Review: Catherine (Xbox 360)

Catherine, the pseudo-perverse puzzle platformer that might as well be a Persona title and is (and is not) an unofficial MegaTen title. Since we're the official unofficial MegaTen Review Website on accident apparently (we're kidding), let's get this review underway.

You are Vincent Brooks, alcoholic extraordinaire (seriously, he has a problem, in both games he appears in), patron of a world where chicks apparently love their men drunk and directionless, and boy is Vincent directionless. He wants life to stay exactly as it is, comfortable with his tentative fiancee Katherine McBride, his apartment, his all-hours coding job, and his buddies at the local pub.

Vincent soon meets Catherine, the titular character, when she intrudes on his lonely, lonely drinking at the pub (it's still drinking by yourself if it's in public, and really that's even worse bro) and starts hitting all sorts of on him. He finds himself instantly smitten with what he perceives to be everything he could ever want in a woman.

In true Persona fashion, you spend time throughout the day chatting with both K/Catherines, your buddies at the pub, and strangers who can become friends over the course of the game.

Your interactions with characters, how you answer their questions and address their dilemmas, even how you respond to text messages will influence your morality and desires. Your responses to characters and certain plot points evolve and change in response to how strongly your character desires freedom or order. Also dependent on how you influence your gauge and answer questions influences which ending you receive. There's eight endings.

At night, Vincent finds himself thrust into a world of nightmares, where death in the dream means death in real life. In order to escape the nightmares, he has to maneuver and overcome a puzzle of the "blocks" that make up the issues and dilemmas he is subconsciously facing.

The game mechanic ends up taking a puzzle-platformer slant here, with all of the puzzle aspects being extremely satisfying for all difficulty levels, including first-time gamers and those who are looking more for story than challenge. Easy mode provides a satisfying level of challenge for basically every first-time player, unless you're a Professor Layton et al veteran and are used to bashing your brain against your system until the solution drips out of your nose. Or blood. Either way please just save at the pub every night and then do all of the nightmare stages on another save file so you can always go back and change the difficulty at any time. Don't feel ashamed, the Japanese got a version that was harder to the point of near unplayability.

Also, and this is pretty critical, don't ever physically harm yourself, others, or pets/objects over a difficult game. If the game is too challenging it's fine, maybe it's not for you. Step down the difficulty, do whatever you need to do. It's worth it.

Graphics

I seriously love the Shin Megami Tensei art style, and it's translated brilliantly here. Most of the character art is fantastic, Vincent's outfits are constantly enviable if you're male, and both K/Catherines are attractive in their own fashions. All of the scenes have believable detailing, down to the wood grain floors and booth seating of the pub, Vincent's tiny-ass Japanese apartment with a bed, laptop, kitchen, and a door, wherever the game brings you. The nightmare levels and block design are interesting as you get through each night of nightmares, reminiscent of Tartarus from Persona 3's changing designs, the boss designs are appropriately terrifying: everything is in its place.

My gripe is this: on the Xbox 360 version, the version we played, it is evident that there are sections of the game that are upscaled from 720p to 1080p, like unacceptably noticeably so. I say "unacceptably" in the sense that, no matter how great the rest of the game's visuals, designs, and settings are, I simply can't give Catherine full marks here. Feel free to respond in the comments if you've played the PlayStation 3 version and can comment on the quality of the animated cutscenes on a 1080p screen.

Score: 9/10

Sound

Pretty much everything about the game sonically is fantastic. The voice acting is my only gripe, since sometimes the enunciation and facial expressions don't match the script, or some other combination therein. Other than that, the music is great, the cameo selection from other Shin Megami Tensei titles is well-appreciated (but I'd appreciate a lot more Persona tracks since really there's no reason you couldn't). The sound effects during the game are pretty authentic, the "gameyness" of the sound effects during the nightmare levels is pleasing and nostalgic to the point that its repetitiveness is a welcome treat.

Score: 9/10

Controls

So, this game has two different control schemes.

When you're in the outside world, the game is mostly menu-driven like the game's cousins, and the pub acts as a semi-free roam hub where you can talk to the other pub denizens until they decide to go home, even granting you an achievement for staying at the pub until everyone else goes home, drink until you're trashed which grants you a bonus in your nightmares, and even help your strangers-turned-friends with their personal issues. Pretty much un-screw-up-able, and Atlus managed to pull it off no problem.

