Chrono Cross review

Chrono Trigger is often lauded as one of the greatest RPGs of all time and this is not without reason. It had everything such as time-travel, great storyline, solid turn-based combat, catchy soundtrack and was one of the first RPGs to not include random battles.Yet despite all this the games sequel, Chrono Cross, hardly ever gets a mention. I have often wondered why that is so I decided to go back in time and give the game a go myself!

Now let’s get into what is often the biggest gripe people have with JRPGs, the opening. The amount of times fans (including myself) have said “Once you get through the first few hours it’s really good!” is quite surprising and telling of the genre. This is where Chrono Cross is quite clever though because while it does have the typical story building sections to set up the games plot, it doesn’t start there. The game actually begins with your characters raiding what appears to be some kind of temple and throws you straight into the dungeon exploring action. This section is nice and simple so lets you ease into the games workings without much worry. Serge (the main character) then awakens from this “dream” to begin the more traditional opening as well as giving a glimpse of something to come. I was very impressed by this design choice though as it was a nice change of pace from the norm and shows you how your characters could become once powered up.

Lucky that the starting area is nice and simple as well as the combat system isn’t the easiest thing to get the hang of, at least at first glance.  It’s a turn based game so your characters will each take a turn depending on their party position, going from left to right. So far this all sounds pretty by the books but this is where it stops being conventional.

Each character starts with seven stamina points and you can choose between three attacks that are light, medium and heavy. The difference between them is the stamina they consume (1,2 or 3 points respectively), the damage they deal and the accuracy (weaker attacks hit easier).  Each successful hit will also cause your accuracy to go up for the next consecutive hit, as well as add ranks to your element grid depending on what you hit them with (again 1,2 or 3 ranks respectively). Outside of battle you can attach elements (much like materia from Final Fantasy 7) to its matching position on the grid, allowing you to use that spell once you have built up the correct rank. Once used the spell cannot be used again in that fight and you can continue to rebuild your spell ranks to use other elements.

The fact that you can only use each element equipped once per encounter creates a much more strategic feel to the battle system. Using the wrong spell at the wrong time can lead to an early death, this is especially apparent with judging when to use healing elements. Overall I really enjoyed how it worked and spent a lot of time arranging my characters elements into an order I thought was best and adapting them for certain battles. Another nice touch is that you can use remaining ranks and elements after battle to heal up your party, so as to not let them go to waste.

But sadly the games mechanics are not without its flaws. As mentioned earlier it doesn't make much effort in helping you understand its systems, which would be okay apart from I still do not understand some things about the game after finishing it. One gripe I have is that the enemy turn order doesn't seem to make much sense, they seem to just attack when they feel like it even if it’s during one of your characters turns. While I admit that it's not so bad in itself, the part that annoyed me was that it will sometimes (but oddly not always) reset the accuracy you had built up, ruining plans for attack you may have had.

Another weird thing, although not necessarily bad, is that I have no idea how levelling works. It’s linked to summon stars that are acquired after boss battles but the rate in which stats will increase over time seems quite random. The upside to this though is that not much grinding is required in the game as you will generally be at max strength for each boss. Despite this though the lack of XP is oddly disconcerting as there is just something magical about seeing those numbers increase.

With the mechanics out of the way I can come to the part that will often make or break an RPG, its story and theming. The main theme of this game follows parallel worlds, having the Home world and the Another world. While each of these worlds are similar, characters have made different choices and events have unfolded in radically different ways. You eventually gain the ability to swap between worlds allowing you to change between them to acquire certain items and learn about the characters varying pasts. This creates a really interesting dynamic and seeing the difference between the worlds is rather intriguing.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said about the story itself and this is where Chrono Cross again runs into some minor problems. While it does have some high points with certain twists and events (the Dead Sea portion being a phenomenal standout), there are a lot of dull moments. The lead up to the finale is quite fun in places but it just felt like an elongated fetch quest and the final payoff was not wholly satisfying, making the experience quite inconsistent. A redeeming factor though is that there are multiple parts where the game will pose choices and go down diverging paths. This offers both different story and characters along with there being a multitude of different endings, adding greatly to the games replay value.

The games wide cast

The game also plays host to a massive cast of characters containing far more than you would usually see, offering a possible 45 party members to acquire. This may add plenty of variety with many combinations but it also holds the game back a bit since because of the large cast it’s really difficult to care for all of them. While the game does concentrate on a few major characters that are done extremely well, most characters only have a short segment of story to themselves, leaving overall character development to be quite lackluster. So even though you have a lot of choice I never felt compelled to use more than around 10 of the characters on offer.

Some last things to add about the game; Like a lot of PS1 era RPGs the game toys with different accents by “adjusting” the script of certain characters, which is quite funny in some cases and provides some humour to the game. There are also several mini-games to play, each is well thought out, enjoyable and the gimmicks aren't overused, which is great as those segments then don’t overstay their welcome. The soundtrack is another stronger point of the game, it carries a lot of emotion and the songs used are memorable along with having a great effect, this alone is definitely worth checking out as it is amazing. Finally the game clocks in at around 40 hours so you would be getting your money’s worth for sure.

