Things Just HappenWhat the hell

This game annoys me. Have you ever played Zelda and wondered if it could be any less fun? Well, Avalon Code proves that, not only can it be more boring, trying something new isn’t always a good idea.

The game opens, and we’re told the world is going to end – no ifs, ands, or buts, it’s time is up, and the player is tasked with deciding what gets carried over to the next world. Why the player’s character is chosen do to this is never even touched on, they’re just “the Chosen One”. That’s right, our hero(or heroine, if you would have it so) is a heroic mute with no past or any real personality. Genius. What does the game then have us do? That’s right, a MacGuffin fetch quest to power up the Book of Prophecy, the artifact of doom you’ve been given to accomplish your task. And that’s pretty much the first half of the game, retrieving the MacGuffin fairies that are scattered around for god knows why. There’s hints at more plot, but not much happens until the midpoint, during which there’s a cutscene so long I went to bed and it was still running when I woke up. This cutscene is actually pretty notable, in that it’s the second time to townspeople betray you, despite at this point the hero being considered a national hero. Just as jarring is the fact that as soon as you get back to town, they forgive you. These fucking townspeople flip-flop so much that I really can’t see why anyone would want to save their sorry asses. There’s also the hero’s best friend, who betrays him and steals the book to give it to the villain so he can use the book to revive his little sister…begging the question of WHY DIDN’T HE JUST ASK THE HERO TO DO IT? Then you spend the second half of the game on the EXACT SAME MACGUFFIN FETCH QUEST AS BEFORE. So after this, we finally get back to the main plot(such as it is) and find that a giant demon is trying to revive itself so it can steal the book and create it’s own world. Why this extremely dangerous demon was merely sealed by human, and then not torn to bits or otherwise destroyed in the intervening time is never so much as mentioned. I really hate when the Sealed Evil in a Can trope is invoked WITHOUT REASON. There’s no reason for the people to leave this demon sealed, there really is not – especially considering at the time it was sealed, they had another of their super weapons made just to kill it available, which brings up the question of WHY WOULDN’T YOU HIT IT AGAIN? Hell – at the end, the BBEG’s giant demon body is explicitly stated to still be sealed, and yet the fucker just goes and unseals it because HURR THIS IS MY FINAL FORM! And then there’s the question of why he didn’t outright die, but what the fuck ever. At any rate, the game ends up as a traditional JRPG SAVE-THE-WORLD shitfest, with any originality the early part may have promised just totally fucked up the ass with senseless bullshit.

So surely the gameplay is better, right? Well, we start out with a top-down Zelda setup. Not bad, so far, but it doesn’t stay there. There’s a roll maneuver for some reason I still don’t understand, as using it to dodge results in a cooldown time that makes it more likely you’ll get hit, making it completely pointless. Then there’s the meat and bones of the game, the Code system. Using the book, you can scan damn near anything, people, monsters, weapons, hell, even grass, and then change the attributes assigned to them. While this doesn’t do much in the case of NPCs, it’s absolutely essential to getting better weapons and weakening your enemies. The problem with this is that most of your time will be spent fucking with codes rather than actually playing the game proper, and it’s mind numbingly boring.Even worse is the fact that you can only hold four unassigned codes, meaning many times you’ll be stuck tediously moving back and forth to move codes instead of moving them en masse. This becomes even more annoying as later in the game, you’re able to put more codes on a single NPC/item/monster, but you can still only move four at once, making things even more tedious. As if that wasn’t boring enough, some genius thought it would be a great idea to include sliding puzzles which you have to solve to get the better weaponry, because clearly if you’re fighting monsters and progressing the story, you’re not spending enough time doing boring shit. As if that wasn’t enough, every dungeon room has a goal or puzzle that frequently turns out to be either tedious, or downright annoying – it doesn’t help that many later dungeons simply have repeat rooms. Then there’s the boss fights. While normal enemies are easy enough because you can knock them down, bosses are just a giant pain in the ass. The game starts you off with a mere five HP, with a single hit normally doing 1 damage – except for the bosses, who do at least two or more per hit, meaning even at ten HP, you’ve only got five hits before you bite it. When you die it lets you continue right from the beginning of whatever room you were in, and while this effectively defangs any threat other enemies might have, it also halves your HP and drops you MP to 50. This isn’t normally a problem, except when you realize you start every boss fight at full health, and you’re somehow expected to survive the fight at half-health if you didn’t the first time, and not bang your head into a wall until your vision fades and the pain stops. It doesn’t help that your movement sucks, the roll movement is useless, and many bosses are simply a matter of running around without getting hit long enough for them to die(many will go on for 30+ hits). There’s also dating-sim elements for those of you who can’t be bothered to go outside and talk to people, and don’t mind doing a list of sidequests that are as boring as doing your laundry but end up accomplishing a lot less.