Now, when you're in the nightmare it's a somewhat different story. The game follows what I'd call "literal puppeteer controls". Basically imagine what The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past controls like (isometric top-down view with literal directions, a la up = north, down = south, etc.) where your movements are modified with the face buttons to perform actions like grabbing and pushing blocks, using items, and attacking foes and obstacles. The following is why I give these controls a 9.95/10.

When you're hanging off of the edge of a block, sometimes the controls get wonky and left stops being left and vice-versa. That's my one complaint.

Scores: 10 and 9.95/10

Story

The main story is great. We've played three of the endings so far. Catherine's "true" ending is fantastic even though it's the true freedom/chaos ending as well. Katherine's bad ending, or at least the one we encountered, is well-deserved. Katherine's "true" ending, being the true order ending, takes a goddamned nose dive out of nowhere and ends up being completely boring and confusing. It's also the first ending we got, which almost made us abandon continuing on with getting more/all of the endings.

That notwithstanding, we still intend to play this game to completion, including obtaining all achievements. Based on having seen three of the endings, we feel comfortable in being able to review the meat of the story since most of it remains unchanged.

Score: 9/10

Catherine is a welcome addition to both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 lineups, and it shows that Atlus' Persona team understands the market's shift towards puzzle games, ungamer-friendly gameplay and storytelling, and a final note I wanted to save for the end of this review.

The original run-up to the game's release began with a lot of tantalizing imagery of Catherine, which had a lot of gamers questioning how the puzzle mechanics, not long enough in the demo to display how the puzzles evolve in complexity and inventiveness across the course of the game, would mesh with a love triangle story including a girl perceived initially as "whorish" or "slutty". Despite this, every single aspect of the game's plot is handled in an appropriately mature fashion, both Katherine and Catherine end up being compelling and interesting characters in their own right as well as being seemingly repulsive in parts, at least until the truth behind the events of the game is unveiled, all becomes clear, and you, the player, says "oh right, I do have every reason to trust Atlus."

Final Score: 9.25/10

- Evan

Review: Final Fantasy V

Final Fantasy V Advance

Official Nintendo Power FINAL FANTASY V ADVANCE Player's Guide

As promised, part one of our thirteen-plus part review of the Final Fantasy series.

So, we wanted to begin with one of the more underrated Final Fantasy titles, Final Fantasy V, in order to build our tolerance for the series early and make adapting to later, "easier" titles that much faster. After playing FFV, I'm pretty glad we spent the time playing all of the Shin Megami Tensei games we did prior, given the game's challenge level as well as its depth of customization and sheer, well, we'll say that a lot of series and games owe a lot of creative debt to this game.

Concerning the story, those who have played any pre-PlayStation Final Fantasy can probably spot most of Final Fantasy's tropes and archetypes from a mile away: your characters are infused with one of the four elements and are charged with the responsibility of maintaining the balance of nature in the world. The ultimate bad guy is an incarnation of a sheer force of evil, somewhat of a destructive and malignant fifth element, There's chocobos, airships, Meteor, Holy, you name it.

Surprisingly, this is not a bad thing.

Final Fantasy as a franchise has always done one thing right, and that's stick to the script. Their theme has always been the potential end of humanity by its own hand, usually due to resource exploitation. Usually this abuse rears its head as the personification of some negative force, who coincidentally is the final boss. Sticking to this motif allows them to reinvent themselves at the nuts-and-bolts level, telling the same story but with different characters, settings and events, hopefully to give us a different perspective on their message. Sometimes this reinvention goes completely sideways. Sometimes it's the story's fault, sometimes it's the battle engine, sometimes it's the levelling.

Final Fantasy V is not one of those games.

If you've played Final Fantasy VI and understand the Espers system, you understand most of the job system in V, but there's some under the hood stuff that's worth reading.

