Ush's Videogames review thread!

NINE HOURS, NINE PERSONS, NINE DOORS (DS)

For the first time, I got a DS game on import, because waiting for some Atlus titles in Europe is just ridiculous and the sequel was about to come out on the 3DS.

For those who don't know, this is a 'visual novel' rather than a traditional game and it is 3/4s illustrated book, linked by some 'escape the room' style puzzle sequences. These are competent but not very difficult. The other point of interactivity in the game is the choices you get to make which can bring the game in several different directions.

Being a mini-review makes it hard to give this game justice. In very Japanese style, the plot has you wake up trapped on a ship with eight other people and forced to play the game of some remote maniac named Zero who has placed explosives within each person on the ship which are linked to the bracelets they also wear; the explosives will go off if the bracelets are removed or the rules of the game are broken. The bracelets also have a role in deciding how the group splits and who goes where, forming many of your decision points. So, basically, your job is to solve puzzles, survive the game, and find out more about your fellow contestants. There's lots of death and suspicion and treachery and secrets and what-not, and you find out different things about people depending on what route you take, with multiple play throughs helping you form the bigger picture. The various routes all seem to end in you dying or, in one case, suddenly confronted with what seems to be a breakdown in continuity/reality.

And here in lies the clever nature of the game, as indeed there is a way out but it can only be found with information gained from multiple play-throughs. I am trying not to spoil much, but the super-clever bit here is that this isn't even some arbitrary metagame; this process actually forms part of the game plot, and the point you realise this is very powerful indeed. And again, past that, near the end, is another twist which makes you re-evaluate not just the plot of the game, but everything you have been doing and even, in a particular stroke of brilliance, the purpose of the two screens on the DS console throughout the game.

Now, some people would (and do) argue that this is not a game. Most of it is just reading text, which scrolls far too slowly and can only be skipped if you've seen it in a previous playthrough, and even then the skipping speed is a bit slow. I know skipping text the first time would destroy the game, but it scrolled out far more slowly than I could read it and this was an artificial lenghtening of the game. Regardless, is putting in some puzzles and branching points into a bunch of text and pictures actually enough to make this a game and not just a fancy story?

Personally- I don't really care about the distinction. What this game was for me was an awesome entertainment experience, so what exact sort of thing it was is less relevant. This game is a real signpost for how video games can be used as a storytelling medium that is simply not possible in other media. I know people like the stories in games such as Mass Effect, or even my old favourite Baldur's Gate, but in the end these are 'just' games with storylines kind of jammed in; they act as a complement to the game experience, which is great, but essentially limiting. It is THIS game that truly points to how games can expand our understanding of telling a story. This is not to say that the story itself is an amazing piece of literature- though it's not bad- but the means of delivery is brilliant and it really widened my ideas of how narrative can be experienced, and I am, and will be, very willing to argue that in a professional context in my academic career. The only thing I can really compare it to of late is Braid, and that's not really a story but a piece of artistic expression, albeit a very good one.

In short then- I loved this, but your love of it will depend very strongly on how much you are able to get into the story and whether you actually can find any enjoyment in the visual novel style. A 9 out of 10 from me, but it is a game very suited to my tastes.

VIRTUE'S LAST REWARD (3DS)

The sequel to 9 Hours (etc.), this game immediately has an uphill struggle because, basically, the 'trick' is blown by the first game. They took the only route possible, which is to assume everyone knows the trick and front-load it almost immediately, with the very first conversation you have being a big signal to returning players who will instantly get what is going on.

This actually gives the writers a certain freedom to expand upon the idea. We have a bigger game with many more branching paths to take. Everything is streamlined and more convenient. You can leap at will between different branches you have explored to get information, the text scrolls at a much better rate and there is far less wasted time (though more time overall as it is a bigger game). The puzzles are a little more difficult and you can turn off the copious hints the original kept giving you. In fact, in all technical aspects this is a better game. My one dislike is that the anime style of the original has given way to full 3d models- more advanced technologically, but it lost a bit of character there to my mind.

It was impossible for the game to have as strong a narrative as the original. Nonetheless, they do well. The setup is very similar, and likewise has a strong set of distinct characters you can get to know in various playthroughs. Other than the big problem of not being able to have the impact of the original- which could hardly be expected- the game has two narrative issues. The first is simply that the underground bunker setting of this game is not as interesting an environment as the cruise ship of the original. The bigger problem, though, is where the narrative goes. The original game was basically a survival/mystery horror game with the hidden plotline, for all its sci-fi complexity, being basically a tale of revenge- all very human-motivated and reasonable. Here, though, the hidden plotlne goes absolutely batshit insane into a near-incomprehensible story of global plague, a form of time travel, cyborgs and some ridiculous twist about where you have been the whole time which is so ridiculous as to be laughable- they try to make it make sense but it really doesn't work.

