Flash - Evoland Classic

Haiku-Review:

memories of Link?
traversing early designs
throughout RPG's

Additional Comments:

I feel as if I'm turning my nose against Evoland by only contributing words to its "beta," if you will, LudumDare contest winning entry as opposed to the full game. But unlike physical products, I'm far more apprehensive to spend money on an unknown in the digital realm. However, Evoland has piqued my interest for some time, even with the gamut of mediocre to bad reviews floating around out there. The idea of evolving a game from a simple Game Boy-esque overhead action-adventure game to a 3D RPG sounds incredible and the trailer completely sold the idea. Still, as a paid download, I refused to move ahead and had to confide in some YouTube footage and disheartened rants to either satisfy and/or hopefully deter me from wanting to play the game. I know, I sound like a cheap asshole, but really I'm a stubborn materialist that refuses to pay for product that exists solely in the digital domain. As a result, I could potentially be missing out on some great fun...or maybe not. Fortunate for me, Shiro Games has Evoland Classic available for play on their website so I can at least take an interactive stroll through the game's genesis.

Classic's gameplay brings the player up through to a PC interpretation of a 16-bit RPG - sort of reminds me of topdown elements found in RPG Maker VX. But I believe Classic has more than enough to clearly exemplify the full game's potential. Maybe I didn't get to experience any real RPG goodness or see some rotund non-playable dullards in all their glory, but Evoloand Classic plays exactly as described - a surreal evolution of video games, from restrictive left/right movement all the way up through some senseless grinding. Ok, the grinding's completely involuntary and serves no real purpose beyond a developer's heartless joke, but the experience is at least present I suppose. Hmm...is that a good thing or a bad thing?

If there's anything discouraging I absolutely must declare, it's that a couple of the chests are a tad absurd to locate. I've never been a fan of the whole "illusionary" wall gimmick. I didn't like it in Legend of Zelda's second quest, and I shook my head in haughty derision over it here. I suppose I shouldn't completely write off the gimmick, but when you have to walk into every single wall hoping for a fake, I find it ridiculous. Otherwise, that's all I've got.

Unlike most of my critiques, I surprisingly have little to say about this game. It's short and sweet, sure, but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the concept and found the Eno-esque background music delightfully relaxing. And despite my criticisms toward digital purchases, this "teaser" more or less convinced me it may be worth purchasing after all. We'll see though. We'll see....

Rating: 4 pr0n banners out of 5

NES - Faxanadu

Haiku-Review:

questing needs: a sword,
shield, keys... "This is not enough
Golds," to my dismay

Additional Comments:

Faxanadu is an interesting piece of classic NES gaming. Its mix of fantasy and RPG-esque action/adventure platforming seemed to be a true rarity - well, a true rarity in the sense that it was done well. Most games that fell into this niche always put me off for some reason. They were either too bogged down with unnecessary devices (qv Zelda II) or just ridiculously awkward to play (qv Castlevania - yes, I can already imagine the hate for that, but there are some of us out there, namely me, that just don't like the Castlevania games). However, if a Venn diagram existed for all that was right in these two games, Faxandu would clearly represent that ideal slice right in the middle.

Sometime in the late 90s a friend lent me the game and I was instantly awed by the mysterious "World Tree" mythology around which the game was built. This especially held true in the World of Branch where the graphics showcase the idea of adventuring within a giant tree perfectly. Essentially, the story, graphics, and gameplay were quality enough to draw me into a marathon session one afternoon and play it from beginning to end. It's very rare, if ever, for me to do that with any game the very first time I power it up.

I can't say what my opinions on difficulty were, but considering I took it down in a single afternoon, it couldn't have been all that trying. Although I specifically recall one particular screen in the World of Branch that frustrated the hell out of me due to suspect enemy placement. But other than that one instance, the game won me over and stayed on my A list for years to come. Heck, according to my top 25 NES games I listed back in 2010, Faxanadu ranks at number 5!!

But now that I've returned to the game years later, Faxanadu sadly took a bit of a tumble. I was looking forward to returning to this game, and did so with open arms. What came as a result is I found myself teetering on the same jagged edge that I found myself on with Dark Cloud - a beloved game that was suddenly put under a steely-eyed microscope embittered over a whole new world of imperfections. I began to see flaws that I either initially missed or chose to ignore for the sake of a joyous romp through a comparable Yggdrasil. However, unlike Dark Cloud, I'm a bit more apprehensive about what side of the line I'm throwing my weight towards. Fundamentally, Faxandu is still a brilliant game, but it's hampered throughout by stupid little details that could have easily been fixed with some simple tweaking - namely smooth scrolling.

