A look back at Fire Emblem

Originally written: December 21st, 2008

This year I have played through all four Fire Emblem games currently released in North America. In January I played through Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn on easy mode, due to everybody saying how difficult the game was. During the summer I picked up Fire Emblem and beat the game on Hector Hard Mode, a setting that managed to kick my ass ever since I first got the game. During the fall, I played through Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on Hard Mode (though PoR lacks the Japanese version's Maniac mode, so it's not that big of an accomplishment), and then I played through Radiant Dawn again, this time on normal. Now I've gotten through playing through Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones on the hardest difficulty setting, even going so far as to complete all ten floors of the game's super-hard extra dungeon.

And I'm going to rant about this while I can: what the hell am I supposed to call the first NA-released Fire Emblem? It doesn't have a subtitle, so if I talk about it, one might think I'm talking about the series in general. I could call it "Rekka no Ken", or the translation "Blazing Sword", but newcomers to Fire Emblem wouldn't know which game I'm referring to. And I can't call it "Fire Emblem 1" because it's actually the 7th game in the series (damn you Japan). However, FE7 is the most common way to refer to it, so if you didn't know that, I'm going to call it that from now on.

Anyway, Fire Emblem 7 is among my favorite games of all time, possibly because...it's flawless. Really. All the problems I've seen people have with it are all intentionally part of its design and serve a specific purpose. Don't like that you can't bring characters back to life? Go play Final Fantasy and spam Phoenix Downs, you wimp. You shouldn't have let him die in the first place. Complaining that you got critical'd with a 1 percent chance? For one, most of the time you should prepare yourself just in case luck turns against you, and besides, it doesn't happen often enough to justify changing the game. And it's not just a lack of flaws that make Fire Emblem great; Pikmin 2 was flawless but it doesn't rank among my favorite games. The Fire Emblem games have great stories, likeable characters, incredible depth and intentionally challenging gameplay, as well as a great, stylish art design. Hell, there's even just enough bugs to let you bend the game's rules without breaking the difficulty curve. Probably wasn't intentional, but cool nonetheless.

And after saying that, I just have to give an example. In FE7, there's a glitch with the mine item that allows you to take control of the enemies for a single turn. Usually the best course of action is just to make them all discard their weapons to make them easier to kill. However, in one chapter of the game, the storyline dictates that the boss is supremely overpowered and should be avoided. However, instead of making the character herself get strong stats, they just silently added the bonuses to the weapon she was carrying. If you use the mine glitch in this chapter, you can actually make her trade the item with another enemy (one with a useless droppable item), and then kill that enemy and get this superpowered weapon for yourself. Sadly, it breaks rather easily, but that's still really friggin' cool.

As well as all that, I think one of the main reason I like Fire Emblem so much is consistently good game design. I rag on the game design a lot in my Sonic Unleashed and Tales of the Abyss reviews, but the Fire Emblem developers actually seem to know what the hell they're doing. The storyline is good, but at the very least they make every cutscene skippable so you don't have to watch them if you're playing the game over again, or even if you just need to play the level or chapter over. None of the games are filled with technobabble (stupid TotA) and let a new player easily understand it the first time through. Even then, returning players can fulfill certain criteria in order to see more of the story, including hidden backstory about the side characters. It just gives you a ton of incentive to replay it.

In fact, the replayability of FE7 is probably why I still enjoy the other games in the series, even though they barely change the core gameplay. The developers seem to realize that the formula they made is a winning one, so changing it too much might end up hurting it. Yet, they also realize that they need to at least try to switch up the game so that the experience still differs. Sacred Stones had that branching promotion system, Path of Radiance gave us a base at with to distribute EXP and buy weapons, and Radiant Dawn gave us a third tier of promotions. I mean, when it comes down to it, swords still beat axes, Pegasi are still weak to bows, and there's always an overpowered Paladin at the beginning of the game to help you along, but does it really matter? The core gameplay is fine; that's why the developers are so hesitant to change it.

