While trying to reach 100% completion of the Normal Mode missions in For Answer, I have completely hit a wall in my attempts to actually complete mission 42, what I think is the final mission of the last plot branch of the game. There are so many things I could say about how poorly this mission is designed, how this last plot branch is itself horrible, and how basically unfun it is to get stuck in a game designed to be played through multiple times without any choice but to proceed forward through an impossible challenge, even if there are still things undone on other plot branches, but doing so would probably only make me more angry, so I won't. Instead, I have devoted myself to playing through the game's missions on Hard Mode using the Free Play option (which is a nice option they made available), and I have been pretty happy with the experience.
I will start off by echoing the sentiments my brother expressed in his recent article: it is much better for the higher difficulty levels of a game to provide new challenges, rather than to be a rehash of the normal difficulty level. This is especially true for any game in which you have to unlock higher difficulty levels and the player is expected to play through the game multiple times, such as the Devil May Cry series or Armored Core For Answer. Trying to change the difficulty by altering the math that controls damage values and similar properties is often a bad idea, simply because it can easily imbalance some of the game, often making things more frustrating for the player rather than adding to the feelings of excitement and sense of overcoming impossible odds that are incredibly important for higher difficulty settings. However, adding new challenges to overcome on top of the old ones does add to that sense, and also keeps things fresh. The Hard Mode missions of Armored Core For Answer take the approach of adding new challenges rather than altering the old ones, and it has rekindled my interest in playing through the many missions I have cleared several times already.
One thing I particularly like about the alterations made to the For Answer Hard Mode missions is that they are unpredictable and logical at the same time. In some missions the enemy is reinforced with additional troops, and in others you simply don't get the reinforcements that you typically do. In some missions they add new hazardous environmental conditions, and in others you have to deal with new, severe technical issues with equipment vital to the given mission. The game actually tries to create a sense that the Normal mission is the version in which things go off without a hitch, and the Hard mission is where unforeseeable problems interfere with the mission parameters (listening to your operator get much more angry with the people hiring you to do these missions and even explode into short tirades about poor intel really changes the mood of the missions, and can be pretty funny, too). The fact that Hard Mode makes you fight even more Arm Forts and NEXTs than Normal Mode is another nice touch, since those kinds of enemies are the most imposing and fun to fight type of enemy in the game.
Still, I wish there was a bit more consistency in how big of a change was made in the jump in difficulty. For some missions, the change is hardly noticeable, such as the addition of a few Normals to a NEXT battle or the removal of some reinforcements that didn't help much anyways. This goes as far as few missions in which I am not even sure what they changed (they probably just added some additional enemies). In other cases, the change completely alters the nature of the mission, such as the inclusion of a pair of NEXTs into a mission that was just a straight-up battle against MTs and Normals. The last example is practically the equivalent of adding a totally new mission into the game, that happens to occur when you are already depleted from a protracted battle. I would be a bit happier if more of the missions took the middle road and avoided either extreme. Adding on a complication that matches the existing challenge, like the sudden arrival of a third NEXT into what is normally a battle against two NEXTs, works much better in my opinion.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Dragon Quest 4: Equipment and Nostalgia
When I first walked into an equipment shop in Dragon Quest IV: CHapters of the Chosen for the DS, I was greeted by a very familiar sight: a cypress stick, an oaken club, and a copper sword were for sale, along with wayfarer's clothes, leather armor, and a leather shield. For me, that simple list of weapons and armor is full of nostalgia that dates back to my earliest memories of playing console RPGs. The fact that the Dragon Quest series keeps even the list of low-level equipment more or less constant throughout is a pretty good example of how the series utilizes consistency in order to cultivate nostalgia. This is a sound strategy, since nostalgia can be a very powerful thing, since it is what drives people to become dedicated, long-term fans for a series.
The first console RPG I ever played was the original Dragon Quest, renamed Dragon Warrior in the US. By far, my strongest memory of the game is the decision the player faces at the very beginning of the game: to spend his meager amount of starting cash to buy an oaken club and a set of wayfarer's clothes, or to focus on defense and buy the cypress stick and a suit of leather armor. Since I have never put a whole lot of time into the game, I never really made it much further past that point. As a result, that early experience of shopping ended up being particularly memorable, especially since I repeated it several times to experiment with different starting equipment set-ups.
The next time I played a Dragon Quest game, it was Dragon Quest VIII, Journey of the Cursed King, for the PS2. Farebury, the very first town, had the same stick, club, copper sword, and leather armor that was available in the first shop in the original Dragon Quest. Based on some quick research on GameFAQs, it seems that this near-exact list of early equipment is available early on in pretty much every installment of the series. Even when I was playing Dragon Quest VIII, seeing a copper sword immediately brought my childhood memories of struggling to save up enough money to buy one in the original Dragon Warrior. I experience the exact same feelings of nostalgia when I started Dragon Quest IV last week. All it took was that little bit of familiarity to get me really excited about playing the game. The nostalgia value has been enhanced by the use of the same graphical representations for these pieces of equipment in both DQ IV and DQ VIII.
