Old Favorites: Secret of Mana

Secret of Mana is one of my favorite Super Nintendo era games even to this day. Not only did Secret of Mana (also known as Seiken Densetsu 2 in Japan) transform the Mana series from a Final Fantasy spin-off title into a fully fleshed out series of its own, it still stands as one of the best games in the entire series. While the game was rather simple in terms of gameplay and story, many of its elements were unique and ahead of their time.

The most distinctive part of Secret of Mana was its multiplayer. In an age where two controller ports were standard on every console, Secret of Mana allowed for up to three players to take part in the action (if the third player had a MultiTap adapter that is). What is more, additional players could jump in at any time, since the game did not distinguish between singleplayer and multiplayer modes. Since the three controllable characters were always part of the combat team regardless of how many players there were, having multiple players did not change the overall power of team, nor did it change the story around. It was a simple solution that avoided the problems that can be seen in many similar, more-recent multiplayer games like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, which often featured gutted plot-lines and segregated single-player and multiplayer modes. Secret of Mana stands out for having both a full length story with complex characters and really strong multiplayer gameplay at the same time.

Secret of Mana was also a game that gave the player a lot of freedom, particularly in its opening stretch. For example, the player has the chance to recruit the Girl at a few different places in the opening stretch of the game. The player can recruit her at Pandora castle before going to Gaia's Navel (though only temporarily, she leaves before you enter the main dungeon), at Pandora's castle after recruiting the Sprite, or by saving her from a werewolf attack if you try to go to the forest without recruiting her first. Later in the game, when cannon travel becomes fully available, three areas open up all at once: the desert, the snow-field, and some parts of the Empire. While it is necessary to complete these areas in a rough order, the player is free to explore them as he sees fit immediately. There are no artificial barriers preventing the player from entering the Desert Palace before he completes the snow-field, for example.

Instead of relying on saying "you can't go there yet" to the player, Secret of Mana borrows from its predecessor, Final Fantasy Legend, and uses a lot of tool-based obstacles to control the player's movement. For example, the party can't advance very far into Elinee's Forest until they acquire the Axe, since the Axe is the only weapon that can cut down the pillars blocking the road. Of course, the Axe can only be acquired by completing a major story sequence. Many of the weapons in the game have such special properties, such as the Whip's ability to cross gaps and the Sword's ability to cut through thick bushes. These powers are derived from the Flail, Hammer, and Axe of Final Fantasy Legend, which were put to similar uses (it can be assumed Final Fantasy legend borrowed the idea from the Legend of Zelda series, which it strongly resembled). The game also requires the player to use certain magic spells to open up paths by casting them on magic orbs. I like these methods of preventing player movement, since it lets the player check out an area ahead of time if the player wants and encourages the player to explore the gameworld to look for places where he can use powers to open up new areas. It is a much better solution than many alternatives that I have seen.

Another thing about Secret of Mana's weapons that I liked was that all three characters can equip any of the eight weapons. At the same time, you have to build up weapon skill levels to unlock more powerful charged attacks. So the game encourages the player to divide up the eight weapons among the three characters. I liked giving the hero the sword, the axe, and the bow, while giving the girl the whip, glove, lance, and javelin. The sprite (who was usually controlled by the CPU) got stuck with just the boomerang. Thinking about it, this system supported the multiplayer system by letting the players use the weapons they liked, no matter which of the three characters they were playing. Of course, this also encouraged the players to each choose one of the three characters to main. At the very least, the game did not punish any of the players for playing a certain character, since all three characters could put up a decent fight in physical combat. Though in hindsight, giving the male hero access to magic would have evened out the three characters even more.

While the Mana series seems to have been suffering a decline in recent years, Secret of Mana still holds up as a fun game. The series would be well served by returning the the simplicity of its second iteration, and by returning its focus to Secret of Mana's excellent multiplayer.

Lufia's Prequel

As I mentioned in my last post, the classic RPG Lufia and the Fortress of Doom let you play through the final confrontation between the hero Maxim and the evil Sinistrals, and in doing so created a memorable and interesting group of characters, despite their lack of screen time. As such, it was no big surprise when the sequel to Lufia ended up as Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals, a prequel telling the entire story of how Maxim came to be the hero who originally defeated the Sinistrals. Lufia 2 was a very good game, and despite a few oddities and flaws it surpassed the original to become a truly memorable game. Even if it weren't for the quality of the game itself, it is an interesting game for me because the designers had to make a story that would be interesting even though many players would have already seen the game's final confrontation and learned a lot about the characters.

There are several important facts that are made clear about Maxim's story in the original Lufia. First, Maxim was the hero who wielded Dual Blade in the final battle. Second, the final team that fought the Sinistrals were Maxim, Selan, Guy, and Artea. Third, Maxim and Selan were married and had a child. Fourth, the final battle was fought on the floating fortress Doom Island, against the four Sinistrals: Daos, Gades, Amon, and Erim. A player going from Lufia 1 to Lufia 2 would expect all of these things to hold true, and other than a few minor details regarding the sequence of events on Doom Island, they are. Lufia 2 doesn't even try to twist around events in order to have a "real" final boss battle that takes place after the battle shown in Lufia's opening sequence. The battle fought against Daos at the start of Lufia 1 is the final battle of Lufia 2. In fact, Lufia 2 goes so far as to keep a lot of the same dialog and give Selan the "light" spell she uses to illuminate the dark fortress at the start of Lufia 1. Of course, while the end of Maxim's story is set in stone, the journey itself is a different matter.

Lufia 2 begins with Maxim living in a small town in a region totally unlike anything seen in Lufia 1, where his closest friend is a girl named Tia. As he travels through the game, Tia joins him as a major ally from the start, and he meets Guy, Selan, and Artea on his travels, along with two other major party members. You end up using Maxim, Guy, Selan, and Artea as the final team, but that is hardly the only team available. In fact, one of the new characters introduced in Lufia 2, Dekar, is one of the most entertaining and valuable allies in the entire game. Also, because of Tia's presence in the game, the inevitable romance between Maxim and Selan is unexpectedly made out to be a lot less inevitable and obvious than it otherwise could have been. Because of this, even if the player has the foreknowledge who will join for the final team, there are still many things in the game that would be new for that player, so things remain interesting.

Because Lufia has already established that Maxim and Selan are married and have a child at the end of their journey, Lufia 2 is one of those very rare games in which the love story results in the two lead characters meeting, falling in love, getting married, and having a family all across the course of the game itself. In fact, most of that occurs halfway through the game. Also because of what is known from Lufia 1, Lufia 2 is an even more rare type of game in which a married couple actually adventures as a team, rather than being a more conventional story of a hero who leaves his wife at home. The designers even had some fun with that element of it, particularly in the rather unconventional way Maxim and Selan ended up celebrating their own wedding (which involved the weapons and armor they kept hidden under their wedding clothes). As a result, the relationship between Maxim and Selan is far from being a typical over-used plot, adding to the uniqueness of this game.

My only real complaint about the way Lufia 2 carries over from the original game is the way it depicts the sword Dual Blade and Doom Island. Dual Blade is Maxim's iconic weapon, and is very important to the plot of Lufia 1, but hardly has any role at all in Lufia 2. Doom Island is the site of the final battle and is the main place that links the two games, but doesn't appear until the end of Lufia 2. In fact, both pretty much just appear out of nowhere at the end of the game, with fairly little explanation or build-up, even though Lufia 1 implies that both are central to Maxim's quest. It simply seems odd that a game that otherwise works well as a prequel would ignore two of the most important pieces of the series' plot.