TL;DR

Whilst Chrono Cross is a bumpy ride that may not quite reach the lofty heights of its predecessor it has a lot of interesting ideas and manages to get a lot right. This is evident in areas such as the outstanding music, a few clever story elements and intriguing battle system that help to offset some of the pacing issues and poorer design choices. All in all I had an enjoyable time playing through this game and would recommend it to any fans of the genre for some good ol’ parallel universe hopping RPG fun.

4/5 

Sonic Generations review (re-post)

There is nary a blue furry werehog in sight as Sonic is returning to his roots... But the question on everyone’s mind is whether or not the hedgehog can still cut it?

For years now Sonic has had release after release of sub-par games of questionable quality, leaving fans such as myself waiting for the day that Sega just get it right again. As the game attached to the 20^th anniversary of the Hedgehog himself, Sega promised this game to be a playable tribute to all of Sonics past.

Well I can put your minds at ease as Sega have listened to the fans for a change and left the gimmicks out and concentrated on pure speedy action, yet there are still some things missing and the game just doesn’t quite reach the lofty heights of old.

The game opens up in a very clever way, no cut-scenes or anything, just straight into the Green Hill zone as old-school Sonic. The opening few steps are perfectly replicated in 3-D graphics, as well as the music having a new remixed form, yet still oddly retro in its style, to anyone who has been playing since the days of the Genesis such as myself, this was a purely amazing and nostalgic thing to walk into. You play through the whole act, which while it varies and adds new elements to the formula, it keeps the original side scrolling feel and the only abilities available to Sonic are the ones that he had in the genesis days, once you clear this though the storyline steps in and this is where the cracks begin to show.....

The opening cinematic re-introduces us to the modern day Sonic and has large variety of friends, which appear to have gathered for Sonics birthday and are throwing him a surprise party. Now I know that the Storyline is not what people are going to play this game for but do the characters really have to be so incessantly annoying? While watching any of the cutscenes throughout the game I would literally cringe at line after line and the story is very throw away, I honestly think that the game would be better off without it and simply got down to the game itself. Anyway basically a big purple cloud thing steals Sonics’ friends and scatters them throughout time, in which both Sonics decide to journey through their past to rescue them.

But enough about that, let’s talk about the gameplay itself. The game has been split into two major styles, classic Sonic and modern Sonic. Classic Sonic is representative of the genesis era of Sonic game, and therefore both looks and plays in that way, it seems that to make this happen they took the engine from last year’s Sonic 4 and changed up some things as it seems to work a lot better.

Modern Sonic is represented by adopting the style from the normal Sonic sections of Sonic Unleashed (you know, the parts that were actually good), and there is not much change from it, boost system remains intact along with homing attacks, drifting and sliding. It’s fair to say that modern Sonics levels give the game a massive sense of speed and in many ways play much like a racing game which works to its advantage, as you get into a good rhythm of performing certain actions and stringing together successful homing attacks that it makes the game feel really tight, it’s safe to say that this is the best that 3-D Sonic has ever controlled.

You enter the levels via a hub world which is completely white and by moving from left to right you will come across the zones one by one, with a boss gate situated after every three zones. The game limits you by splitting the hub world into sections which have been dubbed ‘Eras’, while you can enter the zones of each era in any order you must complete each of these zones and defeat the era boss to advance onto the next.

There are three sections in total which are the Genesis era, the Dreamcast era and the Modern era. Each contains three zones (from three different games of that era) and every zone has two acts, one for Classic Sonic and one for Modern Sonic. Through the whole game none of these zones are bad and all have their own aspects to them, saying that though some of the later stages start to become less fun and more annoying, specifically the stage from Sonic Colours, to me it goes on for far too long and the sound for one of the power ups is really irritating, and you’re forced to use it a lot throughout the level. Another complaint I have was that the zones needed some more variation, there were three city themed stages and no sign of the series’ iconic casino level, I mean c’mon guys.

Another major omission to do with stage structure that I cannot let go is that the game contains no special stages! These are an integral part of the classic Sonic series and I cannot believe that Sega overlooked the chance to bring them back, especially considering this is meant to be a tribute to the past. Instead you acquire the Chaos Emeralds as you defeat bosses and rivals, I was very disappointed by this.

This brings me nicely to my next point which is the Boss stages, which I think is an aspect of the game that has been treated very poorly. None of the bosses that you have to fight are that fun to fight at all and end up bordering on being an annoyance, I can see that they tried to introduce some cool mechanics, specifically from the first boss fight but they are still far too easy. I believe that if the bosses provided some more challenge then I would have enjoyed them much more, but alas they ended up being the worst part of the game, the biggest offender being the final boss who put a real downer on the game. Alongside these bosses though were three Rival fights, in contrast to the boss battle these were actually handled very well with them having some cool mechanics to use and were actually fun to participate in, they were still a little on the easy side though.

