Game Review: Dragon Age - Origins (Part 1)

Note: This review has grown to the point where I've decided to split it. Part 1 is Introduction/Setting

Well. It seems my plans to resume a more regular review schedule have been utterly derailed, as I spent November and some of December in an intense playthrough of BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins.

Make that two playthroughs, actually.

So... where do I begin?

I actually had "Dragon Age" installed on my PC about six months ago; I'd put off playing it because I couldn't risk distractions during the concluding phase of my graduate project. But BioWare games have intrigued me for quite some time, specifically RPGs such as "Knights of the Old Republic", "Mass Effect" and "Dragon Age" where the player's ability to determine various courses of action supposedly leads to a more immersive role-playing experience.

In fact, one thing I enjoy about these "Western" RPGs is that, in theory, I'm able to formulate my character before starting the game: if I want to play the part of an honorable hero or a self-serving prat (or something else altogether), I can make those choices consistently throughout the game and emerge with a coherent character arc. It all depends on the extent to which the game world and the plot accomodate my decisions.

My first experience with a BioWare game didn't quite produce the desired result. I saw "Knights of the Old Republic" as a way to resolve an old beef I have with the "Star Wars" franchise: my player character would be a powerful, intelligent female villain. The Anti-Daala, as it were.

Unfortunately, being a "Star Wars" game, choices in "Knights of the Old Republic" are largely based on a simplistic moral binary: you're either roleplaying the Jedi equivalent of Mother Theresa or the Sith equivalent of Jeffrey Dahmer. And the game practically requires you to embrace one extremity or another, since the efficiency of talents such as Force Lightning and Healing are directly proportionate to your position on the Light Side/Dark Side scale. As a result, playing a villainous character meant making truly despicable decisions - appropriate for the cartoonish Emperor, perhaps, but not for the type of character I wanted to play.

"Dragon Age: Origins" is a much more subtle and flexible creature. I should note that I'm doing a great injustice to a very complex and intricate story by summarizing, but for brevity's sake it goes something like this: the kingdom of Ferelden is on the brink of destruction following a disastrous defeat at the hands of the vile darkspawn. You and another survivor are the last remnants of the fabled Grey Wardens, and you are tasked with assembling a new army and stopping the darkspawn incursion before they devour the entire realm. Naturally, every possible source of aid is currently neck-deep in its own troubles: the forest-dwelling Dalish Elves are under constant attack by a mysterious clan of werewolves, demons have overrun the Circle of Magi, the dwarves are a breath away from civil war and the human knights of Redcliffe have scattered across the land seeking a mystical cure for their dying leader.

Broadly speaking, that's all par for the course with RPGs: you have to solve other people's problems before they'll help you. But what's truly great about this game is that there are multiple solutions to the major quests, and unlike "Knights of the Old Republic" these options aren't based on morality per se, but rather a sort of cynical pragmatism versus idealism. For example, after a long trek through the underground ruins of the dwarven empire, you discover the Anvil of the Void, an ancient artifact capable of forging powerful golems. The Anvil's creator begs you to destroy it, as it requires a constant stream of living sacrifices to do its work. What's more, you may have a golem in your party that has described to you, in vivid detail, what basically amounts to an eternity of servitude. On the other hand, preserving the Anvil means the golems' raw might will benefit both you and the long-term survival of the dwarves. There may very well be a moral component at work, but it's not at the heart of the dilemmas you face.

Exploring Ferelden (and, by extension, the world of Thedas) was something of a marvel to me, as it's a world that defies the preconception of fantasy as simplistic literature. Unlike Middle-Earth or its derivatives, the existence of evil is treated more like an incurable disease than a tangible threat: the darkspawn and their corrosive Blight are beaten back again and again, but can never truly be eradicated. Ethereal demons from the dreamlike Fade can possess anyone with the slightest magical inclination, at any time, for any purpose. And there is no traditional solution to any of these problems, no keystone that instantly results in the enemy's destruction. This lends much credibility to the moral ambiguity permeating every aspect of the storyline: the thought of executing innocent mages should seem absolutely reprehensible, until you realize that there are no preventative measures that can be taken against possession. And since mages are arguably the most powerful class, both in story and game terms, the possibility of wiping them out "just to be safe" isn't something that can be set aside so easily. But is their current situation - a lifetime of virtual imprisonment within the Tower, under constant guard by the templars - any better? There are no easy or "right" answers, which ultimately means that the player's choices really count.

Ferelden's rich history is communicated to the player primarily through various Codex entries scattered across the world. Even the apocryphal material makes for pleasant reading, though some pieces of information (ie: the more detailed summary of Andraste's crusade and her death, or the profile on high dragons) can prove unexpectedly vital. You can certainly understand the plight of the elves better if you learn what really happened to them, and one of the major villains in the game becomes somewhat sympathetic in light of what the Codex reveals about his past. It's not an ideal scenario, since you're not likely to pause the game in the middle of a fight to read five paragraphs about the creature trying to crack your skull open, but it's far superior to twenty-minute infodump cutscenes.

The player is actually able to experience a part of the world before the story properly begins: character creation includes a choice of five possible backgrounds, depending on race/class. These serve as "prologues" to the main narrative, and are set in various regions across Ferelden, some of which you'll revisit during the major quests. Aside from informing how your character is perceived by others (a human noble is treated differently than a city elf or a dwarf commoner), these prologues also help root your character within the setting. You'll recognize NPCs who participated in your first adventure, who may have even fought at your side. While the world itself isn't much changed by your decisions, you may still find yourself more emotionally invested and immersed in the game. It's a clever device, and it works well enough that you'll probably find yourself creating new characters just for the different initial scenarios.

It's also worth noting that various DLCs add new locations and sub-stories, most of which are seamlessly integrated into the overall narrative, but I'll be reviewing those in a different segment.

Ultimately, I think what I most appreciate about the world of "Dragon Age: Origins" is that it actively resists many of the tropes and conventions that have become overly familiar and stale. The foundations are the same: humans and elves and dwarves learn to set aside their differences and unite against a common enemy, one that just happens to be a faceless horde of monsters. But once you're drawn in, the subversions become more and more evident, and what you're left with is an incredibly compelling world that breaks the right rules and upholds others.

Thedas: a great place to visit. But you wouldn't want to live there. Seriously. Everything wants you dead. Yes, even that. Especially that.

Next segment: Characters/Gameplay

Postcard From Thedas

Playing "Dragon Age: Origins".

Much to say.

Can't stop long enough to write.

Later.

Game Review: Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic

It's been quite a while since I've had time to play video games, let alone review them. Fortunately, my summer workload is finally starting to break up, which hopefully means a lot more content starting next month. In the meantime, let's have a look at a game from the "Star Wars" franchise: BioWare's Knights of the Old Republic.

Admittedly, my expectations for this game may have been slightly unrealistic: I've always imagined the distant pre-narrative history of "Star Wars" to be so much grander and more interesting than the "present" of the Lucas films, but what happens in the very first scene of the game? A small Republic transport comes under fire by the warships of the Sith Empire; the last few survivors crash on a fringe planet without hope of rescue; one of them carries a secret which can change the course of the war. Oh, and the Empire has a mysterious superweapon.

It's a rather blatant reiteration of the set-up to the first "Star Wars" film. In itself, this is hardly a major offense - if the idea is to instantly place the player in a familiar context so you can get to the actual story without further delay, that's fair enough. However, the overt similarities don't end there. When the opening scroll mentioned a Sith Empire, I imagined an army where even the grunts could use the Force. Instead, Sith Troopers are basically Stormtroopers with shinier uniforms, and this Empire is ruled by Darth Malak, a Sith Lord whose lower jaw has been cybernetically replaced. More machine than man, perhaps? Hmm.

It may seem strange for me to castigate a game because it strongly resembles its source text... but again, I chose "Knights of the Old Republic" assuming that it would tell a different story within that framework. Instead, it turns out that things haven't changed much in four thousand years.

Theoretically, the player's ability to influence the plot via various choices throughout the game is meant to counteract the overly familiar plot elements. And it could have worked - I've heard enough about "Dragon Age: Origins" and the "Mass Effect" series to know that BioWare has almost perfected that aspect - but in practice, "Knights of the Old Republic" falls short of the ideal. To demonstrate, I'll explain a bit about the character I created and why I ultimately lost interest in the game at a very early stage.

I went into "Knights of the Old Republic" determined to create and roleplay a character neither Lucas nor his successors have ever really provided: a competent, powerful female villain. Someone who wields the Dark Side of the Force without degenerating into a moustache-twirling caricature, and whose evil acts serve a higher purpose than self-indulgence.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Alia Sha'tir:



Bonus points if you can figure out the significance of her anagrammed last name. And yes, those are a pair of lightsabers she's wielding.

So Alia begins as a soldier in the Republic, and pretty soon the game starts offering those morality-based choices to determine where she is on the Light/Dark scale.

Said choices are utterly ridiculous.

My greatest disappointment with "Knights of the Old Republic" is the way in which it takes the Jedi/Sith binaries beyond even the simplistic extremes of Lucas' films: playing a dedicated Dark Side character will force you into courses of actions that are not simply evil, but obnoxious as well. It's one thing to be ruthless in achieving your goals, it's another to act like a prat "for the evulz".

Moreover, your actions will draw constant criticism from your companions - and since their alignments never change, you can either put up with a neverending stream of disbelief and outrage (forgotten as soon as the conversation ends) or play the entire game with characters whose position on the moral scale is closer to yours, and who probably won't be as helpful as a Light Side Jedi who can heal the party.

The most problematic aspect of this particular mechanism, though, is the fact that the game practically requires you to be consistent in your approach. I tend to be more aggressive than defensive in RPGs, which suits a Dark Side character just fine, but abilities such as Force Lightning and Life Drain become more costly and less effective the further you get from the Dark end of the morality scale. So to get the most out of my chosen set of powers, I had to sink to the utter depths of depravity for the first eight hours of the game, at which point I detested Alia so much that I stopped playing.

And more's the pity, really, because from a purely technical standpoint I could have enjoyed "Knights of the Old Republic" - the game allows you to pause during battles and arrange attack patterns and sequences for each party member (adding a bit of tactical thinking to otherwise-straightforward fights), the environment and character designs hold up despite somewhat antiquated graphics (what a difference half a decade makes) and the voice acting is mostly solid, if lacking in real standouts.