One thing that makes Lufia 2 a truly unusual prequel, though, is the fact that you can go through the whole game knowing that Maxim and Selan will die in the end. The year of peace they enjoy in the middle of the game is a nice touch that gives much of the same effect as a happy ending, but it still is the closest they come to a "happily ever after". Lufia 2 does not dodge around the fact that Maxim and Selan died in the opening of Lufia 1, and it does not do anything to try to undo that fate and give them a happy ending regardless of what was said in Lufia 1. This makes the game feel very bittersweet even in the light-hearted moments, but at the same time helps make those moments seem even more important.

Lufia's Opening

One of my favorite RPGs from the SNES era that is almost completely forgotten now is the Lufia series. The first game in that series, Lufia and the Fortress of Doom, is one of my favorite games from that era. It is a solid RPG that put a lot more emphasis on telling a good character-driven story than many other games of its time. However, one thing particularly good about the game is its opening sequence.

Lufia and the Fortress of Doom starts out with the player controlling a group of characters led by a red-haired warrior named Maxim who have just invaded the floating fortress that serves as the final stronghold of a group of all-powerful evil beings called Sinistrals. The four heroes are all at very high level, are equipped with very powerful weapons and armor (including the legendary sword Dual Blade that is central to the plot), and have a large arsenal of powerful magic. In other words, the game starts with what would otherwise be considered to be the final dungeon of a game, including a battle against the most powerful foes in the game, the Sinistrals themselves. However, after the heroes make great sacrifices in order defeat the Sinistrals, one hundred years pass, and the player is introduced to the real hero of the game: Maxim's descendant.

The idea of the hero of a game being the descendant of a great hero who saved the world from evil in some time long ago was hardly new when Lufia and the Fortress of Doom was made. After all, such a plot, the story of Erdrick/Loto and his descendant, was very important to the original Dragon Quest (actually, it is important to at least the first three Dragon Quest games), and has appeared in many other places (in Final Fantasy V there are even two different levels to the idea, and it is central to game plots as recently as the Jecht plot in Final Fantasy X). However, while that plot was far from new, the fact that Lufia both lets you play through the climactic final battle of the old heroes and keeps the two different time periods close together results in a game where the battle of the past actually feels relevant to the events of the game's present.

Because the two eras of Lufia are only spread a hundred years apart, the evil of the Sinistrals and Maxim's heroism are within living memory. In fact, you meet one of the former heroes very early into the real story of the game, and an important goal later in the game is trying to find and meet the other surviving hero. The relatively small hundred-year gap also means that the game's hero is only the great-grandson or so of the legendary heroes Maxim and Selan, rather than some kind of undefined "the bloodline flows through you" descendant (a typical plot element that I despise, actually). Also, the inevitable revival of the villains and the search for Maxim's Dual Blade are made to be far more directly connected to the events of the past than is usually seen.

More important than the small time jump, though, is the way that the old heroes and villains are given real identities and characterization. The sense of long-held camaraderie between the heroes, their brave and desperate stand against terrible odds, and Selan's touching and tragic final wish that she could hold her child one last time before her death all add up to make the old heroes memorable and likable. Meanwhile, the fact that the most important villains are all named and given identities and personalities right at the beginning becomes very important to the plot of the main game, particularly for one very surprising plot twist late in the game. Many turns in the plot and a lot of the real emotion of the game is built upon the characters and events of the "ancient battle", and that would be far less effective if the battle was simply talked about, rather than shown.

Also, one final great quality of Lufia's opening is that it is a lot of fun. It is a really great opening simply because it starts the game with a lot of action and gameplay, letting the player actually play the game while simultaneously introducing a lot of central plot elements without an excessive amount of exposition and boring narration. It grabs the player's attention with fun battles and good characters right from the start, without any kind of excessive build up. It is hard to find openings that do so quite as cleverly as this one.

Xenogears' Opening

Since I have been writing about games with giant robots in them lately, I feel like I should give a nod to one of the greatest games in the mecha genre, and one of the greatest RPGs of all time: Xenogears. Despite the fact that the game is tragically incomplete, there are a lot of good things to say about its story and gameplay. One small sample of this I would like to dwell on for now is the complex opening sequence.

The game starts out with an animated movie segment (using the same combination of computer graphics and hand-drawn animation as the rest of the game), set on an incredibly huge spaceship. The spaceship, the Eldridge, suffers a mysterious calamity at the hands of a mysterious biomechanical organism, resulting in the destruction of the ship and the appearance of a woman with long indigo hair. When I first encountered this movie, it was in the demo for the game, so I actually had no idea about what kind of game Xenogears was supposed to be (never having heard of it before). As such, the movie made me expect it to be set in a traditional space-faring sci-fi setting.

Immediately after the movie ends, though, the game uses a sequence of paragraphs to relate the story of two nations at war on the desert continent of Ignis, and the rise of "Gears" built from lost technology. This sudden change in tone radically changes the player's perception of the setting, and establishes the idea that the opening movie was just a brief glimpse into the backstory of the game that foreshadows things that will occur a lot later into the game.

At the end of the text narration, the story is suddenly focused upon a small rural community put on the border between the two warring nations. There, we see a battle between the giant mecha called Gears (with a character standing next to one for a size comparison), that involves a desperate youth and a man trying to dissuade him from fighting. Mention is made that some of the enemy Gears are not falling like they should, and a fairly evil-looking Gear appears at the end, shortly before the scene focuses on the flames in the background, before shifting to a different image of a flame. This flame turns out to be a painting drawn by the same youth who was in battle, who is now in a peaceful situation, and the real gameplay finally begins. Essentially, all of this last scene turns out to be ominous foreshadowing of an battle that will occur some time later in the game.

The next stretch of the game (which can take quite a bit of time) is built around establishing both the identity of the main character, Fei Fong Wong, and his place in the peaceful village of Lahan. There are quite a few characters introduced here, including Fei's wise adoptive father, Fei's friend Timothy, Fei's other friend Alice, and Alice's annoying brother Dan. It is also established that Fei has amnesia and has only lived in the village for three years, Alice and Timothy will be married the next day, and that several people (including possibly Alice) wish that Alice was marrying Fei instead of Timothy. Also, there are a number of minor sidequests and minigames to be found, as well as a lot of helpful and nice people to talk to, and the whole place is made out to be a likable little refuge from the conflict gripping the continent. The characters are likable and their situation is interesting, and the whole thing feels like a classic start to a traditional RPG. At this point, I would not have been surprised if Timothy or Alice were main party members or long-term allies (or, in Alice's case, a major love interest for Fei).

Further gameplay takes the hero to Citan's home, where the player is introduced the Citan (the man from the ominous battle sequence) and his family. Here, Fei is introduced to a music-box playing a beautiful and sad-sounding melody (originally seen as Marle and Crono's love song in Chrono trigger, actually, so the connotations of it being a love song is clear to anyone who has played that game), which leads to Citan musing to himself that Fei would be happier if he could live like a normal man (a clear indication of Citan knowing more than he lets on about Fei), and the ominous shattering of the music-box (which, coming right after Citan's musings, indicates that Fei will not have that chance of happiness). Shortly afterwards, Fei returns towards Lahan village, only to see two groups of Gears flying towards the village, and he rushes home to see if his friends are alright.

