So Japanese! featuring Final Fantasy V

The Dragon Quest V remake had removed a stigma for me. It had made me see the appeal of Japanese RPGs. And so my eyes turned to that other Japanese Juggernaut: Final Fantasy. I never played the old classics from the NES and SNES era, but the PlayStation Games (FF VII and up) turned me off to the series. Whenever I hear an otaku bemoan the loss of Aeris I look the other way and pretend it doesn't exist. It doesn't stop there though. Metro-sexual underage protagonists? Melodrama and teen angst? Huge swords, gunblades, keyblades, beyblades, all wielded by children on a quest to save the world? I'll stick with Dungeons And Dragons, thank you very much. Let me make my own characters and choices. But then I heard the original Final Fantasy was actually based on Dungeons And Dragons. Aw shucks! Japan often adopts a concept and evolves it in it's own unique way. That, to my mind, is a positive thing. So I picked up the Final Fantasy V remake, at an outrageous price I might add, the original dates back to 1992, for Gameboy Advance and had a go at it.

The game is none to shy about its system. And in fact that's about all there is to it. It's atypical to JRPGs in that sense. There's almost no story to speak of. Of course there is one, but it's mainly there to nudge you along the areas, open up new classes and progress you towards the ending (though I'm not actually sure there is one). Even the Dialogues have been kept to a minimum even though the script knows a few funny lines. It's almost as if the game isn't taking itself very serious. This game is all about its class based combat system. Kind of a big deal. In short: There's a huge variety of classes. You gain job levels through combat. Job levels earn you job skills. You can change classes at any time and you can equip one (two in one case) learned job skill at any time. You get four Characters to play with. Mix and match as you please. Reminiscent to D&D and Guild Wars' ability to dual class, this system introduces a level of strategy and depth that is lacking in games like Dragon Quest V. It also gives the player a lot more incentive to grind away as new job skills are never far off. The game will throw a boss at you from time to time, and I always have a lot of fun figuring out what combinations of skills and classes will work against it. The downside to all this is the grind I mentioned before takes some time. With different motivations it's different from Dragon Quest's grind though; progressing your characters and gaining a strategic advantage in stead of progressing a story. But overall I think that in the current day and age these type of games would do well to speed up the leveling process.

In all though, FFV replaced DQV as my handheld game of the moment. A moment that's been lasting for a couple of months now. In between, I regularly bemoan the loss of Galuf on various message boards. In fact. I'm typing up a touching poem right now.

From the moment I met you there,
Oh Galuf, sage old man, yet proud and free,
alone and forgetting 'why' you were,
I spend so long for you to get XP,
hammered you into something fierce I do decree,
despite old age yet still you died,
and were replaced with Krile,
with a sprite so top heavy I could barely cope,
why a woman! a blonde cliche and why so dope,
now here I am, on message boards,
where all I do is type and mope.

So Japanese! featuring Dragon Quest V

While the world gets shuffled like a worn pack of cards I am trying to keep track of the card I picked. A fixation that has kept me busy for quite a while.

But in between chaos and pandemonium I have been playing quite a bit of games.
So let's start with the beginning. Otherwise we risk upsetting the delicate balance between time and space. I had been playing a fair amount of western RPGs lately, and I have been for a great part of my life. All the while pretty much ignoring the existence of Eastern RPGs. Which is odd, since that must make it the only eastern thing I have not had the joy to experience.
No more.

I knew Dragon Quest has been kind of a big deal. So that's what I got. "Dragon Quest V: Hand Of The Heavenly Bride" for DS to be precise. Few words could describe what happiness was in store for me. So there's finally a chance this could be a short blogpost.

It's a charming game. Objectives are laid out as if they were lighthouses on a clear summernight. There's humour that strikes me as being "So Japanese!". DQ5, however, does have its emotional moments. Soppy as it sounds, the game is actually quite humble (but do keep in mind the DS is humble technology as well) about this. It misses all the pretentious melodrama that is so typically associated with Japanese RPGs, wich makes it all the more absorbing.

My biggest gripe though is perhapse not with DQ, but with Eastern RPGs in general. And that is that the game is padded with grinding. And without a combat system that isn't engaging or a class system that supports it, the experience can get old rather fast. I understand that later DQ games have mended this ailment. And to be fair, there are games with more grinding. Furthermore, DQ mixes up the grind with the ability to go out and try to pursuade monsters to join your side. After which they become party members. Yet, while bringing more complexity, it Unfortinatly creates more grinding and more tedious inventory management.
And there really isn't that much incentive to grind exept to get your character level up. Which brings about another questionable gameplay mechanic. As you level up, so do the enemies. Meaning the game's relative difficulty remains about the same from start to finish. Each area having you playing catch-up on character levels. Thus encouraging the grind rather then make you think about how to get trough an area by combining skills, spells or party members. But that's just the way these games are made.