But no other video game genre is so dependent on sympathetic protagonists as western RPGs. Twats like Kratos, Prince Arthas and Duke Nukem are tolerable because we control them from a distance, and never really think of them as extensions of our own selves; Western RPGs like "Fallout" or "Knights of the Old Republic", on the other hand, present tabula rasa protagonists whose appearance and personality are determined by the player. And if the end result is a character so reprehensible that the player can't stand her... well, there's something fundamentally wrong with that process, isn't there?

Game Reviews: Iron Roses, Mata Hari

Well, if I spend all my time on thesis-related work I'll likely fuse every neuron in my brain. So today we'll be looking at two contemporary adventure games, Iron Roses and Mata Hari.

The adventure game genre has always been something of a double-edged sword. It's ideal for telling stories because adventure games typically require only a minimum amount of interaction with the player, which means you can sit back (for the most part) and let the plot unfold without being distracted by gameplay mechanisms.

Unfortunately, this also means that once the story's over you have little reason to replay the game. Even if multiple endings are possible, the narrative experience just won't change that much. Contrast this to strategy games where any tactic can change the course of a battle, or RPGs that let you develop characters a dozen different ways, resulting in a dozen different play-throughs, and so on.

In the olden days, the Sierra paradigm dealt with this problem by really making you work to complete the story. Oh, all you had to do was click the PICK UP command and then click on the fire extinguisher... but if you didn't get the insulated gloves from the shelf three hours ago, a burst of static electricity will detonate the extinguisher as soon as you touch it, and the foam will suffocate you. Sierra games were particularly brutal: you could die eighty times before leaving the first screen, or waste half an hour pixel-hunting for a coin on a beach, or get stuck in a no-win scenario because you didn't pick up a key item and you can't backtrack.

The only way to effectively cope with this (without using a walkthrough) would be to constantly save and reload, inching your way towards victory through a very lengthy series of trials and errors. This had the effect of making Sierra games seem at least three times longer than they actually were, and since the death scenes were usually humorous, you didn't mind so much when your character turned left instead of right and literally fell off the screen. Unless you forgot to save, in which case you'd be very frustrated.

With Sierra's decline, a more forgiving trend emerged, pioneered by companies such as LucasArts ("Sam & Max Hit The Road"): gamers weren't punished for making a mistake or overlooking an important inventory item. You could always go back to a previous area and search more thoroughly. This allowed the story to flow more smoothly; it also made the genre much less challenging, which in turn made them much shorter.

"Iron Roses" and "Mata Hari" are examples of the current model in the adventure genre: the gameplay is largely simplistic in that someone tells you to do something, you go to the appropriate location, you do it, you report back and receive a reward of some kind that moves you a step closer to the endgame. I'm probably generous in estimating that neither game takes more than six hours from start to finish.

To be fair, both games try to pad things out with mandatory mini-games: whether it's waiting tables or performing a dance, the plot pauses at certain points to break up the "fetch quest" routine. In theory, it's a good idea that can maintain a player's interest if the core game is too monotonous; in practice, these mini-games just aren't compelling enough.

"Iron Roses" tells the story of Alex, a sympathetic young woman who wants one last crack at fame and fortune. Her band, the Iron Roses, disbanded years ago due to the drunken antics of their faux-British lead singer; the group split up and went their separate ways. When Alex finds out about an upcoming Battle of the Bands, she is determined to reunite the band (sans lead singer) and reclaim their lost glory.

It's a solid, down-to-earth premise that works nicely with the adventure game format: to reassemble the Iron Roses, Alex has to run around town from one ex-member to another, helping them out with their problems so they'll have time to hear her out. There's even a bit of sardonic lampshade-hanging regarding the fact that Alex is expected to solve everyone else's issues before they're willing to lift a finger for her. Being a game about a rock band, it's worth noting that the game's soundtrack is quite good and helps set the mood during various scenes.

Unfortunately, as I said above, the story's dreadfully abbreviated, and leaves some awkward plot holes: Alex's roommate Lynn disappears after the second act, and there's a last-minute development with her father that seems to come out of nowhere. I would've liked to see more of the band's past rather than just be told how awesome they were and how John (the lead singer) ruined everything; I rarely encourage padding, but it might've done more good than harm here. And though the ending tries to loop back to the beginning, it actually falls short by not showing us whether the Iron Roses actually win the contest. Considering that it's the lynchpin of everything Alex does, that's a rather striking omission.

"Mata Hari" faces an entirely different problem: it's too sedate. Based on the life story of the infamous Mata Hari - now immortalized as the archetypal femme fatale - the game promises intrigue and adventure, but you'll spend most of your time either talking to people or playing some rather dull minigames. I was actually surprised at how placid this game turned out to be: granted, it's probably a more realistic depiction of Margaretha Zelle's biography, but that doesn't make it especially entertaining.

The game also features a rather poorly-constructed quasi-RPG system wherein you can perform certain acts to increase Mata's spycraft, wealth and skill, either through minigames or uncovering hidden objects. You'd be forgiven for ignoring it altogether, except that higher final scores unlock alternate endings regarding Mata Hari's ultimate fate. The bigger problem is that you'd have to spend an absurd amount of time - far more than is really necessary for the story - to get more than halfway there. And there's really only the one minigame per category: to attain wealth you have to play a minigame with a hilariously subdued recreation of Mata Hari's provocative dances, and to raise your skill you need to evade agents while running up and down train tracks across Europe (not as much fun as it sounds, believe me).

Both these games left me feeling like they hadn't achieved much with the tools they had: decent graphics, (mostly) solid voice acting, strong premises... but they fall short. And maybe the problem does have to do with challenge, or lack thereof. If the puzzles are easily solved, and the plot just isn't lengthy enough to hold the player's attention for very long, the solution isn't to throw in a bunch of tangentially-related minigames: clearly, that's not helping. Crimson Cow's "A Vampyre Story" was a much stronger game than either of these, simply by virtue of having a really good story that - while segmented across several games - still accomplishes a lot more than either of the two we've looked at today...

More Game Reviews

I wasn't much surprised to learn that A Vampyre Story was created by a group of developers who'd previously worked at LucasArts: it's very much a part of the tradition established by adventure games like the "Monkey Island" series, "Day of the Tentacle" and "Sam & Max Hit The Road". You play the part of Mona, a French opera singer abducted by the vampire Baron von Shrowdy. Turns out Shrowdy did more than just kidnap her, as she can now turn into a bat and the sight of a crucifix sends her into convulsions; but Mona remains in denial about her situation, insisting that she's simply developed a taste for warm, salty, thick red Merlot. Along with her wisecracking sidekick, a bat named Froderick, Mona has to find a way out of Shrowdy's castle and into the nearby village, in the hopes of curing her "condition".

If it weren't for the graphics, I'd think I was playing a game from the mid-'90s. And that's not a negative comment: "A Vampyre Story" plays like something from the height of the adventure game genre. It's got an amusing script, it's comfortable to play, you can't get permanently stuck, and the puzzles range from easy to complicated without tipping over into You'd Damn Well Better Have A Walkthrough. Voice talent is a bit of column A and a bit of column B: though Mona herself is unbearably shrill, the Jersey-accented crypt rats and Shrowdy's channeling of Peter Lorre (among others) suit the comedic atmosphere perfectly.

The drawback? Length: the story stops at an arbitrary point, just as things are getting interesting. Now, this was ostensibly done to set up the sequel, and it's a tactic that seems to be getting more and more popular ("Starcraft II" will apparently have only one campaign, with expansion packs to follow), but as a result what you get here is an incomplete story with only two settings: Shrowdy's castle and the village. Granted, both locations are large enough to keep you busy, but I seriously doubt you'll get any closure once you complete the last puzzle. It might be better to hold off on playing this game for now, at least until the sequel comes out (no release date yet).

And now, a Microids marathon! Without realizing it, I ended up playing three adventure games from this French company in rapid succession.

Let's start with 2002's Syberia. As Kate Walker, an American lawyer, you must set out on a journey across Eastern Europe to find the long-lost heir of a toy factory, uncovering the legacies he left behind in the process.

Visually, "Syberia" is absolutely beautiful: designer Benoit Sokal went all-out to create stunningly detailed environments, from the pristine university of Barrockstadt to the desolate, rusted ruins of Komkolzgrad. Each location leads you to discover pre-eletronic mechanical wonders created by Hans Voralberg, the object of your quest - wonders that are often as meticulously detailed as the settings.

By the time you complete the second area, though, you'll probably figure out the game's biggest weakness: there's minimal character interaction. Kate spends most of her time alone, occasionally receiving a phone call from her friends and family back in New York (these ultimately prove to be significant to Kate's character arc, such as it is, but they're scattered at random intervals). The only other character you consistently interact with is Oscar, an automaton designed to run the train you're riding - and the whole point of his character is that he can't deviate from his programming, so... yeah. Not exactly the most engaging partner. Every other character is just a stock piece that's meant to present (or complicate) whatever objective you're working on; this becomes especially blatant in the epilogue, when Sergei does an abrupt about-face just because the game demands one last puzzle before proceeding. Despite lovely graphics, the story rings a little hollow, especially once the whole Syberia/Mammoth Island bit works its way in (wait, we're supposed to take that seriously?).

Post Mortem, released in 2003, is a step in the right direction: it's a murder mystery with an engaging protagonist straight out of the noir tradition. Gus McPherson was a private eye working in New York until something bad happened (we never learn more about his past, which is appropriate given the atmosphere). He moved to Paris and tried to become a painter, at which point Sophia Blake, a typical femme fatale, knocks on Gus' door and demands he solve the grotesque murder of her sister Ruby.

So far so good... but right at the very beginning of the game you're going to notice two very annoying flaws in the gameplay. First, there is no way to skip dialogue or cinematics. At all. This might not seem like such a big deal until you take it in conjunction with the other problem: the dialogue tree.

Like many adventure games, your interactions with the various characters of "Post Mortem" take the form of dialogue trees: you choose a line of dialogue out of several, and the conversation continues in that vein. You're usually able to go back and select other lines in the course of the talk, to get as much information out of the other character as you can.

