
Second, the classes. In my opinion, the class scale for this game sorta does it wrong. Classes are broad, not deep, like in FFT/most SRPGs. I have 6 people ... And there's a bunch of classes that I don't use, as I don't have the right race or what have you. I really dislike their race and making classes based on those choice, but... I can see why they do it.
Now, as for level scaling/quests. There are too many quests or you level up too fast. No matter what you do, there will always be quests that the enemies are just 20 levels lower than you and you'll stomp on the enemies like it's nothing. If you rush through the plot, you'll have a bunch of sidequests you stomp. If you do a bunch of sidequests... You'll have a bunch of sidequests and plot you'll stomp. I appreciate things not scaling, as sometimes you just want to go "... :3" and beat faces in. However, there's a sidequest line, where you're supposed to be fighting the toughest guys from another continent. I'm 10 levels higher than their generals. The fights are pathetic. Those, at least, should scale to you. Always be a level or two higher than you, so you can't just destroy them. It'd be nice to worry about something, to think the fight wasn't in the bag at the beginning every time.
As to owning territory - Instead of fighting for it ... And fighting again every 20 days or however absurdly short the time span in FFTA was, you auction for territory. It works pretty well, actually. Once you own the world, you can use the auctions to get rare items. Neat.
Finally, the difficulty scaling. In FFTA, I thought the game was easy from roughly hour two. This game, at least, had me thinking it might be not too easy for the first 10 or so. I've at least... thought a fight might be hard. (Exception: When I fought a group of level 90 monsters. At level 45. Who automatically get 2 turns before your group to cast about 5 buffs on their entire group. And even then? I think I could take them in roughly 5-10 levels). So... This might just be that, compared to FFT being my first SRPG, I've played a good 30 of them since. Am I getting better, or is FFTA/FFTA2 easy? Good question.
Final summary: FFT > FFTA2 > FFTA. It's gotten better, but it's not astounding. I like it, it's a solid game, tho. But, again, grain of salt might be good, considering my love for all things SRPG.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
The problem with Ports/Remakes.
So, after buying 2 ports/remakes, playing them for a few hours, and then moving onto different games, I've realized something I've never really thought about before. While I love both Dragon Quest 4 and Final Fantasy 4 - Playing a port/remake, no matter how different, just doesn't have that ... new game feeling. Part of the excitement of owning a new game is that it is just that. There's some new game mechanic to learn, even if it's just that game's implementation of an already done system. That's what excites me most about playing new games, I think. Show me something new and innovative, that makes me have to think a bit, and I'll be drawn in. I suppose that might be one of the reasons I like SRPGs so much - They tend to have an insane amount of customization and depth. Starting a new SRPG means digging into a system and learning how it works. Growlanser Generations, I think, makes a great example of this. It's one of my favorite games mostly because nothing I've played is similar. When I started to play it, I was floord, and played through both games in the next few weels.
So... End mini-rant/ramblings, I suppose.
So... End mini-rant/ramblings, I suppose.
Friday, October 17, 2008
World of Goo
Alternately, the best game to come out so far this year.
It's ... hard to easily explain why this game is so amazing:
It's the simplicity - The game's closest analogy is probably Lemmings, your goal is to use goos of different types to achieve your goal of saving the rest. The game has an almost perfect learning curve, putting new things to you, but with hints on how to do things and never very hard at first. The game does get difficult toward the end, but the game provides you with a number of level skips you can use. If a level stumps you, you can just return later.
It's the amazing atmosphere - The game has an amazing art style and does a lot with it. When you first hit the fourth chapter, you'll be amazed. Also, the sound effects are used to great effect, making me think of Worms. The goos don't speak, really, but they do emote. They giggle, make noise, etc. It's incredibly cute, and you attach to them (... No pun intended.). And, ah, the music. The songs, while short, are great. Finally, the game's story/plot/symbolism. A puzzle game with plot, you say? Yes, I do. It's told via the signs and a few short cutscenes. It's amuzing, in a similar way to portal. It's nothing amazingly deep, but it's cool. Each chapter end level is something different and weird, not hard.
It's how great of a puzzle game it is. As I said, the difficulty curve is amazing, but you'll see levles that, at first, you have no clue how to do. It took me some messing around, but for all the levels I did and most of the levels I skipped (Skipped due to getting incredibly close to the end, having the goostructure collapse, and being out of timebugs), I didn't have to look up a solution to any of them. And for some of the levels, you'll feel like a right clever bastard after figuring out the solution and implementing it. Most of the levels have a great solution.
Really, my first line says it best. You owe it to yourself to play this game.