The largest flaw this game faces is poor sprite placement which becomes more and more noticeable as the game wears on. The issue is not so much initial placement if you view each world map specifically as getting from point A to point B like a typical platformer. In this respect, placement is fine. I can think of a couple instances where this is not entirely true, but it's not anything to cry over. However, since Faxanadu has a Metroid style layout where you can backtrack all the way to the entrance of Eolis if your heart desires - not that you would - poor enemy placement suddenly becomes a nagging issue. To boot, the game does rely on backtracking resulting in forced hits on occasion. Even more frustrating is when I ran into the same exact trap that got the best of me on my initial playthrough back in the late 90s - although said trap was further enhanced by flawed ladder mechanics (more on that in a moment).

On my latest playthrough, I began to see similarities between Faxanadu and Mega Man. Obviously, they're worlds apart, but level design, despite having a Metroid style layout, felt eerily reminiscent of some early Mega Man stuff - could be those insufferable ladders. However, I think Faxanadu made a giant misstep by presenting the entire game as a series of single screens as opposed to utilizing some basic scrolling here and there. There's probably good reason why Falcom chose to go that route, namely the whole interconnected overworld design, but still. And by allowing scrolling in specific key areas, poor sprite placement would immediately be thrown out the window.

But what really gave me that Mega Man déjà vu is the overabundance of ladders carved out of the tree's woody interior. Unfortunately, I let the Mega Man similarities seep in far too much causing consistent brain farts on how one properly exits a ladder tile. I cannot even begin to express how much I hate the ladder mechanics in this game. Why can't I jump off them? Why!? Why do i always have to suffer an inevitable hit by some sword swingin' Dwarf Knight as I'm desperately trying to maneuver my way off the top of one of these things? Why the fuck would they design a screen entrance of a ladder coming up from the bottom of the screen with a pit on one side and a ledge with a Gladiator on the other with stupid ass ladder mechanics and the most dreaded of all game mechanics: knockback!? The same goddamn trap infuriated the hell out of me...again!! (Oh wait, I've already mentioned that...) Fortunately, halfway through this playthrough I realized you can use deaths to your advantage allowing backtracking skips. Heh, you've got to love games that do that - improve one's seemingly dire fate by actively walking into the bloodthirsty sword of thy enemy.

As far as knockback is concerned, it's a fairly trite mechanic and terrible at best, although there are games out there that make decent use of it - the Mega Man series comes to mind. I don't remember pulling my hair out over it the first time I played Faxanadu, and it didn't exactly get under my skin like it does in other games this time around either. The other design flaws likely trumped knockback enough to deem it forgivable. Although there were moments where I found myself cursing it, namely around screen boundaries thanks to constant enemy respawns.

Otherwise, it is a good game. It definitely suffers from bad design, but unless you nitpick the game, it's easy to forgive, overlook, and just enjoy the ride. The story unfortunately trickles out and the leveling.... Well, I'm not entirely certain why an experience system exists in this game other than to manipulate your Golds by repetitious suicide. Is it still a top 5 NES game? For me, no. But it can still knock about in my top 25 easily. Sure, the game stumbled in my eyes, but I'm still glad I went back and played it again after all these years, and although it wasn't the same experience I had years ago, it was well worth it. Not to mention, I got to listen to that wonderful soundtrack once again - another golden moment in Nintendo's early years. Beautiful pieces like Opening Theme, King's Castle, The Kingdom, and one my personal favorites, Daybreak run rampant throughout the game. And if anything, that's a perfect high point to end this critique on. Huzzah!

Rating: 3.5 tobacco smokers out of 5*

*Given Nintendo's ironclad grip on censorship and age appropriateness throughout the years, it's just so weird to see NPC's actively smoking...or am I simply misinterpreting that particular line of pixels? Huh...

PS2 - Dark Cloud

Haiku-Review:

my haiku, ruined
by an extensive gauntlet
through excessiveness

Additional Comments:

I've learned something during my six month absence from Beat All Games: the desire to see a game through to the absolute end can often ultimately lead to a far different perception of said game than was originally imagined, and not necessarily in a favorable light. Sadly, one of my favorite franchises from the PS2 era led me to this conclusion. Damn my desire to explore every nook and cranny, locate every object, and experience everything a game has to offer. If it wasn't for my OCD tendencies to 100% everything, this post would likely be singing praises - not to mention, would have been posted some six months ago. Instead, I'm going to bludgeon Level 5's masterpiece to death. (Worthy note: it's the above statement that's caused me to loathe giant, open-world sandbox games, despite loving the concept of them, and the main reason why I've yet to complete any current gen game. Add DLC to the pot and it's a whole world of frustrated incompleteness.)