Not so with "Post Mortem". To begin with, there's minimal causality in terms of the choices you're offered: you can actually ask Sophia about her sister's murder before she even tells you about the case. And there's no way to backtrack: if you say the wrong thing, or ask the wrong question at the wrong time, you'll have to find the information another way. (Which, I suppose, is a nice counterpoint to this problem: you can make mistakes, but the game will always offer you different opportunities to regain ground.) Since you can save anywhere, you might think that saving before any conversation would be the best way to properly navigate the dialogue tree... but since you can't skip dialogue, you'll be dooming yourself to repeating certain lines over and over again until you figure out the ideal sequence of options.

Unpleasant? Try doing all this with a first-person mouse-controlled camera. The good news is you'll never have reason to look up or down; the bad news? Try finding a pencil at a hundred paces. Not as bad as a pixel hunt, but getting there.

The plot holds its own for the first half of the game or so: as he investigates the various characters connected to the murder, Gus discovers the prime suspect is Jacques Helloin, a private detective who was working a very similar case right before Ruby's death. When you find Helloin, the game switches perspectives, allowing you to play as Helloin in an extended flashback, allowing you to basically set up the clues that Gus will later uncover. It's an interesting approach to the conventions of the mystery genre - it actually reminded me of "Fahrenheit" in that you were playing both the "criminal" and the detectives tracking him down.

The game also reminded me of "Fahrenheit" because an absurd supernatural twist comes out of nowhere shortly after the Helloin segment. Psychic visions, alchemy, an immortal who - surprise surprise - has connections to the Knights Templar (and if I never play another adventure game referencing the Knights Templar I'll be a happy woman), and a magical statue that transfers your mind into another body. Rather tellingly, the writers of "Post Mortem" try to have their cake and eat it too by providing an alternative, realistic explanation (ie: maybe the bad guy's just crazy and it's all in his head), but it's kind of late for that. Like SF, mysticism doesn't really work with the detective/noir genre (at the very least, I haven't seen it performed successfully yet), so the story just goes off the rails.

The same is emphatically not true of the sequel, Still Life. A major improvement over "Post Mortem", "Still Life" splits its story between Gus in 1920's Prague and his granddaughter Victoria in present-day Chicago, as they both seem to be investigating the same serial killer. As a protagonist, Victoria's quite entertaining, with a sharp tongue and enough wit to make you want to pursue every possible dialogue option with her. Gone is the awkward camera and the impossible-to-navigate dialogue tree: when speaking to other characters, left-clicking is for matters pertaining to the investigation (ie: what you need to hear to proceed with the game), while right-clicking (when available) will tell you a little bit more about the character - for example, Claire might mention some trouble she's having with her daughter. Not really relevant to the game plot, but it certainly gives you the option of fleshing out the cast.

The story is divided into seven chapters alternating between Victoria and Gus. I was quite happy to see that while Gus still suffers from utterly irrelevant psychic flashes, the possibility that he and Vic are chasing the same murderer is never raised. No hocus pocus here, thank you very much. A lot of supplementary exposition is relegated to the journals - in fact, Victoria can access both her own logs and Gus', which makes the growing similarities between their cases all the more evident.

The puzzles are much more complex here than in any predecessor of "Still Life" - lots of sliding tiles, navigating a robot through a laser maze, using fingerprints and Luminol to gather evidence... though, again, it's impossible to get yourself stuck, you might find yourself spending a lot of time trying to pick a complex lock by holding various tumblers apart at different intervals. Quite challenging.

Bad news: as with "A Vampyre Story", the conclusion of "Still Life" is quite unsatisfying, with countless loose ends left up in the air. Good news: "Still Life 2" was released a few weeks ago. I'm hoping to pick it up by next Friday so that I can continue Victoria's story...

So it looks like the adventure genre is alive and kicking! Good to know.

Game Reviews

Ever since I had my PC upgraded last month, I've been dipping my toe in higher-end games that didn't work with my previous system (that's one reason why I've spent so much time on DOS-era material).

Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is the latest from Marvel, a third-person action game with a bit of a twist. Once a certain plot-related event is completed (fairly early in the game), you're given the ability to switch at will between Spider-Man's classic suit and the Black Symbiote. Unlike "X-Men Legends 2", where the difference in "skins" was cosmetic, your appearance has a real impact on how you play. In his original outfit, Spider-Man is fast and uses web-related attacks; the Black Suit slows you down but gives you a massive boost to strength, as well as the ability to project tentacles that can snag a target from across the street.

The graphics are astonishingly detailed, with a real sense of scale attached to the game's version of Manhattan: you get the feeling that every street and building in the city is right there, along with some famiilar fictional locations like the Daily Bugle and Stark Tower (continuity alert: it's got that bizarre Sentry-related hologram on top of it, which probably dates the game more than Marvel would like). It's the most realistic virtual representation of Manhattan that I've ever seen.

Gameplay can be a little confusing at first, but only because this is the closest emulation I've ever seen of Spider-Man as he appears in the comics: swift, agile, able to take down a dozen criminals without touching the ground, swinging between skyscrapers and bouncing off flagpoles... some battle sequences even take place entirely in midair. It's very easy to lose your sense of direction and get entirely turned around, especially since the camera changes angles every time Spidey sticks to a wall and starts climbing. But once you get the hang of it, it's a lot of fun.

Which isn't to say the system's entirely without kinks. For starters, the auto-targeting feature has an annoying habit of locking onto random objects regardless of what you're actually aiming for; in a regular fight, that's not such a big deal, but having your attacks directed at minions in the middle of a boss fight? Irritating.

Another problem has to do with the various missions you receive throughout the game. You'll initially want to complete every objective, even the optional ones, since you're rewarded with points you can use to unlock additional skills. But it doesn't take much to max out both suits' capabilities, and you don't have much incentive to follow the "side-quests" after that. It doesn't help that the objectives tend to be repetitive: save 5 civilians, save 20 civilians, save 150 civilians, etc. At some point I just decided to get on with the main assignments.

The plot's not much to write home about, though that's where you'll find the twist I mentioned: after a confusing prologue (later revealed to be a flash-forward), the game starts by pitting you against street gangs and the Kingpin. But the plot takes off in the second act, as Venom starts infecting people with symbiotes and SHIELD responds, turning Manhattan into a war zone.

Here's the interesting thing, though: at various points in the storyline, you're presented with a choice between the Red Path and the Black Path. The Red Path is typical superhero fare: subdue an enemy without excessive violence, choose your long-time girlfriend over your sexy-but-amoral partner, wielding great power with great responsibility, etc. The Black Path sees Spider-Man being corrupted by the power of the Symbiote, gradually becoming darker and darker until he finally starts killing his enemies. The story develops in rather different ways depending on your decisions. There's an alignment meter that charts your current situation, though as far as I can tell the only gameplay-related effect this has is to limit your choice of allies: as you progress through the game, you gain the ability to summon backup in the form of Luke Cage, Moon Knight and Wolverine, as well as Black Cat, Vulture, Rhino and Electro. Obviously, the heroes won't help you if you go dark, and the villains won't turn up if you stick with the good guys.

All in all, it's a fun game; not very long, even with two play-throughs to cover the different paths, but it'll definitely hold your attention while it lasts.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest is also a third-person action game, based primarily on the Peter Jackson films. The player is able to choose from four classes - Warrior, Archer, Scout and Mage - each with his own strengths and weaknesses. You must then navigate various locations seen in both the novels and the films (ie: Rivendell, the Pelennor Fields, the Shire) and follow various objectives; the challenge, of course, is figuring out which class is best suited for those goals. For example, if you have to carry an object from Point A to Point B, your best bet is the Scout, as he can maintain an invisible cloak for a certain amount of time. On the other hand, if you need to fend off waves of enemies in close quarters, you're better off with a Warrior. You can switch classes at various "safe zones" in each level.

Almost every mission unlocks a Hero character as you near its end: these range from Aragorn to Gandalf to Sauron himself. Though these heroes may seem impressive, they're actually just more powerful versions of the pre-existing classes, with largely the same abilities. And, oddly enough, they're just as vulnerable to the various "instant kill" traps as anyone else, so Sauron can get picked up and eaten by an Ent just as easily as a common Orc. Also, only Mages can heal, so if you're stuck with a Hero from another class, you have to be as cautious as you would in regular scenarios. I thought that sort of defeated the purpose of having these heroes, being able to finish various missions with style, but...

Anyway, at first you can only play through the Good campaign, which is basically a retread of the films: you go from Helm's Deep to Moria to Minas Morgul, and finally go up against the Mouth of Sauron at the Black Gate. But once you complete the Good campaign, you unlock its Evil counterpart, an alternate-history version where Frodo dies at Mount Doom and the Nazgul reclaim the One Ring. Revitalized, the forces of Mordor turn the tables on their enemies and sweep across Middle-Earth. Here's another quirk, though: both campaigns rely on cinematic cutscenes taken directly from the films, which means the Evil campaign basically consists of various clips taken out of context. Hugo Weaving's narration helps with that, but it's still kind of a stretch. CGI might've been more appropriate.

Like "Web of Shadows", little effort was put into creating real variety for the missions here: regardless of the campaign, you're pretty much tasked with slaughtering never-ending waves of enemies while moving from Point A to Point B. Again, it's certainly a lot of fun to play, but you won't find much to keep you going after that.

Game Review: Overlord

Now this one's just plain cute.

Seven heroes (a Halfling, an Elf, a Paladin, a Dwarf, a Wizard, a Thief and a Warrior) defeated the Evil Overlord, ransacked his Tower and scattered his minions throughout the land. Years later, you awaken as the new incarnation of the Overlord, and set out to rebuild your empire.

There's just one problem: those heroes who vanquished your predecessor? They've each succumbed to one of the Seven Deadly Sins, so the Halfling steals food from other villages and has ballooned up to the size of a small house, the Paladin's lecherous liaisons with succubi has brought a plague of undeath down on his city, the sloth-induced slumber of the Elf King left his people vulnerable to an invasion of greedy Dwarves seeking gold, etc.

It's a subversion of typical fantasy fare, because while the game casts you as the traditional villain of the piece, you're fighting fallen heroes who are arguably worse than you. But the real appeal of "Overlord" is its darkly humorous approach and the many in-jokes: for example, as you stand at the mouth of a labyrinth, your chief advisor (and the game's narrator in lieu of the silent Overlord) tells you to kill any dancing goblins or singing princesses you may encounter. It'll probably come as no surprise that the game was written by Rhianna Pratchett (daughter of Terry), as its semi-irreverent parody of the fantasy genre and its conventions is very much in line with something like "Good Omens".