It's ... hard to easily explain why this game is so amazing:
It's the simplicity - The game's closest analogy is probably Lemmings, your goal is to use goos of different types to achieve your goal of saving the rest. The game has an almost perfect learning curve, putting new things to you, but with hints on how to do things and never very hard at first. The game does get difficult toward the end, but the game provides you with a number of level skips you can use. If a level stumps you, you can just return later.
It's the amazing atmosphere - The game has an amazing art style and does a lot with it. When you first hit the fourth chapter, you'll be amazed. Also, the sound effects are used to great effect, making me think of Worms. The goos don't speak, really, but they do emote. They giggle, make noise, etc. It's incredibly cute, and you attach to them (... No pun intended.). And, ah, the music. The songs, while short, are great. Finally, the game's story/plot/symbolism. A puzzle game with plot, you say? Yes, I do. It's told via the signs and a few short cutscenes. It's amuzing, in a similar way to portal. It's nothing amazingly deep, but it's cool. Each chapter end level is something different and weird, not hard.
It's how great of a puzzle game it is. As I said, the difficulty curve is amazing, but you'll see levles that, at first, you have no clue how to do. It took me some messing around, but for all the levels I did and most of the levels I skipped (Skipped due to getting incredibly close to the end, having the goostructure collapse, and being out of timebugs), I didn't have to look up a solution to any of them. And for some of the levels, you'll feel like a right clever bastard after figuring out the solution and implementing it. Most of the levels have a great solution.
Really, my first line says it best. You owe it to yourself to play this game.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Meritous
So, last year, I was telling a friend of mine about Roguelikes. He then said that it reminded him of a game that a friend of his wrote, called Meritous. Hm, ok, I went and downloaded it. And ... It's not really a roguelike. It makes me think of a combination between a Roguelike and a SHMUP (Scary idea, innit?). Everything's randomly generated and, on normal mode, you only get 3 lives. After that, save is gone. But the fighting involves you dodging enough bullets and lasers for the game to be called a bullet hell game. Don't fret, however, you get a shield. And a charge up attack that attacks the entire room.
The attacking mechanic is quite simple, but has a bit more depth than you'd think. You hold the spacebar down to charge, then release it to launch the attack. The longer you hold down the attack, the stronger it is. Also, though, the longer it takes for you to start charging up again. The attack also, if it's over a certain power, destroys bullets. So, it's a nice balance in offense and defense.
The game, actually, has a bit of an RPG element. As you kill enemies, they drop increasing amounts of crystals which you can use to upgrade your Shield, Total Charge Power, and Charging Speed. Further, you also encounter bosses, find upgrades throughout the map, and find treasure chests that upgrade you after certain rooms.
I found it to be a very fun game, but not in large doses. An hour here, an hour there, etc. Probably took me 10 hours or so to beat the game all told, over months. My only psuedo-complaint is about the monsters... Which are really just semi-different looking blobs. The sound works great, portraying the atmosphere well. And one of the elements of the graphics is the color. The more danger you're in (The more monsters that are around), the more greyed out everything is. As you clear monsters out of an area, it turns a more lively blue. When you enter into mob encounter rooms (Sort of like Arenas in Roguelikes; a room with a buttload of monsters and little cover), it starts off deep red, then pales as you clear the room. It's a very well done mechanic and, frankly, it's awesome. It's a great effect that more games should do something similar to.
It's a great game for freeware.
The attacking mechanic is quite simple, but has a bit more depth than you'd think. You hold the spacebar down to charge, then release it to launch the attack. The longer you hold down the attack, the stronger it is. Also, though, the longer it takes for you to start charging up again. The attack also, if it's over a certain power, destroys bullets. So, it's a nice balance in offense and defense.
The game, actually, has a bit of an RPG element. As you kill enemies, they drop increasing amounts of crystals which you can use to upgrade your Shield, Total Charge Power, and Charging Speed. Further, you also encounter bosses, find upgrades throughout the map, and find treasure chests that upgrade you after certain rooms.
I found it to be a very fun game, but not in large doses. An hour here, an hour there, etc. Probably took me 10 hours or so to beat the game all told, over months. My only psuedo-complaint is about the monsters... Which are really just semi-different looking blobs. The sound works great, portraying the atmosphere well. And one of the elements of the graphics is the color. The more danger you're in (The more monsters that are around), the more greyed out everything is. As you clear monsters out of an area, it turns a more lively blue. When you enter into mob encounter rooms (Sort of like Arenas in Roguelikes; a room with a buttload of monsters and little cover), it starts off deep red, then pales as you clear the room. It's a very well done mechanic and, frankly, it's awesome. It's a great effect that more games should do something similar to.