The village is in a panic because of the battle raging between the various Gears inside of the village, and several people (including Alice) are convinced to flee the village to find safety. While looking fort the missing boy Dan, Fei spots a gear that has collapsed, its pilot dead, and something unusual happens. An animated movie starts, showing Fei looking at the Gear, when an image of a cross-shaped pendant is suddenly displayed, and Fei sees a mysterious boy whose eyes are hidden by his hair sitting in the Gear's cockpit. The movie ends, and an oddly quiet Fei suddenly climbs into the Gear. An easy Gear battle against two enemies follows. Afterwards, Citan muses about how Fei has a terrible fate (more evidence that the man knows something, and that Fei is someone special), and more enemies appear, the evil-looking Gears from the foreshadowing battle. Presumably, the events from then repeat here, but the player does not have to suffer through the repetition. At this point, Timothy appears, looking for Fei and Dan, the evil Gears seize Fei's Gear, and the evil group's leader makes a gesture. This is the point where the original demo ends.

The moments after the end of the original demo transform the game completely. In another animated sequence, the evil gears open fire on Timothy, killing him while Fei looks on in horror. Fei blacks out, and a bright light erupts from his Gear, filling the whole area. The screen briefly shows Alice being enveloped in the light. A short time later, Fei awakens, and learns from the angry villagers that he has just destroyed the tranquil, lovable village of Lahan and killed both his adoptive father and dear friend Alice, while Dan, who once looked up to Fei, now curses him as a murderer. Instead of being an unusually pleasant town full of allies to support the hero, an exaggerated version of something commonly seen in earlier RPGs, Lahan is destroyed, and what few friends and little identity that the amnesiac Fei may have had are lost. The contrast between the happiness of the earlier gameplay and the grim agony of this loss drives Fei's feelings into the player in a way that any less involved telling of the story could not.

I could probably go on a bit further and describe Fei's first encounter with Elly and the appearance of Grahf (both excellent scenes), but this probably suffices as a description of the opening. The way the game deeply involves the player in the stories of the characters in Lahan village, and then goes against expectations to completely destroy the village, is a great piece of storytelling. At the same time, countless minor details are mentioned that hint at the complex forces working in the background of the story, including many details that will not be clarified until the second disk of the game. Even minor details like an random NPC's comment that painting just came naturally to Fei will combine with other information later in the game to add depth to the story. The complex and emotional beginning hooks the player and provides a great start to one of the best stories ever told in a videogame.

Old Favorites: Zone of the Enders 2

I am still playing through SRW:OG2 (I'm at mission 36 out of 43, the end of the third route split), but I think I have used up all of the good topics from that game, so I'm going to move on to something different. I have been meaning to write about Konami's Zone of the Enders 2 for quite a while now (I even pulled it out and played through most of it again a few weeks ago), so now is as good of a time as any.

Zone of the Enders 2 is one of the finest action games I have ever played, and it is easily the greatest mecha action game I have ever known. Its format is simple and classic (go through a series of stages in order, fighting through countless enemies and bosses), it has a straightforward plot (there are a lot of complex things happening in the background, but the story focuses entirely around just a few characters and events, making it easy to follow), and it has a lot of good action. The game has a very bad translation, terrible enough that the original promotional trailer has better dialog, but it doesn't get in the way of the gameplay. It is also short (in many places, it seems like there were sections of stages and scenes that were cut) and the Versus Mode is lackluster, but it has a lot of replay value and a great Extra Missions mode.

The real glory of Zone of the Enders 2 is found in the controls and combat system. It was a brilliant move to combine shooting and blade attacks into the same button, with the attack you use determined by range. Most similar games have different buttons for different types of attack, but since Zone of the Enders 2 puts so much emphasis on the lock-on and focusing on one foe at a time, it makes a lot of sense to use one button for both kinds of attack (after all, who is going to swing a sword at long range?). Being able to modify those basic attacks with the Dash and Burst modes (both of which are triggered with the same button) adds to your basic abilities and flexibility, while still keeping things simple. With the powerful Grab attacks and Subweapons also both controlled by one button (though this is toggled with a press of one of the L buttons), you can perform a very wide variety of different attacks with just four buttons and the analog stick, freeing up other buttons for controlling vertical movement, the lock-on cursor, and the defense shield. All combined, the game lets you freely fight extremely fast-paced and exciting battles while freely moving in 3D space, and is a lot of fun. My only problem with the control scheme is that too many minor effects rely on the poorly designed analog face buttons of the Dualshock 2 controller, which means even a slight change in pressure on the button can lead to different results from some attacks.

In terms of stages, battles, and opponents, Zone of the Enders 2 is great. Unlike the first Zone of the Enders game, there are quite a few enemy types, each of which is very unique and requires different strategies and weapons. My only complaints in this regard relate to the bosses. The first Zone of the Enders has truly great boss battles, concluding with a pair of unforgettable high-speed fights against an opponent evenly matched with the player, but the sequel doesn't have as many good boss battles. The battle against Ardjet is too easy, the battles against Nephtis are overly drawn out and rely on repeating the same gimmick over and over, the battle against Inhert is muddled by the opponent's constant evasion, cheap doppleganger tricks, and the pitch-black second half, and the battle against Anubis is ruined because you can't use even half of your normal combat options against him, while he has a single attack that dominates the flow of battle (the homing, shield-breaking fireball). The game would have been even better if the designers just let you fight bosses the same way you could fight normal enemies.

As a final note, in my opinion the original Zone of the Enders is a great example of building a story around how just a single character interacts with a much broader conflict. The reasons for the conflict and the details of what is happening around the hero are ignored, and everything is focused entirely on how the hero reacts to a sudden catastrophe and grows in response to it. Even though the original Zone of the Enders is a tragically short game, its story plays out like a good movie so well that I don't think it would work as well if it were any longer. Not every game has to be a huge epic in order to tell a really good story.

Old Favorites: Skies of Arcadia Legends

Skies of Arcadia Legends (a Gamecube port of Skies of Arcadia for the Dreamcast) is still to this day one of my favorite RPGs. It was a breath of fresh air as far as RPGs go at the time, due to its uniquely fun characters and setting. However, the aspect of the game that I remember most fondly is the game's battle system. While the system had a few unbalanced elements, it strongly rewarded, and sometimes absolutely required, excellent strategy on the part of the player.

The heart of Skies of Arcadia Legends' battle system was the Spirit gauge: a single meter that fueled the attacks of all four party members. Both magic spells and individual character's super moves use up set amounts of Spirit points. However, each character also automatically restores a certain number of Spirit points to the gauge each turn. Furthermore, a character can use the "Focus" command to double their Spirit contribution for one turn. The result of this system is that every battle in the game comes down to careful management of character actions and the Spirit gauge. So developing sophisticated strategies that involve all four characters is a must.

Of course, this system is at its strongest during difficult boss battles. It usually is not necessary to worry too much about normal enemies, particularly since the system lets the player annihilate most random encounters by using Aika's all-enemy attacks without cost every turn once the party generates enough Spirit. While the game leans towards the easy side, there is a category of enemy that always proves to be a challenge: the optional Bounties. All of the optional Bounty enemies, as well as the Pirate Hunter Piastol, increase in strength to match the party level of the heroes, so it is impossible to beat them easily by taking the time to level up. As a result, the fights against the Bounties and Piastol are some of the most strategically demanding and fun that I have ever seen in an RPG.

The biggest problem of fighting off these enemies is that their offense is often enough to wipe out the entire party in very short order. However, one of the greatest strength of the Skies pf Arcadia battle system is its strong support for defensive strategies. Every character has at least one defensive/support special move that has turn priority, in other words always goes at the beginning of the turn. For example, Vyse has Skull Shield, which shields the entire party from basic physical attacks (and follows up with counter-attacks) for the entire turn. Aika has Delta Shield, which makes the entire party immune to magic for one turn. Fina has numerous powerful healing moves and an all enemy debuff attack called Lunar Winds. If the party is generating enough Spirit, Vyse and Aika can use both of their defense moves to make the entire party immune to regular attacks and magic spells (though enemy special attacks, which most optional bosses have, are unaffected).