Luckily, this doesn't spoil most the game. It's just a shame they went so outlandish with it all. It's also all sequel bait for thje next one, which I look forward to but hope they dial it back a bit, though as a direct continuation that could be tricky.

A better technical game, then, but a worse narrative, which is what the game really needs. But it's not a terrible narrative by any means, and I still enjoyed myself, so a solid 8/10 here.

XENOBLADE CHRONICLES (Wii)

The big Wii RP game released in the console's dying days. I'd not played the earlier Xeno games, so just as I did with Final Fantasy I intended to play through them to get a read on the style, but that failed because I though Xenogears was... not very good, in either gameplay or story, and not just because of the famously mangled second half.

So in the end I went into this one cautiously- and loved it. The setting is certainly original, being a story of two civilizations each of which is built upon the body of two ancient and vast titans in an endless ocean. The organic titan is home to normal life, whilst the robotic titan is home to the evil mechon robots that keep invading the organics. A technomagic sword, the Monado, is the one weapon that works well against the nigh-unkillable Mechon, and the game revoles around the owner of that weapon.

The game has a very enjoyable action style. It teaches you to play in a fabulously active action sequence prequel during a Mechon invasion (games with slow starts, PLEASE take note) and just runs on from there. The game is easy to control and fun to play with a very active battle system that has your character auto-attack with you selecting super-attacks as needed. The AI for your party is generally good, only going wrong in damaging environments where they have difficulty getting to safety The game is both huge in length and breadth, having plenty to explore and dozens of hours of playtime. It is beautiful, proving again that low horsepower doesn't stop you making good looking games if you make the effort, and the music is the best of any game I've played recently.

Some say this game modernised the Japaense RP. No- it actually only brought it up to date with MMOs from ten years ago, as much of the content is a huge barrage of fetch and kill quests. But they are fun enough, and the only problem that the living environment where there is a day/night cycle where people live their lives and do stuff can make it very hard to find a person who gave you a quest in order to turn it in, as they move around and there's no indicator where they are. The creation of a living world is worth it, though, and the whole game feels very vibrant. There are massive amounts of skills to unlock, people to be found, companion relationship to work with (no romance choices though), a sideplot about rebuilding a trashed colony that is almost as large as the main plotline, and huge imagination in settings and creatures. The voiceover work is also very good, and also very distinctive as- as part of the famous localisation issues here which almost saw the US not get a release- the voice actors are all English, which comes as a shock when playing a Japanese RP.

The only real limiter is the plot. The setting is wonderfully imaginative but the plot is not, and worse, near the end the game goes absolutely ridiculous. Virtue's Last Reward went crazy; this one goes... beyond insane. It turns into some metaphysical nonsense about the nature of reality and meaning of life and ends up destroying the entire setting and creating another- it was better when it was just about the struggle with the Mechon.

Nonetheless, great stuff, and for those who like the big old multi hour RPs of old, a good place to look- if you still (or ever) care about Wii games, anyway. I'll give at an 8 out of 10- almost a 9, but just a bit of excess of grind to make some of its time wasted.

This one did well enough for a spiritual sequel to be developed for the Wii U, which will certainly be a big release for a system in dire need of distinguishing games.

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THE LAST STORY

Coming out at roughly the same time (and with the same Britush accent localisation amusement), this was meant to twin with Xenoblade to be the great classic JRPG resurgence, from the original maker of Final Fantasy no less. The problem is that Xenoblade kicks the crap out of this game.

This one tried hard- it goes for an action style, but the problem there is that the action style is not as good as Xenoblade's, so it doesn't triumph there and in going all-action it won't please the classic FF fans either, so it's stuck in a rather average no-man's land. The setting and plot are generic fantasyville, not in itself a disaster but nothing that's not been seen and done many times before. The game is much smaller- it is about a third of the length of Xenoblade with much less to do (it has an abortive multiplayer component that is barely worth it), much less interesting environments and, in the end, it just feels like a smaller and less ambitious game.

All of which makes it sound terrible, which it is not, it's just fairly 'meh', and very much in Xenoblade's shadow. If you like RP games, it's absolutely playable, but this was never going to attract much attention.

A 6 out of 10 then; playable, but ultimately flat and dull.