FFV features a job system that gives you your expanded attack, defense, special command, passive ability, and weapon class attributes as a character. You start off as a Freelancer, who can equip any weapon and only has Attack and Item for options. As you progress you unlock new jobs, beginning with Black/White/Blue/Red Mage, Thief, and Knight, all stalwarts from the series' perspective, but eventually you get classes like Ranger and Mime whose influences on your stat development may be minor, but completing their jobs unlocks some of the best attacks in the entire game. At a point the game gets somewhat cheesy, but considering the minimal hand-holding at the beginning and the amount of elbow grease required to unlock some of the better skills, it ends up making the end game extremely satisfying. The cool thing is, once you max a job out, the passive skills (for sake of example, Thieves learn the passive skill Find Passages that makes hidden pathways visible) rub off on you once you pick a neutral job class. Once you get the hang of the delicate nuances of the system, you can build every character precisely the way you want.

The above is squarely the reason I feel many of today's games owe a great debt of inspiration to FFV, including FF Tactics, the Disgaea series and most other Nippon Ichi games, World of Warcraft and its ilk, etc. Beyond the more obvious face-value inspiration, the blown-outness of the game's core mechanics is something we rarely see in games today, and that level of polish is normally the realm of fighting games, open-world adventure titles (which RPGs are, just with more numbers), first-person shooters, you name it.

I have some problems with the game overall, but many of them are relics of their time, and since this port is particularly faithful I must forfeit some of them. However, one sticks out as particularly inexcusable: the final boss of this game takes constant left turns into "so bad it's good" territory, and the game as a serious effort suffers. While certainly not as terrible of a villain as Sephiroth (really, who could be), Exdeath (in this port, sometimes it's translated as Exodus) does his fair share of wiping out hapless innocents and making sure the justice league (that's you) has a lot of personal sacrifice to endure. Let's just say that someone's home town doesn't make it to the end of the game, which if you've been paying attention, is not much of a spoiler when it comes to this series.

If you have a Final Fantasy itch but are (somehow) sick of replaying IV and VI for the seventeenth time (okay, on second thought...), then V's totally worthwhile. We prefer the GBA version for the updated script, the PSX version will play on your PS3 if you have one of those and it's probably like $15 on eBay or Amazon so pick whichever you like. It's up in the higher ranks of our favorite, if not our actual favorite, because while it doesn't bring the freshest of ideas to the house consistently and the villain's story is hilariously bad (but good!), the things it gets right it hits out of the park. The job system is truly revolutionary and is fleshed out to near-perfection, and the integration of the rest of the game's systems into it shows they truly stood by this element of their design. "But E, we play RPGs for story!" Go for it, so do we, and even though it's a story we've heard a few times already, this was a particularly excellent retelling.

-E

Review: Ys 7

Buy Ys Seven at Amazon.com

I don't use my psp for a whole lot other than the terrible and probably illegal task of playing old ps1 games. The handful of games I've bought for it probably have dust on them and the DS has more of my attention than ever.

That is, until I saw this little gem during one of my last days at *insert hellish corporate game selling store here*. I am a sucker for Limited Editions and Japanese RPGs. E, however, knowing my impulsive desire to covet and collect these sorts of things wouldn't let me buy it. He also unfortunately knows that I never play anything on my PSP.

Solution? Play it and see if I like it.

This was probably one of my greatest RPG experiences. It's, at the very least, on my Top 5 of all time.

Story
Isn't that the reason people play RPGs? It's mine, anyways. (I guess some people like fighting and grinding but those people are certifiably insane.) From what I understand now, all of the Ys games are different sections of the main character's, Adol, really long ass adventure. Knowing nothing of the other games or the series, I dove right in - it's very newcomer friendly. The story itself is incredible. There's something happening at every turn and nothing feels like a fetch quest, EXCEPT THE FETCH QUESTS THEMSELVES. E and I have been talking about how awesome certain ideas would be if we could make our own RPG - well, Ys 7 beat us to them. It's all absolutely incredible. You're an adventurer who's just passing by, the king wants to give you a task! Lo, it becomes more than it seems at first. Cliche, but played out oh so wonderfully.

Gameplay

Action RPG. Not quite hack n' slash. This game is comprised of having a party of three characters and you get three different attack types that are effective against the three different types of monsters. Go figure. So obviously you should carry one of each at any given time. But don't worry about who you want - just pick your favorites and go! Your reserve party members, get this, level up alongside you. You can only control one at a time though but it's easy enough to switch off. 