So, some fairly complex and versatile strategies are possible for example, a typical strategy might be:

Vyse- using his best attack Special

Aika- using items to heal/buff

Fina- Focusing to build Spirit

Enrique- using Justice Shield to halve all enemy damage

Alternatively, if fighting enemies without Special attacks:

Vyse- Using Skull Shield

Aika- Using Delta Shield

Fina- Alternating between Focus and using items

Drachma- Alternating between Spirit Charge and attack Specials

Simply attacking every turn with every character and healing as necessary won't cut it against many of the super-powerful optional bosses. The game also opens up more strategies by making a full-party super attack if the Spirit meter caps out. So the player can choose between an attack strategy and turtling until the super attack becomes available.

I find this kind of full-party strategic combat to be much more interesting than the somewhat more common "save MP until boss fights, then nuke the enemy with your best spells every round" battle-systems. The only real weakness of the Skies of Arcadia system is that magic is useless in it. Most spells only do the same kind of damage as special attacks, or mimic the effects of items. However, Special attacks can do any kind of elemental damage, and items do not use up Spirit. So healing and buffing spells are completely over-shadowed by items, and attack magic just doesn't have much in its favor.

Still despite that one weakness, Skies of Arcadia has one of the best RPG combat systems I can remember. The only way I can think of improving it would be to couple it with the Lunar series system of enemies broadcasting their attacks, so that the player can devise counter strategies.

Old Favorites: Drakengard 2

In many ways, I consider Drakengard 2 to be a much better game than the original Drakengard. It has a few severe flaws, but for the most part its story and gameplay are a significant improvement over the original game.

Gameplay in Drakengard 2 is organized in an identical manner to the previous game. There are ground missions in which you fight large numbers of soldiers with weapons, magic, and dragonfire, and aerial missions that feature dogfighting between your dragon and aerial foes. The terrain is more varied (and far less flat) in the ground missions this time around, aerial missions are a bit more complex, and there are a few minor nods to blurring the lines between the stage types, but the basics of gameplay are the same. However, there are a number of significant changes that make the whole game feel very different.

One major change in the game is that there are no more red-armored soldiers who are immune to dragonfire. Every enemy can be at least harmed using attacks from your dragon. However, the same role is filled by the large monsters such as ogres, minotaurs, and behemoths, who will counter-attack and knock you off your dragon if you try to defeat them with dragonfire. Unlike the red-armored soldiers, though, these enemies can be defeated quickly and tend to be an interesting fight, so it is never tedious (I recall always using physical attacks to defeat them, so I can't remember whether they are immune to magic or not). Also, the role of "enemies who can not be hurt by magic" that was filled by red-armored soldiers has been given to undead soldiers this time around, who mostly only appear in indoors missions where you can't use your dragon. Also, archers and the effect of being knocked off of your dragon when consecutively attacked remain from the last game, though archers tend to appear in smaller, widely distributed groups in this game.

As a whole, the game does more to restrict your use of the dragon through design of the stage map and artificial restrictions on the dragon's availability than through certain enemy types. It has more dynamic stage locations like small tunnels the dragon can't access and narrow passes filled with archers and mages, which actually serves to keep things very interesting when completing stages because the situation can change so much more in the middle of a mission than in the previous game, and the decision about whether to use your dragon or not is more complex. Even the experience system has been changed to make you think more carefully about using your dragon or not, because unlike in the previous game, killing enemies with the dragon will not build up the hitpoints or other stats of the other characters.

While using stage design to get rid of the need of red-armored soldiers is a good thing, it seems to come at a pretty severe cost. Namely, Drakengard 2 has very few stages like the dominant stage type of the previous game: large-scale battles against hundreds of soldiers where you can rain down dragonfire to level an army. Most stages of a similar type tend to have much fewer enemies than similar stages would have had in the previous game, and in the one stage that actually has a large number of foes you can fight on dragon-back, you are fighting in a closed area and the objective is merely to kill a minor fraction of the enemies present, rather than use the old Drakengard system of having both targets you must kill to complete objectives and large numbers of enemies you can kill for fun. Finally, no mission in Drakengard 2 compares to the early missions of the first game, where there are countless enemies far off the normal mission path. Instead, the game tends to leave areas you don't need to visit fairly empty. The end result is that the missions are a bit too focused, and you ever really have a good opportunity to just fight a lot of enemies, which is part of the point of this genre of game.

That being said, the general improvements to the game, such as better controls, the adjustment to the ally characters to be equal in importance to the hero (they are no longer cheap super-weapons at all), creating different enemy types who are strong or vulnerable to particular characters, the addition of flashy Dragon Overdrive attacks, and various other changes, make ground missions a lot of fun.

Aerial missions in Drakengard 2 are very similar to the previous game, except now they feel even less important to the main game. In Drakengard 2, most boss battles are now ground missions, so one of the ways aerial missions were given importance in the last game has been limited. In fact, one of the boss battles in which you use your dragon to fight an opponent is technically a ground mission (which just highlights the fact that the game would have been better if there was more room to transition between proper ground and aerial missions). Also, I don't like the change to the dragon's magic in this game. The "breath spheres" are an awkward mechanic, and their importance and dependance on using direct attacks makes homing shots too much of a poor choice. I think it would have been better if they simply created an aerial version of the Dragon Overdrive system.

I still have a lot more to say about the two Drakengard games, but the kind of detailed analysis I want to do would take up too much space in this post, so I will save it for another day. Both games have very convoluted characters and plot/gameplay structures, after all.

Old Favorites: Drakengard

Square-Enix's PS2 action game Drakengard is one of those odd games that make blogging interesting for me. It is far from being perfect, but it has enough raw entertainment value that I kept with it until the end (no matter how insane things became by that point).

There are two main game modes in Drakengard: ground missions and aerial missions. Gameplay in the ground missions consists of either chopping your way through hundreds of enemies with weapons and magic, or flying over the battlefield on the back of a dragon, burning the enemies from above. Aerial missions are battles on dragon-back against all kinds of flying monsters, built like classic aerial dogfight games (they are supposedly inspired by the Ace Combat series, from what I have read). Neither game mode implements any individual element in a particularly novel manner, but the combination is unique and implemented fairly well.

One thing the designers of this game understood very well when designing the ground missions was that defeating whole armies with blasts of dragonfire is a lot of fun. Starting with some of the earliest missions, they present chapters which have many hundreds more enemies than is really necessary. In fact, even the very first mission has incredibly huge areas filled with enemies far too powerful to be defeated by the hero himself at the beginning of the game, even though these areas are not even touched upon by the actual mission objectives At the same time, the game is very clear about mission objectives, and makes it so that you can clear a mission by simply defeating a fairly small fraction of the total number of enemies. The level design supports both the player who wants to take his time having fun by defeating many opponents and building up weapons, and the player who just wants to clear through a mission quickly.

The only problematic part of the ground mission design is the fact that there is a time limit on missions. The time limit is usually absurdly generous, so that it is almost never an issue, so it really doesn't seem to exist to encourage clearing maps quickly or be a challenge. If you use your dragon to defeat enemies, you will pretty much never run into a problem with the timer. It is only if the player wants to defeat every last soldier on foot in a large map that the timer will ever be an issue, but in that case it is purely a choice on the part of the player, so I wonder why the game designers would want to punish such behavior.