"Overlord" belongs to a particular sub-genre I've only just started exploring, where the environment and storyline react to the choices you make. At various points throughout the game, you're offered certain choices: do you save the last surviving Elven women or abandon them for a cartload of gold? Do you forgive the treacherous peasants who conspired against you or slaughter them to the last man? Do you stay loyal to your strategically-minded, prim and proper mistress or throw her over for her sluttier sister? You can choose to be noble or truly evil, and your appearance and powers will change depending on what you do; likewise, your Dark Tower (seen from the outside only at the main menu) will reflect your level of Corruption, as will the game's multiple endings. For the most part, the game seems to reward the most vile and wicked courses of action, as they result in more powerful minions and far more damaging spells. But to get full 100% corruption, you have to do things like kill 500 peasants, burn down the Elves' Sacred Grove, and steal a sacred idol just because it looks nice in your mistress' quarters. Too evil? That's up to you!

This compensates for a rather linear plot. While quests in any given land can generally be completed in any order, you can't choose which of the seven heroes to target, and you can't leave your current "zone" until the major quests have been resolved (probably a good thing, given that the levels get progressively harder). On the other hand, the game's script is so enjoyable that I don't much mind its restrictions.

Gameplay is interesting: you directly control the Overlord, but most of the action is achieved via your loyal minions - using the mouse, you order them to attack enemies, pull switches, pick up items and so on. Initially you start with five Browns (simple warriors), but you'll eventually recover the lost tribes and gather a horde thirty or forty strong. Summoning minions requires life-force, which you harvest by killing anything that moves: from sheep to townsfolk to trolls to rock giants. Controlling the minions can be a bit tricky, as you have to specify targets via a mouse-keyboard combination and you will encounter scenarios requiring you to multitask and split your followers accordingly, but once you get the hang of it, you'll enjoy setting traps and launching two-pronged attacks on unwitting enemies.

The expansion pack, "Raising Hell", takes the story a step further: you learn that villagers attempting to escape your tyranny have fled into mysterious portals that have opened up throughout your kingdom. Of course, as befits a Pratchett story, it's not quite that simple: the heavenly backdrop falls away to reveal a dimension of fire, torment and pain called the Abyss. And the souls of the fallen heroes have ended up here as well, suffering eternal torture of the ironic kind (ie: the Halfling's gluttony is stymied when the food comes to life and fights back). Since "Raising Hell" is integrated into the main game, you can actually access the Abyss levels before completing the core game - the death of a hero unlocks the Abyss zone correlating to his land. But the difficulty level is significantly higher, so you're better off postponing your trip to Hell until you're properly equipped.

I had a really great time with this game: it's charming, it's relatively fast-paced (except for the long walks between checkpoints...), it takes a hilariously sardonic swing at some of the biggest cliches in literature, and you'll probably get a little attached to your imp-like minions after a few hours. Very much worth a play-through.

Game Review: Dreamweb

Another DOS-era adventure game, but a bloody weird one where your interpretation of the plot basically depends on whether or not you read the manual addendum written as the diary of the main character.

The protagonist of "Dreamweb", Ryan, has been having constant nightmares about the impending destruction of the world; it seems that seven men and women - working individually - are seizing control of the seven nodes of the Dreamweb, the sum of humanity's hopes, aspirations and dreams. If they're successful, the whole world will descend into madness and evil. Ryan is contacted by the Keeper of the Dreamweb, and is told he must find and kill these seven before they complete their corruption of the nodes.

And that's more or less how the story goes: you move about a dirty city where it's constantly raining, hunting down one target after another and reclaiming the dream energy they leave behind when they die, returning it to the Dreamweb. There are a few twists along the way, but I don't want to spoil them. Or the ending, for that matter, which is... kind of an anticlimax on the one hand, but on the other hand it still makes sense in the context of the story.

So you have the whole Chosen One angle and it all seems pretty traditional. Now, in my specific case, I beat the game and then read Ryan's diary... and it added a huge amount of ambiguity to what I just played, because the story takes on a completely different context if you believe the diary.

So far all I've talked about is the story, mainly because there's not much to say about the game's visual dimension: it's a top-down perspective, and not a particularly good one - there's a smaller, separate window which provides a sort of "zoom" on objects you're pointing at. All dialogues are pre-programmed and your seven targets are put in a set order, so it's all quite linear. And yet, I think this is one of those cases where the interest in the story outweighs the predictability and mild clumsiness of the mechanical aspect. Worth a play-through for the story and the music alone.

Game Review: Gabriel Knight

In keeping with my re-exploration of old-school adventure games, I recently completed one of the few Sierra game series I never had a chance to play in their heyday: the "Gabriel Knight" trilogy, comprised of "Sins of the Fathers" (1993), "The Beast Within" (1995) and "Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned" (1999).

There are a few factors which set "Gabriel Knight" apart from its contemporaries, even within Sierra's own product lines. First of all, it's the only series in which all the games had voice-acting (apart from "Phantasmagoria", though that doesn't really qualify seeing as how they were two completely unrelated games that happened to have the same title). Granted, "Sins of the Fathers" came out relatively late in the company's life - in fact, "Blood of the Sacred" was the very last traditional adventure game Sierra ever released - but even in 1993 you had games like "Space Quest V" that never got vocal treatment.

And the cast for "Sins of the Fathers" is pretty impressive: Tim Curry as Gabriel, Leah Remini as his assistant Grace Nakimura, Mark Hamill as Police Detective Franklin Mosely, and Michael Dorn as creepy voodoo expert Dr. John. Everyone involved delivers a great performance, with the possible exception of Curry's ultra-cheesy attempt at a New Orleans accent that actually got more outrageous in the third game. But we'll get to that in a bit. You also had a hilariously sardonic Cajun narrator mocking Gabriel every chance she got.

Another odd thing about the "Gabriel Knight" series is that popular opinion positions the first game, "Sins of the Fathers", as the best of the three. To be honest, while I think "The Beast Within" has its charms, I'm inclined to agree - it's the most "traditional" game in the trilogy in terms of gameplay, graphics and the interface, something that fits in quite easily with other Sierra masterpieces like "Quest for Glory IV" and "King's Quest VI". It has a strong, broad mystery that takes you from Louisiana to Africa to Germany and back, and it takes a very clear-minded (and surprisingly non-Hollywood-pop-culture-educated) view on Voudoun as religion vs. Voodoo as black magic. Also, "Sins of the Fathers" depicts Gabriel and Grace at their best: they bicker, they banter, they come pretty close to admitting mutual attraction, but neither of them are particularly interested in acting on it. At least, not yet.

None of this detracts from the fact that the second game, "The Beast Within", is appealing in its own way. The format shifts to interactive movie, so obviously it's a lot more streamlined and offers the player less possibilities in terms of plot-branching. But Jane Jensen again earns points for doing the research, taking the historical tale of Ludwig II, last king of Bavaria, and throwing werewolves into the mix, and players get to alternate between Gabriel and Grace, each tackling the same case from very different angles (Grace's storyline involves a lot of historical research, while Gabriel goes undercover and confronts the danger head-on). And if Dean Erickson takes the "pretty-boy" angle a little too far, flipping his hair every time he sits down like a slimmer Fabio, he still fits the mold nicely. Joanne Takahashi, on the other hand... let's just say Grace becomes seriously unlikeable in her first few scenes, generally played as an attention-starved stalker obsessed with Gabriel and biting the head off anyone who gets in her way.

Kudos are due for Jensen's use of homoeroticism - I'm not even talking about the explicit stuff like "Louie" being Ludwig's lover, but von Glower caressing a half-naked Gabriel as he sleeps? von Zell getting all bitchy because his ex-boyfriend has a new (and prettier) toy? Wow. Not the sort of thing I would've expected to find in a 1995 video game.

Which brings us to "Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned". And... it just doesn't live up to its predecessors. I mean, it's admirable that they try something new every game, and here we have a fully 3D environment in which the camera can move completely independent of the player character - refreshing at first, but you'll get tired of it very quickly when it comes to navigating and/or finding a specific item or person in a huge sprawling area. Fortunately, the camera moves swiftly, but still, it's an annoyance.

Tim Curry is back as Gabriel, and like I said, he's even more over-the-top here... So Bad It's Good? I honestly can't say. Anyway, after facing a voodoo cult and werewolves, Gabriel and Grace are up against vampires this time around. Sounds exciting? It would've been, if the game were actually about vampires. But that whole storyline gets sidetracked for most of the game so Gabriel can investigate - I kid you not - the Holy Grail. And it turns into a ridiculously muddled mess, with a bunch of scavenger hunters digging for treasure, some mumblings about alchemy, the 11th-hour appearance of the Wandering Jew and an origin story for the Ritter line that is so corny, so ludicrously and blatantly Christian-By-Numbers, that my eyes almost rolled right out of their sockets.

And if Grace and Gabriel didn't come off too well in "The Beast Within", they - and good old Mosely from New Orleans - are even worse here: Gabriel calls Grace a walking chastity belt while she's within hearing distance, and then he has a bad dream about a vampire attacking her and bamp-chicka-wow-wow, Something We Know Not What ensues. And the ending... abrupt, unsatisfactory, supposedly grows out of earlier events but I'm hard-pressed to see the connection. The whole Gabriel/Grace dynamic is just screwed to hell with this game, and that was a big part of the fun in the first game (and, to a lesser extent, the third as well). It doesn't help that "Blood of the Sacred" has some of the most obscure puzzles in the trilogy, especially towards the end with the whole "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" bit.

So, yeah, lousy ending to a great pair of games, for what that's worth. I'd say stick with the first two and give the third a pass - any closure you think you'll get from "Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned" will be disappointing to say the least.

Game Review: Fahrenheit

Before I start, I should note that I played the uncensored European version of this game, "Fahrenheit", but American players might recognize it as "Indigo Prophecy".

A friend of mine noticed that I occasionally blog about DOS-era adventure games, like the Sierra Quest line. That was my favorite genre growing up - which isn't to say I passed up the occasional "Wing Commander" or "System Shock", and I'll even admit to playing a few rounds of "Doom" before realizing that I'm absolutely hopeless at first-person shooters. But adventure games made up about 90% of my hard drive back then.