For a game that was originally released in 1992, DQ5 remade for DS holds up. I don't know if I'd spend the time to play it in my spare time, maybe in small chunks, but it's been a great companion on the daily commute.

Consider Battlefield Heroes

I recently got my beta code for Battlefield Heroes, DICE's free to play cartoon shooter. Being intrigued by this game from the get-go, I was finally able to take it for a spin. On first looks, DICE succeeds in creating a whimsical "casual" third person shooting game. But looks can be deceiving.

First of all, this is a beta I'm talking about so the game is still a work in progress. However. There's already a store in place for you to go spend real money on battlefield bucks, called Battlefunds. These are used to buy in-game items, such as fancy uniforms. I knew character customization would be on a to-buy basis, but it was sobering to see that just about everything in the virtual wardrobe is on sale. Of course there's some freebies in there which you can buy with valor points. These are the points you get from just playing the game. Logic would tell you that enough accumulated valor points (which boil down to "time played") would beget you some better customization options, or at least some form of visible markings of veterancy. But no dice. Because of this I think the game is lacking a basic form of feedback, namely that of character growth. The one constant is your hero and his Hero Points, In MMO-speak, this would be your character's level and skill bar. But there's no way of reading either.

To add insult to injury, the items you get in the game disappear after a week or a month, depending on how much you are willing to spend. The problem here is that DICE can slack off in making new items, since you'll never accumulate a lot of them anyway. Adding a time limit also adds pressure of "having to play the game, or I have paid for nothing". I can understand why you would apply this to weapons and power-ups because they give you an advantage in the game. Even if those weapons are considered balanced. If you play better with them, there's still an advantage. But I don't quite get why you would have clothing an accessories disappear. This goes against some MMO conventions, where you "win" gear, and once you do it's yours forever, or until you sell or replace it. People might find it disheartening if they have to rebuy their outfits time and time again. But the special gear is more of a hook rather than a gameplay defining element.

I'm unsure as to how well it will score with the casual audience. Maybe the concept of a shooter isn't that well suited to casual play either - even if it is from a third person perspective. We can make the case that casual players play games for killing time and having some easy fun. It's hard to match this with a shooter, which operates in a competitive, hostile environment. Sure, the game is easy enough to dive into, but from there you need to really work your way up the roster. The game is said to find matches according to your skill level so maybe this won't be as much of an issue as I think. Still, the people I played against were often on voice comms, really organized and put up a very good fight.

This game feels like a reskinned, hardcore battlefield game. Where all the character models are replaced by cartoons and some of the sound effects were swapped with the ones you hear on a Sunday morning. To some ears this might sound like a bad idea. But for me, this game looks and feels better then the older battlefield games. Of course, "realistic" shooters are a dime a dozen nowadays, which makes Heroes stand out as being quite unique. The closest comparison I could make are to Batallion Wars and Team Fortress 2. With Heroes sitting somewhere in between those extreme ends of the spectrum. It's not an imitation of either, mind. To add some contrast, Batallion Wars is a third person shooter RTS and Team Fortress 2 is Quake to Battlefield heroes' Battlefield.

So will it all work? I think so. But not with the casual audience, because I don't think this is a casual game. If this is marketed right, and (content) updates keep coming, DICE may be sitting on a goldmine. But they will get competition from other shooters. Many are aiming for the same audience. It's easy to see how someone might become invested in this game however. Spending real money on digital items. I bet some people on Ventrillo will agree with me, given the fact they have already spent some of their earnings on peg legs and sailor uniforms.

commutement

One of the unique properties of being a working man is the daily commute to work. I go by bike, train and foot. And nothing is more enjoyable then playing railway roulette.
The one bullet in the gun is the pretty girl that sits in front front of you and smiles back. Or that casts the one, not so innocent glimpse when she is about to turn her head.

On my ride home today I sat down in a two by two compartment. While unshouldering my rainstained black leather bag, I turn and look up into the pink face of prudence. She must have been about 72 years old, scrubbed and wrinkled. Very dignified. I could imagine she has her milk and coffee in see-through porcelain cups with her pinky doing the Heil Hitler salute.
The word that surfaced out of the murky depths of my brain was "chicken", brooding right in front of me. And for someone reading a recreational magazine, she didn't seem much entertained.
Her mouth so downturned there isn't enough skin below the chin for a smile. It looked very much like she had a ventriloquist dummy mouth installed.
How did this come to be, I asked myself as I have time and time again. It must be all the prudence, I replied.
The gun clicked.

