Star Ocean: Til the End of Patience

So after trying out some Fallout 2 this past week, I went ahead with Star Ocean: Til the End of Time since I was already on a roll following Star Ocean: The Second Story. I’m not sure why Tri-Ace saw the need to over-engineer the combat system, but they tacked on a whole slew of changes that pretty much turn it into a micro-management suckfest.

Battle Gauge
What’s the point of this? Experience in the game compared to Second Story has been heavily nerfed. We’re talking encounters that give maybe only one or two experience points early on and difficult encounters later that give only a fraction of what they should be worth. The Battle Gauge is a mechanism that is built up during combat and once it tops out, carries over to all over subsequent battles as long as it doesn’t “break” when an enemy gets in a lucky hit. The Gauge offers up all sorts of bonuses the longer it stays filled, such as doubling the money earned in combat to…you guessed it…tripling the experience earned which, in my mind, is merely building it back up to a “normal” level of what players should be earning anyway. The tiny amounts of experience that are given in each encounter only encourage the player to fill the Gauge back up and then try to maintain it in combat.

This has several problems. First, it almost forces the player into repetitive combat in order to build the Gauge up and then maintain it long enough for the bonuses that they want…such as tripled experience…which makes the grind even more annoying since the experience earned while building the gauge up is pathetically low. Second, maintaining the Gauge gives combat a throw-away sense of being temporarily “normal” with its rewards, which makes losing the Gauge feel like a waste of time when it breaks. Not a good feeling to have when you simply want to enjoy the game. Third, the Gauge is a gimmicky attempt to make combat more exciting and rewarding which doesn’t work for the reasons above…it feels too much like a gimmick to keep players interested in combat. At least Second Story didn’t have this problem, experience earned was reliably consistent without the need to burden the experience with a forced mechanism whose only purpose is an attempt to make it “different”. Well, sorry, that might work in an FPS or a platformer with power ups, but in an action RPG like this one, I’ll take reliable and consistent results over this. Enough hours are going to be spent on the game without having to fight for its version of “normalcy”.

Juggles
One of the things that had also changed from Second Story was that enemies can no longer be beaten while they are down. You can’t juggle them anymore. Granted, they can’t do the same to you if you’re knocked down, either, but that was only something to avoid in Second Story, was manageable without being too much of a problem, added a sense of urgency to the battle in order to get to weaker party members and defend them from breath attacks that could juggle their HP away, and was incredibly efficient in helping you kill monsters much faster. In TTEoT, that’s no longer an option so your characters will tend to whiff air even if their weapon appears to “connect” with an enemy because the gameplay gives it a temporary reprieve. This forces you into the scissors-paper-rock mechanic that has been emphasized with this change making battle more of a technical exercise in running around and waiting for the opportunity to hit the enemy again as opposed to going in and whaling on them with everything you have to keep them off-balance.

Combat has become somewhat boring because of the loss of juggle as I have to wander off and wait a second or two just to hit the enemy again, which leads me to…

Short and Long Range Attacks are Stupid
When the hell did Star Ocean turn into an RTS? Oh, that’s right. Tri-Ace wanted to make this one stand out from the last with even more improvements to the battle system, and one of those is with short and long range modifiers to your attacks. If you’re far from an enemy, you are considered to be at “Long” range and depending on what you have attached to your buttons skillwise, you will initiate an attack that corresponds to this modifier. The same with “Short” range. While this might appear to be a fascinating and intricate combat system, it is really far more annoying to work with than it sounds. Unlike Tales’ superior button skill system or Grandia’s, Tri-Ace opted to over-engineer things with short and long range attacks because they couldn’t think of anything more efficient in mapping their controls for efficiency. At least that’s what I think. That or they didn’t want to appear to borrow from the competition which is somewhat too late. The whole scheme feels like they tried to stuff the controller with too much crap and this was the only solution they could think of to make four different types of attacks work with two buttons. Compared to the simplicity of Second Story’s scheme and, if you really want to go back further, the SNES’s version, this new mechanic just adds another cumbersome layer of garbage to the whole control scheme. Valkyrie Profile 1 and 2, from Tri-Ace, sport far better control schemes in handling combat skills than this does. Seriously, what the heck?