An important problem regarding the game concept that the designers tried to overcome was the question "how can the game be challenging if you can always just climb on the dragon and burn everything from the sky?" If you never need to land, then the entire system of fighting on foot becomes meaningless. This is partially solved through the existence of indoor missions where you can't use the dragon, but even in outdoor missions it is mitigated through two effects: enemies who can't be hurt by dragonfire (the red armored soldiers) and the way the hero is dismounted from the dragon if the dragon is hit multiple times in succession (mostly by archers). Both solutions are fairly good, but they both also have some problems.

I think most of the aspects of fighting archers in this game are handled well. The effect of archers knocking the hero off of the dragon after consecutive hits works well. It means that you can't just defeat every archer by soaking up damage and burning them all, but at the same time you are not guaranteed to be knocked off of the dragon. It means fighting archers from dragon-back is difficult, but not impossible. The problem, though, is that fighting archers on foot is too tricky and annoying. I think trying to fight archers on foot lead to more deaths early in the game then fighting the strongest enemies of the late game, which is not an ideal situation.

I really like fighting the red-armored soldiers in the game. I like having an excuse to get off of the dragon and fight. I still wonder how the designers justify the strange red armor which negates dragonfire and shoot back green energy bolts when hit by fire, but that is a minor issue. The major issue is that a type of enemy which is designed to encourage the hero to fight on foot is also totally immune to all of the magical attacks the hero can use only on foot. These spells are both a good way to avoid tediously long fights and are a lot of fun, so being unable to use them means the red armored soldiers can only be defeated through repeated weapon attacks, which can get tiresome. Also, the logic of the red armor breaks down with this, because while the hero's magic is useless against these guys, the magical attacks of his summoned allies can devastate red armored soldiers very easily. Thus, fighting red armored soldiers is mostly a case of either tedious sword-fighting or summoning an ally to destroy them effortlessly.

I guess I should mention more clearly that I don't like the implementation of the ally characters in this game. Their magical abilities are incredibly powerful, can be used against any enemy, and can be used without any cost. You can only use an ally two or three times in a map, and only or a limited time each use, but within that time they can simply wipe out every enemy in their path. Their fully charged magical abilities are so powerful and easy to use their weak physical attacks and uncharged spells are a complete waste of time. These characters are something of a "Get Out of Jail Free" card you are almost guaranteed to have, which I think cheapens some of the difficulty and mood of the game too much.

Anyways, enough about the ground mission, it is time to talk about the aerial missions. Of course, I am not sure what to say about Drakengard's aerial mission, since they are fairly simple. You breathe either direct fire attacks or homing shots, evade with side-dashing, and use powerful magic attacks when the magic gauge fills. Almost every aerial mission takes place in an empty sky while en route to a new area, and few aerial missions are at all memorable. The missions are fun, but they can feel more like a minigame added onto a robust ground combat game than an important element in of themselves. The most important thing about these missions is that, with one exception, every boss battle is an aerial mission, which is something of an odd choice. These aerial boss battles tend to be a lot of fun, particularly the battles against the hero's rival and his black dragon, but I think it is still unusual to have so few ground boss battles. I suppose it was a bid to make the aerial combat system more important to the game.

If I have any overall criticism of the game mechanics, I think it would be the integration between ground missions and aerial missions. I think the game would have been a lot better if objects on the ground were important to aerial missions and things in the air were important to ground mission, and you could smoothly switch between air-to-air, air-to-ground, and ground-to-ground combat. I understand that the division is probably rooted in technical limitations of the hardware, and what I want would have been difficult or impossible to achieve with Playstation 2 hardware, but it still seems that it is an important thing to achieve for a game like Drakengard in which freely switching between fighting on foot and riding a dragon is central to the game concept.

Before I forget, I think I will mention how much I like the weapon collection and improvement system in this game. Searching for hidden weapons is fun, and it is just as fun to try new weapons out and level them up. Having each weapon have a unique spell, unique fighting style, a distinct appearance for each of its four levels, and its own backstory that is revealed as you level it up is a great concept.

Old Favorites: SaGa Frontier

Years ago, my brother and I were in the habit of going down to the local video rental store to rent a video-game every weekend. We rented way more games than we purchased in those days. There are a few games we would have saved money on if we had purchased them. One of these is an under-appreciated gem called Saga Frontier. SaGa Frontier is part of Square's SaGa series, and was released as part of the landmark first wave of Square games for the Playstation, which also included Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy Tactics, Xenogears, and Bushido Blade.

It is hard to explain why I liked SaGa Frontier so much, because the game was rife with serious flaws. Yet, there was a lot that was very unique and fun about it. One of SaGa Frontiers more unique qualities was that it allowed the player to chose to play as one of 7 main characters, each of whom had a unique plot (though some characters had more plot than others). There was also a very large cast of recruitable characters who appeared in some or all of the seven story-lines. The only other game like it is Seiken Densetsu 3 (the third Secret of Mana game), which was never released in the US.

A large part of the game's charm was those characters. All characters in the game were split into 4 mechanically distinct categories: Human, Mystic, Monster, and Robot. Humans could acquire special techniques and learn magic, Monsters could copy the special abilities of monsters killed in battle and transform into more powerful forms, Robots didn't level up but instead increased their stats by equipping weapons, armor, and special parts, and Mystics could both use magic and absorb monsters into their special Mystic weapons and copy the monsters' attack skills. Humans were the easiest to use, an most common of the four, while Mystics were downright rare, and somewhat weak compared to the others.

Which characters you could recruit varied based on who the main character was. For example, T260G, the only Robot main character, recruits a lot of unique Robots in his story. Red recruits a lot of members of IRPO (kinda like Interpol) officers who were fighting the same criminal syndicate that he was trying to get revenge against. However, there were many characters (including three main characters) who could be easily recruited in any story. Unfortunately, there was a hard cap of 15 characters you can recruit, so you have to be picky about which characters you want to get.

The biggest effect of having multiple storylines in the same game was that the developers were forced to keep each storyline fairly short and simple. In particular, Lute's story was so short that it is possible to fight his final boss within an hour of starting his game. Of course, killing his final boss is impossible without gaining a lot of levels. As a result of this, side-questing took up 50-95% of each of the seven stories. However, the game designers went to some effort to keep it interesting. SaGa Frontier was absolutely packed with side-quests and optional dungeons. Part of this was that it was possible to explore an optional dungeon in one plot-line that was a story dungeon in another plot-line. 

In order to make this more interesting, the game designers took the unusual approach of making monsters encounters scaling in every dungeon. All of the monsters in the game were divided into certain categories, such as Plant or Robot. For example, if you ran into a Plant monster on the field map, you would have to fight a group of monsters pulled from that category that were approximately the same strength as the party. This means that the player can explore the dungeons in almost any order, since the monsters are going to always be the right level. However, there are some monster types, such as Aquatic and Giant, that are particularly dangerous, and there are some dungeons where the monsters are always stronger than the party. So certain dungeons and sidequests are always tough, no matter how strong the party is.

