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A few reviews
Yesterday, I had a "guy's night". Good times: Magic: The Gathering, Kill Doctor Lucky, Puerto Rico, 4-player Bomberman (on two systems), and Batman and Robin with RiffTrax, which made it somewhat more tolerable.
Well, vaguely more tolerable. I had forgotten how impressively awful that movie was. I last saw it when it came out, which would have been 8th or 9th grade, and my memory had erased most of the bizarre camera angles, bad dialogue, and psychadelic lighting effects. (I did remember the Bat-nipples, though. There isn't enough vodka in the world to erase those.) Oh, and the gaping plot holes. And the awful, awful science (diamonds are a power source! They make things cold!) Seriously appropriate movie for RiffTrax to be mocking.
Today, I finished my distraction of the last month and change, La Pucelle Tactics. It's a Nippon Ichi tactical game, made after Rhapsody and before Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. Given that I liked both of those, it wasn't surprising I liked this one, too.
The gameplay is relatively straightforward; the same kind of "move X space on the grid, pick your direction of facing and attack" tactical game that Final Fantasy Tactics made popular. La Pucelle shows a lot of what they later improved in Disgaea--the weapon-experience and geo panel systems overwent a major overhaul in the next games--but also a lot of similarities in effective gameplay strategies and character models and references. (As Edgehopper noted when he returned my copy of Disgaea, "It's very Japanese", and indeed it is. Japanese humor and cultural memes, and not everything translates.)
The thing I particularly like, though, is that Nippon Ichi games are intended to appeal to the insane level-grinder. The Disgaea games let you get characters to level 9999, with stats in the millions, and give you a series of insanely powerful bonus bosses that will challenge a level 9999 party. But they also make the main game and storyline accessable to people (like me) who aren't quite insane enough for that. In all three games I've played thus far (La Pucele, Disgaea, Disgaea 2), you could get 30-40 hours of gameplay just following the main story, ending with a characters at level 60-70 with about average amounts of grinding for the JRPG genre. So I finish the game after the amount of time I want to spend playing it (I tend to get "ending fatigue" after the 35 hour mark, for most games), but if I decide to go back and go to new levels of insanity, the option is there.
Oh, and then I started playing Drakengard. It's like Dynasty Warriors as made by SquareEnix--but without the refinement that came with the DW sequels. You ability to carve through legions of chinamen, err, Empire soliders, is not as simple as I'd hope, and the flight sequences have problematic play control that makes it hard to tell how to fly around something. The gameplay is very modular, with chapters of the game and each combat, flight or cutscene labeled as a "verse"; and you can go back and replay each piece to build experience or try to unlock new things. Apparently there are five different endings, and you need to unlock all of them to get the fifth, "best" one, which TVtropes claim is one of the most WTF video game endings ever. We'll see if I get that far.
Well, vaguely more tolerable. I had forgotten how impressively awful that movie was. I last saw it when it came out, which would have been 8th or 9th grade, and my memory had erased most of the bizarre camera angles, bad dialogue, and psychadelic lighting effects. (I did remember the Bat-nipples, though. There isn't enough vodka in the world to erase those.) Oh, and the gaping plot holes. And the awful, awful science (diamonds are a power source! They make things cold!) Seriously appropriate movie for RiffTrax to be mocking.
Today, I finished my distraction of the last month and change, La Pucelle Tactics. It's a Nippon Ichi tactical game, made after Rhapsody and before Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. Given that I liked both of those, it wasn't surprising I liked this one, too.
The gameplay is relatively straightforward; the same kind of "move X space on the grid, pick your direction of facing and attack" tactical game that Final Fantasy Tactics made popular. La Pucelle shows a lot of what they later improved in Disgaea--the weapon-experience and geo panel systems overwent a major overhaul in the next games--but also a lot of similarities in effective gameplay strategies and character models and references. (As Edgehopper noted when he returned my copy of Disgaea, "It's very Japanese", and indeed it is. Japanese humor and cultural memes, and not everything translates.)
The thing I particularly like, though, is that Nippon Ichi games are intended to appeal to the insane level-grinder. The Disgaea games let you get characters to level 9999, with stats in the millions, and give you a series of insanely powerful bonus bosses that will challenge a level 9999 party. But they also make the main game and storyline accessable to people (like me) who aren't quite insane enough for that. In all three games I've played thus far (La Pucele, Disgaea, Disgaea 2), you could get 30-40 hours of gameplay just following the main story, ending with a characters at level 60-70 with about average amounts of grinding for the JRPG genre. So I finish the game after the amount of time I want to spend playing it (I tend to get "ending fatigue" after the 35 hour mark, for most games), but if I decide to go back and go to new levels of insanity, the option is there.
Oh, and then I started playing Drakengard. It's like Dynasty Warriors as made by SquareEnix--but without the refinement that came with the DW sequels. You ability to carve through legions of chinamen, err, Empire soliders, is not as simple as I'd hope, and the flight sequences have problematic play control that makes it hard to tell how to fly around something. The gameplay is very modular, with chapters of the game and each combat, flight or cutscene labeled as a "verse"; and you can go back and replay each piece to build experience or try to unlock new things. Apparently there are five different endings, and you need to unlock all of them to get the fifth, "best" one, which TVtropes claim is one of the most WTF video game endings ever. We'll see if I get that far.
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