cameron (Sequels! [E3 2009…): Does 'The Last Guardian' … AgentNein (The light of day …): The premise of this game … M.H. Mason (The light of day …): Without a shadow of a dou… NevznachaY (GameSpite Quarter…): Um, did anyone notice tha… mrbuu82 (The light of day …): The "Previously On" and "… mrbuu82 (Sequels! [E3 2009…): Apparently, Spielberg is … Ken (The light of day …): Wait, what part was origi… MojoBox (Sequels! [E3 2009…): Er, yeah, I meant that I'… Nicola Nomali (GameSpite Quarter…): Well, the GBC only had tw… Miss So-hee (Sequels! [E3 2009…): Overall, to me anyways, E…
This is the archive, folks. The current stuff is on the main page.
ActRaising a toast
31 May 07 | 10:18 | Posted by:
I guess my elegy for ActRaiser in this week's Retro Roundup was the best thing I've ever written or something? It's received plaudits from sources as diverse as Kohler and Carless. Well, actually, that's about it. But still! High praise... for my high praise.
Playing the game again (even if was a fleeting glimpse as I made a headlong rush through the week's offerings for a refresher course on why Kid Chameleon is lame) has really reminded me how incredible Quintet was in the 16-bit era. Which of course reminds me how completely depressing the company's eventual dissolution was. Granstream Saga and Godzilla: Generations is no way to cap off a legacy of artfully crafted and morally complex RPG-tinged classics! I think... I may have to revisit the Quintet quintet. Or simply visit, in the case of the elusive Terranigma.
I've heard there's a healthy amount of discussion centered around these games on this week's Retronauts, but you know how rumors are.
Speaking of morally complex! Have you guys heard about the new Google "Street Level" thing? It's pretty rad -- on a fast enough connection you can essentially take a real-time tour of major cities like New York and Miami. Oh, and I hear San Francisco is in there, too, which I guess makes sense seeing as Google's located here and WAIT A SECOND
WHOA HOLY CRAP YOU CAN TOTALLY SEE IN MY WINDOWS
Remember when everyone was all freaked out about how pervasive Microsoft was? How half the world was up in arms because nothing could stop the invasive Redmond juggernaut? Ah, the '90s. When we thought the most insidious threat a technology company had to offer was being in everyone's home rather than showing them in detail. And that the worst thing a president could do was put in a little overtime with an intern. It all seems so... quaint, now.
Talking Time update: phpBB kind of sucked, so! I'm looking into an actual paid solution, like Invision, going by the philosophy that you get what you pay for. Of course, this means I gotta dredge up some funds first. So it may be a little while yet.
I've been forced to set aside my playthrough of FF Tactics in order to review... Final Fantasy II Anniversary. Honestly, the things I do for my art.
This means I currently have all three Matsunoverse games in a state of suspended play: War of the Lions is frozen at the beginning of Chapter Four. FFXII is still stalled just after Archadia, since I was forced to give it up back when I was using all my free time for Bonus Stage and haven't had time to jump back in. And Vagrant Story is halted a mere two hours in, since I just started up a new game a few days ago in order to test out the new PS3 firmware update's backward compatibility enhancements for HD. (Verdict: pretty nice.)
The continuity of Ivalice mystifies me. Does such a thing even exist? I see all these weird, loosely stated connections between the three games, but mostly they serve to thwart any and all efforts to create a consistent timeline. Granted, anything that frustrates people who take games a little too seriously is fine by me. Sure, I wrote a dissection of the overarching Mega Man storyline, which does throw my mental competence into question, but all of those story details are right there in the open; it's not like I was trying to prove that there's an incredibly convoluted continuity that encompasses every Zelda game or anything. Because that would be just silly.
Besides, someone once posted this image in the late, lamented Talking Time forums, demonstrating that all of the Ivalice games actually do fit together, at least in a jigsaw puzzle sense of the phrase. But the continuity is pretty much impossible, since FFT refers to Moogles as extinct. And Moogles are in FFXII, meaning it has to come before Tactics. But FFXII features extensive notes on wildlife by a woman named Merlose -- who is in Vagrant Story as an observer, meaning it takes place after Vagrant Story. But Vagrant Story contains items which are relics of Tactics' characters, including Agrias, Beowulf and Orlandu. So it has to come after Tactics.
So, yeah. Can't wait to see people's contrived split-timeline theories. "See, when Ramza defeated Ganon in the future...."
Anyway, I managed to Yell and Accumulate my way through Riovanes Castle, so I'm at chapter 4 of Tactics. I stumbled across another new Delita/Ovelia battle and met Luso, who might actually be the most redundant character ever. He's... Ramza. But with uglier clothing. (Yes, even uglier than the butt-pants.) But at least his intro cinema is nice. Yoshida-style behemoths in full 3D appeals to a strange place in my soul.
