indigozeal

I'd been playing through Super Mario RPG as a distraction while I finished up Silent Hill 3 writing. I actually had a bit of a bizarre grudge against it around the time of its release, the reasons for which I can't exactly remember - something about Mario moving from dominance in the action genre to try to define what RPGs were, too, I think.

Playing it now, I'm struck by how forward-thinking it was. It embraces several innovations that would become widespread in the genre in the 32-bit era: breaking up traditional RPG gameplay by adding action sections that rely on dexterity; having enemies visible on the map (still relatively new in 1996); giving all characters, not just the ones in the active party, experience from battles; controlling character actions directly with button presses instead of just with menus; being piss-easy. There're also some unique systems that I think have big potential, such as everyone sharing a pool of MP instead of having their own reserves, and being able to customize your characters to some extent upon level ups by choosing to give a bonus to one of three stats, and getting a damage boost to your spells and attacks if you add another button press at just the right time in the action animation, though you have to intuit for yourself when that should be.

As an overall experience, though...well, for me, it was only OK. I think it clarifies for what I'm looking in RPGs, which is to meet neat-o characters and explore fantastic worlds. Being a Mario game, y'know, everything is friendly cartoonishness, both storywise and visually - RPG versions of concepts you've seen in the franchise before. That's all right - I mean, this is a beginner's RPG meant to be kid-friendly - but I wasn't that attached to what was happening, and even though the game is relatively short, it had worn out its welcome for me by the end.

I did enjoy the game's really witty lampshade-hanging of the "silent protagonist" RPG trope, with characters asking Mario why he's giving them the silent treatment and Mario having to pantomime his way through conversations (which gets pretty funny). Though the writers correctly skewer Mario's inability to speak as a big limitation, they still manage to give him a pretty strong personality: a quick thinker, sarcastic in spots, and actually really, deeply kind. I also liked Mario's two new allies, sweet anthropomorphic cloud Mallow (who attacks using weather-based spells) and child's-puppet-possessed-by-extraterresrial-being-of-light Geno, and I think it's a pity they can't appear in any future Mario games due to copyright issues with Square. Bowser is great as pathetic comic relief throughout - and great to play as - and there's a sort of childish ur-human proto-Wario who's charming in his utter skancewise bizarreness.

The problematic character is the Princess, who's not the vegetable-tossing hero from 2 or the politician & friend who sends you items and sit reports from 3 or the hostage who struggles free to throw Mario power-ups from World but...well, a self-impressed coward who hides behind others, has them do her bidding, and won't lift a finger to help herself or anyone else, her joining the party notwithstanding. And when she does join, she can do only 1 damage and is completely useless for anything outside healing - an interesting choice strategywise (do you want cheap healing? Then you have to give up a character slot), but, well. Peach has always been 100% pink 24-7, but she's also always been friendly and eager to help out her chums - baking them cakes, giving them items, etc. Combined with her use of tee-hee weapons like slaps and parasols and frying pans and her narcissistic fretting about how "it's HARD to be pretty!", her "helpless, useless, demanding coward" characterization is off-putting and more than a little bit sexist. I would've been way more tolerant of her wet-paper-baggishness in battle if she acted more like the sweet, proactive Peach from previous games and the whole thing didn't seem like part of a concerted effort to make her an aggregate of negative female stereotypes.

Most of the conversations about the rendered graphics revolve around whether or not they're dated. They looked fine to me technically, but what turned me off a bit was how the environments are very samey. If I visit a Rose Town, I want the buildings and walls overgrown with roses. Here, though, they just get the same two or three piddling azalea bushes you can find in any other town. The cloud-based kingdom of Nimbus Land, though, primarily its classical hanging-garden palace, looks rather neat, as does the beanstalk "dungeon" you climb to reach it - the predominance of bright greens and blues in the game's overall palette is very welcome. (The requisite RPG volcano dungeon also looks pretty cool here with the rendering.)

The music is ehh, though.

Frustrating combat bit: offensive magic is worthless, usually doing significantly less than a good timed hit and sometimes inexplicably even doing zero damage. If you're emulating, I also can't recommend playing without some sort of controller attachment; there are some jumping sections that, while not impossible, are aggravating with the keyboard controls. (The game's isometric perspective truly does not help in this regard.) The final dungeon reallllly dragged for me; the game's touchier reflex-based minigames, while meant to inject a bit of action into a traditional RPG, do get very wearying in a QTE way.