But before I prepare my writ of defamation, I'll take a step back, nearly eight to ten months back, and attempt to recall what I do like about this game - that is if I can remember any of it, because by the end everything on my Good list was savagely crossed out. It's funny. I know I genuinely enjoyed the game, at least up through the beginnings of the Gallery of Time, but looking back - exactly what did I enjoy?

*thinks* (I can feel the pops and fizzles exploding from my brain over this quandary. Good grief...)

There's always been two big draws in the Dark Cloud franchise for me: randomized dungeons and city, er...village development, or in the case of Yellow Drops, a giant space robot. Two past heroes from Beat all Games: ToeJam & Earl and ActRaiser solidified my arguments for both of these features - although ActRaiser's simulation aspect was a bit weak. Dark Cloud improved the simulation aspect tremendously while executing randomized dungeons with near finesse...well, almost. A third element that's always intrigued me is the leveling of weapons as opposed to characters. I don't know why, but there's something far more alluring about packing elements and statistics into an inanimate object allowing me to have exponentially more firepower or magically enhanced melee madness - although I somehow suspect it has to do more with the imagery and nomenclature associated with said weapon. And finally, I just love the scenery and locales. I even found the dungeons to behold great beauty, even if they're overall pretty bland and repetitive. But for me, the Moon Sea especially left an endearing impression - yes, all fourteen craters worth.

Most importantly, thinking on when I first played the game way back in mid-to-late 2001, I was just enamored with it all: the look, the story, the gameplay, everything. I felt like I was playing something completely new. Even if the game was nothing more than a minimal hack n'slash action/adventure game, it didn't carry the persona of such. It was different. And at the time, the concept of freshness occluded what should have been glaring flaws. I was far too overwhelmed with awe to realize the game's laundry list of shortcomings. Unfortunately, the Ice Queen, La Saia, put an end to my Dark Cloud experience for nearly twelve years. If that bitch wasn't such a nightmare to defeat, I probably would have begun to unearth glimpses of a padded out excursion to the Dark Genie and beyond. Heck, I probably would have never moved on to Dark Cloud 2 at the time. Yikes! To think that my all time favorite PS2 game could potentially be a complete train wreck when and if I ever return to it. But to be perfectly honest, I did start feeling the apathetic game design somewhere in the depths of Moon Flower Palace and, surprise surprise, never finished the game. Kind of wish I did the same with the first one. True, being impeded by La Saia's near instantaneous death sorcery for so many years left me wanting more, but perhaps I should have accepted it as a black omen for what was to come.

Is it really that bad though? No. In fact, like I said, up through most of the Gallery of Time, I thoroughly enjoyed the game. However, the Gallery of Time began to wear out its welcome and the Dark Genie was a bit over the top - especially when you compare relative boss to dungeon difficulty - or heck, even boss to boss difficulty. Yes, it's the final boss, and as such should cause some hair-pulling, controller-throwing reactions, but when you consider how pathetically easy all the other bosses are, it sort of leaves you wondering. That's right, I said all of the other bosses, including that ice bitch, La Saia. Turns out she's one of those brutal bosses that unfortunately, or rather fortunately, has a massive weakness that can be exploited thanks to sprite/level design - sort of reminiscent of Dark Link in Zelda II. And then, while optional, you have the arduous trek through one hundred floors of uninspired architectural madness. But before I yammer on about how much of a game killer the Demon Shaft is, I want to first address some of the more essential gameplay elements.

While I love the concept of weapon leveling, I equally hate the idea that I have to play the game feeling far more empathetic towards material goods as opposed to characters. Dark Cloud places far too much value on weaponry and next to nothing on characters. It's such a bizarre mechanic to have to wrap your head around. In most games, a death typically equates to a great loss of work. Here, a death equates to a meager loss of funds...and that's about it. I suppose if you push deeper and deeper into a dungeon without returning to town, than a death might hold some meaning, but when the ability to return to a safe haven is so easy, why bother? Not only that, but there's so many items that help work against death plus an almost 90% chance that not just one, but two healing springs will be present in any given dungeon. The result: battle shit to the bitter end, I say. And if on the odd chance health is at a premium, there's more than enough chickens, bread, bananas, cheese, stand-in powders, and resurrection powders to see through even the most horrific battle.