However...there are still a few problems with the series that I do wish they would change; this mostly applies to Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn. Sacred Stones was flawed, too, but it just has an overall rushed feeling to it, so I'm not sure blaming the developers is the right idea. However, the console games have serious presentation problems. Talking heads is fine with the GBA, since that's all it's capable of, but why are you still relying on them when you have a much more powerful system at your disposal? (at the very least, give the characters a few more expressions instead of awkwardly trying to display their emotions through dialogue) The few cutscenes in the games look absolutely brilliant, but why are there so few of them? Even worse...why is the voice acting of these games so horrid? Radiant Dawn had an extremely badass cutscene ruined by awful voice acting. If a game like Disgaea can have good english voice acting, why not Fire Emblem, a freaking Nintendo game? It seems like these presentation issues are keeping Fire Emblem from getting the same kind of respect as Mario, Zelda, or Metroid. It's a shame, because I hold the series in much higher regard.

Ultimately, where's the series going to go? I plan on digging up ROMs of some of the older games in the series, and Marth's game is due on the DS in February next year, so that will be nice. However, I still have a few ideas of what the series could do. Going from turn-based strategy to real-time strategy could be a nice recreation of the series, though that could and probably would anger a lot of fans. Another idea is to take inspiration from Disgaea and make the game bright, cartoony, and nonsensical. Come on, this is a series with a flirty cleric, a swordswoman who does nothing but search for her ultimate rival, and a mage with a stomach the size of the grand canyon. Not to mention the sprite animations where they swing around weapons twice their height and do backflips in order to indicate they got a critical hit. I mean, with Advance Wars they took a cartoony series and made it dark; why not try it the other way around?

Sonic Unleashed (Wii)

Originally written: December 18th, 2008

So a couple of weeks ago, I rented Sonic Unleashed. Partially because I was interested in the game, and partially because I bought Sonic and the Secret Rings and discovered that I flushed 50 dollars in the toilet. So at least I only wasted $10 instead this time. Let me give you an idea of what it was like to be a Sonic fan a couple of months ago, when Unleashed was first revealed. The trailer showed an absolutely gorgeous environment, and had music that was beautiful and contained zero lyrics (unlike every other Sonic game released in the past 5 years). Sonic was zipping through the level at high speed, and it looked fan-freaking-tastic. But then...the werewolf was revealed.

Why was Sonic a werewolf? No, we weren't wondering how Sonic got to be that way, we wondered who the hell thought it was a good idea to turn Sonic into a werewolf. However...we stayed interested. If the daylight levels played as excellent as they looked, perhaps the werewolf levels would be designed just as well. E3 passes, we get some impressions...hey look, the game sounds fun! Though the guy at Gamespot did irk me a bit when he said that Sonic being a werewolf was a really awesome idea. Ugh.

Then...reviews come in. Wii version was average, 360 version was crap. Well good thing I'm a Wii owner. I decide to rent the game. A few hours later, I realized that Sonic's latest adventure was a turd.

What's wrong with it? While I'd like to go "everything", that isn't true. In fact, that's what's most frustrating about the game: there are parts of this game that are really, really fun, well designed, and clever. But the rest of the game is a god-awful, horribly designed mess. We should have known better back when we learned Sonic was turned into a werewolf, but we were so amazed by beautiful stages and great music that we suspended our disbelief.

So what's wrong with it? I'll start with Sonic's annoying little sidekick in this game, Chip. When you meet Chip, he's lost his memory. But he doesn't seem to care. What? Sonic offers to help him get his memory back...what? Not only is this a really awkwardly worded scene, but I can't even understand why Sonic would go so far to help some little creature, especially when the world has been cracked, or, you know, YOU'RE A WEREWOLF. And the worst part is that, from what I played, Chip was completely irrelevant to the storyline. Tails and Amy were there trying to help and figure out what to do, talking to a professor (who has dialogue that's supposed to be funny but just comes across as juvenile), and generally advancing the plot. What does Chip do? He flies around in the back of cutscenes eating ice cream. He has no point to being there. On top of that, he has an annoying voice, poor dialogue, and is a poor helper.