There are a myriad of special attacks that you learn through your weapons. And I love the shopping/equipment system - you can, of course, purchase your weapons and armor OR you can use the various materials to forge together even more powerful weapons/equipment/ and even rare items. This is the only way, in fact, to get everyone's best gear at the end of the game. And as for those items - this game DOES require a fair bit of strategy - with single person only items, you can carry a max of 5. For items that heal the entire party? Maximum of 3. This kind of sucked at the last boss when there were 3 forms and all my characters were split up to fight them. You just have to fight smarter. There is no endurance with spamming items to be found here.

Graphics/Sound

This game has some of the crispest (is that even a word?) graphics I've seen in a long time and a stellar soundtrack. I was pleasantly thrilled when new music played. Definitely worth getting just on that aspect alone.

Overall

This game is like a nice boy your BFF hooks you up with. He takes you out to your favorite spot for dinner and lets you order any and everything you want, gets you a nice bottle of wine, takes you home and makes the bed shake in a truly memorable way and then clobbers you over the head the next morning. I was so mad at the end of game boss fight. That's truly how it felt though and it was probably the best video game experience of my life. Or at least my best on the PSP.

A++++++++++++++++ Would date again.

-A

Review: Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey

Buy Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey on Amazon.com

Another review, another SMT title. ... Hey, wait, where are you guys going!?  I can justify this binge in exactly nine words, or more correctly, four hyphenates and an acronym: first-person dungeon-crawling sci-fi turn-based RPG.

While many of the main themes of the franchise are intact and it recycles some core elements from past games in the series (first-person dungeon-crawling being a staple of the series since the pre-PS2 days), the game stands on its own as greater than the sum of its parts.  Allow me to explain.

Story

A massive black hole opens up over Antarctica and is slowly engulfing the entire planet.  This void is home to demons and elder gods that are attempting to reclaim the planet from humans who have soiled and desecrated Mother Earth.  Soon the United Nations forms a team of soldiers and researchers from across the globe to go poke around in it and see whether or not Earth is screwed.  You are [insert name here], a soldier on the Red Sprite ship, who saves the fucking day.  Or lets Heaven take over.  Or lets the demon world engulf the planet.  Your call bro.

For the record, my Main Character's name?  Bonesaw McGrady.

Gameplay

A list of franchise staples that make a reappearance:

- Demon summoning, in the form of negotiation to have them join your party
- Demon fusion, wherein (mostly) more powerful demons are born from combining two (or more) others
- Greater depth in fusions than the Persona spinoffs
- Strength/weakness-based tactics
- Dungeon crawling.  Oh god there is so much dungeon crawling.
- Law/Neutral/Chaos paths where your opinions and actions affect the plot and final ending (and more)
- Hard-as-nails boss fights until you figure out what you're doing or just grind a little bit

Fusions in this game retain the Element fusions wherein you can upgrade your demons directly to the next step up in its race (see: Devil Survivor) and the Mitama system where you can upgrade particular stats on an existing demon (also on Devil Survivor) but adds a spin.  When you fight demons, you gain Analysis points that eventually help you by letting you see all of a demon's strengths and weaknesses each time you see them.  Fully analyzed demons also give you Sources once you level them up and their Analysis is full.  These Sources beget some of their skills which you can use in fusions of other demons to give them skills they normally wouldn't have.  For example, by the final boss battle I was using Sources to grant Repel-, Null- and Void- skills to demons that wouldn't normally have them just to cover up any exploits (but feel free to divine your own solutions!).  Also a boon is the Password system, where you can convert your demons to a string of letters, numbers and symbols to share with other players or to keep for yourself in case you really want to exploit the Source system (say, a team of demons with all the same skills but not enough Sources to go around).

The dungeon-crawling portions offer numerous obstacles, and is built off the Etrian Odyssey engine, so if you've played those you should have some expectation of what you're up against.  Trap floors, one-way doors, conveyor belts, warp panels, false walls, and even false floors are pretty common, with the last dungeon using a lot of everything.  While in the dungeon you can find treasures like money or items, or Forma which are consumables you use to forge new equipment or software upgrades to your Demonica (battle suit) that will help you get to places you couldn't previously.