It's neat, though, to see the citizens of the Mushroom Kingdom go about their daily lives throughout the game, and there's a sweet subplot where you follow a mushroom couple through their wedding and honeymoon. I also liked the Star Hill, a spacey dreamland of fallen star-wishes from the citizens of Mario's world which had the visual and conceptual charm of the best parts of Earthbound.

Bonus: The ending parade is very sweet.
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I'm trying to figure out why Sepulchre doesn't work for me. The art that's there is well-done, and the "big" metaphors and the methodical, dreadful progression of the protagonist's discoveries at the end could be something out of a good nineteenth-century short horror tale. The big problem, I think, is that you can see where it's going from minute one, which really undoes the threat of the unknown upon which horror thrives. Granted, you can do a lot with the whys and hows if the whats are to a degree apparent (Silent Hill 2 is a master class in this regard), but in Sepulchre, despite the game's atmospheric accomplishments, too much falls upon the revelation itself - there's a little business with the youngest passenger that's smartly subtle, but the setting and the main character are largely depth-free dead zones. That said, the game doesn't deserve the enormous grief it's getting, and there's enough good here in the presentation that I'd advise the creators simply to try again.
(Two notes before that, though: 1) Exaggerated winks at how stoopid the conventions of the adventure & survival horror genres are about as subtle as a brachiosaurus and, in a twenty-minute game that's trying to build a mood of dread, exceptionally immersion-breaking. 2) Making accessing your inventory so obtuse that the player has to look up a YouTube video to find out how to do it - a video where the narrator himself mentions that he had to get help on the very same issue - is, suffice to say, not the best design decision.)



The ten minutes I spent with Desert Nightmare were like a wall of Don't: Don't require the player to download an RTP that you don't yourself provide and that RPG Maker no longer supports or offers in order to play your game; don't open with a slow crawl of logos in a font ripped from '90's shareware shooters; don't confuse making your protagonist a relatably immature teenager with making her a completely unsympathetic jerk (a.k.a. the Longing Ribbon problem); don't reuse the soundtrack from Silent Hill 2 at every turn and thereby relentlessly remind the player of much better survival horror games they could be playing...



So stop me if you've heard this one: a discontented loner moves into a crappy apartment only to be besieged by malevolent supernatural phenomena, whereupon he undertakes a journey to solve his housing woes that leads him through a series of disconnected locations relevant to his phantasmal interloper's own past. Yeah, there are groan-worthy Silent Hill references in The Crooked Man about as subtle as a brick - but the game does soon grow into its own strengths and problems.
I want a word like "workmanlike" to describe The Crooked Man - but one that connotes by-the-numbers blahness despite putting in a good amount of solid work and genuinely trying stuff, not because of an autopilot lack of effort. The game attempts to tackle subjects like depression and disappointments in life from a perspective that's humanistic instead of ghoulish, but the writing is weak, on both the overall and dialogue levels (a character who's supposed to be characterized as overly kind is first shown telling a neighbor who's sobbing loudly enough to be heard through the walls to just shut up and let him get some sleep already). The parallels between the hero's psychic journey and the events of his own disordered life are also too pat and trite. There's a good variety of gameplay mechanics that the creator put solid time into developing, but the boss battles are extraordinarily irritating, and too much of the game is spent trudging all over the map trying to locate the one thing your most recent key unlocked (I've referenced this article twice recently, but, good Lord, some people need to read it). Still, this is a solid amount of effort that didn't cut corners and had genuine sentiment behind it, and I'll be looking into the creator's next game, Paranoiac.
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From both a story and a gameplay perspective, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance would've been better had you have played as (to steal from someone on the 1up forums) triple-jumping Romanian ninja Maxim, the actual catalyst for the game's events. As it stands, Harmony's chosen hero, the obscenely overpowered Belnades-Belmont hybrid Juste, saps any challenge out of the title, and though it tries to be an origin story for the whole "two castles" idea, the game storywise is kind of too incoherent to explain goddamn anything. Harmony isn't a bad Metroidvania and has a couple original levels - a bone gallery that serves as a exhibition of the franchise's skeletal foes; an open walkway on the very top of the castle framed by an ever-racing sky - but a sedate palette (Death's amazing technicolor dream portal up there notwithstanding) and uninspiring level design make this one of the lesser entries.



