Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the Typical JRPG

Oliver: Alright guys here we go, the battle's about to begin. Let's fight!

Esther: (flips hair) I don't feel like fighting Oliver, I'm just going to play my harp.

Oliver: Common Esther! We don't have time for that! Playing your harp is useless!

Esther: But my harp makes such pretty music!

Oliver: Alright, fine. How about you Swaine? You ready to take on these monsters?

Swaine: Ok Oliver, but I have a bad feeling about this.

Oliver: Alright guys, let's do it! Release your familiars!

Swaine: (sulks) Oliver, I'd rather just shoot my gun. I'm not that fond of my familiars.

Oliver: But Swaine, your gun only does 1 damage! Why would you use that?

Swaine: Well for some reason I am incapable of using anything but guns, even though they are pretty much useless. It is rather fun to shoot things though.

Esther: (chanting) Oh ailments, be gone! Be gone!

Oliver: What are you doing Esther? We aren't even hurt yet?

Esther: But I love singing and playing my harp! It's so much fun! I don't want to fight...

Oliver: You both are useless! Why did you even come along on this journey if you don't want to fight? Why do you keep familiars if you don't want to use them? What is the point of me having traveling companions if you won't do what I ask in battle?

Swaine: What are you talking about Oliver? All you ever do is cast that damn Ward spell. Especially right at the end of the battle when we've pretty much already won.

Esther: (cheer) I'm raising your magical attacks guys! Use your attack magic!

Oliver: Esther, this isn't a boss fight! I don't want to waste my attack magic on these pushover monsters! Stop playing that stupid harp!

Swaine: Oliver! I just stole a Confusion-Be-Gone from that monster! I'm so proud of myself!

Oliver: Ugh, if this was Final Fantasy IV I'd cast Fire on all you guys and just fight the damn battles myself! Who needs companions when they are as useless as you guys!

Esther: I love you Oliver!

Swaine: I'm going to find somewhere to sulk...

There you have it folks! The battles of Ni No Kuni in a nutshell. Alight, I did exaggerate a little bit. But Ni No Kuni and I are both best friends and worst enemies. Seriously, does it take a genius to figure out how to create decent battle AI? Or is it just laziness? Why make an awsome real time battle system and then squander it with horrible computer controlled companions. Yes, you can switch between all the characters at will but it takes you out of the action and becomes chore worthy before long. I love the fact that they did real time battles, I hate the fact that the AI is infuriatingly horrible. The battles are extremely fun and extremely frustrating, particularly later on. I had a blast for the first 30 hours of this game, the last 30 hours became an exercise in racing to the finish line. I don't want to race to the finish line, I want to enjoy the ride.

I have never played a Pokemon game before, so the whole idea of "familiars" was new to me. And I loved it. It is a lot of fun in Ni No Kuni to tame and train new familiars and then build them up to be really good fighters. The sheer volume and diversity of familiars in this game is staggering. I don't see how you could possibly train every one. But what good is all that when your companions can't hold their own in a fight or use their familiars effectively? I frequently found myself cursing my companions for doing exactly what I described in the opening narrative. There are battle "controls" that you can use such as "keep us healthy" or "do nothing" or "give it your all." But honestly, it seemed like whatever one I chose for my companions, they did whatever they wanted anyway. When I tell you to do nothing, why are you still casting spells? There were times when the battles worked well, but those times were few.

Bad AI aside, Ni No Kuni is a beautiful game to look at. The animation is beautiful and the cell shading is top notch (although the Studio Ghibli footage had to be less than 5 minutes for the entire game, why bother?). The dialog is funny and occasionally witty and there are some interesting characters to find throughout your quest. But in this day and age that just isn't enough for me. Underneath all the polish is the same JRPG that has been made thousands of times. Can't we do something a little different? You know you have a typical JRPG if you have at least half of the examples below:

Airship? Check. Treasure chests in conspicuous locations? Check. Charming but shallow companions? Check. Linear Dungeons? Check. Ultimate Bad guy in a cloud fortress? Check. Villain hell bent on destroying the world? Check. Companion that joins up towards the end of the game? Check. Ok, so I'm getting a little nit-picky. But I could go on all day.