Visually, the game is animu styled and generally unimpressive, and the music is ultimately forgettable. Really, there’s nothing here to visually or musically distinguish this game from other JRPGs.

To be honest, I don’t hate, Avalon Code, but am deeply disappointed. It seems like at some point some ideas that hadn’t been explored before came up, both in plot and gameplay, but the execution was half-assed and the writing done by a team of retarded marmosets. What Avalon Code does most poorly, however, is at being a game, as games are meant to be fun, not feel like a trip to the DMV.

If ever there was a truly horrible game for me to sink my teeth into, this would be it. So bad is this game, I would compare it to Twilight. Yes, this game features the same kind of condescending attitudes towards women, with a horrible role model for girls, charmless romance, and absolutely mind numbing stupidity.

So, our main Character is Cornet, but you can call her Bella if you like, she’s the same kind of moronic, air-headed dumbass as Twilght’s protagonist. Think I’m kidding? Fuck you I’m not. She says to herself of the prince – who she doesn’t know at all at this point “He’s the man…The man that I dreamt of… My ideal prince…I’ve finally found him… O…oh, my…my prince…”, and that’s a direct fucking game quote from just a few minutes in. Yes, I can see this is going to go well. Granted, this is from a dream sequence, but this is the kind of main character we’re dealing with. Cornet’s stupidity is really through the roof, as just a short while later, she decides she’d rather fight a dragon than give up some useful rocks she found just lying around. Pretty much the entire game revolves around Cornet’s quest to get the prince to knock her up, regardless of what she has to do or who she has to hurt to do it. Think I’m kidding? Dragons that keep local volcanoes from erupting have a MacGuffin she wants, so she just fucking kills them. In fact, even one of the villains calls her on this. Yes, that’s right, a villain chastises our would-be hero for being a horrible person. This doesn’t stop her from doing the same thing later, or even lying about it, promising that oh she wouldn’t kill that nine-tailed fox for it’s MacGuffin at all! The damn fox even says, and I quote “we shall all perish if I give you the stone” SO SHE JUST KILLS IT. She does all this for the prince, a guy she’s interacted with for LESS THAN AN HOUR. That’s right, our heroine gleefully goes about causing natural disasters and dooming people for a guy she’s just so in love with, despite the fact she doesn’t even fucking know him.

For that matter, fuck the Prince too. Not kidding, he is described by one of the characters as “the famous Prince Ferdinand…Intelligent, kind, handsome, daring, and even a great swordsman to boot. He’s everything a woman could possibly ask for…” and it’s not even Cornet. Yes, he’s the magically perfect boyfriend who doesn’t exist. Every time I see this guy on screen I want to kill him. There isn’t an ounce of realism in this guy, he’s just a Ken-doll for Cornet to fawn over. He’s there only to be the perfect boyfriend, and things like chemistry and romance fuck off for the entirety of this game. Even at the end of the game, when Cornet finally decides to feel bad about the horrible things she’s done, the prince just tells her not to sweat it and she’s cool! And you bet your ass she gets her perfect ending, the little shallow cunt.

For that matter, Fuck Kururu, too. Rather than give Cornet sage wisdom or guidance, she just encourages her to do everything in her power to get the prince to fuck her, because that will ensure her happiness. Gee, what a swell mentor figure you are.