On the next stop, I had another shot. The mass of bodies moved off and on the train. Fresh air gushed into the cabine. And with it unanswered questions.
Like "Why is there a monkey next to me, shoving bananas into it's mouth?" I could see it out of the corners of my left eye. I saw a shape swinging a big hand in the air, the trajectory ending at an open maw, which closed on something sloppy and oker. The hand returned to it's lap, while the maw was winking it's delicious content at me.
After I unfroze, I risked a quick glance at this percieved reality. It wasn't quite as imaginative as I had imagined, but still rather shocking.
A button-nosed girl was fisting one waffle after another into her chubby face. Unapologetically and openly mauling the dough in her mouth as if she was mixing concrete in it. The guy opposite to her could propably smell the taste of the sweet salive-waffle paste.
The gun clicked.

We can't win them all. But it just goes to show that life's little frustrations can add much to one's creativity.

Comparing real time strategy games of the same genre.

I could start off by saying you how unabashedly Blizzard ripped of the Warhammer 40k franchise by making Starcraft. Indeed going on looks alone, both of these have Humans (Space Marines and Terrans), "the old advanced race" (Eldar and Protoss) and the insectoid aliens (Tyrannids and Zerg). The similarities are striking and not coincidental, yet they are only skin deep. But makes it tempting to compare them none the less. RTS players know it has happened before, and will happen again with the sequels. I could also say that Starcraft has been the dominant (video game) franchise. The offering of Warhammer titles had been quite meager up until Relic made Dawn of War. But with that, a more superior title was released in the RTS genre. With added mechanics and concepts, which led to radically different gameplay from what had been the standard in titles such as Command and Conquer, Age Of Empires and Starcraft.

All the latter have a arcade-like "spend and win" mechanic. Which boils down to massing an army together. Be it of one unit type or a mix of units. Eventually a battle is fought between huge armies and usually the biggest, or most expensive, comes out on top. Massing comes natural when you have to tech up one way or the other. Spending time and resources on buildings to build a specific unit type is risky. So a consequence of saving on the one building is the funding the one building you did build, and produce the specific unit type it produces.

I had to point this out because Starcraft has this gameplay down, almost to perfection. And with Starcraft 2, we'll see a further evolution of this kind of play. Expendable units, used to (hard) counter the others. With Buildings as technology investments. Starcraft 2 will even go as far as one unit per building. It's quite clear that reality has taken a back seat in this scenario. Which has led me to say that Starcraft is an Arcade RTS.
As a side note: It has become to such a degree that supply depots, which I take it were used to "store stuff in" (i.e. to expand your population cap), have taken the role of walls. This of course was because Starcraft players would wall off their base with supply depots. In Starcraft 2, Blizzard has added a "gate" functionality to the supply depot by making it possible to sink them into the ground. Or, how meta-gameplay feeds into the perceived reality of the Starcraft universe.
Disclamer: I am aware that the cream of the crop Korean Starcraft players don't actually mass all that much. They win matches with a handfull of units and godly micromanagement skills (which still strikes me as arcade play). And seldom make it into the endgame scenario. It is not how the majority (including you) plays the game however.

The opposite could be said for the Dawn of War series. Base building and resource management has been minimized and put in the battlefield to focus more on the actual tactics. DoW1 still had a case of teching with buidings. But the evolution in DoW2 has been an even bigger move into the battlefield. Bases consist out of one portal-like building that produces all units. Not all units are available at start but are unlocked by, essentially, buying the next tier. Resources are found on the battlefield as inexhaustable strategic points. These also form the goals of most battles. I should also mention that the influence of that other Relic juggernaut Company of Heroes was instrumental to the DoW evolution. In terms of gameplay CoH was based on DoW1. And in turn DoW2 was based on both of these. CoH cut back on base building and unit count, expanded on strategic points and added the retreat function. Coh is more complex in nature than DoW. This can both be a good or bad thing depending on what you want in an RTS. CoH has more complex strategy and longer games. DoW is more straight forward, has smaller maps and has shorter matches. But I digress. The biggest contrast between Starcraft and DoW is that in DoW units are a big investment, and letting one unit die can seal your fate. All these units are rather expensive and can be customized in various ways. Mainly modified weaponry lets you deal with different threats. Hero units can equip armor and weapons mid game to make them stronger. Much like you would in, say, Diablo. To help your units service there's a "retreat" command which orders your units to leg it back to base where they can be reinforced for a fraction of the unit cost. This also saves any special weapons they might be carrying and preserves their level, as these units gain experience.

The observation is this. Starcraft is heading along the way of fast paced arcade gameplay using expendable units. Dawn of War is going the way of an RPG with limited yet highly customisable "party members" and added realism with unit AI, physics and a cover mechanic.
And as such, they also become much harder to compare. Both being at their own end of the RTS spectrum.