Anyway, said friend noted that my lament for the adventure genre might be premature, given that - while they're much less prominent these days than they were ten or fifteen years ago - adventure games are still being produced today. As a somewhat-contemporary example, he suggested I should try "Fahrenheit".

The tutorial gives you a pretty good idea of how the creators of this game saw their product: while you're learning how to control your character, designer David Cage appears in the (digital) flesh and talks about how he and his team want the player to view "Fahrenheit" as an interactive film. Which actually reminded me of "Phantasmagoria", in the sense that you spend more time watching the story unfold than you do actively determining its course. To be honest, I don't mind that particular mode of gaming: there's something to be said for sitting back and enjoying a good story.

But the game interface is a lot more complicated than just clicking on objects; for example, you have to drag your mouse in specific patterns during dialogue as a way of selecting which topic of conversation to pursue; if you don't move fast, the timer runs out and the conversation swerves away unpredictably. There are also numerous action sequences reminiscient of Simon Says, where the player must repeat a string of keys as they appear on the screen; failure will result in the loss of a "life", at the end of which it's game over. It's an unorthodox addition to an adventure game, and in the case of "Fahrenheit" it's both a great strength and a great weakness. The action sequences add a lot of adrenaline and reflexive play to a typically sedate genre, but they're also incredibly distracting, in the sense that they tend to kick off at crucial moments in the story, only you're too busy focusing on which keys to press. Entire scenes can pass you by while you're struggling to survive.

Another interesting - though inherently problematic - element of "Fahrenheit" is the Sanity Meter. As you progress through the game, your protagonists have all sorts of optional activities they can do, ranging from watching TV to listening to music to having sex. Some actions - the sort that you'd find calming and reassuring - grant you Sanity Points. Actions that could discourage or even damage your character's psyche (losing a bet, finding a dead body) subtract Sanity Points. If the Sanity Meter hits zero for any of your characters, at any point during the game, you lose. Sounds complicated? It is. Because "Fahrenheit" - despite its wide array of choices - is still a scripted game, and certain events will happen whether you set them up or not. So you may find yourself losing points without being able to do anything about it (for example, Carla's tarot reading which goes completely south, costing you a whopping 30 points). No way out of it, no way around it. And if you don't stock up on points beforehand, you may find yourself in a losing scenario through no fault of your own.

The story of "Fahrenheit" holds together rather nicely for most of the game: you start off with Lucas Kane, a man who wakes up in a restaurant bathroom, having just murdered a man while in a trance. Lucas is sure someone else was controlling his actions, but he has no way of proving his innocence - your first task is to help him conceal evidence and escape into the night.

And once Lucas is away, control shifts to Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles, a pair of detectives investigating the very same murder Lucas committed. It's fun to unravel your own crime scene, and in fact, some of the best moments in "Fahrenheit" involve the constant shifting between Lucas on the run and Carla and Tyler hot on his trail. Of course, Lucas also has to piece together what really happened that night.

It's an imaginative storyline. Unfortunately, it takes a right-angle turn towards the end of the game, after the amusement park sequence with Tiffany. I'm not going to spoil the twist, because it's a genuine yeahbuhwhat? moment, but let's just say you have a very sudden clash between the supernatural and science-fiction, and these things don't co-exist easily when they're set up well in advance; cramming them into the last hour or two of gameplay just feels like either someone lost a bet or the last act of the plot was cobbled together from different scripts. There are multiple endings, but not one of them really delivers an appropriate payoff.

Still, poor endgame aside, I honestly enjoyed "Fahrenheit". It's a different kind of adventure game, and aside from my issues with the action sequences (somewhat ameliorated by the fact that when you complete the game most - but not all - of the sequences are available for play-through or viewing) I thought the game mechanisms and interface were refreshingly innovative. I doubt I'll play the announced sequel - seriously, the endgame is just that bad - but it was fun while it lasted.

Game Review: A Tale of Two Kingdoms

A Tale of Two Kingdoms is another example of "games by gamers" - a freeware adventure game modeled after the sort of old-school types I've mentioned before (ie: Sierra's Quest line). Of course, unlike its contemporaries at AGD Interactive (all of which I've enjoyed), "A Tale of Two Kingdoms" isn't a modern remake: Crystal Shard built this game from scratch. On the one hand, that's an impressive accomplishment given how smoothly the game looks and plays. On the other hand, there are more than a few bumps along the way.

Let's start with the good stuff: the game world is beautifully designed, with visually stunning artwork. The "overworld" is a bit small due to the story premise (more on that in a bit), but there's an advantage to that because you don't have to travel far when you go from point to point - and, of course, this being an adventure game, you do quite a bit of legwork in the course of your progress. The music deserves special mention, as the soundtrack has some truly lovely themes that add a lot of atmosphere.

The story starts out well enough: the prologue details how King Vortigern, ruler of Theylinn, conquered the southern kingdom of Qualinem only to be overthrown and forced into retreat by mercenaries under the command of Maeldun Whiteblade and his lover Branwyn. Unfortunately, both kingdoms - weakened by the prolonged conflict - are now threatened by a goblin invasion, forcing Vortigern to invite Maeldun and his troops to Theylinn as a precursor to an alliance. Obviously, neither side is particularly happy about the circumstances. And then an assassination sends things spiraling out of control.

So far, so good. But things take an awkward turn halfway through, with the introduction of the faeries and their kingdom of Thierna na Oge. Most of the political subplot gets shunted aside while an unnamed villain pops up out of nowhere and starts messing with you. The game's multiple-choice system also presents a specific problem - oh, it's hardly the first game, or even the first adventure game, to have more than one play-through route, but what usually happens in those cases is you get a complete, intact narrative regardless of which path actually plays itself out (ie: the "Silent Hill" serise). But "A Tale of Two Kingdoms" doesn't really do this, partly because very little attention is called to the possibility of random events - one side-quest, for example, relies on you knowing when a specific character isn't present at their usual location... but if you stumble on a different puzzle first and solve it, you'll never be able to complete the former. It's very easy - too easy - to get to the end of the game with huge chunks of the story missing (such as the identity of the assassin). Which means that if you want anything even remotely resembling a coherent story, you need a walkthrough. And that's... kind of a drag. Especially since even the best ending has what TV Tropes would call a We Will Meet Again moment.

So... yeah. It looks lovely, and it plays well, and that says a lot about these talented individuals at Crystal Shard. But "A Tale of Two Kingdoms" doesn't make the most of what it's got, particularly in the story department.

Game Review: Grim Fandango

Okay. Well... that was different.

I'd heard about "Grim Fandango" for years, but never had a chance to play it until very recently. Historically, it's noteworthy for being one of the last adventure games created by LucasArts, before they started focusing exclusively on "Star Wars" material.

Which was a shame, because their adventure line was full of fun games with quirky humor, amusing characters and challenging puzzles. They tended to be more forgiving than Sierra games, because you could never die or get trapped in a losing scenario; while that might make things a little less exciting, it's nice not to have to save your game every sixty seconds (these were, after all, products of the pre-autosave days).

But "Grim Fandango" stands out even among its sister games like "Day of the Tentacle" and "Sam and Max Hit The Road". For starters, it's in 3D (as opposed to the more typical 2D format), and the game's plot and visual style mixes quasi-Mayan mythology, noir and Mexican imagery, a combination I've never seen before. "Grim Fandango" looks different, and that counts for a lot. The story is simple but perfectly balances comedy and a Casablanca-esque atmosphere: Manny Calavera is a travel agent for the Department of Death, responsible for helping freshly deceased souls start their four-year journey to the Other Side. Unfortunately, after an unexplained fall from grace, Manny constantly finds himself with people who can't "afford" (by whatever currency is valid in the Land of the Dead) much more than a walking stick, as opposed to tickets on a luxury train or a car. The story proper begins when Manny meets Meche Colomar, a kind but mysterious woman whose good deeds should have earned her passage on the prestigious Number Nine Express, but has nothing going for her. Suspicious of internal tampering, Manny investigates and ends up chasing Meche on his own four-year journey, through nightclubs and port cities and across the open seas. I should note here that I loved the witty banter between Manny and Meche - kudos to the voice actors for doing a superb job.

Unfortunately, this golden oldie has some mold(ie). After years of using a perfectly dependable mouse interface, LucasArts designed "Grim Fandango" with an incredibly uncomfortable keyboard-based system in which the arrow keys move Manny around, and objects of interest can be examined or used once Manny is close enough that his head turns towards said objects. Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal, except... well, remember the 3D environment? It makes navigation downright obnoxious because the directional keys aren't absolute - "up" means "forward" no matter which way Manny is facing, and it can get very frustrating because he doesn't turn smoothly either, so just moving from one screen to another can be a chore.

So it's very much a "story vs. gameplay" situation, but I think the creative merits of "Grim Fandango" compensate nicely for the problematic mechanisms.

Game Review: Quest For Glory II VGA

The wait is over: it's finally here.

I was a big fan of Sierra's Adventure/Quest line in the early '90s: "Space Quest", "King's Quest" and "Quest For Glory" still rank among my favorites, despite the outdated pop culture references and the poor (well, by today's standards) graphics. To be totally honest, I'm more impressed that creators like Ken and Roberta Williams, Scott Murphy and Al Lowe managed to craft such engaging games with relatively little tech to back them up. Sure, none of the "Quest For Glory" games look like "World of Warcraft", but I get a kick out of hearing John-Rhys Davies mock the Hero for some boneheaded move anyway.

Anyway... as the A/Q sub-genre was dying out, Sierra started releasing "remakes" of their oldest games, doing away with the text parser and the (admittedly rough, even by the most forgiving standards) EGA graphics in favor of a mouse interface and VGA. My guess is that, at the time, updating the classics seemed like a sure way to reach a new audience while maintaining their current fanbase... but reception was cool, to say the least. In all honesty, I'm not sure why: okay, QFG1 was ugly as hell, but SQ1 had its moments. Still, the results were poor enough that Sierra never got past the first game of any Quest series.

Fast-forward about a decade later, and enter AGD Interactive: a group of hardcore Sierra fans who've decided to do the one thing that transcends fanhood into something more - they decide to update the classics themselves, recreating Sierra's finest games in mouse-based VGA. Their first two releases were "King's Quest I" and "King's Quest II", now with more plot, voice-work and graphics at least on par with anything Sierra put out at its peak. And now they've remade "Quest For Glory II: Trial By Fire".

