When I finished the original Mass Effect not so very long ago, I was in awe of how grand and cinematic the game felt. Knowing then that a sequel was right around the corner, I worried how it could possibly live up to what Bioware accomplished with the first one. I shouldn’t have.

Mass Effect 2 takes almost all of the fun that existed in the first game and amplifies it, while eliminating the tedium. In the process, they made quite a few interesting design choices.

The most obvious improvement is with the visuals. It actually looks like they use quite a few of the same models they used in the original game, especially for Shepard, who looks EXACTLY the way you’ll remember her (or him) if you played the first. The shaders used to enhance those models are vastly improved, though; I actually gasped when I saw how good the game looks.

Mass Effect 2 plays very much like a shooter. In fact it may actually be more accurate to call it a shooter than a roleplaying game at this point. But don’t let that put you off; as good as the shooter part is, they have managed to improve the cinematic quality of the dialogue even further in this installment.

The characters so far (disclosure: I haven’t finished playing yet) are extremely well developed, with each getting a considerable amount of “screen time” to be fleshed out beyond generic recruits for your grand mission. Much of this screen time is optional though, a good choice on Bioware’s part as not everyone will care about getting to know these people. This is their loss, as they’re well worth getting to know.

I do have two complaints about the game. One of my favorite elements of Mass Effect was driving around planet surfaces. The rover you controlled was tricky to learn, but a lot of fun once mastered. It is sadly missing from Mass Effect 2, though my guess as to why is that it eliminates potential frustration at having to drive around a large area searching for minerals and other discoverables.

In Mass Effect 2, you locate minerals by scanning planet surfaces. This is a fine approach and would work well if you spaced it out between missions. I, naturally, failed to do this. COMPLETELY my own fault, and something I regret, as I now need quite a few minerals to complete various upgrade and research projects the game gives you. Unfortunately the process does get very dull when you do a lot of it at once.

Still, these are really minor quibbles with a game that in my book is an early contender for 2010’s best.

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Blogs, Impressions mass effect 2, rpg, science fiction, shooter

Way back in January, I wrote an Impression piece on Persona 3 FES, a game I later had to abandon because I got myself stuck in an unwinnable situation without sufficient save games to back my way out of it. At the time, I couldn’t bring myself to restart from the beginning.

Instead, I started playing a different game – the next game in the series, Atlus Games’ Shin Megami Tensei Persona 4.

I’m not going to write an Impression of P4; the game sucked me in so completely that I have already finished playing it. Not just finished – I finished with the true, good ending. Anyone who knows my game playing habits will understand what this means – I usually take a very long time to finish games. My average play time for Final Fantasy games is measured in years. Persona 4 took months, but for me, that’s crazy-fast.

Persona 4 takes the franchise concept in an interesting direction. As in Persona 3, you play a nameless (you get to name him) protagonist, newly arrived in town. Your parents are working overseas for a year, so the protagonist is going to stay with his uncle and young cousin for the year.

Shortly after arriving, though, the town is left reeling by a series of gristly inexplicable murders. As you’d expect, of course, this is an open invitation for the protagonist (a Japanese highschool student) and his friends and classmates to get involved in the investigation. It’s a bit of a tricky situation for him from time to time, as his uncle is a detective with the local police department, but all crime-fighting Japanese highschool students have SOME cross to bear, or it just wouldn’t feel right.

The investigation is aided greatly by the protagonist’s discovery that he has the ability to somehow enter the screen of a TV, crossing over into a strange fog-filled world on the other side. There he is able to use the power of “Persona”, another personality inside himself that he can call upon to fight the Shadows that inhabit that strange, misty world.

Without going into too much of the plot, the story unfolds with mechanics that will be largely familiar to players with experience of Persona 3. There are some significant changes that improve the play experience though, chiefly the ability to take control of all of your characters in combat. Persona 3 allowed direct control only of the protagonist; his friends were always under AI control. Having full control allows you to take advantage of character abilities better and to more carefully manage the health and magic points of the party on long dungeon grinding sessions.

Dungeon grinding is another area where Persona 4 improves upon Persona 3 in a dramatic way. In P4, you always have the option to resume exploration of a dungeon you’ve left at the deepest level you’ve reached in it, which prevents the often tedious trek back up to where you left off that P3 players faced on a regular basis.