By the way, if you're having trouble accessing 1UP, please go into your browser's cookies and get rid of everything attached to the 1UP.com domain. I have no idea what the deal is, but clearing my cookies was a lovely miracle cure for me. And it can be for you, too! Act now and save, etc. etc.
Today's surprise: I'm actually really enjoying FFII. The Japanese FFII, not the fake Super NES one. Will miracles never cease?
Bored out of your mind while Talking Time spends its mandatory three days in the grave? (Sorry, I know it's a little late for Easter.) You could join in the comments for the previous post, since everything that's being written there is alarmingly thoughtful and... verbose. Or you could take our good friend p-natsu's advice and turn your attention to the oekaki board instead. Currently the theme appears to be "design ToastyFrog merchandise," although I'm sure it's going to be difficult to come up with something more disturbing than Abe Lincoln wearing ToastyFrog swim trunks. At least without breaking the "no porn" stipulation, anyway.
Or you could read the Star Wars Retro Roundup that Mike Nelson and I crafted. Yes, between the two of us, we have played all of these. And while it's racking up huge traffic, it's not getting many thumbs-up. I assume this means people still like Shadows of the Empire and Masters of Teras Kasi and resent us criticizing them. The Mega Man retrospective has also rolled along with an all-Nadia production focusing on Mega Man cameos and sleuthing out the worst-ever Mega Man game. Inafune won't tell which they are, since he's far too polite, but he did tell us that he doesn't think highly of the ones he didn't help create. So basically, my long-standing hatred of Mega Man X6 is totally justified.
I was gonna post this in my 1UP blog, but since the site no longer works for me -- the delightfully inexplicable side effect of a speed-enhancing hardware transition that seems to be working a treat for everyone else -- I guess it goes here! We'll just consider this part three of my Seattle photo blog. Uh, but I guess we need a photo first.
Ah, there we go. As we can see from this book I spotted at the first night's dinner, Nintendo is studying up for dealing more effectively with the Internet.
Anyway! I have recapped this week's Nintendo event. At first I was worried I was too, you know, forgiving, too supportive of Nintendo's new approach. But then some guy got his whiny little fanboy panties twisted in a knot because I made a reference to the "two GameCubes duct-taped together" school of thought, clearly missing the fact that it was a disparaging reference. So maybe I need to borrow that book I spotted.
But yeah, I'm totally down with Nintendo's new hook. Of course, like everyone at the event this week, I was disappointed not to see Mario Galaxy or whatever, but apparently I was one of the few who also didn't expect to see it. I've been aware of the company's new tactics since the DS launched, so this was basically just a formal declaration of intent for what they've been doing for years now. And while it does seem something of a waste to fly up to Seattle just to look at Brain Age, there's enormous significance to what was shown -- just not in the usual OMG OMG SO AWESOME EAT THAT 360 AND PS3 sense that serves as the metric for most gamers.
Video games to date have been a depressingly limited medium, jealously lorded over by a narrow-minded and insular bunch of consumers. Which is precisely why there was such negativity in the air this week -- the enthusiast press, like the gamers it caters to, is conditioned to expect certain things, and the likes of Carnival Games and Boogie fall waaaaay off the mark. Some of us were able to grudgingly accept the new face of Nintendo, others not so much... and I worry for the latter camp, because they need to come to grips with it. There's more of a future in Brain Age than in Mario. Look at how many of Nintendo's games are being presented in simple, elegant and mascot-free packaging; the new target audience doesn't need a fuzzy mammal or angry space marine to enjoy a game. They just want, you know, a simple, accessible good time.
There's nothing more pathetic than message board rats who mope about the evil of "non-games" and how Nintendo is ruining video games (ruining, I say!) by daring not to push graphical boundaries and further refine the WWII first-person shooter genre or whatever. And then to see the same people turn around and lambaste opportunistic politicians who decry the violence of video games.
Time for some advanced taxonomic reasoning.
The same casual games that some gamers hate so much are a major part of the solution to the violence in games debate. You're never going to convince people that violent games aren't violent -- but if you let the medium expand to encompass a wider variety of games, including games that appeal to the critics themselves, then the controversial content becomes a tiny subset of a much larger and more inclusive medium. There's more to the motion picture industry than summer blockbusters; there's more to print than Tom Clancy potboilers; there's more to music than what's on the radio. Games need to expand like that as well, or they'll founder into irrelevance.
So just suck it up, forum rats. Nintendo's not replacing you. You still get your Marios and Zeldas and Metroids this year, your Halo sequels and your dozens of Final Fantasy-branded games and your freedom to pretend to be a scantily-clad level 70 lady elf. By opening the medium to a broader audience, by transforming casual games from niche PC-based time-wasters into a major business element for the world's largest gaming company, Nintendo's subsidizing the blockbusters you love so much, introducing new people to the hobbby, and making the industry in general healthier. Please let me know how that is bad! (Preferably with many cusses.) Personally, I'm not seeing it.