I really do love JRPG's and I knew what I was getting myself into when I started this adventure. But for a game with these production values I expected more. It's kind of like the Turbo Graphics 16. 16-bit graphics with a crappy 8-bit processor underneath. Do we really have to have this same tired story about the ultimate evil wanting to destroy the world? Why? For what purpose? In the White Witches case it was simply because the world was imperfect. Seriously? Can't JRPG's come into the 21st century and grow up like the rest of us have? Am I wrong to think that most people who played this game were people my age or maybe a little older that grew up with fond memories of playing Square and Enix RPG's in the 90's? I hate to use this example, but the Harry Potter novels started out for kids. As the kids grew up so did the books. Why can't JRPG's?

Maybe I've just grown tired of the JRPG formula. Maybe I'm just in love with the "idea" of playing a JRPG rather than actually playing one. I'm sure there are plenty of Japanese RPG's from this past generation and perhaps the generation before that I missed. Maybe these explored bolder visions and something other than "guy or girl saves the world" as the main story line. Hell, you can even use that story line if you want, just DO something interesting with it. Is that too much to ask?

When it was all said and done, I did have a fun time playing Ni No Kuni. Yes, the characters are shallow and mostly boring (I did love Drippy though, he at least made me laugh). Yes, the whole idea of destroying the world is tired and yes, the battle system, while awsome, was brought down by the incredibly incapable AI the game designers burdened you with. But what made Ni No Kuni worth playing was the fact that it wasn't pretending to be anything other than what it was. Which is a very serviceable JRPG with a really bright coat of gloss. In the end I got what I paid for. Which was a Nintendo DS game ported to the PS3. Ouch.

Zelda 2: 20 Years in the Making

It was a HOT summer day. And a hot summer in Florida, is lava hot with a steam bath in between. I was in my friends garage. I can't remember what year it was but for whatever reason, his parents made him keep his Nintendo in the damn blazing garage with one of those old 70's TV's with the clicky knobs on them. Why is it that we always got the hand me down TV's for our Nintendo's? Anyway, I remember being excited because Zelda 2 had just come out and I was curious about it. I don't think I even owned a Nintendo yet but I had spent a good amount of time playing the original Zelda at some other house that wasn't mine and on a Nintendo I didn't own. So I planned to do the same thing here. I had no idea how disappointed I was about to become.

My friend had one of those magic Nintendo's that never seemed to need a slap, or kick, or bump, or nudge, or alcohol cleaning kit, or air blower, it just worked. I envied him for that. So we popped Zelda 2 in and it fired right up. There was a sword and then a familiar screen with three save slots. After that, almost all similarity to Zelda ceased. Gone was the pseudo 3D walk anywhere look of the first game, replaced by a fairly typical looking side scroller. Not to mention Princess Zelda was right there on the first screen sleeping away like she was sleeping beauty or snow white. Strange, I thought. Perhaps it will get better. I walked to the right, jumping and throwing my little sword-that-looked-like-a-knife the whole way. Once I exited the temple the game began to look a bit more familiar. Back to pseudo 3D top down view. So I walked right and was immediately assaulted by a black blob with eyes. The screen shifted and I was in a battle scene. Being utterly confused I was killed almost instantly. Back to the temple. With one less life. Wait, I have lives in Zelda? Strange....

So I went out again, avoided the black slime ball and managed to make it to a town. Wow a town! People to talk to! Followed by, confusion. What do I do? I die. Over and over until a few minutes later I handed the controller to my friend and said "I'm going home, this game sucks!" And home I went, never to return to Zelda 2 for over twenty years. You see, when I was 8 years old, I had no clue what an RPG was or how to play one. Little did I know that Nintendo had actually turned Zelda into an RPG, complete with magic spells and experience points! There was nothing in me at that time in my life that would have made me play or understand Zelda 2 any better than I did. Fast forward 20 some years and a lifetime of RPG experience, and Zelda 2 gave off a new light.

Speaking of fast forwarding, after playing the original Zelda recently I figured why not give Zelda 2 another try? So I did. And impressed I was. There is simply no other Zelda like this one. It is an RPG through and through. You could argue that all Zelda games have "RPG elements" and you'd be right. But not like this one. Experience points, random monster encounters, spells and all this Zelda was something different. Dare I say that I might have had more fun with this sequel than the original. Hard to believe.

