Toadlick Games – Page 39 – Reaching a higher consciousness

RPG!

December 18, 2007 by L. Bane. Leave a Comment

I’ve liked role playing games since I was a wee one, but I’m late to the electronic versions of RPGs since I never really thought that the graphics and limited game play on the early gen stuff could compete with the wide open, albeit imaginary, areas of a traditional RPG like Dungeons and Dragons. That changed when my brother turned me onto Final Fantasy X. If there was ever a gateway drug this was it since FFX is, at least in my very limited experience, one of the best single player RPGs to date.

It’s worth pointing out that computer RPGs work much like their pen and paper ancestors: you start out with a base character(s) that fight monsters so that they can level up and fight harder monsters while gaining special abilities. All this leveling should sit atop a story that makes it worthwhile to spend hours in dungeons and whatnot leveling up your (hopefully) entertaining characters.

With that, let’s take a look at some RPGs that I’ve blown some time on while I wait for Final Fantasy 13….

Xenosaga: Episode I

Synopsis: In the future Japanese anime type characters have to fight aliens and misguided…others, in order to…do….something.

Good points: Logged in at a brief (by RPG scales) 40 hours worth of game play. The game nails the ‘space opera’ motif with gargantuan ships performing feats that might be envisioned by the more pioneering minds. The artwork is quite ‘Star War’-sie with narrow platforms over deep gaps and lots of flashing lights, robots, and all the other appropriate sci-fi stuff. Characters for the most part are entertaining. Oh yeah, did I mention that this series of games is best known for being watched for as long as they’re played due to the length and frequency of their (for the most part excellent) cut scenes?

Bad points: Some enemies are uneven with bosses ridiculously harder than the run of the mill monsters in the dungeon and some bosses much easier than the creatures you had to fight to get to them. Like many newer RPGs you get more characters than you can have in battle at any one time, leading to half your characters sitting ‘on the bench’ and not fighting and thus (for the most part) not leveling up. The number of Characters and skills are wide, but shallow and for the back third of the game I found myself using the same two moves with the same three characters over and over and over again. The plot appears to have a Christian theme that was written by non-Christians (like all these games, it was made in Japan). I found out at the end of the game that ‘Xenosaga 1’ isn’t like the Final Fantasy games wherein Final Fantasy 1-12 have absolutely nothing to do with each other; ‘Xenosaga 1’ is actually the first of a trilogy that I probably won’t get around to playing out, despite the favorable reviews for the final entry.

Star Ocean: Till the End of Time

Synopsis: Galactic losers assault backwards planets and fourth dimensional near-do-wells.

Good points: Dungeon design is some of the best I’ve seen and the game features a punchy soundtrack. The story for the first half of the game is involving and interesting.

Bad points: The story eventually takes a third rate ‘Matrix’ type turn which elicits groans more than anything else. About the same time, in order to artificially pad the play time, the dungeon monsters get ridiculously overcharged further exposing the game’s absolutely horrid leveling system wherein your characters can only really level up in a rather arbitrary bonus scheme. Fast paced battles are devoid of strategy and are more closely related to a dungeon crawler like Diablo. New abilities seem to be handed out randomly and bench characters don’t level at all, meaning that adding new, irritating level 1 characters halfway through the game is completely pointless. I made it to the final boss, but didn’t make an effort to beat him since I knew there’d be another serving of inane dialog on the other side of the fight. And lastly, and the big rub for me, despite being sold with a sci-fi motif, the game has very little to do with anything remotely ‘sci-fi’.

Final Fantasy VII

Synopsis: Square’s classic RPG where a rebel group of misfits attempts to save the planet.

Good points: I’ve not played an RPG that started as quickly as this one (check out the remade beginning cutscene). Although quite dated (it’s ten years old at this point), someone took the time to re-do the character artwork (via the Reunion Patch) for the PC version, that I obtained completely legally. The characters are all quite entertaining, ‘bench’ characters level up (for the most part), and the story moves along nicely with some unexpected twists. Overdrives, summons, and swappable magic add a great deal of strategic depth to battles.

Bad points: What do you think of an extra large scoop of Japanese ‘Pagan Christianity’? Most aggravating as well is Square’s habit of putting mini-games into a game engine that’s in no way built for action since their character controls are optimized for moving in one of four directions*. The final boss all but required a secret ‘weapon’ that required about four hours worth of one such minigame and everyone in the Sandmich house was ready to murder the man who conceived of the chocobo.