The popular pitch for Lone Survivor goes like this: a) it's just like Silent Hill 2, because b) it has zombies in it. (Never "and."  Always "because.") Those astute readers who might recall that Silent Hill 2 has no zombies will promptly grasp Lone Survivor's storytelling approach: it attempts to ape Silent Hill - and David Lynch's filmography - without having any clue as to what made those works successful. Thus the characters ironically sock-hopping in an all-American diner with checkered floors framed with heavy velvet curtains, or the hero facing an incarnation of his beloved in a jail cell scene - the latter, of course, without the insightful twists of dialogue and framing that Silent Hill 2 used to comment on the protagonist, because insight is not in Lone Survivor's wheelhouse. The controls are atrocious, spreading actions out across about twenty unintuitively-chosen keys ("Was it Z to take out your gun?! How about A - no, that adjusts the gamma! Wait, why is gamma hotkey--" ::protagonist collapses:: "Well, never mind."), and I got tired real fast of the main character whining about needing to go back to his room to eat and sleep every five minutes. And the resource management is unbalanced; my run ended after I realized that a single wrong turn down a corridor had completely screwed me over supplywise and that my only recourse was to restart the entire game. Distinctive take on pixel graphics, though, with the subtly ever-shifting palette. Even though your character's surgical mask makes it look like he's wearing a singularly maniacal grin throughout the game.



I can't call WarioWare: Mega Microgames as good as my own introduction to the series, the DS installment Touched! - the DS's touchscreen capabilities add a lot of variety and just plain fun to the proceedings, and the system's improved visuals and sound do enhance the franchise's anarchic, pop-media-pastiche feel. But the series was pretty strong out of the gate, and even the ur-microgames collection still provides a few solid days of fun. Bonuses: you can unlock a full version of Dr. Mario fairly early in the proceedings, and that lovely and lyrical paper-plane minigame is a work of art in its graceful simplicity that I would never have expected on a WarioWare cart.



I'm including The Mirror Lied here solely as a warning: despite its pedigree (its creators are also behind the acclaimed To the Moon), the title barely qualifies as a game, as a runthrough takes forty minutes tops and gameplay is largely restricted to one big recursive key hunt. You play a Palette-esque faceless young protagonist holed up in a large Victorian home during something that greatly resembles the London blitz except in an age of desktop computers and IMs. A series of vague warnings are issued to the heroine from the outside world, which culminates in an ending that I'm sure the creators thought was profound but in-game is trite and derivative and answers nothing. The sprite work and sepia palette are well-done, and there's an atmospheric tension between the setting's hominess and its claustrophobia, but the game just has no damn reason to exist, as it's not telling any sort of story. I don't mean the plot is ambiguous; I mean that there's simply not enough story here to make an actual narrative. This is one of those cases where less is actually less.



Speaking of less: A Very Pink Game is a very short game (~15 minutes) rendered solely in black, white, and various shades of pink about a young girl who wants to meet an estranged friend who moved to a nearby town. Sounds sweet and looks darling, but the game design is extremely rudimentary and not very logical, and the typo-ridden LOL script seems to have been written by someone failing their sixth-grade English class. This person has expressed a desire to make more color-themed games, and I'd like to see more of her art style, but she needs to team up with some folks who know more about game design and scriptwriting.
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The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is better than it had to be, but not by much. A beat-'em-up whose aesthetic borrows heavily from that of DVD menus and puts a Middle Earth face on the Cody-Guy-Haggar model, it features plenty of "hey, golly gee, we're on DVD; we can stick ACTUAL FILM FOOTAGE in our games!!!" and cringeworthy abuse of actors snared in the most unfortunate merchandising clauses of their contracts. It also has a Legolas with "Dragonfire Arrows" that can run through enemies like anticop rounds and set stuff on fire, a fun Helm's Deep level where you play tower defense with a team of elven archers and run around kicking ladders off the ramparts, and a game John-Rhys Davies showing the others how enthusiasm can overcome lackluster lines. Sometimes, that's enough.



Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon is renowned as one of the worst entries of its franchise, yet that didn't stop its portable farming action from sinking its claws into me. Once you get a few fields in play, managing the grow times of your different crops to space out your workload and racing to water your plants and harvest all your produce before sundown is as addictive as high-fructose corn syrup. (It doesn't hurt that it's a very picturesque game.) Gradually, though, the creepier aspects of the game world as it pertained to my android player character began to wear on me: your creator/"dad" will sever your consciousness against your will if you stay up his past his deemed bedtime, and he mandates that you come in for weekly brain-scanning sessions where he invades your thoughts, reads all your memories, and leaves commands in your positronic brain for you to "love him." Meanwhile, dialogue in-town remains stagnant for months on end, there's not much to do with the money your raise, and the game is far too artificially padded, resorting to tactics like blocking off access to a labor-saving harvesting device until you talk to one person who has a 15-minute window of availability one day a week (and good luck finding out exactly when that window is, since the game won't tell you). I was finally broken by the game's abysmal pacing when I was roadblocked by an objective that could be fulfilled only by growing poinsettias, which first blossom in December. It was July at the time.



There aren't many games out there that can best be described by the word "darling." So goes Girl's Garden, though, an SG-1000 arcade-style game whose young heroine dodges bloom-hungry bears in a quest to pick flowers for her guy. Use environmental features to evade and block your ursine pursuers, and drop pots honey to distract them; watch the buds across the landscape open up, pick your flowers only when they're in full blossom, and watch out for wilted ones ruining the bouquet! The game's palette is strikingly unique with its bright not-pastels, the gameplay is fun and challenging, and it's a delight to watch the puffy little hyacinths bloom. My only wish, as with so many arcade games: a proper ending.
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All right, I just finished Eternal Darkness tonight, so let's get that out of the way, too. Actually, let's get this out of the way beforehand: Eternal Darkness isn't scary. It's "horror" in a drugstore-Halloween type of way, with neon glowing Evil Magic and Count Chocula laughs and what have you. The game's much-hailed "sanity effects" (where your character starts hallucinating once they've seen enough eldritch horrors, which sometimes manifests in faux technical glitches like your GameCube pretending to turn off, etc.) are the best effort to that end, but while they're novel surprises, I didn't really find them scary. I called the game "grade-A stupid" when I started it (and semi-abandoned it) a couple months ago, and while it gets better in its second half as the locations get more interesting and the plot starts to offer something in its vignettes beyond "protagonist attempts to stand against darkness but fails and is killed in an anticlimactic fashion," it's still all kinda...well, goofy. I mean, the ship sorta left the harbor after the scene where the game's Cthulhu-alike ordered a hit on Charlemagne by name - maybe it's me, but I'd think an extradimensional superbeing beyond time and reason would be a bit above meddling in Western European politics. (Then there's how that level's main objective is to warn Charlemagne of a murder plot against him - by hunting down the key to the plain ol' wooden door to his conference room, a door that's so thin you can hear Charlemagne talking on the other side. You can't use your protagonist's broadsword to break the door down? You can't shout?!)

The gameplay, while rich and well-thought-out with its three status meters and tons of spells that you need to use liberally throughout the game, kind of contributes to the problem. In Resident Evil, you can never be sure from where your foes will pop up next or even if they're truly dead when you appear to kill them, and you're usually desperately low on ammo and resources. In Silent Hill, you're constantly outclassed and can't fight worth spit (which is largely a genuine gameplay problem but does add to the tension in the early going). Here, you've got so many options and wards and protections at your offensive and defensive disposal that you never feel really desperate, really unassured of your own survival. I mean, there're places where you can be stuck or have trouble getting past a certain enemy or take a chunk of damage if you forget to cast your walking-tank spells, but there're a lot of buffers between you and death, and you never have to worry over your meager remaining bullets because they might be your last.

I'm lukewarm on Eternal Darkness, but I have to say that it's an ambitious game. It's not a case with me of "you like that? REALLY?" as per Earthbound. There's a good amount of depth to the gameplay, as noted, and production values are high, with solid voice acting and some striking archaeological & architectural tableaux in the last few chapters. I appreciated, too, how the game centered around a few locations but built on them and showed different sides of them as the centuries elapsed and various routes within were blocked off or extended or changed - a musty temple takes on a different character covered in vines and reclaimed by nature, etc. I think there could've been more variety in protagonists for a tale that spans the ages - out of twelve characters, we have a grand total of three who aren't white and two who aren't male. I suppose the scenarios they envisioned limited the protagonist demographics somewhat, but come on, throw us a bone, here. (Also: projectile weapons are hilariously bad, as you need to target weak points to fight the big monsters effectively and the guns, for some counterintuitive reason, just aren't good at that. You do have a satisfying range of melee weapons, though, all of which handle suitably differently.)