A poor helper is putting it mildly. Not only is Sega forcing this worthless character down our throats, but they make his dialogue unskippable. After a lengthy intro in which Sonic fights Eggman, gets turned into a werewolf, and falls down to earth, he gets into another portion of lengthy dialogue trying to explain his situation to Chip, which is completely pointless, since WE ALREADY SAW WHAT HAPPENED. After that, there's like 5 tutorial levels that last about 10 seconds each in order to teach you the ropes of how to run and jump and such. Hey Sega, remember Sonic Adventure 2?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA-yILpGYro
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCs42XSwI-c

HOLY SHIT SONIC JUST RIPPED A PIECE OF METAL OFF A HELICOPTER AND HE'S USING IT TO SKATEBOARD DOWN CITY STREETS

*ahem*

But still, look at that! There's no pointless exposition; you're given a brief indication to what's going on, and then the game lets loose with a high-speed chase, letting you figure out everything for yourself. City Escape is, in my opinion, the best opening level of any game ever made. Even including the cheesy lyrics, the stage is perfectly crafted to be nice to beginners while still giving you the sense of excitement a Sonic game needs. By comparison, Sonic Unleashed gives you annoying tutorial levels before actually releasing you into the first stage. By this point your attention span is killed and it takes you a moment before you realizing you're actually playing the game you paid money for.

And...it's actually really fun. The daylight stages of this game actually are well-designed, giving you lots of different paths to take while (generally) avoiding cheap deaths. The music is well-composed, the stages are fantastic-looking, and the whole experience is a lot of fun. Then you finish the level and then...

Oh god. The werewolf stages. These stages compose the worst about Sega today. Not only are you given ANOTHER series of tutorial levels before you can actually play, but even those are annoying. During one level, I saw a ledge with a bar over the gap, and another ledge on the end. Naturally, I know what to do. So I get a running start, and right before I jump...Chip freezes the game to tell me what the jump button is. I hate you. He unpauses and I fall off the ledge due to a lack of timing.

What the hell kind of game design is that, Sega? If you want to give me a tutorial, make it optional. In Sonic Adventure 2 we had Omochao, who had no part in the story and only activated if you touched him. And even if he did piss you off, you still had the option to pick him up and throw him off a cliff (seriously).

Anyway, even more problems with the werehog stages. For one, Sonic has these stupid stretchy limbs that don't make any sense. But whatever, I'll deal with it. But what's more annoying is that when you use them to grab ledges, it takes about half a second before the game realizes your button input, so the controls feel strange and unresponsive. The first time I got to one of those ledges, I kept messing up because I didn't know that it took so long for my limbs to respond, and I kept thinking I was doing it wrong. But nope, the game just sucks like that. And what's the point of the stretchy arms if I don't get freedom to use it? In one of the cutscenes, Sonic stretches his arm from building to building and leaps across that way, Monkey D. Luffy-style. But in the actual game, his arms can only grab specific ledges with a certain colored tag on it. Try to do it with other ledges? You just fall and die. That's horribly, horribly annoying.

And the combat. Oh god, the combat. It's like God of War with everything fun taken out of the game. To fight you have to wave the Wiimote and nunchuk around wildly, and there's no skill or strategy involved with the fighting at all. You just walk up to an enemy and wave your arms around until it's dead. Sure, on occasion you have to jump to reach an enemy or maybe you're given the option to pick up enemies and throw them around, but wild shaking is the quickest way to dispatch enemies, so why bother with any other options? It doesn't help that while running, Sonic the Werehog is slippery for some reason. No explanation is given; he's just slippery. This is especially annoying on narrow pathways; you're forced to walk because running will result in you losing your balance and falling off.

I could dedicate this next paragraph to the boss battles, but I'll just say that they were "meh" and move on. With special note to Eggman during one fight, where he constantly shouted "You little...you little!" which started annoying, got more annoying, and then somehow trespassed the annoyance level into sheer awesomeness. Bravo, Eggman.

Want to know how badly Sega screwed this game up? They couldn't even get the MENUS of the game right. In order to access a level, first you have to go to that level's world, which is just a point-and click map where you talk to various people. Except they aren't fun to talk to. And there's no point to it; you just click on every single spot until somebody gives you the key to that world's stage. And even then, you have to go to a "temple" and insert the key, which involves nothing more than walking in a straight line up to the doorway. Hey Sega:

Is this really such a hard concept to follow?