The plot is, likewise, astoundingly shallow. The Prince is kidnapped, oh no! Cornet must rescue him. If that wasn’t fucking dumb enough, most of this time is spent on a pointless MacGuffin fetch quest, during which Cornet proceeds to do everything in her power to ruin other people’s lives, because her happiness is the only thing that counts. Shit goes on during these bullshit quests, but I don’t give a fuck about it! It’s not enough that the story is boring shit, or that the would-be romance lacks any romance, the fucking game comes up with TWEESTS to try and surprise, well, fucking no one. Holy shit Kururu is Cornet’s mother! No fucking shit, game, I knew that a couple of chapters ago. The shit that happens is utterly predictable, lacking even a lingering scent of originality, as it seems to be completely foreign to the writers.

In fact, the best characters in the game are Marjoly and her gang – THE VILLAINS. That’s right – the “evil” antagonists are more likable than the heroine, in no small part due to being hilariously inept, but also managing to have more character despite having much less screen time. I haven’t a fucking clue what the writers were thinking, but things seem backwards as hell here.

The gameplay – at least for the DS post – is as generic as JRPGs get. Top down camera angle, dungeons with rooms that all suspiciously look alike, and boring as fuck menu driven battles. Oh, wait, that wasn’t enough – the battles must have the most annoying possible set of sound effects. And then there’s the “musical” part – at random intervals in the game, people break into song and you have to wait five minutes before you can get on with it. If anything, this just shows that JRPGs and musical don’t fucking mix, not even a little. It doesn’t help at all that the music sucks, and the game really isn’t all that great to look at.

FUCK THIS GAME. Keep in mind this isn’t just a shitty game, this was a game marketed to the young girl demographic. That’s right, like Twilight, this game is out to tell young girls stalking is ok and go ahead and be a stupid whore, you’ll get your way in the end!

Not satisfied with just one massive flaming pile of shit, Nippon Ichi actually made a sequel. That’s right, for whatever reason, this game did well enough to warrant a sequel. FUCKING HELL! Nippon Ichi’s later games are the whole reason I took an interest in this one, and boy I’m fucking pissed I did.

If you like condescending tripe, then this game is for you. If you have a brain in your head and aren’t an empty headed Twilight-zombie fuckface, you’ll avoid it like a it was a flood of plague-infected rats.

Most games suck. Your average video game doesn’t bother to even try to do anything remotely new, especially when tired old formulas can be used to bring in money, because, let’s face it, video games are a business. The sad fact of this is that making good games doesn’t mean you’ll make money, and that bad games can make money – lots of it, even.

Today I’d like to talk about a game I like, that grew from what before it appeared to be a pretty lackluster series of fantasy JRPGs – Breath of Fire III. While Breath of Fire and Breath of Fire II are games that really suck, Breath of Fire III is probably one of the better JRPGs out there.

One of Breath of Fire III’s big strengths is it’s story. Is there a villain trying to take over/destroy the world? Uh, no. There really isn’t, with the main villain being a well-intentioned extremist/mother-goddess figure, and the main story being about Ryu’s quest to at first find his friends, and later to find the truth of his background and people. Unlike your run of the mill JRPG, saving the world doesn’t really come into play – it’s just not about that. Even at the end of it the game, it’s less about saving the world and more about Myria’s overbearing Mother-Bird syndrome. The weak point in all this is that the plot meanders a bit, and it’s quite a bit in once the main plot starts rolling. The reality of it is that if you’ve been playing JRPG’s for a while, Breath of Fire III’s story should be a breath of fresh air, simply because it’s not the same old story. For some reason beyond my understanding, the thinking seems to be that a story is only interesting if it’s about someone saving the world, but this game shoves that thinking in the mud and delivers anyways.

Another somewhat standout is the world itself. Elves? Dwaves? None. In fact, the standard fantasy races are completely absent(although this is standard for a Breath of Fire game). The game both plays straight and averts the corrupt government official trope, and the world seems pretty balanced. There’s also the technology, which is mostly a result of work by people like Momo to restore various machines washed up from across the sea, so the weird mix of low-tech and high tech feels somewhat justified, as these are people who didn’t come into this stuff on their own, but are merely using what they found. The world is by no means a real standout, but it feels like it makes more sense than Final Fantasy VII’s small, old fashioned town which sits right next to a super-advanced city.