Favorite chapter: probably Edward's; I thought the game's R'lyeh was effectively foreign and humblingly huge yet boasted a suitably strange beauty, and there was a good assortment of stuff to do. Peter's never got a chance, really, because my game stopped letting me save for some reason a quarter of the way through the chapter, which was particularly frustrating for such a combat-heavy level. I gather this was a glitch but am not sure.

The end fight was great. I'm a sucker for those FFIV-esque "fallen allies come back to lend you their power" endings.

Final time was a bit over 14 hours, which I gather is a couple hours over the average. Overall, it finished better than it started, and I can't get on the "all-time classic" or even "recommended" train, but it does have more meat on its bones than it initially let on.
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OK, so how does Mystic Ark play? Well, like it really wants to be an adventure game but is afraid it'll disappoint its RPG parents. I have a review here that hits the high notes, but what are LiveJournals for if not to blather past all point or reason.

Let's break this down Ye Olde GameFAQs Way:

Gameplay: There're actually two parts here. See, as mentioned, Ark doesn't really want to be an RPG. Its designers are much more invested in adventure-game mechanics - there're a lot of screens where you have to Inspect various fixtures in the environment and manipulate them or use inventory items to progress the plot, that sort of thing. It's clear that the adventure-game portion of the proceedings has the programmers' hearts - the close-ups of the items that you have to Inspect get most of the graphical attention, and the designers are constantly stopping your progress in towns and whatnot to have you solve a chess puzzle or whatever, whereas the RPG elements of the game, as we shall see, are kind of lazy and half-developed. (Indeed, I understand the sequel, Maboroshi Gekijou for the Playstation, is nearly a full-blooded adventure game.)

Now, on the one hand, it's refreshing to be able to progress the game's plot in a manner other than beating some enemy's head in. On the other hand - can't you think of a better reason to stop the plot than for a goddamn chess puzzle? The brainteasers are rarely original - mostly off-the-shelf slide puzzles and chess problems and Lights Out.

Oh, yeah, Lights Out. We have to talk about this. Upon playing Ark shortly after my 999 run, I have to wonder: is this type of puzzle far more popular and familiar in Japan than it is in the U.S.? Because it reamins unintuitive as hell to me. I had GAMES magazine glued to my hand starting midway through elementary school, and yet whatever 12-dimensional spatial skills that are required to formulate a strategy in this game are far beyond my ken, so I'm forced to resort just to flipping tiles randomly, which makes for Not Fun Times. Ark's puzzles seem at once too formulaic and too reliant on what the GAMES set would call "crosswordese" - they require the player bring certain obscure knowledge to the table (how to solve chess problems, how to fiddle with slide puzzles, how to wire transdimensional hyperdrives) rather than truly challenging one's critical-thinking faculties.

Anyhow, so the puzzles proper are uninspired. There're also, though, a good number of bits where you have to talk to NPCs to recruit their help or relay messages upon encountering a certain obstacle, also as in adventure games - but these don't work either, as the designers haven't taken into account how an RPG overworld works; it's far more laborious and less fun to play several rounds of NPC Telephone when the participants are separated by a monster-infested overworld and a lengthy dungeon than when they're just separated by a couple easily-scrolled screens, as in a Sierra game. As a result, there is a hell of a lot of tedious backtracking through unchanged dungeons in Mystic Ark. I think the idea of getting Adventure Game in my RPG is intriguing and could work as a hybrid genre, but the former in Ark is just too ill-thought-out and bolted on to the proceedings without regard to game flow to work.

The RPG side, for its part, is rather lackluster, probably because the designers just didn't have their hearts in it. It's considerably easier than the U.S. version of Saga, for the most part - there are a few grindy sticking points and overpopulated monster parties, and you do have to start watching yourself a bit in the last third (the next-to-last dungeon of World 4 seems to be the turning point - yes, that is the start of the last third of the game due to the last worlds being a little shorter). Even when the difficulty escalates slightly, though, the fights are never really exciting; everything combatwise just seems so samey. A lot of this is due to lack of:

Character Diversity: You can choose your hero from Paladin or Paladin. The female Paladin has a better design than the male but is slightly more focused on magic, which sucks in this game. That's a comedown from Saga's roster, both on the weirdness front (previously, you could choose from demons, aliens, and robots) and on the gameplay front (learning to main a black mage or mook monster posed more intrigue than the usual play-a-knight scenario).