The most important thing for me in any RPG is the characters and the story, and this is where P4 really shines in my eyes. The story and the world are written in such a way that each character that joins your “investigation team” has a Persona, and has that persona because they were a potential victim of the murder spree. Without giving too much away, each character is forced to face his or her own inner demons – or more specifically, their inner Shadow – and once that Shadow is defeated, that person gains a new level of acceptance of who they are. This becomes manifest by their acquisition of a Persona, a figurative and literal gain in power that enables them to join the fight to discover the truth behind what’s happening in the town.

This is a really brilliant move because it doesn’t just encourage good character development, it requires it. All of the characters you play rise above the stale stereotypes you find too often in games and display a depth and complexity that was beyond refreshing. These are characters who live in the mind and imagination of the player, real people with conflicting desires, self-doubts, multi-faceted personalities and a great deal of growth throughout the course of the game. When the game was over and it was time for me and my protagonist to leave these friends behind, it was with true regret that I had to let them go.

Before you start thinking that Atlus is paying me to write this, I should probably mention that there ARE some things that bothered me about the game. Most serious was the obvious railroading that goes on. Given the time management aspect of the game that P4 shares with P3, it’s completely understandable, but it seemed to stand out even more in P4 than it did in P3. Understandable or not, it did affect my ability to enjoy the game on a regular basis.

All in all, flaws or no flaws, Persona 4 is currently at the top of my list of favorite RPGs. The story and particularly the characters are beautifully executed, and kept me completely enthralled. More importantly, those characters are going to continue to live inside my head for a long time to come, and will likely tempt me back in for another play-through, since getting the ultimate good ending allows you to start a new game with some carry-over data to unlock new stuff.

I can’t recommend this game enough. If you have any interest in JPRGs at all, it’s a must-play. If you have any interest in RPGs in general at all, it’s a must-play. If you don’t have any interest in RPGs at all, give it a try anyway; it may well be enough to change your mind.

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Reviews atlus, jrpg, p4, persona, rpg

As of this writing, I’m about 30 hours into Star Ocean – The Last Hope (SO-TLH) for the XBox 360 and I’m enjoying it. I had wished, when I started writing this, that I’d be able to say I was thoroughly enjoying it, but there are a few concerns I’ve got that prevent me from saying that.

The Last Hope is a fantastic Square-Enix RPG, no doubt. Anyone who likes Final Fantasy style Japanese RPGs will be into this. The title comes from the core of the story, which is that humanity has been up to it’s old tricks and taken warfare to such an extreme that World War III has occurred and left the Earth unable to sustain life, at least on the surface. Humanity has taken refuge under ground, but they can’t remain there indefinitely. The human race’s titular last hope is the search for a new world to call it’s own, hopefully one they’ll take care of a bit better than they did the Earth.

The characters are decent, if a little generic-seeming at the start. They do begin to come into their own as you get further into the game, which is a bit of a relief. Your primary characters are Edge Maverick and Reimi Saionji, humans from Earth’s underground who are determined to find humanity’s new home. They’re fairly typical anime/RPG character archetypes, the idealized everyman that you can identify with comfortably while a part of you wishes you secretly wishes that you could identify with them a little more closely. This makes it easy to slip into their shoes so to speak, but also makes them feel a little bland at the outset. As the game progresses they start to come into their own a little bit more with story events tugging on their personas and moulding them into something a bit more unique.

The combat is enjoyable, resembling other Square-Enix games in the broad strokes but with some twists that are new to this title. It took me a long time to get into the game’s Blindsiding system because I found it largely unnecessary, but now that I do know how to pull them off, I find I do them a lot more often. Blindsiding is a way your characters have of slipping past an enemy’s defenses to strike from their “blind spot” which always results in a critical hit for much more damage than a typical hit would do.

If I had any complaint about the combat, it’s the same one I have with all Square-Enix games – it’s often necessary to go “grinding”, or fighting endlessly for the sake of fighting to build experience up when you discover that you’re not strong enough to get past a particular encounter. This is not always a bad thing. In this game in particular I’ve found it less irritating than I have in other games, because it has led me to exploring the various planets I can travel to in more depth, and I’ve completed a large number of smaller side quests as a result. These side quests make for an effective alternative to grinding, in fact, because you can earn a fair amount of experience doing them,which levels your characters up just as effectively as the fighting.