A couple of relatively obscure DS RPs here:

RADIANT HISTORIA

A fantasy RP game in the classic style with one overriding schtick- early on, the game splits into two different continuities due to a decision, and you can move between the two and advance the two different developing storylines.

This sounded really cool so I gave it a go- and it was a huge disappointment. It's not well implemented. The decisions you make that apparently destroy the world are generally completely arbitrary, but the bigger issue is that nothing interesting is done with the split storylines. I thought this might be a game of great temporal exploration, but actually it is almost entirely linear, and I didn't even notice why the two timelines unified again near the end. I'm not sure there was a reason- 'just because they did' seems to be it. The side missions, even the ones split between the two timelines, are mostly tedious and unfulfilling. This is a classic example, then, of a good idea for a game that simply was not exploited properly- and if you want a game about hopping between branching storylines, play Virtue's Last Reward (and hence play Nine Hours first). You are left with a reasonably ok-ish fantasy RP, but it's not as if the world is short of those. 6/10.

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ENDLESS SPACE

Sci-fi RPs, meanwhile, are more welcome. It's not as if they are unheard of, but anything trying to challenge fantasy dominance is welcome. Endless Space would be a bog-standard sci-fi RP, if there were enough such games for there to be a standard. As it is, it stands out a bit. It has a very down to Earth (and beyond) plot about competing sci-fi empires and your character's life as a quasi-mercenary with his own small battle fleet he brings into action. You can customise your ships and crew, go out, kill stuff, make money and buy better equipment or bigger ships.

It's pretty good, but that's all it is. It's a good size but it exhausts what it has to offer by the halfway point. The makers put in a lot of effort but they couldn't find anything magical to make it brilliant. The plot is serviceable but dull (and again goes weirdly mental at the end, which is a bit crap); it plays ok but is nothing legendary. It's also very linear, and in a game crying out to have exploration and so forth, the only thing you do on your own initiative is grind for better stuff. In the end, its main purpose is to show that grand scale sci-fi RPs can work and people should try making more of them. But it failed there as well, because it didn't sell very well. Darn. This fails to be a Mass Effect for the handheld, and that's a shame as there is no reason why it couldn't have taken some of the better parts from that game.

7/10 then, showing that even dull stuff can be reasonable to play through.

THEATRHYTHM FINAL FANTASY (3DS)

The first thirteen Final Fantasy games re-done as a musical rhythm game, Create a party consisting of characters from all the games and level them up by fighting monsters traversing backgrounds and viewing scenes from those games set to the very wide variety of music, from 8 bit recreations of the early games to full on FMV sequences of the newer ones with all their fancy modern music stuff.

This was such a ridiculous idea for a game that I could not NOT try it. I'm a huge fan of the rhythm game Elite Beat Agents for the DS and I hoped this would be in that mould. It kinda is, but it's not as good, and actually whilst the music is good, the visual accompaniment is rather dull and the whole thing feels rather disconnected from the source material. I had this idea you would actually play through the narrative of each game in musical form, but instead you just do a bunch of mini-stages set to Final Fantasy music. The RP mechanics in it are reasonable as you level up your party and unlock more characters, but it hardly makes the game brilliant.

6/10. Not bad, but a lost opportunity and I soon grew bored of it. Still, some of that music is VERY good and a joy to play to.

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MONSTER HUNTER 3 ULTIMATE (Wii U and 3DS)

Essentially the same game as Monster Hunter Tri, so see my previous review, but updated for the 3DS and then upscaled for Wii U version as well, Being upscaled- and with the passager of time- some of those textures look pretty ugly in high definition Wii U-o-vision, which is a shame as for its time the original was rather beautiful. However, in a game all about precision timing, the animation on the monsters is smooth and magnificent and the whole game runs at 60 fps- perfect.

This upgrade fairly much doubles the size of the game in both monsters and weapon choice, which is all good as playing through with a different weapon can often feel like a whole new game. Sadly there's still a lot of repetition in simply fighting more dangerous versions of monsters you've already killed- in fact, they do that twice in this version, with each basic monster version having two upscaled versions, and as you have to kill each monster multiple times to get what you want,t his is pretty tedious. Nonetheless, the core of the game remains fun and I ended up putting even more hours into it than the original, which was a considerably amount of time.

Two significant additions here. The first is the cross-play available between 3DS and Wii U versions, allowing you to multiplay locally with the two. A good idea, but you do have to buy each version separately. You can also transfer characters between the two versions to bring your character with you. also a good idea but done in SUCH a slow and clunky way- Nintendo is obviously not quite into cloud saving yet.