In combat, your Law/Neutral/Chaos alignment also has an effect.  Similar to All-Out Attacks in the Persona series, when you exploit an enemy's weakness, all the demons on your team with the same alignment join up for an extra attack.  There are of course times when it's best to have a team of varying alignments, but the game does a great job of making sure the alignment system has more of an effect than what ending you get.  It was all too late, for example, that I found out I locked myself out of one of the better items in the game because I was (for story purposes) set on a contrary alignment.

Graphics/Sound

It's a DS game.

That said, most of the character sprites are actually pretty clean and crisp, but some of the demon sprites are recycled from older titles, which is painfully obvious when it's a demon that hasn't been used in the series in a long time.  While I understand that the game has 55-65 hours in the first playthrough and easily over 100 when you go through the two other paths and optional boss fights, this is an oversight that's easy to correct.


The sound effects are unique and iconic, evocative of the sci-fi-meets-Hell-on-Earth setting.  Dramatic soaring opera scores beset by tribal drumming and Gregorian chanting fits perfectly, though I'm not sure this is the type of game that leaves songs in your head for weeks (see: The World Ends with You for a DS example).

Overall

My playthrough was about 58 hours with minimal grinding.  I'm more anal than most about making sure my final team is optimal because final bosses in SMT are hard enough without a laziness handicap.  Even then this game's boss took about eight tries before A and I worked out a strategy that was just right.  All said I do plan on replaying it in the future to get good use out of New Game+ and see what the other alignments have in store.  If it was good enough to get me to stop playing Pokemon HeartGold, well, that says something.  I bet my Gengar misses me. :(

- E

Review: Shin Megami Tensei Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army (PS2)

This game has it all. Rasputin? Check. Terminators? Check. Demons? Check. Gundams? Check. Copious amounts of WTF? Check check check.

I thoroughly enjoyed this game. I'm so mad at myself for not playing it earlier. I remember very vividly buying it and Tales of the Abyss on the same day back in October 2006. I ended up beating Tales of the Abyss, but not touching this one until 2007 or so and only for about 20 minutes. Clearly, I made a mistake in not giving this a good solid play until this week.

Story
This game has everything I could ever want in a detective story. It starts with a dame (ho ho ho vintage talk!). Lots.

The titular character is a descendant of a long line of devil summoners (the 14th in fact), and is charged with protecting the Capital from evil demony bad guys -- basically a one-man Ghostbuster. As such you join up with the local fuzz, the Narumi Detective Agency, in order to run the beat and solve a mystery that begins to unfold the first day on the job: a young woman named Kaya Daidouji is abducted by robots dressed as soldiers. By the end of the game, you've fought Rasputin, walked straight into a bathhouse and punched a Yakuza leader, and square off against a battleship possessed by some ancient demon god.

Suck it, Holmes.

Gameplay

Unlike most games in the Shin Megami Tensei series (which are turn-based), Devil Summoner utilizes a system that is very much Resident Evil meets Pokemon: you have an action RPG way of fighting and you control various demons that you capture in tubes (read: elongated pokeballs). As your demons level up they get special attacks/moves that can help out a ton in battle. Some nullify particular elements, others do amazing attacks that can cause a significant amount of damage. Boss fights, like other SMT games, do require a lot of thought/strategy/skill; no button mashing here. I thoroughly enjoyed every boss fight, even the occasional one that made me throw my controller onto the floor several times. But I'll tell you what: never have I felt so satisfied in beating a boss as I do when it's one in an SMT game that I have had problems with. Most if not all of your problems come from a lack of planning vs. a lack of grinding.

Graphics/Sound

The character designs and the whole feel of the game are very unique and gorgeous. Kazuma Kaneko's back as the main designer and the whole game shows off his art style, which I personally don't mind. I was a little disappointed with Persona 3 and Persona 4 simply because the characters didn't have Kaneko's signature look. The whole period feel is very authentic - the game looks and feels very 1920s - and even the dialogue is spattered with little vintage phrases here and there. The soundtrack is a very good listen. It captures the vintage setting of the game well but still fits in very well with modern music. Honestly, if I still had an iPod, I'd probably buy the OST and transfer it to that just so I could listen to it every now and then.