You can eventually use the Arks to bring seven of your fellow Figurines back to life as party members, and they are a bit more diverse: grappler, ninja, ogre, Lux. You can also swap them out of your three-member party on the fly between battles as long as you're carrying their figurines, which is good. Your compatriots are unbalanced, though - black magic is nerfed, you can rely on items for healing for 2/3 of the game, and as for the physical attackers, there's most of the time no reason to use anyone but Lux and his sky-high offense and defense and his cheap, reliable specials. The last third of the game evens the characters out a bit, lets the attackers other than Lux come into their own somewhat and actually gives you reason to, you know, use some of your other PCs and play around with your party. Without useful magic, enemy diversity, challenge, or a flexible cast, though, much of the game is a dull row to hoe.

Also: none of your companions talk at all. The PCs on Saga all joined, deserted, spurned, and confronted you with character-specific dialogue. This is kind of a trend in the game: instead of refining its predecessor's good points and dispensing with its rough spots, Ark just unlearns everything from its predecessor.

Setting: OK, let's talk about something that's well-done for a change. Part of Mystic Ark's big conceit is that you're hopping interdimensionally from world to world, and the game, to its greatest credit, is determined to break free from the typical RPG ice world-fire world-martial arts town-holy city itinerary. None of the dimensions to which you travel start from stock types or cliche. One world, for example, is modeled after the nursery rhyme "Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater," with the opening village's population facing a crisis with the rotting of their home watermelon; later on, your gourd-dwellers are beset by hordes of hungry beetles. Discovering the premise of each world is one of the game's few great pleasures, so I won't spoil the concepts by listing them here, but I will say this: even if the world ideas don't always end up somewhere coherent (and even if you do overstay your visit), there is without fail (well, save for one world) a true spark of originality in their concepts. I wish more games had followed its example in this respect.

Overall Story: The framing story ain't that hot, though. The premise: a mysterious force is abducting the denizens of various worlds, turning them into statuelike "Figurines" and imprisoning them in a deathly silent transdimensional shrine. As the first captive to break NRFB status, your hero must hop from realm to realm to restore the kidnapped citizens and unravel the mystery of the abductions. Sounds strange if not really intriguing, but there's no payoff. The villain and his/her/its motivations and plan couldn't get more generic. The resolution aims high (and, as elaborated upon in the previous post, has a few touching aspects)but needed to be better integrated into the main narrative to be successful. It's just flat all around.

Graphics: I'm disappointed they jettisoned the more austere 7th Saga town & sprite style in favor of chibis. There're many games that I love with chibis, but Saga's style was a nice, mostly well-realized break, and Ark's chibis are serviceable but kind of undistinguished. Now, battle fares a bit better; the backgrounds are competent-to-good and the sprites are largish and, in many cases, well-drawn. The animation, though, recalls that of Phantasy Star III. Enemies are big but usually have only 2-3 frames of poorly-shaded animation. (Even when Ark swipes Saga's sprites - which it does, very frequently - the animation will be pathetically pared down.) The spells fare particularly badly, mostly a bunch of non-scaled, primary-colored polygons. An ice spell looks and moves like a stumpy blob of Jell-O; Lux's SUPER GIGA STRIKE full-body rocket mega attack is just his static sprite cut out and slid across the screen diagonally. A lot of corners were cut here.

Where the game really shines is in the larger illustrations that accompany examining something in the environment which you have to manipulate or use inventory on. An animated music box, a model ship, an oil painting; on these old-fashioned sepia-toned illustrations was obviously lavished great attention, and they're perhaps the most charming sights in the game. (There're also a few well-rendered cutscenes in world 5 that're a successful break from the game's normal presentation.)