Gameplay is pretty standard for JRPGs, featuring a top-down camera angle and a battle system that should not slow down anyone who’s played a JRPG before. A constant in the Breath of Fire series, you can perform actions out of battle, to either solve puzzles or rob people(unfortunately, you make shit for cash this way), but unlike some other game, it doesn’t push it to the point of annoyance. To be honest, the first half of the game seemed a bit harder to me, with Ryu’s dragon transformations dominating the boss fights and even some annoying normal enemies more and more as the game went on. The transformation system deserves mention, giving you a total of 18 “genes” you can find scattered around the environments or given to you, that let you modify Ryu’s dragon form. While this gives you something to toy around with, it also allows you to customize Ryu’s dragon form to deal the most damage to bosses, making them go down quicker as you gain more and more access to genes and AP restoring items. On the other side of things, there’s a fishing minigame that while not horribly designed and reaps some great rewards, does get fairly boring. There’s also the Fairy Village in the second half of the game, in which you tell the fairies what shops to open, or can send them off on expeditions to find things for you. The Fairy Village not only gives you access to some of the best items in the game, but also contains the art gallery and music tracks. There’s also a slew of lesser minigames scattered around the game, which are for the most part a nuisance, but could really be much worse.

Visually, Breath of Fire II isn’t anything special, but someone in the music department decided “Hey, let’s go with a jazzy soundtrack”, which was bloody brilliant. The music varies from cheerfully upbeat overworld theme to oppressive boss battle music. The soundtrack is a truly impressive piece of work, and definitely stands out against the multitudes of orchestra Final Faggotry-esque JRPG soundtracks that are so common.

What Breath of Fire III does, and the reason I like it, is show us that JRPGs don’t have to indulge in cliched and formulaic storylines, or for that matter, all use the same fucking music. If there was more variety in games, it probably wouldn’t be such a standout, but as it is it’s a fucking gem in a sea of shit.

Some of you may remember a time not so long ago when a certain system came and went much like it’s name might imply, the Dreamcast. A mere two years after Sega released it, they’d discontinued it in North America, quietly coming and going, leaving an impression that something good had been presented poorly.

Despite Sega busily tripping all over themselves like a gangly teenager with no hand-eye coordination, there was a wealth of good games to be had. The Dreamcast didn’t have a Final Fantasy because Square was too busy sucking Sony’s Playstation shaped cock, so something else would have to tide over the JRPG fans and Skies of Arcadia was there.

Skies of Arcadia pits a small group of rebels against a large empire bent on using a couple of Mac Guffins to – alright, the plot isn’t even remotely original. The whole “rebelling against an evil empire” has really been done to death, but Skies of Arcadia uses it more as a device for it’s characters, who are far enough from the Final Faggotry mold that I quite like them. Vyse doesn’t spend hours agnsting about being a being a bloody tomato, but is in fact a confident, capable hero. What ever happened to them? It seems like these days your average hero is so wrapped up in angsty woe it’s a wonder they can be bothered to anything with a sword that doesn’t involve their wrists or strategically placing it so it’ll get their heart when they fall on it. Not only are the heroes not unlikable whiny cunts, the setting is completely different from your generic fantasy JRPG setting, set entirely on floating islands on a planet where shit like that makes sense.