Overall

This game was just the console game I needed to get my ass in gear on reviews. It had great detective elements (and everyone knows I love detectives....), a thrilling plot, lots of humor and was just fun to play. I've already started on the 2nd one in the series (which just came out last May!). I hope this ride with Devil Summoner Raidou Kuzunoha is just as good as the last. If you don't own this game, buy it immediately (eBay~) and if you own it and haven't played it, go do it now! What are you waiting for!?

- A

Review: Crimson Gem Saga (PSP)

I really want to love this game. I do. It has a very nostalgic charm to it that appeals to every memory I have of old-school RPGs. But I can't play it, I just can't. I've officially ground to a standstill.

Story

You play as Killian, a knight-in-training who at the beginning of the game is graduating from Green Hill Academy as salutatorian. Thus begins a series of near-misses and general hijinks that lands our hero square in the middle of a quest to find all of the Wicked Stones, cursed artifacts that someone blah blah blah. Basically you play fetch through various dungeons with forced sidequests until something good happens I guess? The plot really wore thin when I ran out of party members to meet, so maybe the ending is awesome, but I'll never know.

Gameplay

The game is a traditional turn-based RPG. You have a menu from which to select general physical attacks, special skills (like magic), items, etc. You earn XP and SP, the latter of which you spend to unlock skills on a Skill Tree. Each character has their own specific skills, but some of the skills are a combination move which requires all related party members to have the skill. But not only do you have to unlock the skill, you also have to then learn the skill: yes that's right, you basically have to dump SP into one skill twice, without even knowing if you'll like the skill or not. Cue me skipping over a bunch of crap skills to get to the good stuff.

Graphics/Sound

One thing this game excels at. The sprites are all gorgeous, the menus are well-designed and clear to understand, and all of the locations have their own personality. In the beginning the major scenes are all voice-acted, but after a while the voice-acted scenes appeared less and less, to the point that I eventually started playing the game on mute.

Overall

A big batch of mediocrity with a bow on top. I would only recommend this for someone who really loves grinding, and someone who really loves grinding. Also someone who really loves grinding. The SP requirements and the skill trees are godawful timesinks, and when you have to commit that much time to Press X to Win combat, why the fuck bother.

- E

Review: SMT Devil Survivor

Devil Survivor is yet another game in the Shin Megami Tensei series, the first entry for the DS (but not the last -- cannot wait for Strange Journey next month). The guy with the purple hair is the Main Character, and he and his merry band of party members get locked down in Tokyo when demons start showing up and attacking humans. While inside the humans eventually discover that they only have seven days to find a way out of the lockdown, though the circumstances differ based on your actions through the week. The game is a spin on traditional tactical/strategy RPGs in that it also features Dragon Quest-esque first-person turn-based battles. Let me explain:

Gameplay

When your characters are outside of battle, the majority of your time is spent either exploring the city for a route of escape, talking to civilians and finding clues, and general maintenance. Each member of your party, max four, owns a device called a COMP which is used to summon and control demons. Each party member has the ability to control up to two demons at a time, which you can arrange, fuse, and manipulate outside of battle so as to prepare yourself for combat.

When in combat, each party member moves on a grid independent of each other, same as your enemies, and when two opposing units get within attack range, the active unit gets the opportunity to engage. Once engaged, each side gets one turn to take an action before that round of combat ends; additional turns are granted by using moves that exploit weaknesses, similar to the Press Turn system that has become a staple of SMT. Between the six types of moves (Phys, Fire, Ice, Force, Elec, Mystical), different abilities of demons (determined by the demon's race), support skills that let you do things like move further in the grid or float over objects, the major emphasis is on preparation: if you build your teams right, a given combat scenario is over before it begins. Furthermore combat is initiated as part of the plot or by various "Free Battles", but you always have to decide to choose that event, so there's no random battles.

An example of the grid vs. the first-person view. Image courtesy of Destructoid.

As you go about your day, events take up time in the day, meaning you progress through the plot through a series of encounters, meetings, and exploration. You can do any amount of maintenance without using up time, as well as grind in Free Battles for cash or to crack skills without progressing the storyline. New demons are unlocked as you progress the story, and you purchase them with Macca, the game's currency, from the Demon Auction, which is basically like eBay for demons. Another SMT staple, you can fuse demons to make more powerful demons, etc. etc. etc.

