Phantasy Star Zero: Some Early Impressions

For the last week or so I've been playing some Phantasy Star Zero, and it's a pretty fun little distraction. It has plenty of loot to hunt down, mags to grow, interesting characters, and it's really good for some pick up and play action. About the only thing that I really don't like about it is that the camera is kind of blah. I'm also terrible at using spears, but that's more me than the game.

Anyway, after playing for about seven hours, so far so good. I'm playing as a Newman right now, and their story is pretty neat. It means I have to talk a fair bit with Sarisa because we're in cahoots as we investigate the humans, and complete our people's mission. It seems a straightforward story so far, but the characters bring a lot to the table. They're darn charming. I've spent most of my time adventuring with Kai and Sarisa, and like them quite a bit. Kai is very easy going, with only a very subtle bit of cockiness to him. He seems the sort that would be fun to hang out with.  Meanwhile, Sarisa is very kind and just wants to do her best to contribute to the team. It's hard not to like her.

It's actually pretty hard
to find decent screenshots
for this game. >_<

I've spent a lot of my time just wandering around different zones as they're opened up, smacking around monsters and collecting loot. There have been a few useful items that I've found in my travels but most of them have either been used to feed my mag so it can grow big and strong, or sold off at the market for profit. It makes for a nice way to kill 15 or 20 minutes here and there while still being productive in the game. I can see this somewhat breaking the experience, though, because my character has leveled up quite a bit by doing this, and some of the recent bosses I've faced seemed a little on the easy side. I can't see this changing, though, unless I hold off on farming, but it's what I enjoy most about the game, so I'll need to somehow reconcile having easy bosses to accommodate the enjoyment I get from mindlessly smashing monsters.

In any case, I've enjoyed the game quite a bit up to this point. My character has a snazzy claw that she's using now to tear up monsters, and her mag is slowly getting stronger. I'll need to consult a guide to see how I want to go about evolving the thing, though. Right now it allows for a strong charge attack, but it looks like there a bunch of other interesting attacks available that could be worth exploring. In a lot of ways, it feels like I'm playing a portable PSO on the DS. Now if only the handheld supported WPA so that I could actually try the game online...

Hurray! I Survived the Steam Sale!

It may not be as insane as the summer and winter sales, but this year's autumn sale ran surprisingly long, or at least longer than I remember the thing going in years past, and had quite a few really tempting deals. Thankfully I behaved myself though, only getting Skyrim on this go around.

I'd been holding out on that one for ages because I don't like paying $60 for a game. They had it for half off, which doesn't happen often so I finally capitulated and picked it up. For now I'm going to skip on the Dawnguard stuff because after talking with friends and reading up on it some more, it sounds like it's a bit of a tough one to justify getting. Maybe if I was into all of the daedric stuff in a big way it might be worthwhile, but the expansion wasn't really winning me over, even at ten bucks.

Skyrim itself is a ton of fun so far. A lot has been tweaked for this game, but some of the stuff I like include how the combat feels a little smoother, and faster paced than previous games, the visuals are great, and haven't been giving me any problems like obnoxious draw-in (which I found Oblivion suffered from quite a bit), and, as always, there's tons to explore.

I'm not going to go into a full review of the game here, as I'm only about ten hours into it right now, but I did want to mention that I'm enjoying it. But yeah, really happy that I abstained from gorging myself on deals at this sale. Now I just have to do the same or better at the winter sale, which can't be too far off.

Dungeon Siege 3: Final Thoughts

Blasting stuff in the face with a rifle

The other day I finally finished Dungeon Siege 3, so that's one more game out of my backlog. Hurray! Before completely closing the door on it, though, I did want to jot down some final thoughts on the game. Overall, I didn't find it hugely entertaining. A lot of the gameplay is common to the Diablo-alike sub-sub genre of action RPG except with nothing to really set it apart from the pack in a meaningful way. Moreover the game is pretty easy. About the only reason I bothered to play to the end of it is because I found the story mildly interesting, but then again it is a game from Obsidian, and they're usually pretty good at that sort of thing. Looking back on my time with the game, I'd have a really tough time recommending it to anyone, even if you get it for dirt cheap in a bargain bin, a Steam sale, or whatever.

