Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, or 9 years of hype.

After getting Persona 3: FES as a secret santa gift many years ago, I've been a huge fan of the SMT series. However, I had always heard about Nocturne. Legendary for being incredibly difficult game, but great game. I've talked to a number of people about the game since it's come out, but it took me until recently to finally play through the game. Does it live up to the hype? Does it live up to the more recent games in the series?

First, an introduction to the game, and somewhat the Shin Megami Tensei series: It's post-apocalyptic Pokemon smashed together with mythos from around the world. Instead of capturing cute, cuddly beasts, you talk, bribe, and intimidate demons, angels, monsters, and figures from myth into fighting for you, and when you're done with them, you fuse them together to make even stronger beasts. To be fair to Atlus, the SMT series has been doing this much longer than Pokemon has.

I feel like most of the hype for the game's difficulty actually comes down to traditional JRPG conditioning. Status effects, buffs, and debuffs tend to be worthless when the player use them, either because the fight will be over quicker without them or because bosses are immune. In Nocturne, status effects aren't just effective when used by the player, they basically make every single boss roll over. Maybe half a dozen bosses in the game use spells to take off the buffs or debuffs that the player casts, and access to some of the strongest debuff spells comes very early in the game. Maybe if I hadn't played other Shin Megami Tensei games, I wouldn't have latched on to every buff and debuff spell I could find and spammed them at the start of every fight? But other games make the spells harder to access or bosses tend to get rid of them more frequently. I kept waiting for the boss that would smack me down for defeating it with stat buffs/debuffs, but it never came - including the final bosses of the game and the optional boss. Every single boss fight came down to my main characters spamming the strongest physical attack he had, in the end. Where a physical damage dealing MC is, unfortunately, the only optimal build. Other builds work, but they don't work as well, which is a bit silly.

That isn't to say there aren't difficulty spikes, but I feel like it comes down to sucker punches. A lot of early bosses, you'll have to go into twice (or look the boss up, to be honest) because that way you know what the boss is weak to and what element / ailment the boss uses - but once you know that, the boss is easy. And then there are the things that are impossible to completely prepare for. Large groups of foes ambushing you and killing your full HP Main Character (and the Main Character dying is a game over, no chance to revive him) before you can act, instant death spells before you can become immune to them, and a certain boss that can give himself infinite turns at will come to mind as things that frustrated me when I lost progress for things that were basically entirely out of my control. This isn't something that other JRPGs don't have... but it seems to pop up a bit more in SMT games.

This isn't to say the game is entirely a pushover or bullshit - the dungeons of the game are still very well designed. The SMT series started off as a first person dungeon crawl, which is a genre that survives on the dungeons being interesting. Nocturne's dungeons are a bit of a breath of fresh air, compared to most JRPGs. They tend to be more about how long your party can survive between healing, which makes normal encounters more impactful than usual. The mazes, puzzles, pitfalls, teleportation points, damaging floors, and other traps make dungeon trips feel more like the meat of the game, rather than what's stopping you from advancing in the plot.

And yet, despite all my complaints about the game, I actually really enjoyed the game. Nocturne's story is somewhat thin, in a conventional sense, but it makes up for it in presentation. The game takes place in post-apocalytpic Tokyo and Atlus manages to capture the feel of being alone in a wasteland, being in a world that's hostile to your very existence pretty well. There are very few conventional NPCs - most of the idle dialogue is provided by ghosts or demons. Not even towns, or the ruins of, are safe from random encounters or even boss battles, in a couple situations.

Atlus also eschews the normal good vs evil conflict and instead has the player choose who they wish to align themselves with, if they want to align with anyone at all. There's 6 endings, which correspond to the various beliefs as to how the world should be, as championed by the few remaining humans left. Most of the important NPCs you interact with end up dead or disillusioned or both - depending on the path you take, maybe even by your hands.

So, the atmosphere and the aesthetic really save the game for me, though I probably would have finished the game even if I didn't end up enjoying it, thanks to the hype.

Finally, my total hours tally on the game, according to my save, is 140 hours. Add maybe 10 hours for game overs and things I had to redo, subtract maybe 30-40 for the game sitting idle (I'm bad about that). Safe to say, the game is a looong game. That's doing all the optional content, though.

Now what the hell do I do with my life free time?

MAGFest 9

(OR yet another logorrheic con report)
So, yeah. MAGFest 9 was pretty much just as awesome as MAGFest 8. A bit more awesome in some ways, a bit less awesome in others. But overall, totally awesome.