Alright then. Other orders of business: One, the new Retronauts is up. The topic is Starcraft. I say practically nothing. It is probably the best Retronauts to date. Ergo, we may deduce that my participation is to the podcast's detriment. And two, I will try and restore the forums over the weekend. I can't even begin to describe what a moron I am, but I seriously screwed the whole thing up. Soooo, back to the drawing board. Thank you, PHPBB, for your amazing UI design.
Sure, we all knew about the completely fantastic new cinema scenes... but new battles, too? No one told me of this deliciousness! But yes, I've just fought my way through an entirely new battle in which I played as Delita -- and only Delita -- protecting Ovelia from enemy forces. So, so good.
The additions, I mean. Not the screen shots. I mean, sure, okay for a phone camera, but not exactly direct feed quality. Sorry.
Also, don't even bother griping about spoilers. There are plenty of others to find, it seems, so I'm sure you'll probably still have reason to play the game even after having seen these blurry photos.
And one of these days, I'll actually be able to get Gafgarion's crystal. That bastard. I almost had him this time, with Ramza decked out as a Monk beefed up with the Equip Armor skill, but since he'd only learned Chakra he was merely able to sustain his own health rather than air-punch the dark knight into submission.
"Next time, Gafgarion -- next time! (Cue Mad Cat's trademark caterwaul.)
I wish I had taken some time to get into the series' translation hiccups, like why they had to renamed Dr. Vile to Dr. Weil for the U.S. (answer: Since they had already changed bounty hunter Vava to Vile for the U.S. -- whoops). But I guess it's long enough as it is.
Sorry, Battle Network! You only get a sidebar. Because you're lame.
Oh and yeah, there's a new Retronauts, which is frankly all over the place. Specifically: Final Fantasy Tactics, Mega Man 4, why Sharkey hates Ralph Baer and why Duck Tales' moon stage has the best music ever. It is a very uneven but generally pretty okay episode.
And if Rocky Balboa's enthusiasm for Etrian Odyssey isn't enough to make you want a copy -- if Andrew Fitch's burning review doesn't pique your interest -- if Nich's rad translation doesn't make you run to the store... surely this will:
EFF OH EEEEEEEEEEEEE
(For reference, a F.O.E. is a boss-like ultra-difficult enemy in Etrian Odyssey, the only kind of monster you can see while exploring. So basically when you see the fuzzy red circle, PANIC. Like this song.)
I've been taking a more and more concise approach to my writing the longer I work as a writer, trying to be more economical with my words and maybe not bore people with so many needless asides. That Odin Sphere stuff notwithstanding. But I guess I'm still stuck in my old habits, because I started writing about Final Fantasy Tactics yesterdays and suddenly realized I had drafted a 1500-word glurge. And then I did it all over again in Retronauts, except, you know, it wasn't written.
I guess I just can't help myself. I'm a sucker for certain games, many of which have Hitoshi Sakimoto's music in them. This is not the sole commonality! But it is a common enough motif that I guess it would hold up to scientific scrutiny.
Anyway, that preview does include a few small tidbits I haven't really seen mentioned anywhere else: A new translation is confirmed, rather than simply being one of those "Well of course they'll retranslate it" things. The U.S. version will feature voice acting in the CG cutscenes, something missing in the Japanese game. The existing cinemas are beautiful but almost entirely silent, which combined with the technical glitches gives me the sneaking suspicion that the Japanese version was rushed out the door. It also makes me hope that some of the janky slowdown will be resolved.
(Coming soon to Japan: Final Fantasy Tactics: Shishi Sensou International ~ Zodiac Vocal Edition ~ featuring all the minor tweaks of the U.S. version plus some minor unique improvement to annoy everyone who owns a previous version of the game.)
Best of all is the fact that Balthier's voice actor will be returning to speak for his cameos. Balthier is just about the best character ever created, and his vocal performance in FFXII was completely perfect. So this news is unspeakably rad. Blizzrad, even.
Speaking of Rad, I guess I won't be making much use of him or Alicia or Lavian this time around since I've already leveled my starting Pimp Daddy Squad way beyond anything reasonable. As of now, they're known as the Not-So-Pimp Job Request Squad. Sorry, guys. That's what you get for teaming up with that turd Gafgarion.
Edit: By "beyond anything reasonable" I just mean they're a few levels ahead of the average enemy grunt in storyline battles. That's a marked contrast to my PlayStation playthrough, where I essentially plowed through the entire game with special characters without pausing to develop hired hands. I've somehow become a lot more methodical and meticulous about gaming in the past decade.
Churuya's in my Mii parade, all's right with the world
14 May 07 | 22:03 | Posted by:
This week's Retro Roundup is pretty late due to unhappy real-life occurances, but at least this week people can't whine about how I couldn't possibly have spent enough time with these games to have formed an opinion. Ah, who am I kidding. People can complain about anything.