Fortunately, I'm done ragging on the game itself. Sadly, I can't even say just to avoid it, because those daylight levels are really, really fun. Not only that, but even some of the cutscenes are legitimately funny and amusing; Eggman's new sidekick robot is much more entertaining than Chip is. I also find it curious that Amy Rose is actually not annoying in this game.

So what else is left to say? Well, I can always direct you to a blog entry that a guy at Sega did:

http://blogs.ign.com/SEGA_SonicUnleashed/2008/12/08/107408/

"Normally, in Sonic games, we have added new characters to introduce new moves. Tails for flying and gliding, and climbing walls for Knuckles and so on. It's good that we have more members in the Sonic family as a result. But in time some people started saying… "Hey, Tails is a lot of fun. He can fly!" Or "You know, Knuckles is more useful because he can climb on walls and stuff." And if you go back to Sonic again, he hasn't changed much. Since he already has his trademark "speed", it's hard to add new abilities to him. Of course, losing his speed as a result of adding new features was the last thing we wanted.

But I started to think that "Maybe it's time he jumped in on something new." And that was when Hashimoto and Kawamura told me about their idea of the "Werehog". I wasn't expecting this and I was taken by surprise when I first heard this. Although I always wanted Sonic to do something new, a long experience must have been blindfolding me with the idea of "old-school, proper Sonic". "

Does Sega even pay attention to what the game critics say? All I hear about is "I want a game with the old-school, proper Sonic". With classic Sonic gameplay, refined for 3D. Tails and Knuckles there to expand on the basic idea, and maybe Amy Rose too, if they can make her a character with legitimately funny dialogue.

But it doesn't seem like Sega is interested in what its fans want. No, they have to milk the Sonic franchise for all its worth. It's like they still think they're competing with Nintendo; they see how many spin-offs the Mario franchise has, and try to keep up with that number. They see how popular Mario Kart is, and then make Sonic Riders, a lame racing game. They see how popular the Mario sports games are, so they give Sonic and other Sega mascots tennis rackets and see how they do. Hell, just look at the fact that they finally put Sonic in an RPG, not too unlike Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi. They don't have time to slow down and polish his games because they're too busying pumping out as many as they can. And sadly...it's working. People keep buying these games, and Sega keeps making them. I don't necessarily think Sonic is done for, but he definitely needs a break. Give the blue guy a few years off, Sega. What do you say?

Tales of the Abyss

Originally written: October 14th, 2008

This analysis of Tales of the Abyss essentially started a series of rants/analysis for me. It wasn't intended to be read in a blog format, but it did launch my current views on game design, so I've decided to include it for archive's sake.

First off: the dialogue. So much of it is pointless repetition (especially during the skits), with terrible prose and believability. The cutscenes are dull and boring to watch. At least with Final Fantasy X or Shadow Hearts: Covenant the camera is an active participant in the cutscenes, zooming in on people when they're talking or changing to show action, but in Abyss the camera is completely static in the cutscene and it amounts to nothing more than talking heads.

Not to mention many of the the characters are just plain dull. Luke is the personification of everything that is wrong with RPG leads; he's a dick, emo, whiny, and stupid. The characters often don't know how to react to certain events, and their actions don't even make sense. Woah, Guy saw Sync's face and acts really surprised...wait, why the hell are you keeping what you saw a secret from us? So we can all be surprised later on? That makes no sense from a believability standpoint. It's not like it's personal or anything. Even so, none of the characters press him for it, which irritates me even more. Also, I never quite understood why Asch was eternally pissed off. Yeah, Luke "stole" his life from him and his anger's fine for a little while, but after a point it's like "Dude, just shut up and stop yelling all the time."

Not to mention that many scenes in the game just serve to make the game longer for no reason. I recall the characters walking out of some building and see somebody running off. Rather than chasing after the guy and confronting him right away, they're content to just stand there and discuss the fact that he ran off, speculated on who he could have been, and who should go after him. If they had just ran after the guy instead of spending all this time talking about it they would have already captured him! This kind of blatant disregard for prose irritated me for most of the game.