So, I got in on Tuesday (two days before the con), hung out with some other Internets friends, then on Wednesday I went to the con hotel, as my roommate, Andre, was getting in that day and we could check into our room. We settle in, scope out the hotel, grab some groceries, and chill for the night, knowing that the next day MAG would be starting and would overwhelm us with awesome.

We woke up the next morning and journeyed to the registration desk... to find a 2 hour long line. o_o. Yep. MAG9 sold the hell out. Crazy. The entire con would be more crowded than last year, which was one of the downsides. But, ah well. Shortly after we got our badge, we wandered a bit until I got a text from Ashe saying she was in the line to pick up her bag. So, Andre and I... waited through the entire line again. Heh. After Ashe got her badge, we watched the Gamer Iron Chef event, which was pretty awesome, all told. The basic idea is the same as Iron Chef. Make dishes in an hour, get judged, best team wins. It was 3 teams, though. The best part about that was Hiroki Kikuta was one of the judges. His reactions to the dishes were priceless... Though it seemed like he mostly didn't like them. Whoops.

After that, I went to dinner with a friend and got back just in time to catch the Rare Candy concert (which I'll go into more later), which was awesome. I then spent the rest of the night after that (until about... 5 AM) hanging out with Ash in the Challenges booth, keeping her company and honing my gaming skillz. Lyndis arrived at the hotel at this point (the reg line was almost nil at that point) and hung out in the challenges booth area, as well, until she went to bed.

The next day promised much more. More panels, more concerts, more challenges, MORE AWESOME. Kasumi arrived shortly after noon, and we went over to Name That Tune. We both signed up and both ended up as challengers this year. I was originally planning on going to see Brentalfloss's set in the Jamspace that was at the same time as this, but... Name That Tune was pretty awesome, so I went with that. Unfortunately, neither Kasumi nor I went past the first round we were in. I should have made it, but I ended up not taking a semi-random guess at a song that would have been right. My brain also superblanked on getting a Katamari Damacy song in the tiebreaker that ended the round I was in. Alas.

Later that day, I tried to go a-concertin', but, well, I sorta describe that later. So, beyond that, the backloggery group hung out, played some TWEWY, wandered the con and bought stuff, etc. A very fun, if not terribly eventful time. Ashe had another graveyard shift that night, and Kasumi and I hung out with her for awhile (Lyn ended up heading to bed fairly early that night, as she worked in the LAN room in the morning). More challenges were played. Kasumi ended up doing the MMX2 boss rush with no upgrades/no weapons challenge *right* before we went to the Late Night Trivia show. Totally awesome.

The Late Night Trivia show was totally awesome. It was hosted by Jon St. John and was done Jeopardy style, but with 4 teams of two. Now, there's been a team that's won the two previous years straight that we saw win last year. They kinda destroyed last year. Kasumi and I represented the Backloggery as TEAM BAK'LAAG. We were a few minutes late to sign up last year, but we knew a good majority of the questions. This year, however, we were on time... and got picked. We... ended up in second, behind Team Spreadgun, who got their third year winning in a row. Did we not know our trivia well enough? Well, that was a little bit of it. But mostly it was that Team Spreadgun is confident enough and fast enough to raise their hand faster than any other team. We could have done a much better job, though, had we remembered how supereasy the mid-round short answer questions were, though. The first one was Sonic 3 and Knuckles, which Kasumi had barely played, so we decided to not wager all our points. We should have, though, as it was "Name the 3 types of shields and one of their powers". Deeeerp. And if the second mid-round question would have been from a category that wasn't MGS3 [List the powers of all the "The X" bosses] (FF1 [Give NES names of all the classes and upgrades] and Mega Man 1 [List all the Robot Masters] were the other options) we would have wagered it all and been fairly close to Team Spreadgun. Ah well. Still, we did much better than last year and did come in second. We were happy with the result.

Saturday! The last full day of MAG. The thing that got Kasumi and I out of bed after a few hours of sleep was the Hiroki Kikuta Q&A panel, which was an awesome panel to watch. I haven't played anything he's composed for besides Secret of Mana and a tad of Seiken Densetsu 3, but he still gave a cool look into how he develops OSTs. We had met up with Ash there and ran into Lyn on the way out and went to the Composers Tell All panel, which was Western composers doing... well, pretty much the same thing. So, kinda awesome. We then did some hanging out for the rest of the day, went out to a large group dinner (My roommate, the backloggery crew, and two other friends of mine in total), went in and out of the concert hall, etc. Lyn had a shift in the Challenges Booth and then the LAN room that night. I tried to hang out with her some, then, to help out and keep her less bored, but by that point, I was too tired to stay much past 1AM.