In the greater scheme of things, something like the names of early pieces of equipment is pretty minor. Yet, I would argue that nostalgia is built upon the familiarity of what would otherwise be inconsequential details. For that reason, I think maintaining consistency in things like monster choice, equipment choice, and so forth between different iterations of the same series is important. These things are what build recognition, familiarity, and nostalgia among fans. I believe the Dragon Quest series is a text-book example of all of this done right.
The first console RPG I ever played was the original Dragon Quest, renamed Dragon Warrior in the US. By far, my strongest memory of the game is the decision the player faces at the very beginning of the game: to spend his meager amount of starting cash to buy an oaken club and a set of wayfarer's clothes, or to focus on defense and buy the cypress stick and a suit of leather armor. Since I have never put a whole lot of time into the game, I never really made it much further past that point. As a result, that early experience of shopping ended up being particularly memorable, especially since I repeated it several times to experiment with different starting equipment set-ups.
The next time I played a Dragon Quest game, it was Dragon Quest VIII, Journey of the Cursed King, for the PS2. Farebury, the very first town, had the same stick, club, copper sword, and leather armor that was available in the first shop in the original Dragon Quest. Based on some quick research on GameFAQs, it seems that this near-exact list of early equipment is available early on in pretty much every installment of the series. Even when I was playing Dragon Quest VIII, seeing a copper sword immediately brought my childhood memories of struggling to save up enough money to buy one in the original Dragon Warrior. I experience the exact same feelings of nostalgia when I started Dragon Quest IV last week. All it took was that little bit of familiarity to get me really excited about playing the game. The nostalgia value has been enhanced by the use of the same graphical representations for these pieces of equipment in both DQ IV and DQ VIII.
In the greater scheme of things, something like the names of early pieces of equipment is pretty minor. Yet, I would argue that nostalgia is built upon the familiarity of what would otherwise be inconsequential details. For that reason, I think maintaining consistency in things like monster choice, equipment choice, and so forth between different iterations of the same series is important. These things are what build recognition, familiarity, and nostalgia among fans. I believe the Dragon Quest series is a text-book example of all of this done right.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Persona 4: The New March of Time
I am now quite a bit further into Persona 4, so it is about time I actually write about the basic flow of the game. Like its predecessor, Persona 4 is built around choosing how to manage your daily activities as time slowly moves forward. You choose when you dive into the dungeons of the game, but whether you choose to do so or not days will still slowly pass until events occur in the plot. However, rather than just using a direct copy of Persona 3's structure, Persona 4 implements the same idea in a very different manner.
The biggest change in Persona 4 is its much greater focus upon the dungeons you explore. In Persona 3, you go into Tartarus primarily to raise your level and gain the equipment you need for the event bosses, but the major events of the game and the battles against the event bosses are controlled by the date (the rise of the full moon), not how far you go into Tartarus. You don't even need to finish climbing the available areas of Tartarus before the next major event. In Persona 4, however, you must reach the end of every dungeon within the alloted time (before the fog sets in), since otherwise you fail your goal and get a Game Over. Instead of being something you do to prepare for inevitable battles that will happen regardless of what you do, going into the dungeons and defeating the boss in the dungeons' depths is your true goal in the game.
The changes made to the system are a big improvement, in my opinion. I once described Persona 3's Tartarus as a "Plot Desert", but because of Persona 4's changes the TV World dungeons are the stage for many of the most important events in the game. You must reach the end of every dungeon within a certain timeframe, so, unlike in Persona 3, the game designers know both when you are going into the dungeon and what characters are available. It also just feels more rewarding and natural to have the most difficult battle at the deepest level of the dungeon be an important story battle, rather than a meaningless battle against a generic foe. The structure of Persona 3 is ill-suited to putting a large number of important plot sequences in Tartarus, but a few slight changes to that structure reverses that flaw entirely.