Sound: I said in the review that it sucks and I stand by that, but I'll admit that listening to arranged versions of the tracks gave me a bit of "what am I, nuts?" doubt. Here's the problem, I think: the composer seems, to a degree, to be composing for the arranged version played with full-fledged instruments and not really thinking about how these tunes are going to translate to a SFAM sound board. There's a lot of muffled, mushmouth synth in-game, particularly in the battle themes - compare the original "Your Fighting Eyes Are Always Beautiful" to its arranged version; the clear, hard electric guitar that drives the latter is considerably defanged in the former, and the chiptune as a result is directionless and uncompelling. (Another example: battle theme 2 in-game vs. arranged. The arranged isn't great, but the lead instruments make far more sense as real trumpets than whatever that synth is.)

Another possible contributing factor is that the worst tunes are the ones you hear most often - the shrine hub theme, whose instrumentation is Grand Guignol-unpleasant to listen to; the faintly-sleazy-in-a-Duplo-sort-of-milieu main town theme; the aimless-in-chiptune battle tracks. A third is that the music doesn't really track well with what's going on onscreen, be it either because it's just not suited to the surroundings (shouldn't the mountain of candy have its own distinct theme song instead of the generic creepy dungeon theme?) or, most often, because the happenings onscreen don't measure up to any sort of quality soundtrack. There're a couple tracks against which I can imagine happening GRAND DRAMA, but Mystic Ark usually offers up dinky sprites running around chittering. The graphical and script parts of the presentation of this game might be such a vortex of suck that little good can escape from it.

Sound effects are, oddly, OK in the overworld (I particularly liked the stepping-on-sand effect on the hub island) but almost Atarilike in battle.

The Sixth World: is awesome. I don't want to spoil its well-earned surprise, but in brief, the game is trying to do another genre within the constraints of an RPG framework (one that wasn't even mature when Ark was released) and doing it splendidly. Every element that was lackluster previous steps up to the plate here, and it's the only bar-none excellent stretch of the game. I'm glad I made a separate save just before I went in so I can experience it multiple times.

Misc. things done poorly: The enemy radar is back from Saga, though it's just not as useful here - avoiding enemy encounters isn't as crucial to your survival, and the long, thin-and-twisty pathways don't afford as many opportunities for escape. Ark use is also downgraded - instead of using them for free but moderate status buffs or recoveries in battle, you "infuse" them into your equipment to get a moderate status boost. It's a little useful (particularly the ones that add lightning/fire kicks to your weapons) but doesn't add much tactical value to gameplay, and you have to fidget too much to find out exactly what they do and in what they can be used, as the game won't tell you.

Also, the first world, an unending marathon of backtracking concerning two bands of warring cartoon cat pirates, is fucking horrible - one of the worst first impressions I have ever had from a game.

Misc. things done well: There's a dungeon where you're intermittently blown back by a strong wind from the north and you have to use the pauses between gales to find features of the landscape closer and closer to your goal that can catch you when the winds begin again. Another where your path is obscured by treetops instead of dungeon wall and you have to partially feel your way through works organically. There's a neat little interlude where you have to play hide-and-seek that's challenging and fun - an example of a successful puzzle interlude. Better, too, are the puzzles on the Myst-like hub island.

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Anyhow, to sum up: Good ideas, poor execution, blander than it really has the right to be. The folks who love Mystic Ark really love it, though, so give it a try if you're interested - heck, maybe you'll become one of the converted. For me, though, the game was largely a big trial of faith and patience.

To close this out on a high note, let's all appreciate the work of image illustrator Akihiro Yamada, who did some nice work for Mystic Ark and its sequel but who might be better known in gaming circles for his cover for Dracula X. (I also learned that he did work for Mermanoid, a sea-themed PS1 RPG which has long intrigued me.)
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Overdue, I know. I'm going to be going back and forth between the cuts from spoiler talk to vague non-spoiler talk.

As I said in the music post, at its best, 999 is tense and gripping as hell. I don't have a copy of the original Japanese release, so I don't know if this is a faithful translation of a great original script or if Aksys just made shit up, but it's great shit they made up if they did. The music is excellent, tense and creepy and drawing just the right amount of attention to itself, and the character art is expressive and charming, liberally peppered with little evocative gestures like Lotus's dismissive hand flip or Clover's kiddish, pigtail-bouncing jumps for joy. The characters themselves are the game's big draw, illustrated with anime-inspired vibrance but grounded in real human fragility: Clover's a genki high-school girl, but she has spine and will, deeply loves her brother, and manifests the helpless worry of a genuine child (I don't mean that as a perjorative) when he seems to be in peril. Seven has heart and is direct but is also smart and shrewd, and he really likes people. Lotus has biting sarcasm and a refreshing streak of mercenary, self-serving cowardice but also a brain, curiosity, and a lady's upbringing. They have a lot of dimension for a bunch of would-be corpses in a horror title.