Sunday is a short day, so it was mostly packing up, checking out, then heading out. Kasumi headed out for public transit, Ashe drove Lyn and I to the airport and then headed off herself.

So, yeah. I did a lot less gamery, competed in more panels, did more challenges, and hung out with great people more, compared to last year. Which is to say, it was a great time. I do wish that I could hang out with/lived closer to any/all of Ash, Lyn, or Kasumi. They're all fun to spend time with. Lyn needs to get to work on that Backloggery Island idea quicker. (In the pic, from left to right: Kasumi, Lyndis, Ashe, me)

Also on the note of hanging out with people: I met a handful of people from the MAG IRC channel, mostly via that I wrote 'rekenner' on the back of my badge, heh. RadRac/Bunny is an awesome person, and I wish she wasn't busy the entire time. Ah well. Meeting people and hanging out is, as fitting for a con that feels more like a party, the best part.

Challenges Booth:
Between Ashe and Lyn, I knew someone working a night shift in the booth every night of the con, so I had a bunch of time to hang out there. I tried to be there for morale support as much as I could, but sleep set in some nights. The challenges I actually pulled off were fun. I did the following:

Mega Man X - Beat Vile with no health upgrades and no dash
Mega Man - Beat Elecman without taking a hit
Mega Man 2 - Beat Heatman's stage with no upgrades, starting with one life
Mega Man 2 - Beat Gutsdozer with only the Bubble Lead
Mega Man 4 - Beat the Giant Metool without taking a hit
Super Mario World - Beat Bowser through the front door, starting as small Mario
SMB2 - Beat the boss of 5-3 (Clawgrip) as Luigi without taking a hit
SMB3 - Beat the boss stage of World 6 (Lemmy Koopa) without taking a hit
Donkey Kong Country 2 - Finish Screech's race in first
Ducktales - Beat Amazon stage with 0 money
Chrono Trigger - Hold B and press A for a few seconds. I mean. Beat the minigame that gets you a cat.
Sonic 3 - Finish Death Egg stage as Sonic
Sonic and Knuckles - Defeat Metal Sonic with Knuckles

The Giant Metool fight was ... pretty awesome. It was about 30 minutes worth of me figuring out his AI pattern and the correct spacing to make him always high jump so I could slide under him and jump afterwards. Which was pretty sweet. MMX was pretty fun, too, though easier than I thought it would be. Elecman... has an easy to abuse AI pattern that Challenges Andy showed me, heh. And I feel damn accomplished for being able to do the Heatman phasing blocks without the precursor to Rushjet. The rest of the challenges were fairly easy fare after a try or two.

Concerts
So... I only ended up going to Rare Candy and The Megas. Why, despite my love of The Protomen? Well. Partially because small concert room is small. Partially because I didn't want to wait through the previous bands to have a decent spot in the room. Partially because... well, hanging out with people is fine, too. A lot of the bands there are just too much guitar for me to listen to, live. I like them in CD form, but when your band is 4x Guitar (type instrument, so, bass included) + Drums... it gets old to listen to. *shrug*. Rare Candy has some awesome synth and piano, so, fuck yeah. The Megas have vocals, which help. And they played 2 new songs. So, hell yeah.

Gaming
I ... didn't do a huge amount of it. o_o
I did a lot of challenges booth stuff, but I didn't do much in the consoles room. I played some Taiko and some IIdx, but not that much in the way of other games in consoles or the arcade. It was a lot busier than last year, so there wasn't as much free time to just peruse and sit at any of the dozens of open games. Alas.