Another important and beneficial consequence of the change is that it adds to the feeling that the main characters (and thus the player), are actively achieving something by doing what they do. Persona 3 is a great game, but the nature of the way the main characters fight their conflict is very passive. In that game, all you can do is just wait for the next full moon. Even if you complete your climb of Tartarus early, you must still wait for any plot events to happen. Once you fight and defeat the boss that emerges every full moon, the only thing left to you is to get ready for the next full moon, since the characters' only goal is the broad idea of "get rid of Tartarus and the Dark Hour" and every month's battle is only one more small step toward that goal. In Persona 4, though, your goals are almost always much more immediate, so you will either achieve your goal or fail to do so within a limited time-span after the goal appears. Because of this, there are periods of relative peace and tranquility between crisis periods, in which all of your goals are met and there is no new threat and dungeon coming up on the horizon. At the same time, the crisis periods are more focused upon a limited period of time, and the stakes seem higher, so they have a greater degree of tension. As such, the game fluctuates more greatly between periods of high tension (in which your goal is to reach the bottom of the newest dungeon as quickly as possible) and very low tension (in which you are free to pursue a number of optional objectives throughout the older dungeons at a relaxed pace). This helps the game a lot, I think.
Another important part of this change that I haven't touched on is the difference between the goal-posts used for measuring time in the game. Persona 3 is built around the lunar cycle, so every phase of the game lasts around 28 days, which is extremely predictable with no room for significant deviation. Persona 4 is built around the risk of "the fog coming in", which doesn't have a set and predictable cycle. This means that there is a widely variable amount of time that occur between crisis periods in the game, and once a crisis starts you can only really guess at how long you have before you run out of time. This improves the relaxed pace between crises, adds to the tension of a crises period, and, most importantly of all, gives the game designers a lot more flexibility regarding how the calendar is scheduled, which helps a lot regarding things like holiday schedules, unusual events, and exam weeks.
However, mentioning calendars is reminding me of how useful it was having one in Persona 3. The lack of one in Persona 4 is a bit annoying, even though I know it wouldn't be useful in determining how long I have left until the fog sets in. At least Persona 4 more than makes up for it by letting you roll back time if you can't achieve your goal, which prevents the nightmare scenario of being unable to progress any further, and thus having to start the entire game all over again, that is possible (if unlikely) in Persona 3.
The biggest change in Persona 4 is its much greater focus upon the dungeons you explore. In Persona 3, you go into Tartarus primarily to raise your level and gain the equipment you need for the event bosses, but the major events of the game and the battles against the event bosses are controlled by the date (the rise of the full moon), not how far you go into Tartarus. You don't even need to finish climbing the available areas of Tartarus before the next major event. In Persona 4, however, you must reach the end of every dungeon within the alloted time (before the fog sets in), since otherwise you fail your goal and get a Game Over. Instead of being something you do to prepare for inevitable battles that will happen regardless of what you do, going into the dungeons and defeating the boss in the dungeons' depths is your true goal in the game.
The changes made to the system are a big improvement, in my opinion. I once described Persona 3's Tartarus as a "Plot Desert", but because of Persona 4's changes the TV World dungeons are the stage for many of the most important events in the game. You must reach the end of every dungeon within a certain timeframe, so, unlike in Persona 3, the game designers know both when you are going into the dungeon and what characters are available. It also just feels more rewarding and natural to have the most difficult battle at the deepest level of the dungeon be an important story battle, rather than a meaningless battle against a generic foe. The structure of Persona 3 is ill-suited to putting a large number of important plot sequences in Tartarus, but a few slight changes to that structure reverses that flaw entirely.
Another important and beneficial consequence of the change is that it adds to the feeling that the main characters (and thus the player), are actively achieving something by doing what they do. Persona 3 is a great game, but the nature of the way the main characters fight their conflict is very passive. In that game, all you can do is just wait for the next full moon. Even if you complete your climb of Tartarus early, you must still wait for any plot events to happen. Once you fight and defeat the boss that emerges every full moon, the only thing left to you is to get ready for the next full moon, since the characters' only goal is the broad idea of "get rid of Tartarus and the Dark Hour" and every month's battle is only one more small step toward that goal. In Persona 4, though, your goals are almost always much more immediate, so you will either achieve your goal or fail to do so within a limited time-span after the goal appears. Because of this, there are periods of relative peace and tranquility between crisis periods, in which all of your goals are met and there is no new threat and dungeon coming up on the horizon. At the same time, the crisis periods are more focused upon a limited period of time, and the stakes seem higher, so they have a greater degree of tension. As such, the game fluctuates more greatly between periods of high tension (in which your goal is to reach the bottom of the newest dungeon as quickly as possible) and very low tension (in which you are free to pursue a number of optional objectives throughout the older dungeons at a relaxed pace). This helps the game a lot, I think.
Another important part of this change that I haven't touched on is the difference between the goal-posts used for measuring time in the game. Persona 3 is built around the lunar cycle, so every phase of the game lasts around 28 days, which is extremely predictable with no room for significant deviation. Persona 4 is built around the risk of "the fog coming in", which doesn't have a set and predictable cycle. This means that there is a widely variable amount of time that occur between crisis periods in the game, and once a crisis starts you can only really guess at how long you have before you run out of time. This improves the relaxed pace between crises, adds to the tension of a crises period, and, most importantly of all, gives the game designers a lot more flexibility regarding how the calendar is scheduled, which helps a lot regarding things like holiday schedules, unusual events, and exam weeks.