"Trial by Fire" is my second-favorite game in the "Quest For Glory" series (the first being "Shadows of Darkness", because it retroactively made its predecessors pieces in one large puzzle rather than isolated stories) - loosely based on an "Arabian Nights" environment, the player must choose the role of Fighter, Thief or Magic User and journey through the land of Shapeir, fighting monsters and solving puzzles.

The work AGDI has put into this remake astonishes me: on the one hand, locations are virtually identical to the original game, but the artwork is beautiful, from the scenery to the dialogue portraits: it looks more like a contemporary to "Shadows of Darkness" than anything before or after it. Understandably, there's no voice pack this time (seriously, the amount of dialogue in this game goes beyond massive and into the realm of Lovecraftian in its enormity) but that doesn't detract in the least. The nightmarish alleys of Shapeir can also be simplified so you don't spend two hours running around in circles looking for the South Plaza.

And, in the interest of keeping things fresh, the AGDI team has also added some innovations that weren't in the original (but probably should have been) - Magic Users can challenge other Shapeir sorcerers to friendly competitions with prompt rewards, Fighters now have the potential to score Critical Hits on their enemies, etc. So beyond re-experiencing the old game, there's a bit of the new to seek out. By normal standards, QFG2 isn't a very long game - I estimate about six hours tops - but it's certainly fun while it lasts.

AGDI's slogan is "The Spirit of Classic Adventure Gaming". Thanks, guys, for keeping that spirit alive!

Game(s) Review: World Domination

I've recently become fond of "world domination" RTS games, where you're given a large map and must, through tactics or brute force, conquer territories in traditional RTS battles while your opponent does the same. This mode places a greater emphasis on micromanagement and strategic planning, because the game can literally turn on a victory or a defeat at a specific location.

Over the past six months, I've had the opportunity to play three such games, though in each case the "world domination" mode was just a side-game attached to a traditional, mission-oriented RTS: there was the War of the Ring mode for "Battle For Middle-Earth 2", Global Conquest in the "Kane's Wrath" expansion of "Tiberium Wars", and finally, Galactic Conquest in "Star Wars: Empire at War". It's worth noting that in each case, I found the world/galactic conquest mode infinitely more engaging than the campaigns.

So how do they rate?

Let's start with "Battle For Middle-Earth 2", specifically with its expansion pack "Rise of the Witch-King" which made significant improvements to gameplay. This game draws heavily on the film trilogy as its source material, and I think that's a big part of the appeal: it's generally held that the various wars were the most memorable scenes in Peter Jackson's movies, so being able to recreate (or rewrite) those conflicts is a lot of fun. The War of the Ring is essentially a free-style mode that allows you to set your own objectives (ie: conquer all the strongholds of Middle-Earth, capture the South, destroy your enemy's capital, etc.) and you can choose starting points both for yourself and for your opponent. During gameplay, you receive bonuses for consolidating control over a particular "nation" (ie: conquering all the lands of Gondor).

Each faction starts with four generals, the only units capable of free movement throughout Middle-Earth: armies can either attach themselves to a general or move through friendly territories. You have to make a choice right at the start whether you're playing offensively or defenseively: you can either rush neighboring territories to build yourself a large power base, at the expense of having an army capable of defending it if your enemies come calling. Every map corresponds to a specific area in Middle-Earth, so you can find yourself assaulting Isengard or storming the Shire.

The Pros: Setting aside the aforementioned thrill of playing a game so closely tied to the most exciting aspect of Peter Jackson's trilogy, there's a lot to enjoy about the dynamic gameplay in "Rise of the Witch-King". Every land you conquer provides a certain number of build plots, allowing you to customize the composition of each territory: you can build farms to raise your income, barracks to produce soldiers and fortresses to provide automatic defense for otherwise vacant territories - if you leave a land vacant, without either a fortress or a standing army, you will automatically lose the territory to your opponent. Fortunately, even your most powerful units will only require one turn to build, so if you have a few barracks working together, you can pull together a decent force quickly enough. There's also some real challenge in terms of tactics: defeating a fortified enemy will be near-impossible if you're not ready.

The Cons: Auto-Resolve can be outrageously biased in favor of the computer. Even against a Brutal AI, there's no way a single band of garrisoned archers could repel eight Mordor Attack Trolls accompanied by the Witch-King. It's usually best to fight each battle "live", since Auto-Resolve will rarely calculate the potential of each unit when sizing up the different armies. Of course, this can lead to incredibly long campaigns - I usually clock about six consecutive hours or so. There's also an income/population cap that limits the size and composition of your armies: these can be expanded with fortresses and farms, but once you hit 1000, that's it.

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Moving on, we have the "Global Conquest" mode of "Tiberium Wars: Kane's Wrath", the latest addition to the "Command and Conquer" series. On the whole, it's much less restrictive than "War of the Ring", though this can be as much a disadvantage as an advantage...

The Pros: Well, for starters, Auto-Resolve is much more balanced. You actually stand a fair-to-decent shot of defeating your enemy through the Tactical AI, provided you have the right units. Free movement allows you to deploy bases and move strike forces pretty much anywhere you want, in any direction: it's tricky, but you get used to it after a while. There's an interesting array of support powers available for use against enemy forces and bases, and of course each faction has their own superweapon. "Realistic" geography is also an interesting addition: Australia, for example, is an excellent staging ground because it's isolated and you can deploy strike forces all over the map from there. Likewise, the high concentrations of cities around England provide massive boosts to income.

The Cons: The biggest flaw in Global Conquest is that you have very, very few customization options. You can't pick your starting locations (resulting in awkward situations like having a starting base surrounded by three enemy bases) or determine your base layouts (and 9 times out of 10, vital buildings will be placed outside your defensive perimeter). You can't play around with faction alignment - it's always GDI vs. Nod vs. Scrin, and sometimes they'll double-team you. There's also no way to bypass the secondary victory conditions, a ludicrously imbalanced set of goals that will grant you automatic victory if you achieve them. For example, Nod has to corrupt 24 cities around the world - a ridiculously easy task. GDI has to control at least 33% of world territory - again, very simple and much less challenging than military victory. Unfortunately, the Scrin get short shrift here: not only is it practically impossible to get any momentum due to the extremely high cost production of virtually any unit, but their secondary victory condition is building 9 Threshold Towers, which means a minimum of 9 bases if you're not going for any other strategic structure. It's just not a fun way to play... and yet you don't really have a choice, because if you don't aggressively pursue your objectives, one of your enemies will get there first. And even if you outnumber then ten to one, you'll lose.

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And finally, we have "Star Wars: Empire at War" and its expansion pack, "Forces of Corruption". It's rather different than the other two games by virtue of having two strategic arenas: after conducting a round of space combat to control the orbit of a planet, you must then land ground troops on the surface to eliminate the enemy base. Some units, like Darth Vader or Boba Fett, can function in both arenas, albeit in different fashions. Also, there's no real-time production as such: you start each battle, whether space- or land-based, with a specific number of units; if your force is too large, the remainder will be available as reinforcements during the course of the battle. This forces the player to adopt a completely different tactical style, because you can't simply set up a base and overwhelm your enemies; they can make more units, you can't. So you either build a "victory fleet" that can overcome any opposition, or scout the enemy and bring units that can specifically counter those defenses.

The Pros: "Empire at War" is interesting because it's so atypical of RTS games. Unlike BFME2 or C&C, where every faction is more or less equal in terms of raw power, the three factions of "Empire at War" require three different methods of play. The Empire, for example, mostly depends on steamrolling over its enemies with brute force. The Rebellion can't go head-to-head with that kind of power, but they can make lightning strikes on ground forces, snatching planets out from under the Empire's feet. The Zann Consortium (representing the criminal underworld of the Star Wars universe) can bypass the need to conquer planets altogether, corrupting them from afar and allowing all sorts of interesting bonuses to come through. Every world has specific tactical value, and what's more, the game makes defensive play very difficult: the only way you can increase the population cap is to build space stations over newly-conquered worlds, so on the one hand you have to expand your territory, but if you're spread too thinly your enemy will punch a hole right through your defenses. Moreover, your income is based in part on mining facilities built on conquered worlds, so you can't just build a Death Star and blow up planet after planet - if your opponent stages a successful counterattack, you won't have the resources to rebuild.

The Cons: There are some odd limitations to the Galactic Conquest mode - heroes such as Kyle Katarn and Mara Jade, and units like the Imperial Royal Guards, are available in certain campaign missions but not in GC (fortunately, this can be fixed by modding the game). Also, like Global Conquest, the "Forces of Corruption" expansion doesn't allow you to streamline the battle, forcing you to fight the two other factions simultaneously. Auto-Resolve harkens back to the weirdness of "Battle For Middle-Earth" - a perfectly well-defended base can be annihilated by some underpowered units and a hero or two.

Game Review: Final Fantasy IV Advanced

I've always been fond of "Final Fantasy IV" - it may not have achieved the level of intricacy and complexity found in the series' later installments, but there's something to be said for presenting an epic, globe-spanning, coherent adventure with relatively well-rounded characters and an excellent soundtrack, at a time when such things weren't exactly commonplace in the genre.

That said, there's never really been an English version of the game that could be considered "complete". The original SNES release, dubbed "Final Fantasy II", was a hack job, heavily censored and badly translated, with numerous aspects of the game deleted for simplification. The Playstation version, released in "Final Fantasy Chronicles", had a better script and restored most of the edited content, only to fall victim to the platform's limitations by requiring load times at practically every turn.

"Final Fantasy IV Advanced" is, I believe, the game "Final Fantasy IV" was meant to be. The script is excellent, with some new lines added to shed more light on characters' motivations and personalities; gameplay has not only matched the original Japanese version but exceeded it; character portraits have been added to dialogue exchanges, adding a bit of color to them; and the bonus content is worth every minute needed to earn it. The only problem is that, like "Dawn of Souls", airship travel tends to be a bit frustrating because the buttons stick more often than not. Small price to pay.

The real draw here, at least for veterans of the original game such as myself, is the extra material. Specifically, there are three major changes which take place towards the end of the game (and after it). Upon completing the penultimate dungeon, five former party members become available for recruitment, and you can mix-and-match to build your own fighting force for the final dungeon. All former party members will be at a level approximately equal to main character Cecil, so there's no need to go EXP-hunting.