Despite the fact that the side-quests are the same in all 7 stories, the game designers did try and keep things interesting. One thing they did was make it so that the player could only go through some of the dungeons on each play-through of the game. The most important side-quests in the game are ones that unlock the ability to learn certain kinds of magic. These are organized into four pairs of two. Each character can only learn one of the two kinds of magic in a pair, and many of the dungeons can only be attempted in the main hero is attempting to learn that magic type. This means that the player can have a slightly different experience in each play-through by varying which magic types they learn, in addition to experimenting with different characters. The side-quests also can be different thanks to the different ways each character experiences the game. For example, one dungeon where the monsters are always way more powerful than the party is the Bio-Lab in Shrike. It can be a brutal dungeon for a party to attempt late in the game. However, it can be fully explored by Red early in his game when he visits Shrike. Red has the ability to transform into the armored super-hero Alkaiser when he is alone, which easily doubles his power. So, he can easily fight off the strong monsters of the Bio-Lab early in his game, master some techniques, and recruit a rare character.

The biggest, most annoying flaw of SaGa Frontier was money. Monsters simply did not drop enough to buy anything. So, I always had to rely on equipment I found in dungeons and save up enough cash to buy gold. Why buy gold? Easy, once you have enough gold to make a decent starting investment, it is possible to exploit a bug in a gold-trading system of the game to produce infinite money. A bug which was intentionally left in there by the testers to do just that. Once you have all the money you need, it is simply a matter of buying up Powered Suits and fancy guns, swords, and bazookas. No player should ever have to rely on a money exploit as I did playing SaGa Frontier.

Still, I did have a ton of fun with the game. I guess a part of it was the very quirky setting and wierd characters. Since when has there been a game with a superhero, an ancient robot still fighting a long forgotten war, a magician hunting down his own twin brother, a half-Mystic raising a rebellion, an ex-supermodel looking for her boyfriend's murderer, a shape-changing monster looking for magic rings, and a wandering minstrel all as its main characters?

Old Favorites: Way of the Samurai 2

I wrote about Way of the Samurai in my last post, but there are still quite a few things I want to mention about the game and what it tries to achieve, so I decided will write about about its sequel, Way of the Samurai 2.

In many ways, Way of the Samurai 2 plays very differently than its predecessor. Instead of the small, nearly-abandoned train station setting of the last game, this game is set in a thriving, densely populated town. This game spans a longer period of time (more than a week, as opposed to just a few days) which now pass based on actual game time, rather than based on plot events, and the player now needs to rest and maintain a stamina meter. Also, the developers made quite a few changes to the combat system which help speed up combat and make it easier to fight large numbers of opponents (though this introduces an overly simplistic dominant strategy to the game), as well as a few improvements to the sword collection/improvement system.

Despite those other changes, the biggest change comes from the very different way the story is structured in the two games. In the first game, every phase of day has pre-determined plot events open to the player, and all of the important factors that decide what happens in the game come from your choices and actions in these events. However, Way of the Samurai 2 uses a more abstract system of calculating a numerical value for how much each of the different factions likes or hates the hero. With a few exceptions, your actions in story scenes affect that value, rather than affect the story directly. One of the most important ways of affecting that value is to take optional jobs for the different factions and earn their trust through work, completely independent of plot sequences. The final significant change is that none of the plot scenes in Way of the Samurai 2 allow you to control your character normally. Instead, they only present dialog options, so it it is no longer possible to move around freely, ask questions at your own discretion, draw your sword whenever you like, or just walk by a scene and ignore it entirely.

Because of all of the changes, Way of the Samurai 2 does not have its predecessor's perfect fluidity between dialog, free movement, and combat, which was responsible for a lot of the unique charm of the original game. The difference makes the player feel more distant from the character, and less immersed in the game. Also, the importance of faction value, rather than previous decisions, reduces the amount of potential variability of the plot and the potential complexity of the story. In order to get the best or worst endings of the first game, you need to play off of both sides of the central conflict, but doing so is impossible in this game. In fact, some seemingly viable and interesting routes through Way of the Samurai 2, such as helping Sayo and the Magistrates at the same time, are not actually allowed by the game. The game mostly allows you a number of normal endings for each faction path, as well as one or two "bad" endings for each faction path.

A major problem in both games are the "bad" endings for each path. In the first game, after going through a lot of effort in order to unite the different factions to fight against the military, the villain gives you the option to spare his life and join forces with him. Refusing gets you the best ending, and accepting gets you the worst ending. There are no other variables between those two paths. Almost all of the "bad" endings to the sequel are the exact same, including an ending where you take a young girl you have been protecting and teaching for the entire game and hand her over to a the slimiest thug in the city without any qualms. Pretty much all of these endings involve a spectacular reversal of the hero's implied personality and involve complete betrayal of everything he has done up to that point in the game. These kinds of endings feel more like cheap ways to increase the number of endings to the game, rather than proper routes. Important decisions that affect the outcome of a game should not come at the very end, and they should not involve complete departures from the course the hero has taken up to that point.

Anyways, while I am talking about endings, I should say a few good things about Way of the Samurai 2 in which it improves upon the original game. In Way of the Samurai, every story path results in a full-scale battle against the Japanese army, and every final battle is against the general of that army. However, in Way of the Samurai 2, the final sequence can play out very differently depending on which route you take through the game, and there are a few different final opponents (mostly the faction leaders and their lead henchmen). None of the ending sequences are quite as dramatic as the final battles of the original game, but they are more varied and more appropriately reflect the different paths through the game, and the game is more interesting because of the variation,

Before I forget, I should mention that I don't like Way of the Samurai 2's emphasis on earning trust through work, and the large length of time that comprises the game. As a whole, the number of plot events the player will take part in across the length of the game is very similar in both games, but each playthrough of Way of the Samurai 2 is longer, so the gameplay between plot events in the sequel feels more like filler than rewarding gameplay, especially because there are so few jobs available to each faction, and some of them are fairly boring (finding the parcel) or annoying (getting the kid home, pick-pocketing, and extorting money from peddlers). The occasional random attack by a ninja or homicidal maniac helps keep it interesting, but hardly seems to make up for some of the monotony.

Another major complaint I have with the game is the general arbitrariness in the connection between what you say and how it affects events and your standings with certain characters. For example, the very first dialog option you have in the game, after Sayo gives you some food, is a choice between telling her to get lost, and two different ways of thanking her. If you thank her one way, she will wander off and you can go onwards on your own business. If you thank her another way, she will wander off, bump into some thugs, and you will begin a completely different scene. Your choice determines the following scene, but the connection is not logical. As a result, I can never remember which choice does what in that scene, no matter how many time I play through it. Also, your choices in some of these early scenes, seems to affect how Kasumi (another major character with her own faction value) views the hero, even though she is not present to see the scene. This problem gets especially bad in the jobs that involve long conversations (both of which I labeled above as annoying). The consequences of your choices often make almost no sense.

Finally, I will say that I like the system of rewarding the player with a title for completing a playthrough particularly well or under unusual restrictions. In particular, I like ones titles like Pacifist, which requires you to choose an ending carefully in order to earn the title (Pacifist in particular is a good one because it reinforces the central themes of the game. The only way to get through the game without harming any one is to let an innocent child die, meaning that you need to raise your sword and fight in order to protect people.).

Anyways, while I sound harsh in my discussion of the game, I still like it. I never played it to 100% completion of all endings, titles, and swords, but I rarely do that kind of thing in a game, and I still get tempted to pick it back up and try to see some ending or sequence that I haven't seen yet.

Old Favorites: Way of the Samurai

I don't think Spike/Acquire's unusual action game Way of the Samurai has ever been widely known or very popular, but I think it is a game which does a lot of interesting things with its story and game flow. Most notably, it is a game which embraces both interactivity in the plot and a very movie-like style, and combines both with a lot of replay value.