Swag
So, Eli (One of the guys responsible for registraton)'s wife, Julie, is the most awesome person. I noticed and decided to buy a MAG8 shirt at the registration desk, as I didn't get one last year (I thought they were out by the time I was like BEST CON EVER). When I asked, the person there told me to ask Julie. She said she couldn't remember how much they sold them for. I thought she meant in the sense of that they would be *more* expensive than a current shirt ($15), but it turns out that they were less. I said I was fine paying $10, even though it might normally go for $5. I asked for a large... but after digging through the boxes, neither of us could find a large. Well, whatever. I went for an XL and it was all good. The next day, I went to the registration desk to use both of my one day passes that you get for being a Super Supporter. Julie was there and told me that there might be a large in one of the boxes that was elsewhere and was going to look for one. I was shocked that she remembered me, thanked her for looking for a large, and told her I'd be back later. Upon getting back later, she ... had a large for me, and told me they normally went for $5, so I could just have it. Which. Wow. Which was so far above and beyond the call of duty for her. I thanked her profusely. Why am I bringing this up? As yet another example of just how awesome the MAGFest staff are. Best con.

Other swag includes: 6 TWEWY pins, 5 Challenge booth patches, 4 T-shirts (2xMAG, a vendor shirt, and a Challenges booth given away shirt), 4 Megas posters, 3 slime magnets, and the Super Supporter MAGFest bag. Which had a bottle of PEELZ, a bottle of bacon hot sauce, and a few other cool things. No games, this year.

Lost Odyssey

So, I recently Completed* this game. I will say that I liked it, overall. However, if it wasn't for the Thousand Years of Dreams sequences, the game would have been utterly ... well, bog standard JRPG. Bog standard JRPG is fuck boring, nowadays, and has been done for 15 years.

So, what are is Thousand Years of Dreams? Okay. The basic plot point for the game is that you play as Kaim, an immortal. He's been around for 1000 years, unaging. However, he's lost his memory. Over the span of the game, you can unlock 31 memories of past events. These sequences are entirely text, with backgrounds, music, and sound effects. The backgrounds and audio accompaniment are there for effect and such and work well. The stories told by these dreams, however, are amazingly well written. The author of these dreams wasn't a stock JRPG writer (thankfully), but a Japanese short story author, and it SHOWS. These stories are moving. There was more than one that caused me to tear up, more than one that caused me to actually consider life and, to use a bit of a trite phrase, the human condition. They were the best part of the game and some of the best writing I've ever seen in a game, ever.

The rest of the story? Fairly mediocre. None of the characters are really anything new. None of the characters, aside from one, Jansen, are terribly amusing and a handful are even annoying. Jansen, however, is a well done comic relief character. Sed, also, is interesting, though he only shows up about 80% of the way through the game, which is disappointing. He's also a clear Cid-from-Final-Fantasy expy. But, well, given Mistwalker's composition, one can hardly be surprised.

Really, my biggest disappointment with the plot is that ... Well, the only thing that really indicates that you're playing immortals is the odd age difference between Seth and her son and a few other character interactions. The ending felt hollow, too, because of this - It's a standard ending, everyone's happy, yadda yadda. Which doesn't really work for immortals. Dreams aside, that you're playing immortals becomes mostly unimportant for most of the game. I wish they would have really used that as an important part of the plot - Show the characters truly move through time. But, well, then it wouldn't be a standard, boring JRPG, and we can't have that, now, can we?

Sigh. But onto other things.

The music, well. The music was done by Nobuo Uematsu. The man is a great, great composer. The standard battle theme for this game is damned well done, as is the miniboss, boss, and HolyShitThat'sABoss music are also great. I was generally impressed by the music. The graphics... Shrug. They work and they work pretty well. Fairly pretty.

The combat system is a general purpose turn based system, add in a decent spell casting system, a different take on rows, and timed hits. For spells, each spell has a casting time. So, depending on the spell's casting time, it can go off before anyone goes, after, anywhere in between, or even the next round. Getting hit while casting slows down casting (for you *and* the enemy). Which is where the row system comes in. The damage reduction for being in the back row is much more significant than just half damage - It depends on the amount of HP the people in the front row have. Having one person in front is less effective than 2. It's pretty neat. The timed hits are standard things. Time it right, you deal more damage or add effects to your hit. Don't and you don't. The effects are based on the ring you're wearing. Which brings me to the amount of customization this game does and does not have.

The rings! They're fuckall pointless! Okay, no, they're not. However, what you can do with them, in the end, is. Ring component items make up 90% of the items you'll receive in this game. They're all mostly worthless. The difference between just having a basic damage up ring and an element ring is negligible. It would be nice if you could really customize your rings and put what you wanted onto them, but you can't. You're allowed a small set of rings that you can make and that's it. It's annoying, really. To make a ring that has more than one effect, you take the two rings with the individual effects to a ring maker, who combines them. Why couldn't *any* combination work? It would have been nice.