The game takes place many years after a big uprising. A group that prides itself on protecting the land, the 10th Legion, is accused of killing the king, and the people, lead by his bastard daughter, Jeyne Kassynder, rise up and destroy this group. After this civil war breaks out as Jeyne tries to take over the kingdom while a royalist faction tries to maintain control. Fast forward to the present and this war is still going on, though things aren't looking great for the royalists. Where the player comes in is that there are a few descendants of the 10th Legion as well as survivors of the massacre, and players must pick one of four characters to restore the legion and bring an end to the war. Much of the story is typical fantasy fair with a bit of politics tossed in. It's not top tier storytelling or anything, but it did manage to keep me entertained. In fact, and as I said earlier, it's the one part of the game that kept me playing until the end.

Of the four characters I chose Katarina, a gun-toting women with an Eastern European accent. I chose her because I wanted a ranged class for kiting, and generally shooting stuff from a distance. The other characters are a mage, a knight-ish paladin kind of guy, and fire spewing archon (kind of a demigod-like creature). Whoever you don't pick will accompany you on your journey anyway, so they're never too far away, but you can't control them. They just do their own thing, and only one can be out and about doing stuff at any given time. I found the guns to be fun to use. Katarina has a rifle for hard hitting long ranged attacks, and a pair of pistols for when enemies get too close, plus a bunch of special abilities. It's a nice mix of weapons.

Most bosses are pretty average in size, but this guy was
impressively huge

Much of the time I found myself mowing down trash enemies from a distance with my rifle while I had my archon tanking them up close. It wasn't very challenging at all unless I was being hit by a large number of bad guys at once, and this rarely happened. Boss fights could get a little bit more exciting because there was a lot more to dodge, or other things that needed to be done besides wailing on the actual boss. However, difficulty in these cases was still mitigated by liberal amounts of dodging. So, challenge was weak during my playthrough on normal. I guess one would really need to crank up the difficulty if they want to be pushed hard by the game. Luckily there are a decent amount of settings to choose from in that regard.

In terms of presentation, I liked the visuals. There's a good amount of detail to everything, and the game kept me moving forward so the environments stayed reasonably varied, not repeating themselves or anything. The characters looked nice, and there were some snazzy lighting effects, especially when spells were being blasted around. The one thing that really bugged me about the visuals was the camera because it can be a huge pain in the butt. It defaults to an auto-follow setting that makes the thing swing around in really inconvenient ways, and even if you turn it off the camera feels slow and unwieldy. Sometimes the thing will also decide to zoom in a whole bunch making it impossible to see enemies properly. The camera is very problematic.

What to do with Jeyne now that she
is defeated

I should also note that I was playing the PC version of the game, and it was obvious that the thing was a very quick, ho-hum port of the console game because it didn't feel like the game was optimized for the PC. The thing that bugged me the most was the save system because it's just save slots without the ability to actually name them myself. It would just display a time and the place where I performed a save when I'd go to load one up. The problem here is that there are some choices to be made in the game that will obviously change the course of the story to some degree, like choosing whether or not certain characters live. I would have liked to have been able to set the saves such that they could be easily pulled up if I wanted to explore multiple branching story paths. Instead I have to remember the time and place that I made a save before one of these events happens which is very inconvenient.

In the end, I just didn't enjoy my time with Dungeon Siege 3 very much. The game is quite easy, and the camera intolerable. I didn't find the combat all that engaging, and then there are the more nuisance-y issues of the game, like its save system. I mostly soldiered through for the story, but I could see even this not being enough to hold some people's attention. Even if you find the game on the cheap at a Steam sale or something, you may be better off skipping it. The thing will still gobble up 20 hours of your time, and there are better action RPGs out there.

Happy 25th Anniversary Faxanadu!

It's very simple, but this was all the
box art I needed to get interested in
Faxanadu as a kid.

Today marks 25 years since Faxanadu first came out on the Famicom. If you're not familiar with the game, it was a side-scrolling action RPG, and one of many installments in the popular Xanadu series from Falcom (though Hudson Soft had a hand in this particular game's development from what I understand). In fact, the name Faxanadu is derived from the word "Xanadu" combined with "Famicom" since this was the first time the series appeared on Nintendo's console, so yank of the "Fa" from Famicom, slap it on the front of Xanadu, and you've got Faxanadu.  I'm not going to go into much more detail about the game, that's what Wikipedia is for.  Instead, I'd prefer to wax nostalgic about it.

The game is actually pretty special to me because it's the first I ever got for the NES as a kid. I remember seeing it at a local Costco and being mesmerized by it. While my parents were shopping, I'd just stare at the thing wondering what it would be like to play it. I guess my folks took notice because it was the game that got with the system when my sister and I received it for Christmas one year.  After that I proceeded to play that game religiously, maxing out my level, acquiring all of the armor and weapons I needed to face the final boss, and finally beating the game.