I've also posted a preview of Hoshigami Remix, which game had the good fortune to sneak in shortly before Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War arrived. Otherwise I don't think it would have fared as well in the kangaroo court of my opinion.
Yeah, I'm replaying FF Tactics in Japanese. I haven't really touched the game since I first played it in 1998, but I'm surprised as how easily I've fallen back into it. Yes, I know, blah blah blah -- too easy, too simple, not enough units on the battlefield, T.G. Cid is a cheap bastard. Fine, whatever. It's still fun, yannow?
Currently my characters are all around about level 10 and I'm heading to the final battle of Chapter One. Pimp daddy Ramza and his team of fly honeys, that is: Rose the Knight, Yukiko the Archer (whose combination of longbow, Armor/Weapon Break and Concentrate might accidentally make the upcoming battle a little too easy), Jennifer the Monk and Violet the White Mage. Boys are stupid, as Todd Goldman might say, after seeing someone else say it first.
It occurs to me that if I were stranded on a desert island, I could probably manage to get along just fine as long as I had the Ivalice games with me. Heck, just waiting for Vagrant Story's smithy boxes to load into memory could kill months.
Yeah, seriously, Gafgarion. It's not her fault that the PlayStation's memory card slot had such a pokey I/O controller. Jerk.
So hey, howsabout that Odin Sphere segment on the latest 1UP Show? I don't come off like too much of an ass, although through a strange trick of editing they managed to pick only the parts where I repeat myself. The original talk lasted more than 20 minutes, and a constant stream of random interruptions forced us to restart certain segments... so I seem a bit redundant, that's why. Oh, the random Kirby ball was originally there for a reason -- we started the talk by discussing how Odin Sphere is so awesome that we wanted to surround ourselves with spheres day in and day out -- buuuut since that part was trimmed out I'm just holding a random Kirby ball for no damn reason. Yeah. Awesome.
Anyway, I think it's time for another Odin Sphere-inspired blog post. Be warned, I've got a ton of these.
I guess it's pretty much a given that any discussion of Odin Sphere is going to spend much of its time strolling along the well-worn path of OMG SO PRETTY. And that's because, well, it is pretty. Seriously, it's a gorgeous game that sets a benchmark for 2D visuals in a place no one could even imagine. The realization blows the average mind, right out the top, jaw-dropping amazement blasting high into the air like spume from a whale's blowhole.
For all the talk about the game's stunning good looks, though, it seems like one important aspect of the game is being totally ignored: The color design. No surprise, that; color is the John Paul Jones of graphic whoredom, always overlooked in favor of the flashier elements like poly count, framerates, character design, animation, etc. But color is important! In fact, it's just about the single most important factor in creating a cohesive visual style. Obviously, it's important to have characters and environments that look like they belong together, but creating a harmonic palette is the key to pulling everything into a unified whole. And this is one area in which Odin Sphere excels.
It's remarkable to see because so few games actually use color, or at least use it well. The prevailing philosophy in game design seems to be that everything will seem more realistic if it's drab, or else you need to dump the entire spectrum in there to make it pretty (ideally with lots of glowing neon effects). Odin Sphere is colorful -- extremely colorful -- but its use of color is also restrained, tasteful and well-conceived.
The game begins in a battle-torn desert with a blazing orange sky in the background -- is the light from a sunset? Burning debris? Either way, its light is picked up in the foreground sands, making them richer and more interesting than your typical desert environment.
Soon the scene shifts to a forested area where the tones shift from brown to green. Still, there's an earthy undercurrent that makes the levels feel... woodsy? Yes. The palette here is very warm, from the plants to the yellow light that suffuses the background. Cool colors are mainly used for shade in foreground elements that help frame the action in the middle distance.
In both cases, the background color palettes use a fairly limited portion of the spectrum, which helps draw a clear distinction between scenery and characters. Gwendolyn's vivid blues and purples pop from the desert browns and silvan greens, as do Velvet's reds. Still, despite sticking to a specific portion of the color wheel, Odin Sphere's backgrounds demonstrate a painterly use of hues, tints and shades within those palettes.
And that's the real trick that seems to elude a lot of game designers. You can have colorful graphics that are nevertheless subtle -- and tasteful doesn't have to mean bland. On the contrary, selective color choice is a great way to be expressive, to communicate a concept visually and create an atmosphere.
Take the disparity between Odin Sphere's different "civilized" areas. The two upper images there are set in the streets of the Valhalla-like Nebulapolis, a city of warriors ruled by King Odin. It's a majestic place, but it's also cold and impersonal, like its king -- geared toward war and honor rather than compassion and peace. And the colors are cold as well -- not just the glowing blue palace in the background and the starry skies, but also the foregrounds. Unlike the desert and forest areas, the browns in Nebulapolis use cool tones to give an impression of a foreboding, joyless empire.