However, mentioning calendars is reminding me of how useful it was having one in Persona 3. The lack of one in Persona 4 is a bit annoying, even though I know it wouldn't be useful in determining how long I have left until the fog sets in. At least Persona 4 more than makes up for it by letting you roll back time if you can't achieve your goal, which prevents the nightmare scenario of being unable to progress any further, and thus having to start the entire game all over again, that is possible (if unlikely) in Persona 3.
Devil May Cry 4: Son of Sparda difficulty
A couple days ago, I started the Son of Sparda difficulty mode in Devil May Cry 4. I haven't played it for very long, but it has already surprised me. Relatively early in Mission 2, I encountered a group of Assaults, a fairly vicious enemy that was only introduced in Mission 8 on Devil Hunter (Normal) mode. In Mission 3, I encountered a pack of Basilisks, which was the very last regular enemy to be introduced in Devil Hunter mode. As a result, the early missions have felt very different than they did on my first go through of the game. I think this is a great idea, since it has given me fresh and new challenges that I haven't seen before in the game. It is a much better method of differentiating difficulty levels than just tweaking the enemies' AI or stats.
The original Devil May Cry did something similar. If you go through the game on Easy Automatic mode (like I first did), several of the strongest types of regular enemy, including Frosts and Fetishes, do not appear at all. Since I didn't encounter them on my first go-through of Devil May Cry, I was pretty surprised to encounter brand new enemies on Normal mode. I think it was a pretty interesting idea. It gave someone who already beat the game once something to look forward to on a second go-through. In a series like Devil May Cry, where the player is expected to defeat lower difficulty modes before moving on to the higher ones, keeping the experience new is important. Otherwise, the game can get frustrating and dull when moving on to higher difficulty modes.
Goldeneye for the N64 did something kinda similar: it added new mission objectives on higher difficulty settings. For example, on the lowest difficulty setting, the player can clear a certain mission just by fighting his way through to an exit point. On a higher difficulty setting, the player is required to steal some files and destroy some alarms before making his way to the exit point. It made missions play out in a completely different manner, and put the player through more demanding situations.
I vastly prefer this kind of approach to creating different difficulty settings. Not only does it make playing the same game feel different depending on what difficulty the game is set to, it works as a very obvious indicator that the player has moved on to a genuinely more difficult challenge. If anything, I would have liked to have seen the game developers for Devil May Cry 4 hold some enemies or bosses in reserve until Son of Sparda mode.
As a side note, I like the naming scheme for the Devil May Cry 4 difficulty modes. They are just fun.
The original Devil May Cry did something similar. If you go through the game on Easy Automatic mode (like I first did), several of the strongest types of regular enemy, including Frosts and Fetishes, do not appear at all. Since I didn't encounter them on my first go-through of Devil May Cry, I was pretty surprised to encounter brand new enemies on Normal mode. I think it was a pretty interesting idea. It gave someone who already beat the game once something to look forward to on a second go-through. In a series like Devil May Cry, where the player is expected to defeat lower difficulty modes before moving on to the higher ones, keeping the experience new is important. Otherwise, the game can get frustrating and dull when moving on to higher difficulty modes.
Goldeneye for the N64 did something kinda similar: it added new mission objectives on higher difficulty settings. For example, on the lowest difficulty setting, the player can clear a certain mission just by fighting his way through to an exit point. On a higher difficulty setting, the player is required to steal some files and destroy some alarms before making his way to the exit point. It made missions play out in a completely different manner, and put the player through more demanding situations.
I vastly prefer this kind of approach to creating different difficulty settings. Not only does it make playing the same game feel different depending on what difficulty the game is set to, it works as a very obvious indicator that the player has moved on to a genuinely more difficult challenge. If anything, I would have liked to have seen the game developers for Devil May Cry 4 hold some enemies or bosses in reserve until Son of Sparda mode.
As a side note, I like the naming scheme for the Devil May Cry 4 difficulty modes. They are just fun.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Lost Odyssey: Mortals and Immortals
After clearing Grandia last week, the game that I have been playing the most of has been Lost Odyssey for the XBox 360. Honestly, it feels more like a Final Fantasy game than Final Fantasy XII does, so I have been enjoying it quite a bit. The main premise of the game is that the main character, like several other major characters, is an immortal who has lived unchanging for one thousand years. However, while Lost Odyssey has plenty of game mechanics in place to help tell the story of immortal characters traversing the ages and a strong base concept, it doesn't seem to really take advantage of what it has in place.