Looking back at Faxanadu now, it's easy to see that there were a lot of archaic features in it that have long since gone the way of the dodo in RPGs. For instance, the game didn't have a save feature. Instead, you'd visit a cleric at a temple who would give you a password. When you wanted to continue the game, you'd need to enter the password in order to pick up where you left off. This was quite common in the late 80s. Even the original version of Dragon Quest had passwords when it debuted on the Famicom with a proper save feature not coming into the picture until its western release on the NES. So, I needed a pad of paper and a pen on hand while playing the game in order to maintain my progress. Like I said, it was the norm back then, but boy am I glad that isn't a thing anymore.

Towards the end of the game your character looked pretty awesome in his
fancy armor.

Also, it's a fairly grindy game. Pretty much every time you reach a new village there will be a shop or two with various new weapons, items, and spells for sale that are obvious improvements over what you're currently wearing. So, it's a no-brainer to earn the gold needed in order to buy these things. What this results in is marching your hero just outside of town, and beating down the same monsters over and over again until you've earned enough to get all these delightful doodads. As a kid I was okay with this, as I had all the time in the world and, again, this was just the norm when it came to RPGs of the era, the emphasis on grinding, but nowadays this is probably the single biggest facet of the game that makes it difficult to come back to Faxanadu.

There was some cool art in the
game manual too.

Regardless of these old fashioned features, it was still a fun game for its time. I was impressed by the graphics as a kid, and there are some really memorable tunes in it. About the only area in the game I never liked was the mists about a third of the way up the tree. The area sort of dragged on, I was never fond of the gray-ish brown colors everywhere, and the song got on my nerves. After that, the areas were great. Lots of green, interesting dungeons, and some amazing bosses. Oddly, I have fonder memories of the second to last boss than I do of the last boss. This is because the second one guarded the sword I needed for my final armor set. I'd gotten the armor, and was looking pretty badass, but I still had this three pronged sword that looked more like an accessory for a barbecue than a tool for dispensing of monsters. Killing that boss would get me Excalibur, a nice big broadsword. It was actually really tough for me to beat the stupid boss too as a kid. I remember banging my head against him for a couple of days before finally downing him, and I was ecstatic about it. After that, killing the final boss and finishing the game almost felt anti-climatic.

Still, it was a lot of fun playing Faxanadu all those years ago, and since it was my earliest experience on the NES, it will always be a special game to me. So happy birthday to you, you fabulous game. It's hard to believe that it's been 25 years already!

Have you played Faxanadu? If so, share your thoughts in the comments section below. I'd love to hear what you think of the game! ^_^

Record of Lodoss War: Some Nostalgic Fawning

After seeing the news over at Siliconera about there being a new, browser-based card game in the world of Record of Lodoss War, it got me thinking about the old Dreamcast action RPG also set in that world. It was a Diablo clone, but it was very well put together, and a ton of fun. Also, did I mention it was set in Record of Lodoss War?

This was one of my favorite anime when I was younger. It was like watching an RPG in anime form! So, having a chance to actually interact in it in some way was a great opportunity. The game took place several years after the anime, but there were still a lot of familiar characters and people in it. The game managed to walk a line between the new and the familiar, which I quite liked, as opposed to outright regurgitating the anime plot.

The world was actually surprisingly big, and felt like it just went on and on, as my character got sent on a seemingly endless string of missions. The blacksmithing system was also pretty neat in how it worked to improve stats.

Looking back at the game now, it hasn't exactly aged well in terms of presentation. The graphics are pretty simplistic, with some very stiff animations. Just watching your character run around, he's stiff as a board, and the enemies movements aren't much better. Even the sound is not great with simple monster-like sounds coming from everything, ho-hum music, and times when things are just a little too quiet.

Nonetheless, the action is still top notch. I think what helps hold my attention is the constant streams of enemies. As you explore new areas, there are quite a lot of baddies that need to be dealt with, so you get that steady stream of stimulus and gratification as you mow down one large group of enemies after another.

If you like anime and Diablo-alike action RPGs, Record of Lodoss War is certainly a game worth spending some time with. You'll pretty much have to go the eBay route in order to find a copy, but from what I've seen prices aren't terrible there (usually between $20-$40). It's still quite a fun game, and a bit of a hidden gem in the Dreamcast library.