WTF? No more skills?
It looks like that the huge number of skills that players could have learned are gone, but granted, I’m still early in the game so that might change. You still earn skill points each level-up, but the large number of skills that you could improve throughout the game from Second Story appears to have been pared down into a miniscule handful of generic ones. Of all the places to streamline, Tri-Ace decides to do this with what I thought was one of the best aspects of the last title. Console RPGers aren’t stupid, we thrive on this stuff, but I guess in the interests of appealing to the action/battle crowd, they decided to do away in managing skills and devote their efforts in ruining most everything else that I thought was fun about combat in the game.

I’m going to stick out TTEoT until the end, if only to finish it. The combat system is manageable and somewhat fun…it’s not a complete disaster as long as I don’t dwell too much on the above points…but so far, it feels inferior to the last two Star Oceans in this regard. Infinite Undiscovery is coming out next month, so Gamestop’s schedule says, and I’m looking forward to that moreso now than I had been before with Vesperia looming just at the end of this one, so we’ll see.

Star Trek Online allows you to name your own planet…Woot!

A fact sheet on the game has shown up which sounds encouraging on the direction that Cryptic is really taking with STO. Before, I thought that the mention of Klingon captains and combat meant that they were heading into a more fight-oriented direction, where Away Teams would be fraught with peril in facing off with phasers and disruptors to stake their claim on new life forms. Now, it looks like it’s really going to capture the essence of Trek in terms of the exploration options that it will give the player, including naming newly discovered planets.

Binge Gamer was in Las Vegas for the big STO conference there where plenty was revealed to the press, and they’ve put up a bullet list of features here. Only two major factions available at the start, it seems…Federation and Klingon…but more are promised later including the Dominion. There’s also a nice trailer showing off in-game footage there. So far, it looks like the game might actually live up to the hype.

Getting ready for Fallout 3 and why I think it will do well

With Fallout 3 almost around the corner, I thought it might be a good time to try out…Fallout 3…the Van Buren demo that was released into the wild by No Mutants Allowed and what Black Isle had been working on as an official sequel before folding. I took some snapshots which are at the bottom.

The tech demo demonstrates the direction that the game would have taken, going in for a more 3D realized world but with a distinctly Fallout 1/Fallout 2 flavor. Not a lot works in this aside from the character creation engine, the realtime combat (turn based options weren’t implemented), and a few basic quests as you play a citizen trying to get to their Vault before the bombs drop.

The 3D graphics work okay and you can spin the camera around, zoom in, and otherwise get a good idea of what is going on. You even have a temporary partner with you that’ll shoot Commie scum that tries to get in your way of preserving peace, freedom, and happiness by making it to the Vault, loot their corpses for goodies, and generally experience a very brief Fallout game. Despite some of the negativity from the die-hard Fallout fans that aren’t amused at how Fallout 3 looks to be Oblivion-with-guns, I think it’s going to do well precisely because of that which, unfortunately, will only lend more ammo to the Fallout Veterans vs. FPS/RPG crowds when they debate the merit of both positions on the forums ad nauseum.

Am I excited about Fallout 3? Absolutely. Fallout 1 and 2 are two of my most favorite post-apocalyptic RPGs alongside Wasteland. Do I agree with everything that I’ve read and heard about Fallout 3 from Bethesda? Not really…the level caps and carebear NPCs that get knocked “unconscious” are only two of the things that I have a problem with. Still, it’s a game that promises to carry on the spirit of Fallout and for that I’m still excited to give it a whirl.

The Halo franchise demonstrates that your audience doesn’t have to know what the original Marathon is in order to kick open the door in providing them with an experience that they may not otherwise have outside of a PC/Mac…in this case, a tightly designed, sci-fi FPS with some basic multiplayer. In as much as the Wii has shown that a majority of buyers who have never touched a console before will buy into Nintendo’s little white box without knowing Nintendo’s history with Zelda, Bethesda’s reputation with Oblivion and its success on the 360/PS3 may do the same among console RPG fanatics that have no idea what the first two ever were. It’s a sad reality, but I think that’s exactly what Bethesda is counting on. Their adaptation of Fallout 3 as akin to Oblivion and leveraging their experience with that technology is something of a win-win in a strictly business sense in drawing players into what could potentially launch as a new franchise for Bethesda. It’s still a business, money makes games, and at least Fallout is being given as big a chance as any to remain relevant with today’s generation of players.