I'm not going to go into nitty-gritty details but suffice it to say that Zelda 2 is hard, REALLY hard. GameFAQs is your friend here. And without it I would absolutely not have made it through the game. Thank God I was playing it on an emulator or I may not have even finished it. This game is punishing. When those three lives run out, you go back. All the way back to the very beginning. Even if you are in the deep bowels of a dungeon. Trudging your whole way back to wherever you came from was redundant and brutal on every level. You might not even survive your way back to where you were!

The thing that hit me the hardest and of course made me feel like a complete tool, was the dungeon music. I immediately recognized it. Hey, I know this song! I love this song! How could that be? I haven't played the game in 20 years! Turns out it was the music for one of the Zelda levels on Super Smash Brothers Melee. Go figure. My fondest memory of this game came from another game made 15 years after this game. Really weird if you think about it.

The Legend of Zelda in Three and a Half Hours

Having some spare time can be a good thing now and then. And despite the usual amount of chores that need to be accomplished on a daily basis in life, something inside my inner sanctum compelled me to dive into the original "Legend of Zelda" head first. For no apparent reason I just decided to play (or perhaps I thought it would look pleasantly peachy emulated on my 65 inch LCD and oh yes, it did). And play I did, at a frenzied pace! Granted I came nowhere near the thirty four minutes and four seconds record of the insane person on "Speed Demos Archive" but damn, I was proud of myself. The dude in question calls himself  "Tom 'rdrunner' Votava." Tom, all I can say is, my GOD man! Total Super Nova bro!

My experience with Zelda? I haven't really touched the game "seriously" in 20 years. Other than to test it out on various NES emulators to make sure they worked properly. That being said, what else can one say about this game? There are probably more websites and game write ups devoted to it than hairs on my legs (the hair on my legs is at least as thick as the hair on Robin Williams back, remember the Fisher King? Blind I tell you, BLIND!). So why not just talk about the feelings this game evoked from me instead? I hope that would be less boring. For writing and reading.

It made me feel young, angry, joyous, hungry, jaded, happy, hurtful, sad, insane and smarter, I think. It's a great game, honestly, it is. Even in 2013. I never finished this game all those years ago. I just, couldn't. That last dungeon got me every time. Just a maze of blurbbbbbbling ghosts and shield eating pancake stacks. Oh yeah, and those happy decapitated hopping rabbit heads. What the hell man? What WERE those things? And even with the best sword they still took like 4 or 5 hits a piece! Technically they took as many or more hits than Gannon himself. And they were so much happier...

 But let me tell you, when it comes to final dungeons with insanely difficult mazes (Revenge of Shinobi, I'm looking at you) it generally takes me 20 years to beat them. Or at least the advent of the internet with some of those leg hair websites I was talking about. You know, the ones with more insane people that screen cap entire games. But I'm glad to say I did not use a single GameFAQ for this game. The leg hair websites with the maps though... man... thank you. For all the people like me who value 25 year old games over normal things like you know, cats, your maps get us a piece of our childhood back. Minus the frustration of bombing three sides of every room and burning every bush that looks like it's a little strange, and pushing every rock that's conspicuously off by itself in the middle of a forest, and last but not least, hitting the exact SPOT with a bomb where you could have sworn that cave was 20 years ago... Dude, I swear it's right there! Oh fuck it just pull up the screen caps from Zelda Wiki already... 

What A Crysis....

I really don't know what to make of this. I'm NOT a first person shooter guy for the most part so I guess my opinions on this genre are tainted from the start. And it's hard to discern exactly what drew me to this experience. The graphics? The story? The Sci-Fi Elements? The Tropics? The Physics? Ahhhhh the physics.... and how wonderful they are! How many games are there that let you shoot palm trees into bits? And by bits I mean bits and bits and more bits. You can blast the trunk down into tiny hunks of wood and they will roll about on the ground gloriously!  I waited for 5 years to blast those hunks! Although if you shoot some other kind of tree these results generally aren't repeated... what a shame. Damn you Crytek. I want all my trees to explode into bits!

I became enamored with this game back in 2007 and knew that one day I'd be playing it on max settings and not a day sooner. So five years later I did just that. And "that" is the other thing, the technology behind this game. It still takes a hulk of a PC to run this thing on MAX settings and get any kind of decent frame rate. It still chugged on my PC (which is good of course) when things got busy, even 5 years on. Boy was it pretty though.... probably the prettiest game I've seen. But physics and pretty scenery are about the only real endearing things here.