Weapons, on the other hand.... Miscalculate a hit, run out of auto-repairs, or just ignore that annoying beep that's telling you, "Hey! You're favorite tool of destruction is about to bite the big one," and you're in a world of hurt, especially if it's your most powerful weapon. I reset the game on multiple occasions just because I misjudged my button presses and broke my weapon. On the other hand, the couple of times I died and didn't have any stand-in powder handy. What's my loss - about 2500 gold and all my characters have been healed. Fuck it, I'll take another death just for good measure. Maybe I'm just missing the point - that material goods far outweigh human life, or even that of a Neko, genie or moon rabbit. (Oh! Was that a spoiler? Too bad...)

In addition to the vast plethora of items to help make death seem like a thing of the past; as a segue into my next grievance, if one character drops, you've got between one to five more to carry on, depending on how far into the game you are. Thing is, outside of life support, the additional character's bring next to nothing to the table. Actually, I take that back. What I should have said is the game doesn't successfully make use of the extra characters. Their main function is to jump gaps or unlock doors. That's it! Add in the fact that only Toan can gather Atla and you quickly realize there's far too much needless character swapping going on. Eventually, at least in my experience, focus is only put on a single weapon on a single character, since weaponry is the most important aspect of the game, and voilà - I find myself tackling the entire game with just Ruby. To be honest, as a self-imposed limitation, I tackled each dungeon with differing characters to try and make them all feel useful, but once I reached the Demon Shaft, Ruby saw most of the action with Osmond a distant second. Ah! That brings up another interesting bit of information: the uselessness of melee weapons, especially in the Demon Shaft. After the Gallery of Time, both Toan and Goro would have been wise to just pack it in and return home to Norune and Matataki respectively. No matter how many Endurance gems you cram into a melee weapon, their natural fragility against everything dictates the superiority of ranged weaponry throughout the entire game. Yes, even Xiao and her slingshot of powerless pebbles proves more worthy than Toan's most formidable blades, and that's just pathetic.

But all in all, even with the above grievances, it's still an enjoyable game. Honestly, despite the flaws and the encroaching lazy design finally poking its head out in the Gallery of Time, I would still have been satisfied with the game upon its end. Sadly, I tackled the Demon Shaft and that's where everything immediately went south. It's not that it's hard - it's not. It's that it's fucking boring, padded unlike anything I've ever seen, and a complete waste of time when you consider that it brings absolutely nothing to the table. Yes, it's optional, and as such there's no real place for argument, but just because something's optional doesn't mean developers should pop something in that makes watching paint dry sound fun. It's the 200 lightning strike jumps all over again. The Demon Shaft is one of the main reasons it took me so long to finish this game - seriously, I beat the Dark Genie months ago. By the time I got to the last twenty floors, I just started chucking Poisonous Apples at everything. It wasn't worth my time anymore, and it sucks when a game crosses that threshold. And the icing on the cake, you may ask? Equating difficulty to infinitesimal amounts of hitpoints. That's not difficulty - that's fucking idiocy!!

Nano-Win:

I hate to end it all on such a sour disposition though. What's that? I've yet to discuss the soundtrack? One thing Level 5 nailed is the music. Right from the very beginning when you first hear the Main Theme kick in, through gems like Open Your Eyes (visiting Treant was always a high point just so I could hear that silky bass bend and I'd often go out of my way purposefully for that very reason), or the calming Daily Life, the soundtrack is just magical. Each and every one of the village themes are especially noteworthy, but the standouts have got to be Queens and Brownboo. And the dungeon themes are well crafted for each of their representative dungeons; A Sinking Ship being the quintessential example of mood. Overall, it's far too difficult to name only a few songs as the whole soundtrack is worthy of mention.

Nano-Rant:

Ok, I tried and I couldn't do it....

Fuck that stupid ass glitch that causes Jibubu to act like a total cheese-dick where he refuses to return home so I can give him the foundation! I have to wonder if the Sun Gem would have changed my opinions on Toan. We'll never know now, asshole!! And I certainly wasn't going to start over that late in the game because of a fucking glitch.

Rating: 3.5 Pointy Chestnuts out of 5*

*It was a tough call and I tried to place far less weight on certain "optional dungeons" than I probably should have while considering this game's fate, but then again those same "optional dungeons" seriously altered my perception of the entire game.