You can’t please everybody all the time. Even if Bethesda came out with their own irradiated title, forums would fill up with posts either decrying why it’s living in Fallout’s shadow, why it’s a Fallout ripoff, or why Bethesda could not have made a Fallout game. They’re sure to get flack from the Fallout fans that remember Black Isle and Interplay during its heyday, but given that they are the one of the tiny number of developers to even have an interest in pursuing a game that takes place a century or so following the Day After with the familiar trappings of its predecessors, it’s a far better treatment than what Shadowrun had gone through.

Ahh...the world as it was before October

The don't make loading screens like they used to

Well what do you know...that cattle prod DOES work!

Sorry, my bad. I'll get away from the spraying tongue of ignited, skin melting, napalm.

It's the Pip Boy! Notice the window for upgrades and holo disks. Oooh, interesting...

Welcome to the Vault, Citizen. Everything is broken, as usual. Now where's that water chip...

Okay, got my leather jacket, pockets filled with ammo, and a helmet that belongs to Powered Armor on my head. I'm ready!

Star Ocean RPG goodness

Finally finished my run-through with Star Ocean: The Second Story for the PS1 and had a lot of fun with it’s funky mix of medieval fantasy and high technology. I’ve never gotten the chance to play this until now in the past week and it’s pretty good stuff, although the real-time combat engine has a few rough edges that can make it more of an exercise in frustration than gameplay as characters can get juggled, stuck on top of other characters, and occasionally run around like headless chickens. But it’s manageable and packs in a lot of action in somewhat the same way that Grandia and, to a lesser extent, Namco’s Tales series do. It shouldn’t be too surprising considering that the original Star Ocean for the SNES (which never made it over here) was designed by a group that had broken away from the original Tales team.

The story isn’t bad and the characters do alright by themselves in the game, although it is layered in a lot of JRPG melodrama which some players out there might not like. There are multiple endings depending on the mix of characters in your group and who you may encounter in the game, leading to multiple playthroughs. At least it served up an ending for me which was pretty good and didn’t go the Valkyrie Profile route of hiding the best within a bizarre gameplay ritual that few aside from the initiated high priests within Tri-Ace can hope to discover on their own. Very fun, old-school, RPG which won’t demand a hundred plus hours of your time…unless you really want to find all of those endings.

So what’s next? I might take a break before moving on to the next RPG on my backlog. I really should finish Valkyrie Profile Silmeria before the DS version comes out, but I’ve also got Persona 3 and FES waiting in the wings. Decisions, decisions…

Wolfenstein Ghostbusting

Raven has seriously ratcheted up the kind of supernatural shenanigans that the Nazis are involved with with the sequel to RTCW that plenty of fans have been waiting for. Okay, I didn’t much care for the whole “giant undead prince” resurrection thing or the crazy B-movie monster feel that the game had gone into, but it was still fun as an FPS epic whose story was still part X-Files and part Ghostbusters…I did like the occult slant, but the boss fights left something to be desired especially at the end. It’s a historical fact that the Nazis, particularly Himmler of the SS, had something of a fetish for the occult, making Hollywood somewhat right in that department. It’s just that RTCW and its ilk have taken it to the next level, something only hinted at with Wolf 3D.

The sequel looks to continue this tradition of embracing the arcane mysteries that Himmler and the SS are delving into in order to guarantee the Reich’s prosperity. From what I’ve read, it sounds like BJ will have access to certain powers, all thanks to the Shroud…a mysterious dimension that the Nazis hope to harness through the power of the Black Sun, whatever that might turn out to be. It’s not going to be your typical WW2 shooter, that’s for certain, with the introduction and use of these powers that hail from this ghostly place that the SS are trying to subvert. It seems to lean a bit more on the creepy, magic side, while dressing up the action with plenty of carnage with an open city so I’m definitely looking forward to frying some Nazi scum with unearthly power and good old fashioned lead.

Isenstadt by, um, night...

...and in the Shroud. Who you gonna call?

Vee haf vays of making you die!