After my initial rush of: "wow this game is freaking incredible!" I was wrought with a typical FPS story, typical characters, typical dialog, typical over the top voice acting, typical weapons, typical alien threat that no one saw coming (except you the player of course) blah blah blah. You know, just once I'd like to hear a scientist not say something along the lines of: "We must study it, don't destroy it !" While at the same time a bad-ass general guy saying something like: "We must nuke it now before it's too late!" And you wonder why when every horrible FX laden action/Sci-Fi movie comes out you see the critics comparing it to a video game. Games like this give video games a bad name when it comes to dialog and story telling! How about some real narrative for once. Is that too much to ask for? But it is a shooter... Ugh....

Where this game does shine though, is in the jungle. When you are immersed in that glory and you can almost feel the leaves rubbing your arms as you traverse this insane reality these guys have created. You feel like you are actually there. You can see the detail in every leaf, every blade of grass, every rock, it's truly wondrous. I had more fun powering up and tossing barrels 100 feet into the air just to see how they would react with the environment than actually shooting things. I can forgive a game it's asinine tendencies when it makes up for them in other good ways, like palm trees exploding. But once the trees stopped falling, I lost interest and bland, vanilla, genericism soaked the rest of my experience.

Once the glory of the jungle is over, the game switches gears and just delves into boring FPS tedium complete with mostly static environments, big action set pieces with the illusion of control, aliens that look like every other alien and a big stupid gun that you only get to use once. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy myself in this game. But by the time I was two thirds of the way through I just felt like EA came in and told Crytek to stop playing around with the physics engine and blow some shit up! Oh wait....

Metroid, In the Real World

A decade has passed since the last time Metroid crossed my fingers. And my fingers cramped and bled, just like they should. Being played on my new, custom monstrosity of a gaming device (which is fabulous) it was hard not to get caught up in the beauty of this primordial masterpiece. How would it feel after all these years? How can I relate to it now as opposed to when I was younger (and yet even younger the first time)? Keeping constants in life is an important architect in the creation of new ideas and experiences. Something old becomes something new again and again. How would this claustrophobic expedition feel to me now at this point in my life?

I was rewarded for my renewed curiosity. Pure exploration at it's finest. Easter Eggs and a few cruel jokes along the way balanced the experience nicely. Rolling through this maze of puzzles constantly reminded me that I was only a few bombs away from a potential prize. Every time I found one, I was compelled to continue to the next. My best move was playing it as seamlessly and cautiously as if it were the first time. It is easy to cheat in 2012 but I resisted. Playing in an emulated environment was close enough. It seems that playing these games this way gives them something new and perhaps less bouts of frustration related to computation speed and RAM (A mere 10 kB powered this wonder). New technology can somethings bring good things to old classics. Thirty minutes in front of a Jefferies tube shooting speeding bugs to power up was such fun in 1986. Now it borders on a pixelated form of cancer. Slowly digesting your insides until nothing is left, much less my will to play. I vote technology.

My memory during this traverse was fairly solid but then again, some of the most influential things in your life aren't the most obvious ones (or the most useful). I found myself remembering little details but forgetting obvious tricks. Running through the familiar corridors filled me with a nostalgic warmth. Remembering how important ice is. Rejoicing over finding the "wave" and it's pointless usefulness (you don't even need it, or it's excessive beauty, but yet, there it is). How often I reflected on this experience and then realized, I am lost in this game. How often do you get lost in everyday life?

Music is another constant. It leads a trail of bad decisions and triumphs in everyone's wake. The music's tone is dark and forbidding to say the least. The title screen brings it's score to a full new moon. Letting the player know that this is exactly what to expect. Kraid's area score is like a complex 8 bit symphony that has never left my conscience since 1986. The Brinstar theme graces my cellphone to this day with it's simple upbeat groove. Perhaps the only instance of "upbeat" in the entire exploit. A constant reminder of my youth and inexperience haunting me whenever my phone sings it's familiar chorus.

What more can be said? There are only so many ways you can spell "classic." If you can watch Citizen Kane and appreciate the revolutionary camera angles and shadows, you can marvel at this gem of a distraction. If something so old, can after so many years, feel so new again, yet also so familiar, you know someone paid their dues and got paid to do it. Right Sakamoto?