It also continues to have a ridiculously poor system for getting groups together to fight monsters, with such poor lobby design that there must be dozens or hundreds of players that want to group to fight the same monster but just can't find each other. Yet despite this, the game quickly allowed EU and American players to play together, and this in a game where lag issues are super-important. If this game, so primitive with its online in other ways, can do this, why the hell is there still this Atlantic barrier with so many modern PC games? I can't make any sense of it.

Anyway, despite being a re-hash, the additions here a good enough for the game to be 8/10 again. And heck, I had to buy something on the Wii U.

FIRE EMBLEM: AWAKENING (3DS)

I tried a Fire Emblem game back in my early Wii days when I was trying lots of old Nintendo stuff. I didn't like it because of the permanent death mechanic. This is not because it made things too hard, though the frustration level there certainly did not help, but because I found it enormously strategically limiting as it forces you to play in such a particular defensive manner, whilst your AI enemy just suicide-bombs at you, making dumb movers that would lose it the battle in an instant but if they take out one vital character can force a re-load. I don't like that at all. Still, some people loved the mechanic, so good for them.

Awakening made big waves as being the new awesome go-to game for the 3DS, and as it also now had a 'casual' mode where you could play without the permanent death, I tried it out.

But I am underwhelmed again. Removing the permadeath makes the game much more playable for me, but it's still very average. It has good graphics and the systems work fine and it has a workable plot (though I was disappointed to see the whole 'have children and start playing them' thing actually just worked in the form of your kids coming back from the future to join you- likewise, you also get to name your own character, but he;s still not 'you' as he makes his own decisions like any other named character) and reasonable RP progression things, and people made a lot of all this but the big question for me was- was it actually any good as a wargame?

And... it's not brilliant, no, because the AI is virtually non-existent. It stands still until you get close to it wherein it just bum rushes the weakest unit in range. That's all it does, in every scenario, ever. That doesn't fit anything like my idea of how a strategy game should work. They really have to sort this out and make a game that's a proper clash of strategy- as it is, they're not even trying.

7/10 here then. Slick well designed, but as a strategy game,. immensely shallow as a fighting experience.

DIABLO III (PC)

Slick, moody, playable, smooth. Dull, pointless (and OBVIOUSLY pointless, unlike so many games which are ultimately pointless but hide it well) and crippled by the auction house. The first Act of my first playthrough was fun and it got more and more depressing after that.

6/10; boring even to remember it.

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STARCRAFT II- HEART OF THE SWARM (PC)

And so it is that when HotS came out, I didn't feel much like buying it. Blizzard games were once such hot property that awaiting them was torturous, but I hadn't even registered that HotS was coming out and was faintly surprised when I saw reviews.

I did pick it up a few weeks back and... actually yeah, it's ok. Better than I thought it might be. But the e-sports-centred nature of the gameplay will never be my thing, the AI is very dull to play against and the plotline... gah. There was a lot of potential with the Zerg, but you spend most the plotline just spinning wheels with no greater narrative progress, in fact, often you are just undoing whwat was done in the first game. You learn virtually nothing about the overall plot except for the name of the bad guy, and I suspect the final Protoss part of the game will barely care that this part existed.

Still a 7/10 though, as it plays well and some of the mission design is good. In many ways, I was less disappointed by it than a lot of commentators I saw.

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COMPANY OF HEROES 2 (PC)

Relic is not what it was- much of the staff has changed and THQs bankruptcy made things much worse. Dawn of War 2 ended up as a mis-step as they couldn't make the design match the vision. So they fell back on the critically acclaimed CoH game, and decided to revive their fortunes with a sequel set, rather obviously, on the Eastern Front.

Where Dawn of War 2 tried to be innovative and failed, this one plays it very safe, which in some ways is a failure in of itself as there's not much to this over the original. There's the cold mechanics, but they are trivial; the Germans play pretty much the same as ever and the Soviets are not much different to play. It's all still good qualirty COH stuff, but this isn't going to set the world on fire.

Except for the single player campaign. Not because it is great- it's ok at best; Blizzard does this better- but because it is controversial. Its merciless portrayal of the viciousness of the Russian army has caused a massive Russian backlash over the portrayal of the Red Army, causing a metacritic bomb that currently has the user score at 1.6 (see here: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/company-of-heroes-2).