Compare that to the warm interiors in the small village of animal people (whose name escapes my feeble mind at the moment). Lit by candle and firelight, they're warm, inviting and cozy -- the sort of place you go to be pampered by curious anthropomorphs. Which of course is precisely what happens in these little shops; you order up food and crank up your character's stats. Nebulapolis, on the other hand, isn't about nurturing, it's about fighting and political machinations and a complete jerk for a king.
And so on and so forth -- see the grassy knoll lit by cool moonlight to give the impression of nighttime. See the icy mountain from which dull granite slabs jut -- somehow creating a far more oppressive sensation than ice alone would.
Man, what a beautiful game.
A few other titles come to mind when I think of good color design, too. I mean, it's not like Vanillaware has the market cornered or anything.
I have to mention Fumito Ueda's stuff, of course. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus have an ethereal, dreamlike quality that's largely the product of the "overexposed" lighting and the desaturated color he uses in his work. Well, I assume it's his call; he's credited as game designer on both, with an army of character and background designers. So it would stand to reason that Ueda's the mastermind.
In any case, Ico was an extremely grey and bleak game, but tricks of the light made it look much more exciting than you'd expect from an abandoned castle of death. Shadow of the Colossus was a far more open and expansive game, but it maintained its predecessor's wistful tone in part through its washed-out appearance. Not that washed-out is not the same as dull; Shadow is a gorgeous game of sweeping horizons and stunning vistas (to say nothing of the big-ass colossi themselves). But the desaturated colors give it a unifying look and style.
But if you want the textbook example of brilliant graphics through better color design, look no further than the works of Hiroshi Minagawa.
Artist Akihiko Yoshida usually gets all the credit for making games like Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII look so damn good, and yeah, he deserves a good hearty pat on the back. But really, Yoshida's main role is to sort of define the general look of the game, the world, the characters. It's up to Minagawa to supervise Square Enix's tiny army of graphics people and make sure they create a consistent vision of Ivalice.
Which he does with aplomb! And much of this success stems from the fact that the Ivalice games, unlike the more mainstream Final Fantasy games, use color tastefully. That's in stark contrast to nearly every other FF since VII -- games whose worlds are the brainchildren of Tetsuya Nomura and, to an even greater degree, Tetsuya "T^2" Takahashi (not to be mistaken for the Xenogears dude). Their approach to design seems to involve vomiting neon lights and bizarrely rococo carapace-like shells across every surface. Which, you know, is fine. If you like vomit.
I vastly prefer Minagawa's aesthetic, though. It has much more to do with sparing use of color, building a world with lots of neutrals and defining tone by tinting the browns and greys with warm and cool accents. The reason Vagrant Story is the best-looking game on PS1 has everything to do with this adherence to a strict, restrained palette (which did occasionally fall by the wayside in favor of garish lightsourcing in places) as well as brilliant attention to detail -- the backlighting on Ashley in that upper-right picture, for instance.
And FFXII pulled out all the stops in order to become the best-looking PS2 title ever made. About the only interesting thing I learned at the FFXII Post-mortem talk at GDC this year was that about 70% of the labor involved in FFXII's creation was graphic-related -- and it makes use of really brilliant but subtle effects as a result. The use of atmospheric color (above right) does a lot to add uniformity to the game while simultaneously giving it added visual interest. When you think sewers in video games, you normally think dingy, grey and boring, but the sewers of Rabanastre use a sort of monochromatic blue light both to give a sense of scale and distance as well as add some visual contrast to the brown stone.
I guess this is a little Japan-heavy in focus, but Americans make effective use of color, too. For all I bag on Gears of War (MORE LIKE GREYS OF WAR AMIRITE), it definitely has a distinct look, created in large part by sparing use of color. Granted, most western-developed games tend toward the dingy and boring (Oblivion) or the garish and eye-burning (WoW), but most Japanese games look pretty assy, too.
And that is why you should buy Odin Sphere. The end.
Wow! That was boring. I gotta put that art degree to use one way or another, though. Look, Mom, my tuition wasn't a complete waste. Happy Mother's Day.
If I'm going to start doing comics (semi-) regularly around here, I'm gonna need to rework the site layout quite a lot. And frankly, I suck pretty hard at all that new-fangled page layout stuff. CSS! XLM! In my mind a Div is a drunken piece of obsolete home theatre technology, not a layout element. So... anyone out there know a bit o' web layout stuff? I would like to work with you on making my layout not crappy! I am hiring with real tangible benefits. Money or artwork or something, I dunno.
Obligatory link crap:
This week's Retronauts tackles the Mana series, with gorgeous musical interludes from Yoko Shimomura's Legend of Mana soundtrack. Less gorgeous is my inexplicably punchy approach to hosting. Sorry, I'll try to be less wacky and more boring next week. I'd hate for people to think I actually have a personality.