Lost Odyssey splits all party members into two groups: immortals and mortals, and uses different mechanics to determine what skills and abilities they have. Mortals are pretty straight-forward: they gain new spell levels, skills, and passive abilities as part of leveling up. For example, Cooke gains White Magic spells and abilities to augment her healing magic as she levels up. On the other hand, Immortals acquire Skills through two methods: learning a skill that a Mortal knows by fighting alongside that Mortal, and permanently learning a Skill from an equipped accessory. Furthermore, Immortals acquire more Skill Slots (and thus the ability to equip more learned Skills) by using items called Slot Seeds. As a result, Immortals tend to be much more flexible than Mortals, with greater access to passive abilities and complex combinations of abilities. Between the Immortals' added versatility and potential power over Mortal characters and the strong story emphasis on them, the Immortal characters tend to stand out as main characters over the Mortals. In many ways, the game system seems perfectly suited to telling a multi-generational story, where you have a fixed number of Immortal characters in the party at all times, and a large cast of Mortal characters who enter and leave the party as the story progresses and the years flow by. Unfortunately, that is not what the game designers opted to do.
Instead of telling a story that crosses the ages, Lost Odyssey has so far played out like a fairly ordinary RPG. Despite the fact that Kaim Argonar and the other Immortals have a thousand years of history behind them, most of the major plot points seem to have taken place within the last thirty or so years of the game. At the same time, most of the major character development for the Immortals took place in the unseen past. Most of this backstory is conveyed to the player through the "Thousand Years of Dreams", a collection of short stories written in the first person that can be viewed whenever the party rests at an inn. However, almost all of the dreams that I have viewed are stories more focused on various people Kaim has met across his journeys, instead of on Kaim's own character development. So, Lost Odyssey has so far felt like a game with a typical RPG plot and limited character development for the central characters. I am hoping this will change as the game goes.
I think a multigenerational story would have worked much better. That way, the player could watch the character development of the Immortals first hand, as opposed to learning about it after the fact. The game's story as a whole would have stood out much more as well. The real shame is that the game system seems so perfectly suited for such a story that it feels like wasted potential.
Lost Odyssey splits all party members into two groups: immortals and mortals, and uses different mechanics to determine what skills and abilities they have. Mortals are pretty straight-forward: they gain new spell levels, skills, and passive abilities as part of leveling up. For example, Cooke gains White Magic spells and abilities to augment her healing magic as she levels up. On the other hand, Immortals acquire Skills through two methods: learning a skill that a Mortal knows by fighting alongside that Mortal, and permanently learning a Skill from an equipped accessory. Furthermore, Immortals acquire more Skill Slots (and thus the ability to equip more learned Skills) by using items called Slot Seeds. As a result, Immortals tend to be much more flexible than Mortals, with greater access to passive abilities and complex combinations of abilities. Between the Immortals' added versatility and potential power over Mortal characters and the strong story emphasis on them, the Immortal characters tend to stand out as main characters over the Mortals. In many ways, the game system seems perfectly suited to telling a multi-generational story, where you have a fixed number of Immortal characters in the party at all times, and a large cast of Mortal characters who enter and leave the party as the story progresses and the years flow by. Unfortunately, that is not what the game designers opted to do.
Instead of telling a story that crosses the ages, Lost Odyssey has so far played out like a fairly ordinary RPG. Despite the fact that Kaim Argonar and the other Immortals have a thousand years of history behind them, most of the major plot points seem to have taken place within the last thirty or so years of the game. At the same time, most of the major character development for the Immortals took place in the unseen past. Most of this backstory is conveyed to the player through the "Thousand Years of Dreams", a collection of short stories written in the first person that can be viewed whenever the party rests at an inn. However, almost all of the dreams that I have viewed are stories more focused on various people Kaim has met across his journeys, instead of on Kaim's own character development. So, Lost Odyssey has so far felt like a game with a typical RPG plot and limited character development for the central characters. I am hoping this will change as the game goes.
I think a multigenerational story would have worked much better. That way, the player could watch the character development of the Immortals first hand, as opposed to learning about it after the fact. The game's story as a whole would have stood out much more as well. The real shame is that the game system seems so perfectly suited for such a story that it feels like wasted potential.
Persona 4: Down, Dizzy, and All Out
Well, here I am, writing about a Persona game again. Persona 3 was easily my favorite thing to write about last year, so this was probably inevitable. Actually, I think I may be addicted to Persona 4 already. In many ways, it even manages to surpass its predecessor, which already stood as one of my favorite RPGs of all time. Persona 3 and Persona 4 are extremely similar games regarding their game structures, battle systems, and such, but their similarities only highlights the large number of little improvements made in the newer game.