Once a new team is assembled, you'll have the option of exploring a new dungeon, the Cave of Trials, built exclusively as an armory for your old teammates: superior armor is scattered throughout the cave, while the deepest part of the dungeon holds five powerful weapons guarded by five powerful monsters. If you can defeat them, you'll find that even the puny bard Edward will be able to hold his own against advanced enemies.

Upon completing the game, the Lunar Ruins will be unlocked. Much like the Souls of Chaos in "Dawn of Souls", this post-game dungeon is enormous and somewhat randomized, overflowing with dangerous monsters you won't encounter anywhere else and containing equipment that will turn your party members into nigh-unstoppable powerhouses. Unlike the Souls of Chaos, though, the Lunar Ruins are actually a lot of fun to explore, largely due to the immense variety of activities (good thing, since you have to go through it at least two and a half times to get to the end of it). Sure, some floors are the typical hack-slash-find-exit affair, but others require you to punch a combination on floor tiles scattered throughout, or to catch a toad that's teleporting around the screen. Also, each and every character has a trial to endure, ranging from a running a gauntlet to investigating a murder to proving your worth as a paladin by doing good deeds; the trials culminate in confrontations with a Lunar Summon (similar in concept to the Dark Aeons of "Final Fantasy X"), after which you'll receive an ultimate weapon or an item that upgrades your character in some way (ie: Rosa's White Ring changes the Pray command to Miracle, providing much more potent free healing, while Kain's Dragoon Gloves allow him to Double Jump).

In short, "Final Fantasy IV Advanced" offers the best version to date: not only are the script and gameplay in top form, but beating the game is, in a way, just the start of the adventure. Definitely worth the time, whether you've conquered this particular Final Fantasy before or not.

As an aside, this game marks the first time I've ever defeated a superboss; the Brachioraidos is to FF4 what Ruby Weapon is to FF7 (or Penance to FF10 for the more modern crowd). How powerful is it? Its lair is home to an NPC who desperately warns you to avoid the monstrosity stomping across the screen (yes, they gave the Brachioraidos its own map sprite). I was very, very lucky - Kain's ultimate weapon randomly casts Tornado (an HP-sapping spell), and he struck first, the spell was cast, and the next blow destroyed the fearsome creature. Like I said, pure luck; I have no doubt in my mind that I'd lose ten rematches. :)

Game Review: "Elvira II - The Jaws of Cerberus"

This ancient contribution from HorrorSoft makes for an interesting - if deeply flawed - experience.

You play an anonymous hero-type summoned by horror hostess Elvira to her movie studios. The demon Cerberus has kidnapped our Mistress of the Dark, converting her three film sets into real nests of supernatural activity. You must search all three studios (a haunted house, underground catacombs, and an insect maze) for the captive Elvira, slaying Cerberus' minions along the way, and then gather the magical artifacts needed to banish the demon back to Hell.

"The Jaws of Cerberus" belongs to a particularly unforgiving sub-genre of adventure/RPG, the type where it's very easy to make a mistake (ie: drop or use an item at the wrong time) resulting in an unwinnable game, only there's no mechanism to let you know that you're stuck. You can just go on for hours, never realizing you can't proceed beyond a certain point. It's the sort of thing that makes playing without a walkthrough far too great a chore to be enjoyable.

Even with a walkthrough, gameplay leaves much to be desired; combat is pretty much randomly clicking on the enemy, and either you hit it or you don't. Spells are useful, but there's no way to recharge your MP aside from standing around for hours at a time - and unfortunately, the game will most likely force you into this position at least twice. Magic is also problematized by the enormous amount of dead weight, ie: a lot of spells and spell ingredients are just plain useless to you in the course of the game.

Fortunately, "The Jaws of Cerberus" excels at visual presentation, and that's enough of an incentive to at least give the game a casual run-through - there's plenty of gore (exploding eyeballs, blood, mutilation, giant insects, maggoty corpses), but more in the vein of how the '80s classics used it (to enhance frightening scenes) than the more gratuitous methods used in modern films like "Saw". The set designs are surprisingly detailed given the technology that was available when the game was made.

As a throwback, then, it's the sort of game you wouldn't mind watching as a film or television series, but actually playing it requires a great deal of patience - more, perhaps, than is warranted.

Game Review: Phantasy Star IV

A word of warning: I believe my overwhelmingly positive response to this game may be influenced by the nostalgia it invokes (which affects me as someone who'd played through the series to that point) and by what I call the Manna Effect - after two "okay" games and an abysmally awkward third, anything more than halfway competent is bound to look like a Godsend by comparison. Objectively speaking, though, I have no doubt that "Phantasy Star IV" is a substantial improvement over its predecessors, and is certainly the best of the four.

Don't let the title fool you; this is actually a sequel to the second game, not the third. In fact, looking back on "Phantasy Star" as a whole, PS3 really comes off as the "Freddy's Revenge" of the series - the black sheep that could be erased from the canon altogether without making any difference. But in any event, we're back in the Algol star system, a thousand years after Rolf Landale and his friends destroyed Mother Brain. In the interrim, civilization has collapsed and everything has changed. It's the same trick PS2 used to distance itself from the first game while maintaining basic continuity: since we don't get to witness the changes as they occur, we're thrust into unfamiliar territory once more even though it's the same world.

Chronologically, we've reached the early '90s here (1993 to be exact), and this is when RPGs took a turn for the better on the creative level. PS4 uses a number of interesting narrative techniques, such as a telescoping plot and a false protagonist, and it features a cast of distinct characters with individualized personalities. Sure, none of them are particularly complex, but they don't need to be - it's enough that we can see them as people rather than stick figures, and watch them interact with each other and the world around them. Diversity is also another big plus: at various points, your party will include a Dezolian priest, a Motavian axe-warrior, a Numan, two Espers (a male sorcerer and a female warrior) and a pair of androids. Easily the most varied bunch ever seen in a "Phantasy Star" game, leaning more towards the "band of misfits" archetype than homogenous adventurers.

The story begins with renowned huntress Alys Brangwin and her 16-year-old protege Chaz Ashley. On a routine assignment, the two accidentally stumble upon an impending planetary crisis; as their journey progresses and they gather up allies, the cause of Motavia's troubles seems to be Zio, a psychotic warlock out to destroy the world. But Zio is only the puppet of a darker power, concealed behind many masks and guises. The party must ultimately face a cosmic entity and end the cycle of violence and destruction that has plagued Algol for so long.

It's the very definition of the telescopic plot - starting small and local, and growing in scale with every plot twist until it ends on a global/galactic level. The key to success is having us get invested in each stage of the unfolding tale, and "Phantasy Star IV" achieves this largely through the likeable characters and their subplots. I think what makes them so compelling, despite a seeming lack of complexity, is the fact that most of them reflect basic human concerns: Gryz wants revenge but finds no reason to continue with the team once he gets it, Raja just wants to have fun, Kyra's out to prove herself to her peers, Rika's determined to test her lab-learned knowledge against life experience... and, of course, Chaz is forced to grow up and stand on his own. In fact, Chaz really surprises me towards the end of the game: when he's told of the cosmic battle between Light and Darkness, and is tasked to destroy the Darkness, Chaz refuses - not out of fear or an ulterior motive, but because following the commands of a disinterested metaphysical entity doesn't make him any different from Zio and Dark Force. It's a surprisingly profound point, worthy of the most sophisticated modern RPG.

While we're on the topic of characters, I have to give one last round of cookies to Sega; whatever problems I may have had with the "Phantasy Star" games, there's no question that I appreciate their concentrated contribution of strong female protagonists to the RPG genre. The fact that Alys Brangwin is a well-rounded, interesting figure in her own right is even more commendable.

The graphics are spectacular by "Phantasy Star" standards, showing full animations for spells and physical attacks while using illustrated manga-esque panels to enhance cutscenes. Everything is so much more dynamic here; this is the only game in the series where I didn't feel the need to disable random encounters, because they were genuinely fun to watch. Fun to play as well, which is another important note: after three wildly erratic games, "Phantasy Star IV" finally achieves the perfect balance of encounter frequency and difficulty. With the added incentive of macros (allowing the characters to execute pre-programmed attack sequences) and combination-attacks (where two or more party members combine their abilities to create more devastating techniques), you'll probably spend most of the game wanting to get into fights. The Hunters' Guild side-quests are also worth mentioning: during certain lulls in the quest, you can undertake some optional missions for Alys' and Chaz's guild, running the gamut from rescuing a dog to halting an invasion of cyborgs. Most of them are pretty fun, and you can get plenty of EXP and money per mission; again, it's the sort of level-building side-quest that's typical of modern RPGs, and "Phantasy Star IV" does it just as well as its contemporaries.

Nostalgia is a big part of PS4's emotional payload - and it's the little things that have the most power. Stepping into the Bio-Plant and being greeted by PS1's Tower theme; Rika being the perfected version of Nei; the wreckage of the worldship; Lashiec and Daughter representing the villains of the past; meeting Myau and Lutz; the statue of Alis in Termi (which provides the last frame of the finale); and, of course, the Elsydeon scene, where Chaz meets the heroes who came before him. There are also things the game doesn't explicitly spell out: for example, towards the end of the game you're sent to find the Aeroprism, which Lutz concealed in the Soldiers' Temple. Except he'd given it to Rolf before the Noah mission, which means someone made it back alive from the end of PS2 after all.

Of course, most of this won't mean anything to players who haven't gone through the first two games at the very least, which suggests to me that PS4 was primarily targeted at the pre-existing fanbase, offering as much closure and continuity as possible. It's a nice gesture, and one that serves to wrap up the "Phantasy Star" series at its peak.

On an unrelated note: this was my last review for the next few months, as "Sententia" goes on hiatus while I get married and make some life changes. I'll probably be incommunicado until March, but comments are welcome as always. :)

Game Review: Phantasy Star III

Oy. kazekage was right; this one was a real bitch to play. Even cheating my butt off and fast-forwarding 95% of the time, I still came very close to quitting several times.