Another nice side effect of the side quests is that many of them are crafting quests. People or shops will often ask you to find or make special items for them. The game contains a vast number of resources you can acquire in various ways. You can then take these resources back to your ship’s lab, where you can launch the crafting interface and create a dizzying array of items that range from weapons and armor upgrades to ship upgrades to useless bits of arts and craft that can be sold for more than the cost of the components you made them from. Like blindsides in combat, this was not something I jumped into right away, but once I did start messing around with it, it quickly became a fun passtime in it’s own right – and the more combat oriented items are yet another way you can reduce the need for grinding, as they can make those extra-tough encounters a lot easier to manage.

Visually… well, it’s a breathtaking game that often inspires me to just sit still and pan the camera around the world to take it in. I won’t go on too much about how great the game looks, because honestly, it’s not often you find A-list games these days that don’t look spectacular.

I have had some problems with SO-TLH that have driven me absolutely crazy. The game seems to be unusually crash-prone. I’ve had more problems with crashing games on the XBox 360 than on any other console, but this game in particular crashes more than any other 360 title I’ve played in recent memory. I’m not sure whether this is because the game is buggy, the console lacks stability, or because  my console is one of the earlier 360 releases, but no matter the cause, it’s frustrating to lose progress due to lockups.

It does say something about the compelling quality of the game that I keep going back to it though. I’m anxious to see where the story is leading; what more is going to happen with these characters? What more will they go through, fight through, endure through? It’s good enough to be worth a little frustration to see where things are headed.

Overall impression: I’d rank it a bit below Final Fantasy XII or Persona 3 FES, but still definitely worth a look for fans of this style of gaming.

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Impressions 360, gaming, rpg, square-enix, star ocean

A quick note to begin with. This blog documents my impressions of Persona 3 FES, as opposed to Persona 3. The two are not entirely the same game;  Persona 3 FES contains extra content not available in the original Persona 3. However, for the sake of my aching fingers, I’m going to just call it Persona 3 or even P3.

Yes, the name of the game really is Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3 FES. What a mouth full! With a name like that, you just have to guess that it’s a  Japanese role playing game, and you’d be very correct. This is no Final Fantasy though, and that’s a good thing.

I love the Final Fantasy series, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes I need a break from that style of play, and Persona 3 has given it to me. This is not  a game of physical exploration, wandering from place to place in a vast fantasy/sci-if environment, meeting strange creatures and killing them.

No, this is a game that takes place largely within a few specific locations in one small town. The physical exploration takes place within a vast secret tower in the town, while the bulk of the exploration is more social – exploring relationships between your protagonist and the various friends you make in  and out of school during the course of a full calendar year.

You do your explorations in the role of the Main Character, or MC as he’s often referred to online. In the game, he’s referred to by whatever name you  choose to give him.

MC is a fairly typical high school student, or at least he seems to be at first. His life can take any number of turns depending on how you play the  game. Is he going to be a straight-A student with incomparable academics? A social butterfly that can charm the socks off the ladies? Maybe someone very brave in the face of danger and dating? Manage your time well and you can make him any or all of these, or not, as you prefer.

It all depends on how you want to play him, and the game as a whole. Your socialization with other characters and groups that you meet will have a strong effect on your combat performance in the dungeon parts of the game, thanks to an interesting experience system based on the concept of “Social Links” that power the various personas you control. The stronger your social ties, the more experience a related persona gains when you create it.

Social links are only one method of improvement, however. The charm, academics and courage stats that I alluded to earlier are another form of social advance; your progress on those three stats determines how strong your relationships can get with three particular characters that are of critical importance to your game, and may have other effects as well. I’m not quite at the halfway point in the game yet, so I can’t really say authoritatively what those possible other effects would be.

Like most RPGs, your main character has hitpoints and spirit (magic) points, but lacks most other common stat types; strength, endurance, magical potency and the other “vital” stats are not associated with MC himself. Instead, they are associated with the various personas MC can make use of. This means switching personas in the middle of a battle has a much greater impact that just changing your selection of special abilities; the fundamental traits of your character change as well. You might switch from an exceptionally high strength with one persona to one that’s very physically weak, and find yourself doing far less melee damage as a result. The tradeoff may be that your magic potential is hugely boosted. This is a pretty fascinating system that makes the choice of personas all the more strategically important.

Not having finished the game yet, this isn’t a full review, but just an impression. I’ll leave off at this before I get into anything too spoilerish, but I’ll invite anyone who’s interested to comment or write to me with questions. If I can answer them, I certainly will.

My impression so far: This is a beautiful gem of a game, not to be missed if you can handle going back to the last generation of console games and picking up something for the PS2 ninstead of the shiny and new PS3.

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Impressions console, game, games, gaming, persona, ps2, role-playing, rpg