One such improvement is the change to the way the Down condition works. I really liked the One More/Down/All-Out Attack system in Persona 3, so I was surprised and disappointed when I read in the manual that they actually changed it for Persona 4, but when I actually played the game I was impressed to see how well the change works. You see, in Persona 3, whenever you hit an enemy with either a critical hit or an element that enemy is vulnerable to, that enemy is knocked down and the character who made the attack can take another action. An enemy who is knocked down wastes a turn getting back to their feet (unless they get attacked, which means they stand up), and if all enemies are knocked down you can launch a powerful All-Out Attack, which does a lot of damage to all foes but also returns all enemies to their feet. This creates a great trade-off between relying on All-Out Attacks for damage and knocking enemies down in order to prevent them from attacking, and made targeting enemy weaknesses a very important strategy.
Persona 4 keeps that system, but changes it in three very important ways. The first is that knocking an enemy down no longer forces that enemy to waste a turn getting up, the second is that hitting an enemy who is already down doesn't cause them to get back up, and the third is that you can hit an enemy who has been knocked down in order to trigger the dizzy condition, which causes the enemy to lose a turn and remain in the vulnerable downed state until the start of the turn after the lost one. All-Out Attacks still returns all enemies to their feet, though. The reason I first thought that this new system was worse was because I didn't know about the second change, but with that change it vastly improves the choice to not make an All-Out Attack.
With the Persona 3 system, you pretty much have to hold back on attacking downed enemies and only attack standing enemies with their elemental weakness if you want to use the down condition to prevent enemies from attacking, but by doing so you can totally shut down their ability to attack. In the Persona 4 system, you can only prevent every other attack (because the Dizzy condition only ends at the beginning of a character's turn), but you can attack freely while the enemy is down and dizzy (and can deal a lot of extra damage that way). The value of All-Out Attacks is the same in either game, but now the alternative is a lot more fun. After all, it always more fun to go wild and attack rather than to sit back and wait for the enemy to get back up. At the same time, it adds a bit to the challenge because it is impossible to completely shut down an enemy just by using elemental attacks. It also adds some extra flexibility to enemy and boss design, because a boss can be allowed to be knocked down without fear of it being totally crippled, which means it is not as problematic to give bosses elemental weaknesses. The fact that down and dizzy are separate conditions, so an enemy may be susceptible to being downed but not dizzied, only adds to the flexibility.
I also have to mention that this change is also an improvement when you consider how it changes the way allies are affected by critical hits and hits against their weaknesses. In Persona 3, getting knocked down by an enemy is one of the most annoying situations you run across frequently. It means that either the character lost their turn, or you have an ally waste a turn in order to get rid of a condition that only makes you lose one turn. The skill that clears the down condition, Re Patra, is a waste of a valuable skill slot in that game. In Persona 4, however, merely getting knocked down is not a problem at all, since it won't cause an ally to lose a turn, but getting knocked dizzy causes an ally to both lose a turn and be vulnerable to attack for a period of time, making it worse than the old knocked down condition. As such, a skill like Re Patra isn't really needed to restore the down condition, but might actually be worth using to help a dizzy ally. Far more importantly, unless an enemy is particularly aggressive in attacking a downed ally, allies losing turns is a rarer occurrence in Persona 4 than in Persona 3, which helps reduce the chance that a single enemy attack can damage the team beyond their ability to recover and thus lead to a Game Over. This seems like a pretty good design move to me.
As a final side note, I have to say that I am happy that they changed it so you can get a One More attack even if you hit a weakness with an all-enemy attack. It makes enemies that use such attacks a bit more dangerous, but it also avoids a number of frustrating situations and slight ability imbalances that plagued Persona 3. It is amazing how much these minor changes can affect the game.
One such improvement is the change to the way the Down condition works. I really liked the One More/Down/All-Out Attack system in Persona 3, so I was surprised and disappointed when I read in the manual that they actually changed it for Persona 4, but when I actually played the game I was impressed to see how well the change works. You see, in Persona 3, whenever you hit an enemy with either a critical hit or an element that enemy is vulnerable to, that enemy is knocked down and the character who made the attack can take another action. An enemy who is knocked down wastes a turn getting back to their feet (unless they get attacked, which means they stand up), and if all enemies are knocked down you can launch a powerful All-Out Attack, which does a lot of damage to all foes but also returns all enemies to their feet. This creates a great trade-off between relying on All-Out Attacks for damage and knocking enemies down in order to prevent them from attacking, and made targeting enemy weaknesses a very important strategy.