*Apparently those crappy minigames have a draw somewhere since they’ve started making mobile versions of them.

Japan Land #3 – Hiroshima #1

September 14, 2004 by L. Bane. Leave a Comment

Okee-Dookee. Our first destination that would probably be of interest to outside interests was Hiroshima. I had a desire to visit there when I found out it wasn’t too terribly far from Tokushima. When I tried to suggest it, I learned that it was already a planned destination. In hindsight, though, I don’t know if it was scheduled primarily for a historical visit, or for food and fun. I’ll start with the heavy issues, but whenever I hear the name Hiroshima from now on, I’ll think of the lighter things it has to offer. It isn’t fair that a city that has so much to offer gets pigeon holed as ‘that nuked city’.

The Hiroshima A-bomb Dome

Although Mr. Kendall was well familiar with the Hiroshima Dome, I hadn’t heard of it until I did some web searching prior to our visit. It’s rather heavy (spiritually), with the rubble still in the same place on the ground from where the bomb had blown it free. Understandably, it’s seen a lot of reinforcement operations to keep it standing in its familiar state. A huge (especially for Japan) tract of land is set aside where there’s a rather large park and the extremely affordable Peace Museum.

The eternal flame. The museum is at the end of the walk.

Inside the Peace Museum is where the rubber hits the road as far as the Japanese perspective on this historical event. The museum had a cool audio device that would give the English (or a dozen other languages) language translations of the presentations. Needless to say, listening to America bashing and left wing gobbledygook got old real quick, and the thing hung dead around my neck through most of the museum walk through.

Although there weren’t any blatant lies, there seemed to be several sins of omission. Primarily, it seemed as if the U.S. decision to use the bomb was made in a vacuum. Much was made of the secret Hyde Park agreement between Churchill and Roosevelt, but it failed to point out various reasons for such a decision then, and its later irrelevance when Roosevelt was dead at the time when the decision to drop the bomb was made. I may not have been paying attention, but not one battle was mentioned in the lead up to the bombing, and much was made of Japan’s (apparent) weakness at the time.

My buddy mentioned that much arm twisting had gotten the Japanese to acknowledge the Korean and Chinese forced laborers who died in the bombing. Of course, either by poor translation or intentional sloppiness, one would get the impression that the evil Americans had killed these innocent slaves who happened to find themselves working in Japan.

There was also the B.S. quip towards the end about how wars never solve anything, etc.

The only problem with all this is, I can’t heavily fault the Japanese for the tone of the museum. The war certainly didn’t solve anything for the people who were burned to charcoal on the streets of Hiroshima. Sure the Japanese could admit that they were more nasty than they let on, but in their mind, it’s irrelevant to the issue at hand. I’m sure the question they’d pose is “How much less nasty could we have been to avoid such a fate?” This, of course, gets into the various reasons for the war to begin with.

Before

After
As well, I got an uneasy feeling at the museum. The mantra told to me in school was that more people died in the firebombing campaigns of WW2, but as my buddy pointed out this was one bomb, and a nasty one at that. Also taught to me in school, were the various good things brought about the bombing, especially the saved American and Japanese lives. However, such facts could be used as a justification for any horrible weapon. The American military could have just as easily dropped chemical weapons on population centers in an effort to bring about peace. “But Sandmich” you say “the Japanese had chemical weapons too, and then it would have been okay for them to use it on us”. Well then, was the Japanese lack of nuclear capability the only thing that made using the bomb ‘correct’?

It was also, at least in my mind, a dangerous gamble. Mr. Kendall pointed out to me that the heads of the Japanese military didn’t want to surrender even then, and only the intersession of the emperor brought about peace. What if Japan didn’t surrender? What if they decided to use some nasty weapons of their own? Would people anywhere tolerate more nuclear bombing runs?

If I was Truman, I don’t know if I would’ve made the same call. In hindsight though, it would appear the correct decision was made; war is unavoidably nasty. No doubt if the U.S. didn’t use the Bomb, and pictures continued to come back of American dead stacked up on Japanese beaches, Americans would be furious that we didn’t use our super weapon to put an end to the horror. As well, though the museum preaches the peace mantra now, it would’ve been more helpful if they did that before Pearl Harbor, it’s all to easy to puke that stuff up now.