It's a great game for freeware.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime
I'm an unabashed Dragon Quest fanboy. I've played the series since I was a wee lad and my grandmother and I played 3 and 4 together. It's probably my favorite video game series of all time (No doubt partially due to nostalgia, but I really do love the games.). So, when I saw this game for $15 used, I had to pick it up.
It's a really simple game, on the whole. Go to areas, rescue your slime friends, be a kleptomaniac and steal everything that isn't bolted to the ground. However, it manages to be very fun in the different areas. However, the various tank fights get a bit ... old.
Wait, tank fights? you might ask. Yeah. The town that the game is centered around gets attacked and destroyed by a gang of monsters that attack with a massive, massive tank. You end up getting one of your own and fighting a bunch of them over the span of the game. I'd say about 30 or so. The sad thing, is that each fight runs exactly the same. Before you get a crew, you run back and forth between the ammo shoots and cannons. After you get a crew, you go to the enemy tank and attack their crew until your crew deals enough damage. None of the fights are really at all difficult, either, sadly.
The story, of course, is throwaway. However, there's a lot of neat references to other Squeenix games and a good bit of humor. Graphically and soundwise, pretty average.
Decent game, short (About 12-14 hours). If you see it on the cheap, go for it.
It's a really simple game, on the whole. Go to areas, rescue your slime friends, be a kleptomaniac and steal everything that isn't bolted to the ground. However, it manages to be very fun in the different areas. However, the various tank fights get a bit ... old.
Wait, tank fights? you might ask. Yeah. The town that the game is centered around gets attacked and destroyed by a gang of monsters that attack with a massive, massive tank. You end up getting one of your own and fighting a bunch of them over the span of the game. I'd say about 30 or so. The sad thing, is that each fight runs exactly the same. Before you get a crew, you run back and forth between the ammo shoots and cannons. After you get a crew, you go to the enemy tank and attack their crew until your crew deals enough damage. None of the fights are really at all difficult, either, sadly.
The story, of course, is throwaway. However, there's a lot of neat references to other Squeenix games and a good bit of humor. Graphically and soundwise, pretty average.
Decent game, short (About 12-14 hours). If you see it on the cheap, go for it.
Zone of the Enders 2
Mm. Mech combat, cel shaded graphics, and great controls. Zone of the Enders 2 does a lot of things right. The controls will stick to you in 5 minutes, if not less, and the graphics will wow you the first time you see them in action. You'll feel like an utter badass the first time you destroy a huge mech swarm or use one enemy mech to bash another or any number of other amazing things you'll do over the course of the game.
However ... I find that the majority of the bossfights get sorta ... boring. Like, you do them once to find out what the trick is and how to avoid their attacks, and then a second time to actually beat them. There's a single trick to them and that's it. None of the subweapons really work against them and your ranged attacks do pitiful damage. This leaves your sword and picking up the random steel beam to hit them with. But, the thing is, you can't deviate from the designated trick to beat the boss. I wish the fights were less ... linear? I suppose.
That, and the final subweapon you get is the most terrible MacGuffin ever, and then isn't even that useful for the boss that would, supposedly, absolutely destroy you without it. Except I barely used it. And found the final boss fight to be easy enough to beat with my eyes closed. I could beat it on sound cues, as the first 75% doesn't even require my attention. Blah.
Another disappointment was that the translation and dialogue, while never a shining aspect of the game, go way downhill in the last couple of hours.
Overall, a solid game, but I recall the first being better.
However ... I find that the majority of the bossfights get sorta ... boring. Like, you do them once to find out what the trick is and how to avoid their attacks, and then a second time to actually beat them. There's a single trick to them and that's it. None of the subweapons really work against them and your ranged attacks do pitiful damage. This leaves your sword and picking up the random steel beam to hit them with. But, the thing is, you can't deviate from the designated trick to beat the boss. I wish the fights were less ... linear? I suppose.
That, and the final subweapon you get is the most terrible MacGuffin ever, and then isn't even that useful for the boss that would, supposedly, absolutely destroy you without it. Except I barely used it. And found the final boss fight to be easy enough to beat with my eyes closed. I could beat it on sound cues, as the first 75% doesn't even require my attention. Blah.
Another disappointment was that the translation and dialogue, while never a shining aspect of the game, go way downhill in the last couple of hours.
Overall, a solid game, but I recall the first being better.
Doom 1 and 2
Ok. I'm not a huge fan of FPSes. I'll play through them, but slowly, typically. I end up disliking how the games end up not feeling just like run and gun awesome action. They add in puzzles and stealth and ... Arg. Now, while I don't dislike those elements in other games, they tend to ruin FPSes for me.