Story

With this particular game, it's best I stop at the synopsis in the opening paragraph. Just to reiterate, there are a number of different endings, and the actions you take throughout the days determine your outcome, who your party members are, and what locations you see. The ending you receive has less to do with the strict "good/bad" mentalities as seen in games like Fable, Infamous, and Mass Effect, and more to do with your perspective on matters. The gravity of your choices, however, run deeps, to the point that your party members can (and sometimes do) leave you because they can't accept your actions.

Graphics/Sound

Ultimately the graphics and sound of this game do not use the DS to its fullest, especially as the game has no touch screen controls whatsoever, but for what they are they're very well-done. The hand-drawn character portraits are crisp, the music is fitting and catchy, but there's absolutely no voice acting. To me this shows Atlus's general mentality about production qualities: make a new IP that's clean and polished, but isn't exactly a filet mignon. Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army, a late-generation PS2 title, is absolutely absent of voice acting as well.

Overall

Devil Survivor has a very delicate and very intelligent balance of complexity, strategy and difficulty to make any fan of RPGs, SRPGs or games-that-make-you-think pick it up at least once, if not the five times required for all of the endings*. On that note, the game does feature a New Game+ mode, and you simply won't complete all of the maintenance one can do in your first playthrough without doing in on purpose -- I mean, sure, you could go ahead and get all your characters to level 100 or whatever but you still wouldn't have access to the ending-specific demons that are unlocked with each ending path, crack every skill, etc. etc. Ultimately the grind is pointless until you need a couple extra Macca to mess around in fusions some more, so don't be too concerned that the game will become a gigantic time sink.

If you're looking for a bit more challenge for your DS and are a fan of any kind of strategy game (hell, I'd count checkers as qualifying here), track down a copy of this game and fire it up.

- E

* This number is probably wrong, it's somewhere in the 4 - 6 range though.

Review: SMT Persona 3 FES

This is going to be really, really, really long. Kind of like the game itself.


I realized last night that I never got around to completing the boss fight for this game, even though I started it about a year ago. I figured it was worth trying to finish a game I had sunk 90 hours into, right?

The premise of the game is the same as the rest of the Persona series: you and a group of people end up with the ability to summon personae, which are like aspects of ones' personality turned into summons. You are special (for reasons not spoiled here) in that you can use many different types of persona, which forms most of the strategy: being well-equipped with a versatile set of persona is more valuable at times than what equipment you're wearing. These basically act as summon spells, except each persona can have up to eight different moves at a time.

The key feature to the game and most post-PS2 era SMT games is a variant on the Press Turn system, which uses elemental strengths and weaknesses to grant extra turns. For example, if I use Wind magic against an enemy weak to Wind, I knock it down and get another turn right there and then. There are different variations on what does and doesn't work, but that's the basic idea. Since persona can have various movesets, the more versatile each persona has (for example, hybrid ice/wind uses are more effective than one guy with four different flavors of fire moves) the more useful they end up being.

Another feature is persona fusion, wherein you can use two or more persona to make new persona. This is a feature that becomes indispensible during the last sections of the game, as sometimes going nuts with fusions for a little bit can yield better results than grinding specific persona. Furthermore you can inherit skills from the fused persona, meaning you can end up with persona that have abilities they wouldn't naturally learn, which is actually what ended up helping me finish the last boss fight.

Finally there are Social Links, where this game usually ends up having a split in the audience. Persona 3 was the first in the series to add interaction with friends and party members in exchange for a boost in fusion powers. Each persona is grouped into one of the 20 major arcana of tarot, with a respective friend/team member representing an aspect of that tarot. One of the first people you end up teaming with, Yukari, is associated with the Lovers arcana. So by going to the movies with her on a day off, you can level up your Lovers arcana (all the way up to level 10), resulting in boosted experience when you fuse persona of the Lovers arcana. Again, the ability to get multiple free levels out of a fusion could mean the difference between spending your time grinding and spending your time winning.