On every practical level - gameplay, characterization, music, visual design - "Phantasy Star III" is an enormous step down from its predecessor. This, in itself, isn't uncommon where game series are concerned: generally speaking, if they spike up they can drop down just as easily. And if "Phantasy Star III" were simply a lousy game, it wouldn't be such a big deal; the real problem is that, as Marlon Brando put it, "it coulda been a contender". I'm going to do something a little different this time, to demonstrate:

1. The Gimmick

Why it could have worked: You don't see many multi-generational sagas in RPGs; "Phantasy Star III" follows Rhys, then Rhys' son, then his grandson, three generations of a family undergoing various quests, all of which are connected to the Dark Force (primary antagonist of the "Phantasy Star" series). You'd have three self-contained tales which all interconnect to form a larger tapestry. What's more, the game allows you to determine how Rhys' bloodline evolves, by letting you choose who Rhys should marry - and, at a later point in the game, who his son should marry. The choice of wife/mother determines who the next-generation protagonist will be. Thus, you actually have six different games in one (the two possible sons of Rhys, and the four possible third-generation heroes). With distinct storylines and characterizations, replay value would be extremely high.

Why it didn't work: There's no characterization at all - the main characters might as well be the sodding Light Warriors for all we know about them. As a result, you're not really inclined to care who should marry whom, since there's no basis for any kind of romantic tension; imagine if "Final Fantasy VII" had given its players the choice to pair Cloud with either Tifa or Aeris. People still debate about that triangle today. But since character interaction is non-existent in "Phantasy Star III", you reach the point of choosing a wife without any reason to pick one or another at all. To make things worse, the third-generation storylines are way too similar, so it ultimately doesn't matter how you manipulate the family line - a monumental waste of a very clever device.

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2. The Big Twist

Why it could have worked: From the very beginning, it's clear that the world of "Phantasy Star III" doesn't quite fit with its predecessors; the environment is distinctly medieval, with princesses being abducted by dragons and held captive in ancient castles. In fact, there's not a hint of technology in sight... until you're called upon to travel from your world to an adjoining planet, and the passages connecting the worlds look like something out of "Tron". Nevertheless, besides a single name-check of the Dark Force, there doesn't seem to be any tangible connection to the "Phantasy Star" universe; the mythologies are all wrong, you're clearly not in the Algol system, and no prior characters make an appearance. Then the truth is revealed: the planets you've visited are sections of a thousand-year-old worldship, the Alisa III, carrying the descendants of the survivors of Palma (the planet destroyed towards the end of "Phantasy Star II"). It's an excellent twist, because it accounts for every single anomaly: the medieval environment is due to Palman civilization being "rebooted", which also explains the wildly different history that shapes the plot. This revelation undermines our whole perception of the game reality - a twist worthy of the Wachowski brothers.

Why it didn't work: I actually think this is the only aspect of the game that turned out right; granted, the dramatic effect is diminished by the fact that you're not really invested in events due to bland storylines and persona-non-grata characters, but it's still a big surprise and a clever, pleasant link to the previous games.

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3. The Multiple Endings

Why it could have worked: This one's self-explanatory; multiple endings grant the player a certain amount of control over an otherwise-linear storyline. You'll come back for more if the outcome promises to be different.

Why it didn't work: Except the outcome isn't really different. Aside from the fact that the four endings are painfully abbreviated and anticlimactic, they're also very, very similar. In fact, two of them are practically identical, with the same sequence of events and the same dialogue (the only difference is the presence of a black hole in one and a sun in the other). What's more, only one of the four makes any kind of sense in the context of the series: in Aron's ending, the Alisa III goes through a black hole and emerges near Earth, thousands of years in the past. Though the sequence itself ends there, the implication is clear: the people of Earth make contact with Alisa III, are exposed to Dark Force, and use Palman technology to create Noah and Mother Brain (as seen in "Phantasy Star II"), all part of Dark Force's plan to return to Algol. History comes full circle. Sadly, none of the other endings invite even this amount of speculation: one ending simply promises that the people of Alisa III will fight Dark Force again in a thousand years, while the other two announce the intent to settle on Earth in the present (and anyone who knows how PS2 ends knows they're not going to find anything there). At the end of the day, you're not rewarded for a second or third playthrough; instead, you're left feeling incredibly stupid that you went to all the trouble for nothing.

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4. Visual Design

Why it could have worked: even though there's a considerable gap between "Phantasy Star" and "Phantasy Star II", you're still broadly in the same solar system, visiting the same planets. The Alisa III, by contrast, is a completely new world, something we've never seen before. Quite frankly, the creators had an opportunity here to construct an appealing, engaging fantasy world on their own terms.

Why it didn't work: They didn't. Not only do the worlds of Alisa III look more or less the same, they're comprised of huge, sprawling maps that are empty. You can walk for fifteen minutes in any given direction and never find the slightest trace of your next destination. And it's not just on the level of the world maps themselves: all the towns on all the worlds follow the same visual design, including the very confusing shop signs which make no fucking sense: why does the Armor Shop have a picture of a duck over its door? Why is the Inn's logo an urn? Why is it that the icon for executing a turn in a battle menu is a crank key and a fish? It's all horrendously abstract and arbitrary, all the more outrageous given the clean and ordered designs "Phantasy Star II" had sported.

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I could go on, but the point remains the same: "Phantasy Star III" is a sloppy, shoddy mess, all the more condemned for the many ways it could have succeeded with the tiniest amount of effort.

Game Review: Phantasy Star II

I'll start off with praise for the mighty Game Genie, because without his "No Random Encounters" and "Instant Level 50" codes I'd probably still be EXP-gorging in Paseo. Thank you, Genie; Barbara Eden's got nothing on you. :)

"Phantasy Star II" represents a major leap forward from its predecessor, largely due to the move from the Sega Master System to Genesis. Graphically, musically, in story and gameplay, it's... different. Some areas have improved substantially, some not so much.

Let's start with visual style. I overlooked this in my review of the first game, but the "Phantasy Star" series offers something I haven't seen in your typical RPGs: it's situated firmly and directly in the science-fiction genre. It's not that other games don't make use of futuristic settings - "Final Fantasy VII" comes to mind - but there's usually some kind of religious/mystical undertone woven throughout the storyline (in FF7's case, the Jenova/Cetra/Lifestream subplot). "Phantasy Star", conversely, is pure sci-fi: everything that happens is rooted in technology and space travel. There are no gods, no demons, nothing otherworldly at all except for the Dark Force, which has yet to be explained. Visually, this is apparent in the design of the characters and the towns/worlds: sleek, metallic, a little cold and inhuman... and as we later find out, this isn't just because of the genre, but because of something that's actually going on in the game. Battle sequences are improved, though, as we can now see the participants on both sides facing off and delivering blows.

This game has one very notable flaw on the technical level: lack of variety. Dungeons are back to 2D overhead point of view (the first game had switched to first-person view during these segments), so you're basically stuck with the same perspective throughout the game. Most of the towns look the same, there's very little variation in how battles unfold thanks to the tweaked combat system (which allows you to automate a fight after issuing commands to your party members), and the music... well, even the boss fights don't have unique tracks, it's the same melody over and over again. A bit more work in that area would've kept ennui from setting in - as it was, I ended up fast-forwarding through most of the dungeons. You do get to build your own team out of a roster of eight, each with unique skills and attributes, but by mid-game the strongest and most useful characters become painfully obvious.

The story takes place a thousand years after Alis Landale defeated King Lassic and the Dark Force, becoming Queen of the Algol system. It's been an eventful millenium, and "Phantasy Star II" makes good use of continuity not by preserving the past, but by presenting familiar elements in a completely new context. Motavia, the desert world, has become a lush, green paradise, and whereas the bulk of the first game's actions took place on capital planet Palma, Motavia is at the heart of the story this time around. We begin the game with an introduction to Rolf, an agent of the Motavian government who dreams of Alis' final battle with Dark Force. With him is his... I'm not sure what Nei is to him, but she's there when he's assigned to check out apparent malfunctions in Mother Brain, the omnipotent computer network that regulates and controls virtually all aspects of life in Algol (Samus Aran would pitch a fit, I'm sure). Soon Rolf, Nei and their allies are drawn into an interplanetary conspiracy, with disastrous consequences.

So far so good... but pace becomes a major problem for this game after a while. For some reason, we get a string of random, minor events (reuniting a thief with his kidnapped daughter, learning to play the piano, investigating the source of the monsters plaguing the world), then the death of a main character. It's sudden, and a bit of a surprise, but there's no emotional depth because like their predecessors, the cast of "Phantasy Star II" have minimal personalities. It's just hard, if not impossible, to care about the fate of a complete cipher. This character is never spoken of again, for reasons that aren't very clear to me (especially since the character's name emerges towards the end of the game, but in a completely unrelated context, and nobody bats an eye). Anyway, after that things start getting awkward: having received minimal exposition so far, the team sets out to Dezolis, which is pretty much the same as it was a millenium ago, and receive a massive infodump from Lutz, nee Noah from the first game. Any pleasant surprise I might have felt at seeing him got utterly lost in the torrent of information that he blurts out: "Hey, Rolf, guess what! You're descended from Alis Landale! That dream you keep having? Really happened! And we've met before, remember that time when you were ten and your parents died on a space shuttle? Yeah, I'm the one that saved you. Oh, and there's an enormous space station on the edge of our solar system that's been watching us for a while. And I think the Dark Force is back and messing with Mother Brain. Okay, bye now."

See the problem? There's no build-up prior to this - you could try and hazard a guess that Rolf is descended from Alis, but we don't know anything about his life before the game starts, let alone why his orphaned status is so important (because the death of Rolf's parents wasn't an accident). And the bitch of it is, there's no time to digest this information, because you're catapulted forward towards the end of the game, and there's a brilliant plot twist where the true masterminds are revealed... it would've been great, but at that point you're so saturated with exposition that any dramatic impact is lost. The story ultimately achieves an ambiguous climax that would've been amazing, had we been given time to appreciate it. Thematically, the game goes all-out at this point: we see how dependence on technology leads to complacency and weakness, and Rolf's ultimate decision is wonderfully ambivalent in the sense that you're wondering whether he knows the ultimate consequences of his actions, and accepts them because the alternative is unthinkable. Lots of clever ideas, hampered by the fact that they're not set up properly.

Side note: continuing a nice tradition from the first game, the toughest fighter and the most efficient healer in "Phantasy Star II" are both women (Anna Zirski and Amy Sage, respectively). Still with minimal personalities, but again, it's enough that they're front and center. And, of course, this is one of the few games I'm familiar with where the final boss is a woman.

An above-average game, though I imagine my opinion of it would be much lower if I'd actually had to fight my way through random battles every five steps. But it gets the job done, and that's what counts.