Now, I'll admit that not all of the story was bad. There are lines in the game that are genuinely funny, and the parts of the five God-Generals (Asch not included) were well written. Also, for the first 15 hours or so, I didn't have much of a problem with the story. It was typical RPG fare, sure, but the story moved briskly and tried to keep things fresh. However, once Luke sheds his long hair and it seems like the game is approaching its finale, everything just stops. Suddenly the game pulls all these punches to make you drag through as much pointless dialogue as possible just so they can put "40+ Hours of gameplay!" on the back of the box. The part following the fake ending was especially grating, as it was three solid hours doing nothing but going from city to city watching cutscenes. No fighting, no puzzle solving, just mountains of exposition. It was hell.

That said, the actual battle system of the game was decent enough to not detract from the game. A bit of a button masher, but it was still fun, and boss battles required a decent amount of maintenance for your party members, and while none of the fights in the game seemed overly difficult, I'd say it was a success. As for the puzzle solving and exploration outside of the fights, I give a "meh". Nothing spectacularly fun, but on the other hand, it wasn't painfully dull. Standard RPG fare, I see nothing wrong with it.

So the gameplay is the important part of a game, right? So if I thought the gameplay was good and the story was bad, why do I hold it in such low regard? The main problem was the the gameplay is -not- the crux of the game. One of my favorite game series ever, Fire Emblem, suffers from the "talking heads" style of cutscenes that I really wish they would grow out of. However, I don't despise the game for a few reasons. For one, the story moves at a brisk pace, so even if the cutscenes are dull they don't last long, and even better, I don't have to read them; I can skip them if I wish. And more importantly, the battle system is far deeper than TotA's. While I liked playing TotA's battle system, it really wasn't very rewarding. I never bothered to learn how to chain those element circles or whatever, and some of the stuff I did in the menus didn't seem to have much effect, but I still managed to beat the game just fine, so what was the point of it all?

Ultimately, what killed TotA for me was pacing. The game gets off to a great start, but ultimately slows to a crawl, to the point where I was begging the game to shut up with all its exposition just so I could go kill stuff again. I recently replayed Golden Sun, and I admit, it was rather bland compared to how I remembered it the first time I played it. The story wasn't all that interesting, and the battle system was meh, but I still enjoyed it. Why? Well for one thing, the story didn't dominate the game. Some talking about what's going on, a couple of tips on where the party needs to be going, and that's that; you get to go onto the next dungeon to fight and solve puzzles. Ultimately, there wasn't anything really wrong with TotA's gameplay. However, the insufferable story that refuses to give control back to the player and drags on and on just to say it's a long game for the sake of a long game is a terrible, terrible idea. I'm all for getting the most of your money, but as Shadow Hearts taught us, a 20-hour long RPG with a quick pace and good direction is a much better use of your money than a 40-hour long borefest. Hell, Shadow Hearts has some of the traits I mentioned; static camera, poor voice acting, etc. But the characters were believable (as quirky as they were) and interesting, and more importantly, likeable. TotA's storytelling is its greatest flaw, and had they cut out a third of the dialogue in the game it could have been vastly improved.

Prototype - A great game, as long as you don't bother playing it

I have this weird philosophy about sandbox games. When I play games like Grand Theft Auto or Assassin's Creed, etc, I tend to avoid the "sandbox" bit and am content with just going through the story. I realize that isn't the point of those kind of games, and that I'm probably missing some of the fun by doing so, but it's never really bothered me; a linear experience is typically what I prefer to experience in games. Doesn't mean I think those games are bad or anything; I just play them differently than someone else would.

So imagine my surprise when I played Prototype for the first time. After the opening sequence in which you're introduced to all your abilities, the cutscene explaining the character, etc...for once, I didn't care. From the very beginning of the game, the entire city is free for you to explore. I ignored the mission markers and just ran around the city, throwing cars, running up the side of the buildings WITH the cars, finding the tallest building around, climbing to the top then jumping off, trying to land on a car somewhere on the street below. It was fantastic fun. The controls took a long time to get used to and were a little clunky, but I didn't mind, because they allowed for so much freedom of movement and exploration. I looked in my upgrades menu and saw all the little toys I could get if I only had some more experience, so I decided to start playing the actual game.