One major complaint among fans is that some of your contacts are female, so the social aspect of the game at times plays like a dating sim. My defense is it's one way for you to establish relationships with other characters, and the idea of making a main character asexual is something that got thrown out of character-driven RPGs a long, long, long, long time ago. Furthermore, the PSP remake of this game will feature a female protagonist, meaning you can get yo mack on with boys if that sort of thing appeals to you.

The other major complaint of the series is that this is the first and only SMT title where you do not control your party members. You can issue general commands, but otherwise they pick their own moves as based on a pretty sophisticated AI. It isn't perfect in that it's not telepathic, but that's kind of the point: the central theme of the game is friendship and trust, and simply put, being able to fully control your party would take away a part of what makes the game special.

I haven't even discussed the story yet, because I want to leave this as spoiler-free as possible, but the basic idea is this: There is a mysterious 25th hour called the Dark Hour that most people can't see: in fact, most of them temporarily transform into the shape of a coffin. The protagonist and the team of persona users named SEES are the only ones immune to this effect, and therefore are charged with figuring out what the hey is going on. Also there's the weird part about how your high school turns into Tartarus, a 200+ floor tower, aka the game's only dungeon. It may seem tedious, but the game takes place over the course of ten months so you'll have plenty of time to get to the top.

Speaking of which: each significant action takes up a set amount of time, meaning you have to budget between raising your personality stats, raising your Social Links, and crawling through Tartarus.

I have written way too much. Let's go to the summaries:

Gameplay: 5

The intricate balance of plot, combat, and friendship is pitch-perfect and shy of the upgrades to the basic systems Persona 4 brought (and ultimately Persona 3 PSP will bring), I would change nothing.

Story: 4

Again, without revealing too much, the game is far more character-driven than story-driven. What central driving plot there is is told well, and is paced in a way that just makes sense. My only problem is that some choice elements weren't as fleshed out as they could be, though those particular plot points weren't in the first release, and were added in for the FES release.

Graphics: 5

All of the character models are detailed perfectly, the personas all look awesome, the settings and structures are evocative of modern-day Japan, and the cinematic sequences are gorgeous without being too anime.

Sound: 5

This is another point where the crowds are split. The music for the most part ends up sounding like a hip-hop/jazz/pop hybrid with lots of Japanese vocals, which will not appeal to everyone. That there's a large variety of battle music, every setting has its own theme, and all of them are memorable more than counteracts that. The soundtrack is not 100% in that it will appeal to everyone, but that it fits what the game is doing.

Oh yeah, and the sound effects are well-done.

Overall: 5

This game took me almost a year and over 90 hours to complete. The reason for the time gap was that I found the final boss battle too difficult at the time, being as this was my first SMT game. I sat the game down, played Persona 4 and Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor during my break, picked it back up, and messed with some fusions and ground about three or four levels. I ended up beating the final boss on my first go.

This is a game that requires you fight smart, not strong. There will be fights you have to sit back and heal while you let your team do the damage. There will be fights where you switch to one persona for elemental coverage and then only attack physically because it has an ice affinity and won't learn fire moves. You will die repeatedly. Essentially this game is for people who have worn out the X button, and only the X button, on several controllers. This game is for people who would like having a greater influence on major plot points, say who the main character ends up fooling around with or whether you want to be a dick to everyone you see. This game is for people who would like a challenge, both in the game itself and of their own abilities as players.

Beating that final boss after a year and 90 hours is one of the most rewarding experiences of my gaming history, and I can't wait to load up a New Game+ file.

Final Score: 5 (classic)

- E

Final Fantasy VIII: Thoughts So Far, Part One

I don't hate it. Not by a long shot.

Junctioning is pretty sweet, and the plot, while having not gotten too far off the ground yet, is at least not up its own ass with symbolism. Yet.

However, the character designs feel like a very dreadful precursor to the insanity Square Enix would later pump out: see Kingdom Hearts, FFX, The World Ends with You (even if the latter is my all-time favorite game).

- E

Contact, post one

So far I've been abducted by a bald man and his pet sheep-cat, carted around the world to hunt down green crystal shards, stabbed random animals with a blunt knife, met a naked chef and was given his costume which gives me the ability to cook all that raw meat I picked up off those dead animals, and subsequently learned how to cook.

Needless to say the game's been a blast so far, and I don't even know who the bad guys are.

- E