Skills! Here's the best thing about the game, mechanically. All the immortals you have (4), can learn skills off of accessories and from the mortals in your team. Of the skills they know, they can have an amount equipped, which can be increased with items you find. So, you can fairly heavily customize your immortals. However, due to this, mortals really... suck in comparison. So, it's a bit odd, endgame, when your immortals are horrifyingly good and can do everything, but your token included mortal is barely functional in comparison. It'd also be nice if you didn't get enough skill slots to include literally every ability worth having, and if the abilities were a bit more interesting or smaller. I'd like if I had to actually make choices and make people specialize.

Overall? Fun game, worth it for the Dreams, but not amazing.

*Okay, to be honest, I didn't get all the achievements, but I don't give a damn about achievements in most anything. So, I didn't have to find every treasure in the entire game, which is the most retarded achievement known to man, anyway. Further, I didn't get all the seeds, as, well, see above. I did all the major sidequests and killed all the optional bosses. So, I think that suffices.

VVVVVV

The Letter V six times might be a better title, as I think(?) that's how it's supposed to be said. Whatever. So, what the hell is it? A very simple in execution platformer. There are exactly 3 movement controls: Move left, move right, and flip gravity. While a few other games have done this or done this for certain segments, this game relies on it as its only way for you to move vertically. As long as you're on a solid surface, you can flip gravity. Combine this with a fast paced environment, with a few twists, and you have an amazing game.

The game is pretty simple, all told. Your goal is to explore a strange dimension that you and your crew have been sent to, and to find and rescue them. Also along the way are twenty trinkets to collect. The game is divided into levels, though only in a cursory way. There's an overworld to explore, and then from there you can find levels, which share a theme and have a crew member to rescue. Further, the levels are where most of the action is - While there are spikes and trinkets in the overworld, most of them are in the levels. As a nice touch, every screen that's in a level has its own name, typically a descriptor of the screen or a hint as to how to solve it. Or, in some cases, mocking the player for their insolence.

The game is hard. Flat out difficult. For those following along (all none of you), you'd know that I love difficulty in games, as long as it's fair. And VVVVVV's difficulty manages to be the epitome of fair. There are checkpoints everywhere (Some rooms have up to 4), and rarely do you have to repeat a section because you died, though the trinkets (which are optional to collect) throw this off. To put in concrete terms, despite playing the demo and playing two of the levels before buying the game, and thus starting my death count, I died almost 1500 times in just over 3 hours of playing this game. That is a truly impressive amount of deaths. Yet, due to the incredibly short respawn time and commonness of checkpoints, I felt like I had never really lost more than a few seconds of progress. Nothing felt unfair.

While this game is pretty short, clocking in for me at about 3:10:xx with getting all the trinkets, I can say that the game has absolutely no filler. It was three hours packed with "WHOA!" and "... This is AWESOME!" and "Holy shit!" moments, when I got to new sections or finished particularly exhilarating sections. This game has one of the absolute best auto-scroll sections I've ever seen. I normally dislike auto-scroll levels, but this one left me wanting more. It was an adrenaline pump.

Now, to talk more about the trinkets and the difficulty. I'd say about half my deaths came about due to one trinket, that you have to go through 6 screens, then back through, to get. It's pretty devious, actually. The trinket is on the other side of a basic platform, with a single block in the way. To get past it, you have to gravity flip up through 6 rooms, lined and covered with spikey death, hit a disintegrating platform at the top, then gravity flip back down through them. It's referred to as Doing Things the Hard Way (The initial room's title) or as Veni, Vidi, Vici (the name of the first 3 rooms of the challenge, in sequence). When done right, the sequence takes about 10 seconds. Yet, it took me about an hour to complete. And yet? I loved it. It became pure muscle memory and quick reflexes when I finally did it (twice! In a row!) at the end. It was me telling my brain to bugger off, I needed to work at a level that's sub-brain processing to beat it. Which I loved. It might not be for everyone, but, well. Optional. Getting the trinkets really adds to the game, though, as some of the most devious, clever, and fun puzzles are for trinkets.

Lastly, the music. It's all chiptunes. Some people like chiptunes, some people hate em. It takes the right type of chiptune, for me, but I loved the music. I even went off and bought the soundtrack for this game, separately.