The gameplay has it’s downsides, mostly that combat gets horribly boring late in the game, wherein you can essentially put up a shield of invincibility every turn and taunt the enemies until you have enough power to bitchslap them back to Bedrock. While this doesn’t work as well against bosses, pretty much every other enemy because a pushover since they can’t hurt you. Thankfully there’s also ship to ship combat, where you fly your airships – in this case, not zeppelins but actually ships that fly for whatever reason – around each other trying to shove great hot cannonballs up each other’s aft sections. While this amuses for a bit longer, it also bores late game, because again a single strategy is enough to defeat most enemies. Exploration takes a pretty good role in the game, not only to upgrade Fina’s weapon, but also to make money. The maps is covered with “Discoveries”, which range from rare plants to sand-falls and even to being the first to figure out the world is round. Finding all of these, especially without the aid of a guide, is a fun challenge and while the reward for finding them all isn’t anything to write home about, the whole process is really rather fun. The Gamecube port, dubbed “Legends”, adds a few more exploration goodies, in the form of what was originally downloadable content for the Dreamcast version and a completely new quest to find special fish.

To be honest, the music never struck me as particularly great, but at the very least it was fitting. The designs are unique enough to be easily recognizable, and at the same time immediately tell you what the characters are: Alphonso, for example, looks like and IS a useless buffoon, and Galcian looks like the big bad he is. I don’t normally like anime styled models in video games, because to be honest they look awful, but Skies of Arcadia at least managed to make them almost OK.

If Skies of Arcadia got a medal from me, it would be a bronze medal, with a couple of big shiny diamonds in it. It’s not a great game, in fact a lot of it’s incredibly average, but what it does good it does really good. The character are memorable, the setting, sadly unique among it’s peers, and the exploration is a lot of fun. And who doesn’t like pirates?

If you own a Wii and don’t own No More Heroes, you’re probably the kind of person who still think Final Fantasy and Halo are good games, which is to say a complete moron. If you own a Wii and like action games at all, go buy No More Heroes right now. While I can say without any doubt that No More Heroes is a game that you should buy, I really don’t feel I can say the same about No More Heroes 2.

No More Heroes 2 picks up three years after No More Heroes, and starts off with an animation that should be familiar to anyways who played the first game. The writing is solid, expounding on the nature of assassins and revenge, but fails to live up to it’s predecessor, the more serious tone meaning there’s less blending of drama and comedy that made No more Heroes so much fun. That’s not to say the writing is bad by any means, it really is on the same level as No More Heroes, just lacking in some of No More Heroes’ charming wackiness. There are a whole lot more bosses than before, and yet they somehow lack the charm of the original ten, and they seem to have less screen time as well, with Travis and Sylvia hogging the camera.

The core gameplay has changed only slightly, with the high/low stances actually changing how Travis and the Dark Step being slightly different. Other changes include the charge attacks being a whole lot less useful, two new beam katanas, battery power lasting much longer, and the Ecstasy Gauge, which is just a way to bypass the slots and go right into a Darkside mode. Ultimately I think the Ecstasy Guage was a bad idea, because I went though most stages(which, by the way, are for the most part a lot shorter) without taking a single hit. The money making games are back, but the assassination missions are gone, meaning the side jobs are the only way to make significant amounts of cash because you no longer reap rewards from ranking fights(to be fair, you don’t pay for them, either). But you won’t need to do them for long, since Naomi sells only two beam kanatas, and the gym is more or less a waste of time due to being annoying and unnecessary(I went through the entire game with two health upgrade and nothing more, and I was still able to kill the enemies and bosses rather quickly). There was some comments that led me to believe Santa Destroy would be more explorable this time around, but it fact you can’t explore Santa Destroy at all, being instead just choosing where to go on a map. You can play with Jeane, the cat, and you get a move that’s rather broken when used with the Rose Nasty, but the actual process of playing with her is about as exciting as taking a shit.

Visually the game looks a bit darker, and the music has some new vocal tracks, but for the most part it’s more of the same. Sadly the enemies didn’t get a death scream that matched up to the ubiquitous “MY SPLEEN!” from the first game, which was rather disappointing.

No More Heroes 2 lacks a lot of the charm of the original. and while this seems intentional, I don’t feel it works for it. No More Heroes sold us an odd tale about a weirdo assassin, but No More Heroes 2 seems more like a martial arts revenge flick. It’s not like they didn’t try, with the giant robot fight and Henry’s fight with a strange dream being, but at the end of it all I still feel disappointed, and that perhaps someone should have listened when Sylvia said “too bad there won’t be a sequel”.