Persona 4 keeps that system, but changes it in three very important ways. The first is that knocking an enemy down no longer forces that enemy to waste a turn getting up, the second is that hitting an enemy who is already down doesn't cause them to get back up, and the third is that you can hit an enemy who has been knocked down in order to trigger the dizzy condition, which causes the enemy to lose a turn and remain in the vulnerable downed state until the start of the turn after the lost one. All-Out Attacks still returns all enemies to their feet, though. The reason I first thought that this new system was worse was because I didn't know about the second change, but with that change it vastly improves the choice to not make an All-Out Attack.
With the Persona 3 system, you pretty much have to hold back on attacking downed enemies and only attack standing enemies with their elemental weakness if you want to use the down condition to prevent enemies from attacking, but by doing so you can totally shut down their ability to attack. In the Persona 4 system, you can only prevent every other attack (because the Dizzy condition only ends at the beginning of a character's turn), but you can attack freely while the enemy is down and dizzy (and can deal a lot of extra damage that way). The value of All-Out Attacks is the same in either game, but now the alternative is a lot more fun. After all, it always more fun to go wild and attack rather than to sit back and wait for the enemy to get back up. At the same time, it adds a bit to the challenge because it is impossible to completely shut down an enemy just by using elemental attacks. It also adds some extra flexibility to enemy and boss design, because a boss can be allowed to be knocked down without fear of it being totally crippled, which means it is not as problematic to give bosses elemental weaknesses. The fact that down and dizzy are separate conditions, so an enemy may be susceptible to being downed but not dizzied, only adds to the flexibility.
I also have to mention that this change is also an improvement when you consider how it changes the way allies are affected by critical hits and hits against their weaknesses. In Persona 3, getting knocked down by an enemy is one of the most annoying situations you run across frequently. It means that either the character lost their turn, or you have an ally waste a turn in order to get rid of a condition that only makes you lose one turn. The skill that clears the down condition, Re Patra, is a waste of a valuable skill slot in that game. In Persona 4, however, merely getting knocked down is not a problem at all, since it won't cause an ally to lose a turn, but getting knocked dizzy causes an ally to both lose a turn and be vulnerable to attack for a period of time, making it worse than the old knocked down condition. As such, a skill like Re Patra isn't really needed to restore the down condition, but might actually be worth using to help a dizzy ally. Far more importantly, unless an enemy is particularly aggressive in attacking a downed ally, allies losing turns is a rarer occurrence in Persona 4 than in Persona 3, which helps reduce the chance that a single enemy attack can damage the team beyond their ability to recover and thus lead to a Game Over. This seems like a pretty good design move to me.
As a final side note, I have to say that I am happy that they changed it so you can get a One More attack even if you hit a weakness with an all-enemy attack. It makes enemies that use such attacks a bit more dangerous, but it also avoids a number of frustrating situations and slight ability imbalances that plagued Persona 3. It is amazing how much these minor changes can affect the game.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Grandia: Story
After more than a month or so, I finally finished the original Grandia early this week. It is a game that has a few issue and shows its age, but it is a game that certainly has some great moments. Sadly, most of the moments took place in the first half of the game. While the first half of Grandia was brimming with a unique charm, the second half of the game ended up reducing the plot into a recycled cliche. In many ways, Grandia would have been better off if the developers had tossed out the Gaia plot in favor of focusing the story more strongly on Justin as an adventurer and explorer.
In the first disc of the game, the plot is centered on a very simple concept: Justin's long and difficult journey to discover the truth of the mythical civilization of Angelou and the enigmatic Icarians who were depicted in its art; a journey that is inseparable from Justin's own growth and coming of age. From the outset of the game, the plot sets up these elements: in the very beginning, Justin is just a bratty and energetic kid who dreams of becoming a famous adventurer like his father and grandfather and is fascinated by the myths of the ancient Angelou civilization. When he stumbles upon a device left behind by Angelou in an old ruin that gives him a clue to the existence of the Angelounian city of Alent, he sets out on his journey. The structure of the game from there on does a lot to emphasize the "journey": the first disk is defined by a number of points in the story where Justin makes a crossing into a new land, leaving the old places he has visited behind forever. The most remarkable of these is where Justin and company climb the End of the World, a massive wall dividing a continent no one before had ever successfully crossed on foot.
In the first half of the game, most of the fun comes from this journey and the sense of being the first one to see these things and meet these strange tribes of people. For me, one of the most memorable events in the game is when Justin and Feena (Justin's love interest) are roped into agreeing to be the couple of honor for a festival, only to discover that they just agreed to be sacrificed to a dragon. Justin's dauntless personality drives the spirit of the game early on, since while he is constantly getting the party into trouble with his reckless abandon, he also spurs the other characters on to accomplish things they never felt possible before.