E3 is no longer a May event, but no one seems to have let the games industry in on that fact. Which is why this week and next are chock full of media events. I've been dragged into the nonsense, of course, and here are the results:
MySims: The Wii game actually looks really good! The DS game... well, there's still time for them to turn it around.
Sonic Rush Adventure: Fortunately, much more of "Rush" than of "Adventure." People seem very offended that I was under the impression that Blaze is a hedgehog, which is probably fair enough but does kind of confirm my wary sentiments about the Sonic fanbase.
Ghost Squad: If a Tom Clancy military squad were trapped in Time Crisis 3, it would be Ghost Squad.
Finally, a freaking huge Mega Man 20th Anniversary feature went up today. It's only the first part of four! Our good friend Nadia ably wrote the retrospective portion, while I put together a distressingly involved retro roundup of the entire series. It's all really good, I think! And there are still three parts of equal size to go. Just please don't watch the video. I am a horrible, terrible, no-good interviewer, especially when tag-teaming with someone else in a noisy, awkwardly arranged environment with someone who doesn't speak the same language I do. YEAH.
Look! Another manga review. It's only taken me... uh... three months to finish it. Yeah.
Welcome to the N.H.K. Vol. 2
Tatsuhiko Takimoto & Kendi Oiwa | TokyoPop | Feb. 2007
Like its predecessor, Welcome to the N.H.K. Vol. 2 is a study in cognitive dissonance. Except even more so!
See, I tend not to buy manga rated "18+" because, like most video games designated "M," the 18+ is usually a bit of a lie -- they may be marked as being for "older readers," but only those older readers with minds and emotions firmly rooted in adolescence. People whose idea of "mature content" means the constant juvenile fanservice shows nipples instead of simply hinting at them. Like mainstream American comic books, this sort of manga caters toward the boys who never quite grew up but still like to imagine that they did, and who prove their adulthood by demanding their favorite junior high escapism "grow up," too. Typically, this is achieved by adding a little more brutal violence and being a lot more overt in their misogyny. Women are scary when you never stopped being a boy, so best to put them in their proper place.
I think this should solve the debate once and for all! Being the new Lester Bangs is as much about how you live (and, er, die?) as it is about how you write.
I do feel kinda bad about killing off Igor, though. Well, not really.
So you may have noticed that the site has been pretty unreliable lately, which is pretty frustrating given that I'm using Dreamhost and they offer about 4TB a month for data transfer. I am using roughly 0.5% of that in a given month, so their server should be able to keep up. But yesterday was sort of the last straw....
The 9 a.m. jump there is where the Joystiq link happened. The dramatic spikes downward are where the server vomited all over itself. That's, what, five outages? Hoorah for losing half a day's traffic at the worst possible time! Anyway, I griped a bit and they were nice enough to put me on a new server, which seems all robust and solid and stuff. So that's good. Please let me know if you see more of those dreaded 500 errors. I want to believe... that they are gone.
Meanwhile, the box art for Dragon Quest Swords has been released into the wild, and at least I understand what the game is about. Clearly, it is about Akira Toriyama diversifying his art style by drawing characters who appear to have escaped from other games:
And now, the terrible, terrible ending to something that wasn't particularly awesome to begin with.
My original concept for the Pokémon review that I didn't write was to mimic the format of Green Eggs & Ham quite carefully. A Seussified version of myself would gripe about not wanting to play the game, a Seussified version of our editor (whose name is, in a crazy collision of indescribable literary convenience, "Sam") would iterate why this version is so much better than previous installments (therein providing the meat of the review), and I would eventually give in, try it, and decide I like it enough to play it on a boat/on a goat/etc. A sample Sam-I-Am verse:
The battle system
Is adjusted
Skills sets are
No longer busted!
I even had him waxing rhapsodic about online play:
Its heart is in
The multiplayer
And online adds
Another layer
Or maybe two
Or even three!
Compete with friends
Across the sea
Or strangers too --
That also works.
(And friend codes mean
You'll meet no jerks.)
But of course the idea was ultimately put to rest, and I sort of expected as much; while I was totally in love with the idea of this review format just because of its amazing fit in the Green Eggs & Ham format, I also figured the game needed a more substantial analysis. So... it became GameSpite. And of course Igor is basically the polar opposite of myself, so that meant a totally different, totally anticlimactic, and totally crass resolution. The end.