I also liked how the writers went out of their way to include stupid but subtly illustrative lines that served no big purpose but to provide a light, idle moment:

"I just can't bring myself to like the number 4. ...'Cause it's a half-ass number. Not the best or the worst. ...(9) is a way better number. So what if it's last place, right? Least it's not some lameass middle number."

"-- [picking up doll's foot] This is the left foot of the mannequin.
--[girl, earnestly] Do you think I'm better?
--Uh...what?
--Do you think my legs are skinnier?"

The game is also excellent at not tipping its hand in regards to the identities of its villains; the reveals are all the more shocking and chilling because their identities are a true but well-earned and satisfying-plotted surprise. Few moments in horror games are as chilling as the bit in the Safe ending when ( spoiler )

...But that excellence lasts only up to a point, and here's my first big gripe with the game: The final revelation as to Zero's identity was a bridge too far. When ( spoiler )

My other giant problem is with the gameplay, and this is where I pick up my narrative from my previous posts.

( Yeah, I know the 'spoiler' thing is getting tiresome )

That's right: if you reach the good ending path in 999 too early, you'll be told by the story that you're not ready to see what happens and get a premature game over. You'll then be told you need to start over and take a separate route through the game, then come back once you've finished that path and redo the right route before you'll be allowed to see the ending you rightfully earned.

Imagine if FF4 had done this. You're at the final boss, your party's down and out, when, suddenly, all your past allies - Yang, the twins, even Tellah - come to you in spirit form and give you the energy and hope needed to fight on. The Prologue - the Final Fantasy song - is playing, the battle background is swept up in some kinda starfield-parallax that's awe-inspiring in 1992, Golbez cries "Zeromus! It's the end!", or whatever it is he says in the actually-coherent scripts, and--

--Wait, did you get the Pink Tail? You did get Adamant Armor for every member of your party, didn't you? No? What?! Oh, my! Back to the beginning for you!

Now, would you play through Baron and Mist and the Watery Pass and Damcyan and Mt. Hobs and Fabul and Mysidia and Mt. Ordeals and etc. etc. etc. again to see the ending? Yeah, probably. But a game gets only one chance to seize a great moment; it's never quite the same in reruns. What's particularly frustrating in 999 is that the party actually has all it needs to get past the roadblock, which makes the sudden stop in retrospect a particularly blatant fuck-you.

Only a couple of the text-based choices matter, and only if you're on the path for the best ending; your door choices are the big decider, and they're made largely blind, or are at least illogical enough to be blind. For the first branch: ( yep ) There's a path if you squint and share the programmers' odd priorities, but the game nearly guarantees that you're gonna have to power through it a few times to figure out what's going on.

Part of the appeal of videogames is that they're an "improved" version of real life. Contrary to our world, there is a plot, your actions have meaning, and you do have a fighting chance of figuring out your current predicament or at least reaching some sort of resolution, even if the game is doing something like bringing your objective into question (No More Heroes, Shadow of the Colossus). In 999, though, I did everything right, and I still had no chance. I ultimately felt like my choices weren't relevant, which is a problem for a visual novel; making choices in a story is kind of the genre's whole thing.

(It's interesting to compare this to my Neo Angelique playthrough, where my choices didn't really matter, or at least had considerable room for error and exploration, until without warning they did very much so and one little slip-up in a very short window - a slip-up of whose nature I'm to this day not even sure - blew my whole game. The genre seems to waver between ending requirements that're so strict they dampen exploration and so obtuse that they're unfathomable - both of which, I suppose, encourage hintbook/artbook sales, a favorable outcome for the manufacturer. The genre's reliance on multiple playthroughs also enables these bad habits; the writers don't feel compelled to provide a satisfying play experience the first time through. I've never seen a genre so committed to playing against its strengths.)

A smaller but significant side problem I had with the denouement: ( Yeah, that's the end of the non-spoiler info. Overall, I'm glad I played the title; I just wish the visual novel genre would patch these gaping holes in execution. )
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