Sadly, the entire mood of the game changes drastically early in the second disk. Instead, the plot begins to revolve around the ancient monster Gaia, a creature that was only vaguely hinted at in two or three scenes in the first disk. Now then, Gaia does fulfill a role: it serves as an explanation for why the Angelou civilization was destroyed and is the big bad evil thing that the heroes have to kill to get the ending credits to roll. Unfortunately, that is all that Gaia ever really is, and it ends up dragging the rest of the game down with it. Apparently, the developers thought that they needed a powerful, world-destroying evil in order to have an appropriate final boss. So, they spent most of the second disk building up Gaia as a threat by showing off towns that have been destroyed by Gaia turning everything into stone.
However, the emphasis on Gaia and the plot-lines surrounding it comes at the expense of the spirit of the game itself. There are no more grand journeys into unknown lands in the second disk: the entire thing takes place in a single area that all of the locals are pretty familiar with. Character development suffers as a whole, since the usually talkative and interesting Feena falls into a quiet, depressed mood for most of the latter half of the game, and Justin himself goes from being the driving force behind the party to being someone who needs other people to constantly be telling him where to go and what to do. The point where it becomes absolutely clear that the plot of the game has become twisted is when a certain character asks Justin why he is going to Angelou. The player has three choices: "I don't know", "To find answers about the secrets of Angelou", and "To save the world"; "To save the world" is the only correct choice. When Justin and his friends finally reach the lost Angelounian city of Alent, what should have been the grand culmination of Justin's entire journey is nothing more than a brief stop-over where the heroes don't learn anything they didn't already know.
I don't think that a "save the world from destruction" plot necessarily adds anything to a game. Grandia would have been a lot better off if had focused on a the more personal story of Justin and his journey to uncover the secrets of Angelou and become a legendary adventurer.
In the first disc of the game, the plot is centered on a very simple concept: Justin's long and difficult journey to discover the truth of the mythical civilization of Angelou and the enigmatic Icarians who were depicted in its art; a journey that is inseparable from Justin's own growth and coming of age. From the outset of the game, the plot sets up these elements: in the very beginning, Justin is just a bratty and energetic kid who dreams of becoming a famous adventurer like his father and grandfather and is fascinated by the myths of the ancient Angelou civilization. When he stumbles upon a device left behind by Angelou in an old ruin that gives him a clue to the existence of the Angelounian city of Alent, he sets out on his journey. The structure of the game from there on does a lot to emphasize the "journey": the first disk is defined by a number of points in the story where Justin makes a crossing into a new land, leaving the old places he has visited behind forever. The most remarkable of these is where Justin and company climb the End of the World, a massive wall dividing a continent no one before had ever successfully crossed on foot.
In the first half of the game, most of the fun comes from this journey and the sense of being the first one to see these things and meet these strange tribes of people. For me, one of the most memorable events in the game is when Justin and Feena (Justin's love interest) are roped into agreeing to be the couple of honor for a festival, only to discover that they just agreed to be sacrificed to a dragon. Justin's dauntless personality drives the spirit of the game early on, since while he is constantly getting the party into trouble with his reckless abandon, he also spurs the other characters on to accomplish things they never felt possible before.
Sadly, the entire mood of the game changes drastically early in the second disk. Instead, the plot begins to revolve around the ancient monster Gaia, a creature that was only vaguely hinted at in two or three scenes in the first disk. Now then, Gaia does fulfill a role: it serves as an explanation for why the Angelou civilization was destroyed and is the big bad evil thing that the heroes have to kill to get the ending credits to roll. Unfortunately, that is all that Gaia ever really is, and it ends up dragging the rest of the game down with it. Apparently, the developers thought that they needed a powerful, world-destroying evil in order to have an appropriate final boss. So, they spent most of the second disk building up Gaia as a threat by showing off towns that have been destroyed by Gaia turning everything into stone.
However, the emphasis on Gaia and the plot-lines surrounding it comes at the expense of the spirit of the game itself. There are no more grand journeys into unknown lands in the second disk: the entire thing takes place in a single area that all of the locals are pretty familiar with. Character development suffers as a whole, since the usually talkative and interesting Feena falls into a quiet, depressed mood for most of the latter half of the game, and Justin himself goes from being the driving force behind the party to being someone who needs other people to constantly be telling him where to go and what to do. The point where it becomes absolutely clear that the plot of the game has become twisted is when a certain character asks Justin why he is going to Angelou. The player has three choices: "I don't know", "To find answers about the secrets of Angelou", and "To save the world"; "To save the world" is the only correct choice. When Justin and his friends finally reach the lost Angelounian city of Alent, what should have been the grand culmination of Justin's entire journey is nothing more than a brief stop-over where the heroes don't learn anything they didn't already know.
I don't think that a "save the world from destruction" plot necessarily adds anything to a game. Grandia would have been a lot better off if had focused on a the more personal story of Justin and his journey to uncover the secrets of Angelou and become a legendary adventurer.
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