Now, there's a lot of Russian propaganda about the Red Army that we must be careful of, and it is an army that did a lot of terrible things, especially within the territories it conquered. Yet I do have some sympathy for the complainers as this is an amazingly stereotypical portrayal of the Red Army with all the internal cliches hyped up to the max- fleeing soldiers being executed en masee, civilians being sacrificed, even a completely weird part where soldiers who go and rescue their officer get executed as they weren't ordered to do it, which is not any logic that I think any army anywhere would ever follow. This is not a nuanced portrayal and, worse, it's not even put in context of Nazi atrocities. As history, this is poor, and a decent portrayal of the Red Army would have to be much better than this. Oddly enough, where the game indulges in such cliches as mass executions of soldiers, it says bugger all about mass rapes and mistreatment of Germans and Poles, which is something we have far more evidence for.

The debate about the Red Army is very complex, but in short, I can see why Russian players feel hard done by. 'Computer games aren't meant to be history- cliches there are half the point' some say. I would agree- except Relic keeps claiming they did a lot of historical research for this which they wanted to use as the basis for it all, and that being so, this is not good enough. Not to mention you should be very wary about indulging in such cliche with someone else's culture, especially in such a sensitive area.

However, I'll mark it just as a game. 8/10 where the original was a 9; time goes by and just releasing the same game again, basically, is never going to be as good. But the basic design philosophy is more to my liking than Starcraft.

KING ARTHUR: THE ROLEPLAYING WARGAME (PC)

I'd heard about this game a long time before I played it, as a game that was, basically, better than Total War. I finally tried the demo and loved it immediately and played through the full game and all the expansions shortly after.

This is basically a Total War game set in a stylistic interpretation of Arhturian Britain, basically in the southern half of England, As the titular King,, you have to go unify the kingdom by building an economy and raising armies on the strategic map and winning real time battles on the tactical battlefield.

Where it scores over Total War is twofold. The first is style- this is a very engaging interpretation of Arthurian Britain, and as well as having Britians and Saxons to fight you have weird monsters, the mysterious Seelie and Unseelie Sidhe of the forest, you have magic spells going off, fear effects, weather control etc. It adds a lot.

However, the far bigger part is the titular Role Playing part of the game. This is a game with a story as well as straight conquest- and an interactive story you control. You recruit Knights for your round table and they have stats. Various crises or plot missions and quests pop up around the realm and you send your knights to deal with them, and how they do depends on the choices you make, as some quests become quite elongated stories, combined wit their stats defining what they are god at. In this game you actually FEEL like a struggling ruler trying to take control, and your choices are meaningful to what happens on the map and how the game plot develops. There's a morality system, covering both whether you rule as a righteous leader or a brutally effective tyrant, and also tracking whether you embrace Merlin and the Old Gods are throw your lot in with the Christians and the power of the Holy Grail. Tracking this on both axes means you have four different broad ways of playing the game (evil/good Christian, evil/good Old Gods) with different powers and units available for each, and the game itself has three different ways for you to win.

This is someone taking the successful Total War formula and finding great new ways to expand on it- good stuff. 9/10; I thoroughly enjoyed all of it.

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KING ARTHUR II

... and then they cocked it up.

Ahh! How did they do this?

Here's what happend. KAII does fine in developing the technology and the graphics etc, and also introducing flying monsters and great dragons to fight etc. However, it cocks up in two ways. First the game just doesn't work as well- the balance is shot to hell and some spells are grossly overpowered.

However, the bigger issue is a very sad story. The developers saw how much people liked the role-playing additions to the Total War formula. So they did a lot of all that... but for no rational reason they TOOK AWAY all the rest of the Total War approach. There's no economy or money or empire building. The strategic map is really just a graphical means of showing the story as you march from one chapter to the next. They got this SO wrong- what people liked was the MIX of strategy, economy and role-playing, not the role-playing alone. Just about everyone on the KAII forums trashed it for this reason and I fear the whole game line is now dead as a rsult of this poor design decision.

7/10- because it's actually not bad, just a real shame.

So that's about that for the last two years- except for the Paradox Grand Strategy games which have really been my big conversion, but they deserve more detail than a mini-review can bring, so maybe later.

Next, though, I'll review those MMO games I talked about. For those interested, they are Guild Wars 2 (of course), The Secret World, Firefall, TERA and, finally, my thoughts on Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is an amazing game and basically everyone should play it if they have a DS.

I always liked your reviews Ush, if you have time you should do some more of them.

Oh blimey. I don't play as much as I used to, though I did do a giant tour of various MMOs over the last couple of years. What I really don't have time for any more is to play the big RP games like Dragon Age 3 etc. I started playing through the entire Fallout series at the end of last summer (including both Wasteland games) and that was a mistake as I didn't get finished until December and it took a significant chunk out of studying time, so never again!

Maybe I'll rustle up a few things though.

I'd like to hear your opinion on various MMOs. I need me some Ush in my life.