Imagine my surprise when the actual game turned out to be shit.

Obviously, when you play any game, the game is going to have its strong points and its low points. Nobody expects a masterful story from a Mario game, while Phoenix Wright is more an interactive book than a video game. However, there is a problem when the game's story has a completely different tone than the actual game. There's to be had jumping around buildings, consuming people and taking their appearance, shooting blood out of your hands to fly at high speed, and all that suggests a game that's comical and funny. However, the cutscenes in the game suggest a dark, brooding storyline with an anti-hero out on a serious quest for vengeance. He does what he has to to survive. But when you start playing the actual game your thoughts are less on the serious side and more "I need health. Time to eat everyone around me." It doesn't help that the storyline makes no sense, is difficult to follow, and when I finally beat the game I thought "Wait, that's it?" There's no buildup to the final battle. There was another important battle earlier on that had a lot of buildup, and they could have used that as the final boss just fine, only for the game to just go on. Point is, the story's a piece of crap, and Alex Mercer just isn't an interesting character at all.

But hey, who cares about the story, right? After all, the freedom of movement and the options available must mean that the actual game is great too, right? Well...sadly, no. The missions in the game are repetitive, tedious, and frustrating. They're littered with a ton of poor design choices, the most prominent of which being that no matter where you are, there's always some asshole with a rocket launcher with 100% accuracy to shoot you and mess up whatever it was that you were trying to do. At first you think the game is going to be easy; after all, you're a superpowered mutant that can do just about anything. For a bit, that's true. Then you have to start putting up with other mutants and supersoldiers and whatnot who can move as fast as you do, who can't be grabbed and can hit you for tons of damage while you're waiting for an attack to finish up so you can jump out of the way. Not to mention when hijacking a tank, there's a few seconds of mashing Y before you can enter, and during that time you're vulnerable to all enemy fire, and if you get hit with a rocket, surprise, you get knocked off and have to try it again. Not to mention the hijacking process is painfully slow, with the camera zooming in for dramatic effect, forgetting that the player might want to immediately shoot at the nearest threat, rather than be forced to swivel the camera back around every single time.

Some design choices in the game were painful, too. A certain boss had a gigantic health bar and sat stationary in the center of an intersection. You try tackling it head-on, you get a bunch of rocks shot at you that are too numerous to dodge. Get too close, it does this area-of-effect attack that drains your health bar. The only reliable method of hurting this thing was to run up the side of a nearby building, lock onto it, use the right analog stick to make sure I'm -actually- locked onto it rather than a harmless military grunt, jump off the building (because standing still is a deathwish in this game), and use my extendo-tentacle to chip off a small portion of damage. And I had to do this over and over for like half an hour. My hands cramped up with all the buttons I had to hold down at once to get this to work right. Also the mission where you're supposed to pursue a specific tank, taking out all it's support along the way, only for the mission to end with you opening the tank and consuming the guy inside it anyway. Was there a point for all that delay? Why couldn't I just get it open from the start and save all that time?

For all my rambling, the game does have its strengths. Playing through the story mode is ultimately worth it, because there are so many upgrades you get that make exploring the city and just being a douchebag so much fun. It's crazy how much stuff they fit into the game, even if the controls do suffer because of it. Yeah, the controls are difficult to learn and a bit clunky at times, but it's the only way for the game to work the way it does, so I'm not going to really call that a flaw.

I really don't think Prototype is worth putting down money for (thank god I rented it instead of going for that 40 dollar deal at Amazon), but it does some things right, so at the very least it's worth a look if you're interested. However, throughout the game there was something that really bothered me: the advertising. I know advertising doesn't necessarily affect the quality of the game, but it is unsettling. Seeing Gamestop and Game Crazy ads everywhere just bothers me (and isn't that kind of wrong having two competitors both advertising in the game?) I mean...the game is made by Activision, who I seriously doubt needs the advertising revenue in order to keep going. Also, they really took efforts to push the game's sales and promotion, and the game ended up selling pretty well anyway. So were advertisers even needed?