In terms of the main combat system of the game and other elements of being an action game, it is not outstanding in any respect. The combat system has its variations and a few good mechanics that keep the game interesting, but a few annoying ones (like the difficulty in acquiring special moves and ease with which you can break swords). As an action game, the game is mediocre to average, at best. However, the action elements are just part of the real nature of this game.

As a whole, this game is about choosing your path through a story. In each scene of the game, there are countless things you can do, and each choice has a distinct impact on the plot. Most importantly, these decisions are not merely prompts asking you for a limited number of written options, since simply ignoring an plot event is often possible, and you can often choose from many events simply by choosing where to go at any particular point in time. Also, at almost any time in the game, including the middle of many story sequences, you can just draw your sword and start attacking people, and the plot will respond accordingly. This last element gives the game an unrivaled fluidity between story and action, so the player almost never gets pulled out of the sense that he is in control of the character's actions and identity.

You can see a great example of the variety of choices open to the player in the very first scene. Here, right when you start the game, you see a gang of thugs in the process of kidnapping a young woman. The first option is to simply walk by them without saying anything, and pick one of the two different roads to take to different areas (and different scenes). The next option is to speak to the thugs, and choose from one of the dialog choices, which results either in a fight or the thugs tying the hero to some railroad tracks. Another option is just draw your sword and provoke a fight with the thugs. Finally, you can just wait around a bit until another character shows up and starts a fight (and I only know if this one from FAQs). Based on what happens here, you can get introduced to characters on completely different sides of the central conflict and see the story from very different perspectives. I consider this one scene to be one of the best moments in all of the videogames I have ever played, and it is just one of many similar scenes with different outcomes.

The plot of the game is built on the idea that there is a certain set series of events that will occur, and that the will of the player is the only variable that can alter these events. In fact, one of the characters comments on this, and asks the main character to leave the area in order to prevent him from interfering with what will happen. The player can observe and alter every major event in the plot (though not every event in one playthrough, of course), and these choices affect the rest of the plot and change the ending. This is not implemented perfectly (the final sequence, the battle against the military invasion of the area, is mostly the same in every plot path and can't be avoided), but it lets the player understand the situation and deliberately act to try to control known future events, which is greatly empowering.

The consequence of having a game with so many flexible choices is that the game is very short on each playthrough. It is rather easy to finish the game in one or two sittings. But at the same time, the game has a lot of replay value, and the game developers have introduced a few things to make multiple playthroughs more fun. The ability to collect the swords of your opponents, and then improve those swords and bring them into the next playthrough of the game, is a nice touch that lets you try new fighting styles and combat strategies, even when going through the same fights from a previous playthrough of the game.

Way of the Smaurai is not a perfect game, but it does many things to create a great sense that the player is the character he is controlling, and has the power to influence the game world just as a person in that world should be able to do. It provides an immersive game with a lot of freedom.

Old Favorites: Chrono Trigger's Dual Tech System

Since I can't think of anything from the games I am currently playing to write about, I guess I will borrow my brother's idea of writing about older games that I like. In this case, one of Square's last RPGs for the Super Nintendo: Chrono Trigger. I can probably write a lot about the many things I like about that game, but I will start with the Dual and Triple Tech system.

In Chrono Trigger, each of the seven characters has a list of only eight special techniques they ca use in battle other than the basic attack and item commands. These lists are fairly specialized for each character, with each character being (with a few minor exceptions) being limited to a single element and a limited number of roles (such as healing, physical attack, or magical attack). Also, it is impossible to alter this list or customize the characters in meaningful way, so your only choices of how to customize your team is through choosing team members. However, because of the way Chrono Trigger embraces that concept, the system is not limiting at all.

The biggest strength of the Chrono Trigger system is the way it makes the classic idea of choosing a few people for a battle team from a larger pool of characters and turns it into something far more than just picking characters to cover every role that you need. In a typical RPG that allows character choices, so long as you have the basics of survival (healing and defense) and attack covered, character choices do not depend on each other. For example, in Breath of Fire 2, choosing between Nina and Bleu, who are both mages who use attack spells, is simply matter of personal preference, and won't affect the rest of your team. However in Chrono Trigger, while both Robo and Ayla are primarily physical attackers, the choice between them is decided by more than just personal preference, because of the Dual Tech system.

With the Dual Tech system, combination of character affects your team's abilities just as much as character choice itself. For example, the choice between Robo and Ayla when Crono (lightning attacker) and Marle (ice healer) are already in the team. Choosing Robo not only adds his own physical attack abilities to the team, his Dual Techs with Crono enables powerful wide-area magical attacks, and his Dual Techs with Marle brings some very strong full-party healing moves to the team. On the other hand, Ayla's Dual Techs with Crono enable powerful single target lightning attacks and wide area physical hits, and her Dual Techs with Marle give a powerful stealing ability and strong ice attacks. The choice between Robo and Ayla affects the abilities of the other characters. With certain combinations, this lets characters do things as a team that they can not do individually under any circumstance (such as ice mage Marle and fire mage Lucca using Shadow elemental attacks).

In essence, Chrono Trigger sacrifices individual character flexibility in exchange for much greater flexibility of the party as a whole. Choosing the party is the very same thing as customizing your characters. It embraces the idea that choosing members for a team is an important choice, and has an elegant system for rewarding good choices in party composition. I think this is a huge improvement over many other RPGs, where the choice of team members is redundant because of the freedom to customize characters individually (such as Final Fantasy 7 or 8, where you choose a party of three characters out of a pool of 6-8, even though each character is infinitely flexible in equal ways), or where the choice between characters is no different from merely choosing a list of abilities you want to bring to a battle.

Unfortunately, the concept of a deeply integrated system of character synergy affecting team selection has not been imitated much by later RPGs. A few RPGs have used it to a limited extent (such as the Unite attacks in the Suikoden games), but they do so more to encourage specific plot-related combinations of characters rather than provide a way of making every character combination unique. Even Chrono Trigger's sequel, Chrono Cross, failed to effectively make use of such a system. However, the quality of the concept is good enough that I imagine it will resurface eventually.

Old Favorites: Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, part 2

The progression of Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is constant. The story and gameplay work together to create an overriding sense of urgency and the constant push to move onward. In most RPGs of this kind, the progression of the game is more stop and go. The usual progression involves alternating time spent exploring dungeons, and time spent outside of dungeons gathering information and buying stuff. In this way, most RPGs have a leisurely pace that allows the player to explore, back-track to old towns, fight battles to level up, and take on side-quests. However, the gameplay structure of Dragon Quarter is such that it creates a very different pace than normal: an urgent one that matches with the plot of the game.

The plot of Dragon Quarter is pretty straight-forward: the hero, Ryu, is simply trying to save the life of the young girl Nina, another one of the main characters of the game. Early in the plot, Nina becomes terminally ill thanks to some poison, and the only way to save her is to get her out of the polluted environment of the game's setting. The entire game takes place in a massive underground complex, where no one has seen the outside world in over a thousand years. In order to save Nina's life, Ryu and Lin, the third character, have to get her to the surface. However, while the plot is simple, it has a lot of poignant elements to it. While Ryu has been granted tremendous power, that power is killing him slowly (or quickly, depending on how much the player uses it), and it is quite clear that Ryu knows this. So he decides to use this power, and his remaining life, to save the life of Nina by smashing all of the obstacles between them and the surface.