Doom 1, however, is the perfect FPS, IMO. The entire game is you running around and killing the everloving crap out of everything. There's few things more satisfying than knocking around a Cacodemon with a rocket.
... Well, except for using the Super Shotgun. If Doom2 did one thing right, it was the addition of the Super Shotgun. The firing noise and reload noise of that gun is great. Also great is running circles around an Arachnotron and filling it full of shotgun. However, Doom2 ends up having platformingish aspects and a lot more of the whole 'Run around level, find key' aspect. A bit less fun than Doom1, but both are amazing games.
Doom 1, however, is the perfect FPS, IMO. The entire game is you running around and killing the everloving crap out of everything. There's few things more satisfying than knocking around a Cacodemon with a rocket.
... Well, except for using the Super Shotgun. If Doom2 did one thing right, it was the addition of the Super Shotgun. The firing noise and reload noise of that gun is great. Also great is running circles around an Arachnotron and filling it full of shotgun. However, Doom2 ends up having platformingish aspects and a lot more of the whole 'Run around level, find key' aspect. A bit less fun than Doom1, but both are amazing games.
GrimGrimoire
A console RTS. As a friend of mine said when I was describing the game to him, he said after I told him the genre that it sucked. Unequivocally, console RTSes suck. Until I played GrimGrimoire, I'd have agreed with him. It's not just a port of a PC game, but a game built around that it knows its own weaknesses. You can pause, for one. This makes up for how inferior a PS2 controller is compared to a mouse for RTSes. The controls really aren't perfect, but you get used to them quickly.
The AI has the standard hair-tugging aspect of any RTS - They micro-manage a bunch better than you, and there are spellcasters with very, very annoying spells. However, all of the fights are easily beatable on a second or third try if you put some thought into what you did wrong. The game throws a number of oddball scenarios at you, so later in the game I tended to suicide my first time playing a map so I could scout everything out.
The system is pretty neat, overall. There are 4 schools of summonings that you can use, each one having 3 runes, which are the buildings that you build units and upgrades at. Each group has a resource collector, base units, caster types, and so on. There's a summon type circle, where each one is weak to one and strong against another. There's another aspect, where some units are astral and can't be hit by some units. Thus, there tends to be multiple counters to things and multiple strategies to each map. It's a suprisingly deep game for a console RTS.
It's a game made by VanillaWare, the company responsible for Odin Sphere, so the graphics are 2D and absolutely great. Sprites that are huge, detailed, and gorgeous (Of course, I've always loved sprite graphics, so I might be a tad biased.). The music is ... there. There's only 1 battle music for 25 fights. I've heard it for a over 10 hours and I can't even recall it. =/
It's a bit of a short game, though. I beat it in about 15 hours (Of course, that doesn't include failed fights.), but I didn't do the extra missions, of which there are 25 more. Those would probably take at least the same amount of extra time to complete.
The story is pretty neat, too. It has a few nice twists, some implied lesbianism, and is overall well done. I'd say more, but it would be hard to without spoilers.
It's a good game. Pick it up if you like strategy.
The AI has the standard hair-tugging aspect of any RTS - They micro-manage a bunch better than you, and there are spellcasters with very, very annoying spells. However, all of the fights are easily beatable on a second or third try if you put some thought into what you did wrong. The game throws a number of oddball scenarios at you, so later in the game I tended to suicide my first time playing a map so I could scout everything out.
The system is pretty neat, overall. There are 4 schools of summonings that you can use, each one having 3 runes, which are the buildings that you build units and upgrades at. Each group has a resource collector, base units, caster types, and so on. There's a summon type circle, where each one is weak to one and strong against another. There's another aspect, where some units are astral and can't be hit by some units. Thus, there tends to be multiple counters to things and multiple strategies to each map. It's a suprisingly deep game for a console RTS.
It's a game made by VanillaWare, the company responsible for Odin Sphere, so the graphics are 2D and absolutely great. Sprites that are huge, detailed, and gorgeous (Of course, I've always loved sprite graphics, so I might be a tad biased.). The music is ... there. There's only 1 battle music for 25 fights. I've heard it for a over 10 hours and I can't even recall it. =/
It's a bit of a short game, though. I beat it in about 15 hours (Of course, that doesn't include failed fights.), but I didn't do the extra missions, of which there are 25 more. Those would probably take at least the same amount of extra time to complete.
The story is pretty neat, too. It has a few nice twists, some implied lesbianism, and is overall well done. I'd say more, but it would be hard to without spoilers.
It's a good game. Pick it up if you like strategy.