Where can you find it? Here, for a demo, link to the demo online, or to purchase it, for $15. Right after playing the demo, my immediate, instinctive response was "... I need to get this". Which, I did, and then played it and ;loved it. Despite the shortness, I feel like what I paid was well worth it. Some people might point out it was $5 per hour to play, I'd point out that it was an amazingly fun hour for each of those $5.

Finally, To steal from another review I read for this game, at Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

After playing VVVVVV for a little while, the power of prophecy gripped me. I became aware that during the next year or two, Terry Cavanagh will be approached in a bar by someone unknown to him. Possibly an industry function, possibly in a more general setting – I can’t be sure of the time or place. But this conversation is going to happen:

“Are you Terry Cavanagh?”
“…yeah.”
“As in, VVVVVV Terry Cavanagh?”
“…yeah”.

And then they’ll punch him in the face.

“That’s for Veni, Vidi, Vici, you bastard.”

And Terry will deserve it. As he, in a very real way, totally asked for it.

Except, I think, instead, I'll ask him if he's Terry Cavanagh, the developer of VVVVVV ... And when he says yes? I'll give him a big hug and say, as he's confused and feeling violated of his personal space, I'll say, "That was for Veni Vidi Vici!"

Dragon Quest 4: Chapters of the Chosen

Aah, as I finally get around to finishing this game on DS. This is another one of my favorite games from my childhood. So, it's hard to actually analyze this game, given that I've beaten it a good... dozen times on NES. It's gotten the standard modernization to being more like other Dragon Quest games - You have a bag, whips hit groups, everyone can equip accessories, medals now reward based on number collected as opposed to using them as currency, they changed the character names (probably for accuracy and all, but it bothers me), and all the spell names (and some of the monster names) become utterly retarded... But it can't all be good, eh? So, is it overall better?

In short, yes.
In long, Oh god Cristo doesn't cast Beat or Defeat every other turn in combat and against bosses that are immune to it YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.
...
In longer, let's get down to the review.

So, the largest change, as I implied, is that in chapter 5 you can control every character in your party, unlike the NES version. In the NES version, you control the Hero and give a general idea to the rest of the party for what they should do. This works kind of neatly, as they can react to things on the fly - eg, if you have full health at the beginning of the round, but take damage before your healer acts, they'll heal. And if you trusted them with items, they'll even semi-smartly use items. The characters aren't actually that stupid in some ways.... But they suck at using not-healing spells. Now that you can control everyone, offensive spells and buffs can be effectively used. The typically considered best part in the NES version was Hero/Ragnar/Alena/[healer], and [healer] is typically Cristo. Alena and Ragnar hit things hard. That's all they do. The casters, Mara and Brey, were ... meh, as they didn't cast effectively or use their buffs.

So, my goal in playing this was to switch up my party structure, and throw in a caster. Maya/Mara, and I couldn't have been happier in doing so. That makes me happy, really. It's not surprising, I suppose, given their usefulness in other games, but, hey.

Other added content: They added in an epilogue chapter, which gives the game a true happy ending. I'm not sure if I particularly like this ending more, as it makes the real enemy someone that gets mentioned all of once before the epilogue, and the whole making everything a happy ending thing is.. meh. However, the extra content was still fun. The optional bosses were rough, but required no real grinding. I went straight from game end into epilogue dungeon to beating the epilogue bosses. Sorta surprised me, after Dragon Quest "GRIND FOR DAYS TO DO THE EPILOGUE" 8. Buuut that's a good thing.

They also added an immigrant town, which was alright. Pretty easy to do, and a source of easy mini medals. It has a wifi aspect that's totally optional.

Graphically, it's spiffy and fancy and has camera rotation. It's neat. It actually allows for a bit easier dungeon exploration, heh, as you can see more of the dungeon, due to the rotation.

Audiowise, well, Koichi Sugiyama is brilliant. Always has been. The audio on this game is spruced up from the NES version, given better soundchips. And there's some actual orchestral stuff. And DQ4 had a great OST to begin with. So, it's great.

My total time for completion was about 20 hours - Though, again, I know this game forwards, backwards, and inside out from the NES, and like 90% of it still applies. So, it'd probably be longer for people not intimately familiar with the game and its mechanics. Same goes for my assertion about not having to grind for the epilogue, I suppose.