Since both Ryu and Nina have death looming over them for most of the game, the plot has a strong sense of urgency to it. And the gameplay backs up this urgency by encouraging the player to constantly move forward and not look back. The most important source of this urgency is the D-Counter. Since the D-Counter goes up every several steps, the player is encouraged to not waste time running back to old areas. Furthermore, there is never really any need to back-track in the game. The entire game progresses one floor at a time. There is one treasure chest on each floor, and everything you need to open it is on that same floor. At no point in the game is there something you can only get by backtracking back down a floor. In addition, as I briefly mentioned in my last post, there is no way to spend time leveling up by fighting old enemies, since every monster in the game stays dead once killed.

The game also cuts out other aspects of most RPGs that slow down game progression. Towns were minimized in Dragon Quarter. Most towns are only a few screens long, and have little more than shops, a save point, and two to six people to chat with. Furthermore, there is no need to advance the plot by talking to people in town. You can normally just skip right through a town with no drawbacks. Towns are little more than bigger versions of the small rest stops scattered throughout the game. The entire game is essentially one big continuous dungeon.

In addition, there are no side-quests to be found in any of these towns. There really only is one side-quest in the game. At one point, the characters are given the option to go on a short side-quest to find medicine to help ease Nina's worsening condition. In that way, that one side-quest only serves to add to the urgency of the heroes' mission. There is only two major exceptions to this in the game: the mini-game of developing the Fairy Colony, and the optional dungeon Kokon-Horay. However, the Fairy Colony takes place in essentially an alternate dimension where the D-Counter doesn't go up, and time only progresses by killing monsters in the normal game. So in practice, the Fairy Colony is only a place the player checks in on a semi-regular basis while pursuing the main plot. The optional dungeon Kokon-Horay exists inside the Fairy Colony, and is itself one of those massive dungeons where the character's levels revert to 1 and the D-Counter resets to 0.00% whenever the player braves it. It is in practice an optional challenge that a player only attempts after beating the game once or twice.

The game also adds to the sense of constantly moving forward by giving the player a way to track his progress: the depth gauge. While the game starts a bit higher up in the underground complex, Ryu only acquires his dragon powers and meets Nina and Lin at the very bottom of the cave system, 1200 meters below the surface. From that point on, the characters are constantly going upwards towards the surface. Every floor brings the player one step closer to reaching the goal, and that progress is tracked by the depth gauge, which constantly reports the player's distance from the surface in meters. This gives the player a concrete way of tracking his progress.

This progress is part of one of the symbolic elements of the games plot. In some sense, the character's actions are an attempt to overthrow and transform their corrupt, dystopian society. The characters are from the very bottom of a society that classifies everyone by some estimate of potential known as a D-Ratio and locks in their choices of promotion and housing based on those numbers. The characters, an extremely low D-Ratio soldier with no chance of promotion, a poor, abused lab subject, and a rebel, start their quest in EndSector, the lowest level of the complex and home to the people with the lowest D-Ratios and poorest conditions. Yet they eventually climb to the highest levels of the complex and fight against the rulers of that society. In a literal sense, it is the story of the weak and oppressed over throwing the strong in their quest to find a new world.

Old Favorites: Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, part 1

One of my favorite PS2 RPGs is Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. Dragon Quarter is certainly the black sheep of the Breath of Fire series; it is technically not even a numbered part of the series. In terms of tone, gameplay, character design, and story, it is completely unlike its predecessors. Unfortunately as far as I know, game critics and fans did not receive the game well. It certainly falls into the category of "you either love it or you hate it." However, there is much about the game that I think is original and truly artistic. Here in part 1, I will be talking about the overarching gameplay system of Dragon Quarter that sets it apart from any other game on the market.

At its core, Dragon Quarter is built around one gameplay mechanic: the D-Counter. The D-Counter is a numerical display in the top-right corner of the screen at all times that shows a percentage that is constantly going up through the game. The D-Counter first appears after a significant event early in the game where Ryu, the main hero, first gains the power to transform in his dragonized form, a staple of the Breath of Fire series. From that point on, the D-Counter begins its count at 0.00% and begins its steady climb upwards. Every several steps or eery round of battle, the counter goes up by 0.01%. However, it climbs much, much faster whenever Ryu actually uses his Dragon powers. Whenever Ryu uses his D-Dash power on the field to avoid encounters with enemies, the D-Counter rises constantly and quickly. When Ryu transforms mid-battle using D-Dive, the gauge rises a full percentage point every round, and rises another point or so whenever Ryu attacks with his super-charged strength. And when the D-Counter reaches 100.00%, Ryu dies and it is Game Over.

The entire game revolves around this relatively simple mechanic. Using Ryu's dragon powers can make any point of the game very easy. D-Dash allows the party to avoid any non-boss battle, and D-Dive makes any boss battle impossible to lose. Whenever Ryu uses D-Dive, he literally becomes invincible to all attacks from every enemy in the game (excepting a couple of enemies in special boss battles). Furthermore, by charging up his attacks, at the expense of 2.00% of the D-Counter per charge, Ryu can kill even the strongest boss in the game in one hit. However, if you rely on this overwhelming power or are reckless with it, the D-Counter will reach over 90% in a matter of a couple hours. At that point, a Game Over becomes inevitable. On the other hand, if the player completely avoids using the dragon powers, the D-Counter will barely break 10.00% by the end of the game.

The trick of the game design is that it is impossible to beat most of the bosses in the game on your first attempt without using D-Dive. Most of them are disproportionally powerful compared to the enemies leading up to them. Furthermore, there are enemies lurking about the areas of the game that are much higher level than the other enemies. Without D-Dive, the characters would quickly die. And since there are no random encounters, and no enemies in the game regenerate, it is impossible to farm enemies for experience to gain levels. So, the game design forces the player to use D-Dive without throwing enemies at the player that can only be killed with D-Dive (again, with limited exception at the end of the game).

Since the player is expected to use D-Dive, and thus create a situation where advancing through the game becomes impossible, the game designers created a system to make the game more playable. At any point in the game, it is possible to reset to either a previous save point or to the beginning of the game, and keep your equipment, skills, items in storage, and bonus experience. This means that Dragon Quarter is a game where you play through the game multiple times, growing stronger every time you reset. Since you can't keep your levels nor all of your items, it isn't something to be done lightly. However, this system allows the characters to gradually grow strong enough to defeat enemies and bosses that previously required D-Dive. This means that the player will gradually progress further and further through the game, becoming progressively less dependent on D-Dive. However, to avoid abuse of this system, game saves are strictly limited, and the player can only make permanent saves in a handful of locations.

Because the game demands that the player resets an area or to the beginning of the game occasionally, the game designers made allowances to make the experience more fun. First off, the game is short for an RPG. In order to get the best score, the player has to beat the game in a single run of 8 hours or less. A more typical run would take between 12 and 20 hours. With replays, it takes a typical 60 or so hours to beat the game, probably less. Furthermore, replaying through areas in the game is spiced up by a prevalence of alternate choices and paths in the game, where multiple play-throughs is the only way to see everything. In addition, the game uses something called the Scenario Overlay System, where additional cut-scenes appear at different points in the game the more times you reset, making certain there is something new every time the player resets.

Altogether, these gameplay systems make Dragon Quarter very unique. The replay value of Dragon Quarter is much higher than any other RPG on the market, except maybe the RPG classic Chrono Trigger. I am impressed how the game designers took the basic idea of the dragon transformation from the previous installments of the series, and found a way to make it a full on god-mode, that was still balanced within the framework of the game design. Furthermore, they took that framework and made it very fun. By making a small game with a lot of re-playability, they were allowed to focus their graphical and musical resources on a relatively small number of areas, the game looks and sounds great for a mid generation PS2 game.

Next Time: How this gameplay framework controls and contributes to the plot of Dragon Quarter.