The World Ends With You
I loved it and hated it. Loved it because the game is damned fun and the story is neat. Hate because the AI sucks and so it can be oddly difficult at times. Let me explain - You have 2 characters in an Action RPG that share a health bar. You control both of them, but one can be AI controlled. The AI sucks, and you can't control both of them perfectly at once. So, I've died in fights because the AI can't dodge worth crap, but the character I'm controlling has never taken a hit. However, I was also level 1 the entire time - you can lower your levels to get higher drop rate - Which I sat at level 1 the entire time. This only cripples your max HP, however. When I had to, I jacked up my level or lowered the difficulty (which you can do on the fly - It changes what enemies drop.).
It's also got a great presentation for a DS game. The graphics were very good, had cutscenes, decent voicing, and great music with actual sung lyrics.
It's overall an awesome, awesome game. Would highly recommend it for anyone that likes RPGs. It's the game that gave me faith that RPGs on the DS can be really amazing.
It's also got a great presentation for a DS game. The graphics were very good, had cutscenes, decent voicing, and great music with actual sung lyrics.
It's overall an awesome, awesome game. Would highly recommend it for anyone that likes RPGs. It's the game that gave me faith that RPGs on the DS can be really amazing.
Dawn of War and expansions
So, since some friends of mine want to play Dawn of War multiplayer, I decided to beat the campaigns to get used to the system. The STORY of the DoW campaign is bloody amazing. However, the gameplay becomes... "Defend against initial attacks. Build up to squad cap in Marines or Terminators. Build up to Vehicle Cap in Dreadnoughts and Predators. Walk all over enemy like it's nothing." Which is incredibly boring, towards the end. =/
I'd still recommend a playthrough, however, as the game is incredibly different than the standard RTS. You don't build units, you build entire squads. You select a barracks, you build Space Marines, and ... Out pops 4 units instead of 1. However, these 4 units all act as one. You don't give orders to individual units, but to squads. Also, each squad can build more units within itself to a cap. Space Marines have a max of 8 marines per squad + Sargeant. One might think this was annoying, but it makes for much easier micromanagement. I suck at micro in every other game,ut I find myself actually getting decent at micro in DoW.
You can also add various levels of customization to each squad. The SMs can add a combination of 4 weapons to counter different things, from dealing with infantry to melee attackers to vehicles, making them incredibly versatile.
Another great innovation is that each squad has morale. If they take too much morale damage their accuracy goes to crap and they become less effective (But move faster.). There are ways to restore morale and ways to specifically damage morale. It adds a lot of depth when you can destroy an army stronger than yours by crippling their morale.
Now ... The expansions... Winter Assault is pretty bad. I beat the Order campaign. Mission 1, alright. Mission 2, suck. Mission 3, fun. Mission 4, annoying. Mission 5, fun. Overall, 2 missions actually worth playing.
Dark Crusade would be much, much better if the AI didn't cheat horribly. So would the entire SP, for that matter. I'd recommend passing on this, too.
Of course, the previous two expansions are great if you're into multiplayer, as they rebalance everything in a better way and add 3 more races and make the Chaos into a race of their own instead of being a Space Marine clone.
I'd still recommend a playthrough, however, as the game is incredibly different than the standard RTS. You don't build units, you build entire squads. You select a barracks, you build Space Marines, and ... Out pops 4 units instead of 1. However, these 4 units all act as one. You don't give orders to individual units, but to squads. Also, each squad can build more units within itself to a cap. Space Marines have a max of 8 marines per squad + Sargeant. One might think this was annoying, but it makes for much easier micromanagement. I suck at micro in every other game,ut I find myself actually getting decent at micro in DoW.
You can also add various levels of customization to each squad. The SMs can add a combination of 4 weapons to counter different things, from dealing with infantry to melee attackers to vehicles, making them incredibly versatile.
Another great innovation is that each squad has morale. If they take too much morale damage their accuracy goes to crap and they become less effective (But move faster.). There are ways to restore morale and ways to specifically damage morale. It adds a lot of depth when you can destroy an army stronger than yours by crippling their morale.
Now ... The expansions... Winter Assault is pretty bad. I beat the Order campaign. Mission 1, alright. Mission 2, suck. Mission 3, fun. Mission 4, annoying. Mission 5, fun. Overall, 2 missions actually worth playing.
Dark Crusade would be much, much better if the AI didn't cheat horribly. So would the entire SP, for that matter. I'd recommend passing on this, too.
Of course, the previous two expansions are great if you're into multiplayer, as they rebalance everything in a better way and add 3 more races and make the Chaos into a race of their own instead of being a Space Marine clone.
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