Trine

So, I've been hearing rave reviews for this game, since it came out. I finally got it thanks to a friend, as a Christmas gift. I've been playing it on PC. And... Well, let's get on to the review.
First, I have to say. The game started out feeling brilliant - Each character plays different and brings something different to the team, and the physics seem tight. Then you realize that the Knight, the character meant to be used in combat, is useless and outshined by the thief entirely when it comes to combat. And then that the physics isn't nearly as tight as they should be. Wait until you hit something based on rotation and you'll see proof of that one. Or have your boxes start to fall through the floor. Or... And so on. The game oscillates between making you feel brilliant by solving a puzzle, feeling frustrated by bad camera work or the physics engine working in unexpected ways (the game is *horrible* at weight), and not knowing how to feel, as you solve something by things breaking in the right way, at the right time. The clever moments are worth it, though.
Each character gets new abilities as you go along - The thief just gets better at slaughtering things, the Knight, with his last upgrade, gets something useful (a very upgraded weapon), and the Wizard gets physics toys. So, the roles go to Thief being mobile, Wizard being physics breaker/puzzle solver, and Knight is meat shield.
The game gets... tedious and annoying, more than anything else. The enemies come in larger waves and are harder to kill, but are never really a threat. that, and there's roughly 5 enemies, if I'm being generous. Skeletons, giant skeleton, giant ogre... thing, bats, and spiders. Combat just got kinda boring. The enemies are just thrown at you as fodder, instead of being used as strategic obstacles.
Also, the final level is horribly designed, and made of frustration, which could have been easily alleviated without even making it easier - It has a classic case of forcing you to watch the level's intro every time you fail. But, it's ... badly done, in my opinion, besides that, for reasons I'd rather not get into because of spoilers.
And a final note: The music in this game was fairly outstandingly boring. It was boring ambient music at its worst. It barely seemed to follow the theme of the levels, and, as a note of how bad it could be: The music in the background of the final level, during the climax, was ... something I'd expect to hear in the background of a medieval ball scene, in a movie. Uhm... Okay? That's just bad.
Evaluated without regard to amount of time and fun for the money spent, this game is fairly mediocre. Not horrible, but not amazing, either. Given how cheap it is, though, that's a few bonus points. Wait for it to be on sale on Steam for $5 and its definitely worth it, but be prepared for frustration.

Half Minute Hero

Occasionally, I play a game that turns a genre on its head and makes me think about things in a totally new way. Half Minute Hero is one of those games.
The basic premise of this game is that you have to save the world in 30 seconds. And then, again. Many, many times. In the main game mode, Hero 30, there are 51 levels. In each one, you have to kill an Evil Lord who is casting a spell to end the world. You have, in each level, 30 seconds before the spell goes off, and game over. And yet, each one contains... most of the elements of a standard JRPG. Dialogue, combat, equipment, items, inns, treasure, and, in some, even gaining party members. So, how the hell does that work?! Well, first, on normal, time is stopped in towns, letting you have a bit of breathing time to buy items, equipment, and get quest hooks. Yep, quest hooks. Secondly, you can actually rewind time back to 30 seconds left, IF you have the money. Yeah, you're working with the Goddess of Time to save the world. But, she's greedy, so you have to pay up. Most levels are well designed enough such that going for the strictest time possible is a challenge, rather than what's expected of the average player, though the levels are still tough.
Finally, the coolest thing, I thought, about Hero 30 was that many of the levels had multiple ways to finish them, some even leading to branching level paths. In some ways, this is the least linear JRPG I've ever played. Some levels are beatable in clever ways and also grindy ways, etc. The game warns you about branching paths, and tends to indicate different ways of doing things via the titles you can earn for each map.
Then, there are 3 other modes that have different mechanics - Princess 30, which is SHMUPlike, Evil Lord 30, which is RTSlike, and Knight 30, which is actionlike. Each one is 30 levels, where you have a 30 second time limit, though, for Knight 30, you're fighting *for* the time to run out. Each level is short, sweet, and challenging. And, as in Hero 30, there are ways to give yourself a bit more time.
Finally, the game ends with 2 more Hero modes. Hero 300 and Hero 3. The former is the story's epic climax, the latter is a balls hard challenge where you have, well, what it says on the tin... 3 seconds before the world ends. That was a fun mode ... in both a sarcastic, dear god, why and in a ... wow, that was fun to work out sort of way. The game, via takikng out the random, makes each level a bit of a puzzle, though one that involves reflexes to do well. An RPG that requires reflexes is an amusing thing, too.
It's an amazingly well done deconstruction of RPGs, and I loved it.