Also! I hope you managed to pick up this year's Free Comics Day comics! Well, the good ones, anyway. You can skip the crappy superhero crap. My selections were the "Unseen Peanuts" from Fantagraphics -- sure, I have all the Complete Peanuts collections to date, but having grown up reading my aunt's dogeared Peanuts collections it's really nice to have all of these "missing" comics in a single volume -- and Oni's Comics Festival. The latter was, of course, awesome, the highlights being:
"The Alex," Darwyn Cooke's surprisingly touching story of towering creative ambition (enhanced by beautiful, subdued colors and wonderfully retro artwork);
Hope Larson's simple but charming snow poems;
Aaaand of course the two Scott Pilgrim features. These were much more compact than last year'scomic, and all the better for it -- O'Malley's artwork is fantastically crisp and looks really great in color, and the panels pack in as many jokes as before while feeling tighter and more purposeful. Did I mention I really enjoy Scott Pilgrim? I should also mention Bryan Lee O'Malley also appears to be a noble human being, at least in that he didn't punch me in the face when I dropped by his table at Alternative Press Expo and was all DUR HUR YOU DID ART FOR MAISON OTAKU!? That, my friends, is restraint.
Man, I really hope Koji Igarashi (and Keiji Inafune, among others) play Odin Sphere. Because I want them to experience the bitter taste of eating their own words.
For years, IGA has been telling us that making a console-based 2D Castlevania would be prohibitively expensive, and Inafune said something similar regarding classic-syle Mega Man games when we interviewed him last month. It's nice that they've explored moving to 2.5D fixed-perspective polygons as a compromise between cost and gameplay (although given the sales of the PSP Mega Man titles we'll quite possibly never see anything else along those lines for that particular series). And for the most part, I think everyone's been content to accept their word, because -- after all -- they are the guys dealing with the realities of game design and budget management.
But then Odin Sphere comes along and makes liars of them all. Here's a 2D game whose visuals totally shame everything pretty much ever. You may not care much for the style (given the abundance of morons guffawing "HAW HAW LOLI PEDO FURRY PORN HUURRR" any time a screen shot is posted); but even a complete Internet retard can't deny the sheer technical panache that Odin Sphere displays. It's pretty much completely amazing to see in motion. Yet -- it's all 2D. Hand-drawn, two-dimensional, sprite-based gameplay. So how did a little never-heard-of-them developer like Vanillaware pull it off where major studios like Konami and Capcom throw their hands up in despair and settle for churning out the likes of Curse of Darkness and Mega Man X7?
I think the trick is twofold. One, Odin Sphere makes abundance use of jointed characters.
Basically, every body in the game moves like an action figure -- limbs are connected independently, and a lot of the animation is simply the motion of individual body elements in relation to one another rather than multiple hand-drawn frames. It's not a new concept! In fact, it's basically little more than a new application of a fundament of sprite-based gimmickry. Konami's been dabbling with it for years in games like Lifeforce and Contra -- create the illusion of large-scale, sinuous motion with small, linked sprites. Treasure pretty much made a cottage industry of it.
If you ever go ROM-diving to look at sprites, you'll even discover that the sprites of old NES characters like Mega Man are actually made of multiple smaller sprites. The NES could only generate 8x8 pixel sprites, so something 24 pixels high and 16 pixels was assembled of an array of sprites two wide and three high. Even sprites for later systems, which weren't hampered by such harsh size restrictions, generally built characters from smaller components so that not every single body part had to be redrawn for every frame of motion.
Jointing characters is simply an extension of that concept, except that than building characters out of smaller pieces serves as the entire foundation of the character's animation rather than simply being a cheat that allows them to fit them into memory or lets the spriter save himself a little extra work. Symphony of the Night was the first time I ever saw this concept in action -- which isn't to say this was the first time it was ever done, of course. The result was that certain large characters like Galamoth and the Hammer/Blade/Sword animated beautifully even though each of their component elements only had a single bitmap frame. Their animation was in the motion of their limbs parts rather than in those limbs' changing details. It worked well since it was limited more or less to armored or undead characters whose bodies naturally consisted of static, jointed pieces.
The technique is pretty common in Flash now, but it generally looks awful, like a cheap digital puppet show. Or it looks extremely stylized, as in the Paper Mario games. Odin Sphere does not look cheap, and it's stylish but not strictly stylized.
That's simply a matter of quality control. The characters' joints blend seamlessly, and their animation occurs on two levels: The gross motion of body segments, and the bitmap art within those segments. The animators also make use of subtle tricks like warping and distorting sprite chunks to give a semblance of movement for things like breathing and the like. It's very sophisticated, and executed with such quality that you really have to look closely to see the man behind the curtain.
So why can't we have a new Castlevania or Mega Man or Mario (or whatever) that looks like this? Therein lies the second trick: Odin Sphere is a tiny game that no one cared about except its creator. I've heard that it's been in the works in various forms since Princess Crown was released, which pegs this as a decade-long labor of love. Generally speaking, major publishers aren't crazy about letting their franchises lay fallow for ten years. Hell, Capcom doesn't seem to want to let Mega Man lay fallow for ten months.
