Masem’s Gaming Blog

Eternal Sonata, developed by Tri-Crescendo and published by Namco-Bandai games, is an interesting variation on the usual Japanese RPG story. The game is based on the life of composer Frederic Chopin, using a dream world to represent people and places he would have known in his life, and incorporates much of his music into the game. The battle system is also interesting, combining typical turn-based with action-based combat along with other twists. While these features are done rather well, there’s a lot of repetition in the game and with too many player characters to choose from at times, it is very easy to fall into these repetitive patterns of play.

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Blue Dragon, developed by Mistwalker and Artoon for Microsoft, is pretty much a by-the-books turn-based Japanese RPG, which is no surprise given that the game design is lead by Final Fantasy alum Hironobu Sakaguchi. While there are a few unusual features that make for interesting character and combat mechanics, the overall game just runs excessively long without being engaging, as a result leading to the game feeling rather tedious to complete. Add in several graphics problems that I thought would never appear in a next-gen console RPG game, and the game quickly loses its charm.

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BioWare’s Mass Effect is one of 2007’s most anticipated titles through both BioWare’s past successes in Knights of the Old Republic, and much of the pre-release press including the demonstrations of its unique conversation system at past E3 conferences. The game, for the most part, lives up to this hype, but does have several rough edges in both gameplay and technical implimentation that suggest that the game was pushed out before they could be smoothed out. However, while these may be annoying, they should not prevent you from enjoying the universe and story with strong voicework that the game provides.

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I know this game has gotten a lot of praise, but while I’m enjoying the story and general RPG elements of it, there’s alot that I’m just unimpressed with.  BioWare has made great titles before, and while I appreciate the complexity of the story and the conversation system, the overall game doesn’t feel like a significant change from past BioWare titles.

I’m not too thrilled on the combat.  I’ve started with a pure soldier class, and while I believe I’m upgrading weapons and armor at each possible opportunity, I still feel I’m struggling against it mostly due to some of the mechanics such as dealing with biotics (telekinesis-type powers in the game), poor party AI that tend to get in the way, and poor visual clues where damage is coming from as to not allow me to react fast enough to find cover or the like.  I can see where they were going with it, and I can understand that they were trying to seamless connection between combat and general interaction, but it feels really clunky.

At times, on planets, one needs to drive a vehicle around.  Don’t get me started on how poorly that controls or how that aims and fires at targets.  That feels like a total misstep in implimentation.

The missions do feel open (I’m two major missions in, and still have like a roster of 4 missions to select from with more being added), which is good.  However, most of these feel much like BioWare’s standard “rule of 3″ - a subpart of the mission requires you to complete 2 or 3 mini-missions, after which the sub-mission allows you to proceed.  I know this is very common in Western RPGs compared to the more linear approach of Japenese RPGs, but it still feels stale given that BioWare’s done this 3 times before (at least) through both KOTORs and Jade Empire.

I still feel intrigued enough with the game to push forward, but compared to what I hear others talking about, this game just feels like it overpromised and had to drop or rush some aspects out to meet end of year sales - not as bad as, say, Blacksite Area 51 or Kane and Lynch, but enough that if they game it 3 more months, they would have had a really polished game on their hands.

I should know better about the NFS series - the series has really ventured away from its roots of being literally about the speed, but too many of the recent titles save for Most Wanted just went in a really weird direction.

To some benefit, Pro Street does not glorify the underground or illegal street racing scene nor tries to even provide a story.  Instead, it’s pure racing.  The career path is present as a branching set of “race days” consisting of 4 to 7 races each.  Within each race day, your goal is to win enough points to win the day, but you also want to consider dominating each day by basically crushing the competition on each race in that race day.  Both a win and a domination gain you prices outside of the usual cash and once in a while a new car.  (In this iteration, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of variances in the car models - you can customize them up the wazoo, but I think I’ve only seen maybe 6 different models so far).  A nice idea is that if you should leave the race day, you loss all progress in it, so you need to make sure you have all the cars that you plan to take into it for the different events up to the specs you want.  While you can repair cars between races in race day, a few race days don’t allow this, so you may have to abandon them early if you lack an appropriate backup car.

Races include Grip (standard circuit races), Drag, and Drift.  Time attack is like Grip save that its who get the best time for one lap, not position.   There’s a Sector Attack mode which is like a combined checkpoint/circuit, where you get points for getting the best time on specific sections of the track.  There’s also a Grip Class race, in which you are only racing against 3 other cars but there are another 4 cars from a different vehicle class on the track, making things get interesting in whether you try to fight for position against a car you don’t have to worry about beating or not.  Everything’s run in the daytime, and based on numerous configurations of tracks at the same setting.

Thing is, this feels more like Forza racing than NFS.  The game now has the same green/red arrow system to help with cornering speeds, and because it’s just pure tracks or roads modified to be tracks, it feels no different than a standard track racing game.  There’s no track that really mimics some of the nice hills and corners that were in either Hot Pursuit game or Most Wanted - so far these are mostly flat with “standard” race-type turns, which , when they’re 180 hairpins, sorta defeats the “need for speed”.  Plus it doesn’t seem like you can blaze through this: the career tree is broken into a series of  “knots” of races, and the core knot of one branch requires a number of wins and dominations from the previous knot branch, but even then you may not have the right car to enter it, or you cars may be pitifully sucky as to have no chance to win, requiring you to go back, earn cash, and upgrade the cars.  I’ve felt I put a lot of time into the game and am only at 15% of the career, so it seems like a long way to go.

I would almost call this an RTS-lite game - at least where I am about 25% of the way through the game.  The game is after FFXII (which, note I have not finished, but was able to pick this story super quick, as it relies little beyond characters and the Ivalice setting), with Vaan and gang now exploring a sky-based group of islands.  The game is a series of RTS games; you control up to 5 party members, and you gain access to Espers - creatures that you summon at the start of each match and, when available through summoning points on the map.  A special Ring of Pacts is set up like the skill tree in FFX, in that you can get new Espers after unlocking other specific ones.  Espers themselves are based on the standard four elemental magics as well as healing/special or no magic ability at all, and you can only take 5 into a match (though you can alter their configuration as needed).  It’s a pretty nice system though I’ve yet had to worry too much about making sure I have elementals to deal with weaknesses the other side has or to prevent being hit by a large advantage.  In fact, the game to this point has basically been “select all, fight here”, though I see this strategy easily being defeated where I am now if I’ve not gotten appropriate new equipment or done side tasks to level up enough.  So I am expecting at some point to have to split my attention.  However, for being one that doesn’t play RTSs much, this is a very gentle introduction that yet still captures the FF game flavor.  And of course, using the DS helps with a lot of the controls.