So basically, those classic series which used to represent the bleeding edge of console game design are doomed to future mediocrity because they belong to publishers who find it easier to strip-mine them for easy profits than to give their creators the time they need to create something truly amazing. As development costs rise, I suspect fewer and fewer series will be allowed the downtime it takes for a proper reinvention -- if indeed those franchises are ever reinvented at all. Changing a successful formula is a risk, and for every Resident Evil 4 that remind people why a series was so popular to begin with, there are a dozen Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarters -- games that take too many risks and despite their quality drive away the fans who just want to replay the same exact game they had last year (but with new graphics) and ultimately flop. We're in a world of Final Fantasy XIIIs (it's not a sequel, it's a brand in and of itself!) and 30 Mario spin-offs for every one game that carries the Super Mario Bros. torch of innovation and creativity.
That's why Keiji Inafune can create something radical and new with Dead Rising, but has to keep churning out Battle Network sequels on the Mega Man side. If a Mega Man game with the budget of Dead Rising flopped, it would kill the series forever. But low-maintenance repetition, while unsatisfying for everyone, at least keeps the name alive, and profitable. Which in a publisher's mind is infinitely better than simply making the name prestigious. You can't take prestige to the bank.
So cherish your Odin Spheres when they come around. George Kamitami and what I assume is a very tiny crew of dedicated auteurs have gotten away with someone here that most developers couldn't, and most publishers wouldn't allow. And who knows if they'll ever manage to pull it off again? The same developer's upcoming Grim Grimoire is reputed to be a great RTS... but its iteration of the jointed-sprite graphic style looks much cheaper and simpler than Odin Sphere's. I guess everyone has to pay the bills somehow.
Please allow me to express my sincere opinion that Odin Sphere is pretty freaking wonderful. I tried to express as much in my 1UP preview, although in somewhat less effusive terms because, you know, restraint and all that. I think what makes me happiest is that this is one of those rare occasions when a mind-blowingly beautiful visual style isn't simply masking a game bereft of actual substance but is in fact a delicious layer of goodness atop an absolutely playable (and strikingly creative) bit of creative genius.
Come to think of it, this month pretty much belongs to Atlus. Between Odin Sphere and Etrian Odyssey, they're effectively winning the day for intricately hardcore role-playing games with decadently beautiful graphics. Single-handedly! I, for one, am not complaining.
Also, new Retronauts podcast for the week. I'm finding that these tend to come out much better when I play the role of host and keep my mouth shut throughout the duration of the show, since it's easier for me to direct conversation that way and prevent too much of the dreaded "everyone talking at once" syndrome. This is slightly galling since the point of me volunteering to produce this stupid podcast in the first place was so that I could talk about old games. Hrmph.
Between my normal work duties and writing up mini-reviews of every single Mega Man game to date for a future project, I've had a little more hands-on time with Revenant Wings. This is actually more of an accomplishment than it sounds! I have been looking forward to the Final Fantasy XII sequel for quite some time, but no one warned me it would arrive while I was ensconced in the likes of Pokémon D/P and (dreamy sigh) Odin Sphere. I've written quite enough on the former and should have more on the latter posted soon.
But what of Revenant Wings? Not enough info, says I! Now is the time to make your story rectify this situation.
The more I play Revenant Wings, the more I like it. This is a marked contrast to, say, Yoshi's Island DS, which after two stages at E3 looked pretty much like the greatest thing ever and after five worlds for review was revealed to be about as appealing as a plate of pus-filled lesions. The first chapter is insultingly easy, but once you get into the real game things step up and you have to make use of the rock-paper-scissors balance more carefully. The learning curve is just right -- you move from one section of a stage in which all the mobs are neatly segregated by type (so it's easy to pick them off with the proper batch of summons) into an area where they start mixing together, requiring actual caution. And then you start seeing NPC leaders (who have high resistance to all attacks, like your main party) in the thick of things, and it gets more complicated from there.
It's definitely not a hardcore RTS, and thank goodness for that. I can't think of a less appealing genre. Besides maybe the punches-your-mom-in-the-face genre. No one likes that one. Especially your mom.
The real draw, though, is that I finally unlocked the License Ring. Don't be fooled by the name, because it's actually just the FFX Sphere Grid... but instead of unlocking abilities or passive bonuses, you're unlocking new monsters to summon. I do take issue with some of the rankings -- a Goblin is more valuable than a Cactuar!? Since when! -- but whatever; the ability to build custom "parties" made entirely of enemies familiar (Bombs, Tonberries, Giza Rabbits) and somewhat unfamiliar (Aquarius? A non-GF Quetzalcoatl?) is downright intoxicating. Or something.
The interface still feels a little lame; while it's nice to have an entirely stylus-driven game, I wouldn't mind seeing some bonus button functionality grafted in for the U.S. version. For instance, it would be great if you could hold down the shoulder buttons as a sort of shift-modifer ability that would let you tap multiple individual units to create a joint group. Or things to that effect. Also, a map rotation ability would be completely boss, especially in situations where background elements obstruct your view.
So yeah, on the whole: Pretty good! You should get it. You know, when it comes to the U.S.
Welcome to the N.H.K. Vol. 2