Graphically the game performs well; it’s nothing exceptional but suits the games style and provides a good visual aspect to the game. In my experience the frame rate held very well (which considering the speed you moved at times is very impressive) and there are no graphical glitches to report. The sound also fairs very well, the Genesis era has amazing soundtrack and has been remixed wonderfully, the songs from later eras while not as good are still satisfactory. The game also contains all of the classic sounds so any Sonic veterans out there will feel right at home.

The game also contains a customisation aspect to the game, you are able to use the points you gain from completing levels (why not just use rings like before?) to buy upgrades to Sonic to help make the game easier. These upgrades include things such as faster speed & acceleration, bigger boost meter and longer breath amount for underwater sections. There are also 5 red medals per act to be collected and a myriad of challenges (often involving Sonics friends) for every act as well, which help to extend the lifespan of an otherwise very short game that will only take you a day or two to get through. While some of these challenges are fun, such as the racing and the Tails based ones where you use him to fly about (reminiscent of the old school co-op), the majority of them are just frustrating and end up being an annoyance.

TL;DR
So while this is easily the best and most concise Sonic game that we have had in years, it is still not without its faults, while it does everything that you want it to do there are some annoying things that are just holding it back from greatness. The game starts off amazingly and I was loving every second of it but the further in I got it just became less fun to complete, which is a real shame since by the end I was left a bit disappointed by the whole experience. Despite this though Sega are on the right track with their Sonic releases, so it’s a worthwhile tribute to the series and a good sign for the future to Sonic!


3.5/5

Plans for the future!

The last thing I did was a while back, but amongst things going on irl and lack of motivation I just, well, didn't really get anything much done. >_>

I've recently gone back and started checking out some PS1 titles that I've always wanted to play but never quite got around to. While playing said games it occurred to me that I should review them while I was at it, a retro review if you will, so that is exactly what I'm going to do! First of all I am checking out the RPGs Chrono Cross and Final Fantasy VIII, I'm playing both at the same time so whichever I finish first get's reviewed first, after that I plan to go onto Silent Hill in preparation for the HD collection being released.

I am also meaning to get back to painting my Dreadfleet box set I bought, I have completed one ship so far but from now on I'm gonna put a step by step process of my work on this site when I get around to it, but gaming takes priority atm.

But yea, there is my update to what I have been up to and I hope you look forward to seeing my reviews coming in the near future! (hopefully near doesn't mean months for a change ^^;) If you have any suggestions for older, possibly less well known games that I need to play, please leave a note down in the comments below and I'll see about checking them out.

Sonic Generations review for Thumb Culture

TL;DR
So while this is easily the best and most concise Sonic game that we have had in years, it is still not without its faults, while it does everything that you want it to do there are some annoying things that are just holding it back from greatness. The game starts off amazingly and I was loving every second of it but the further in I got it just became less fun to complete, which is a real shame since by the end I was left a bit disappointed by the whole experience. Despite this though Sega are still on the right track with their Sonic releases, so it’s a worthwhile tribute to the series and a good sign for the future to Sonic!

For my full review and score, check it out HERE at thumb-culture.com.

Oh Hai there again!

I realise I have neglected this place for oooo I dunno months now or something, but I didn't forget about it and plan to resurrect this place a bit.

But yes! I have now started writing for the site http://thumb-culture.com/ which is an awesome games news and reviews site that is hoping to grow into something much more, you should most definitely check them out and regularly! I haven't been around for the last couple of week or so due to me having to sort out and deal with some IRL things, but I should be back on form later this week with a bit of luck.

Which brings me to my plans for this here blog, obviously now I will be doing reviews for the site so I will post links and maybe some brief thoughts on the game here, but I will also like to continue to post other random reviews and stuff on varying aspects of geek culture, in short anything that interests me.

So there we have it, whether or not I will actually follow through with these plans is yet to be decided, but I'll try to keep this place a little more alive from here on out.

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn review

Golden sun and its sequel The Lost Age worked together to create one of the best JRPG game experiences available anywhere, let alone the GBA. It wooed people with its amazing graphics, great battle system and the extremely clever Djinn Summon system that was a unique and completely new addition to the genre.  After many years of fans clamouring for more, Camelot eventually delivered with its DS sequel Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, which I can rightfully say was most definitely worth the wait!

At its core Dark Dawn is a classic style turn based JRPG, you will choose what actions each character (in your party of 4) will perform and then combat is executed in order designated by the character and enemy agility rating. This of course is all standard fare for anyone who has had previous experience with JRPGs of any kind, but where the game truly shines is with what it builds on top of these classic mechanics and twists it offers to the mechanics of things such as equipment and summon monsters.

As previously mentioned you play the game with a party of 4 characters, which you can select from a pool of 8 people, offering 2 characters for each element. You are also able to switch these characters in and out of your main party whenever you wish, so you are not locked down too much. You start the game by being introduced to Isaac and Garet, the protagonists of the first game and their respective sons Matthew and Tyrell; you are also introduced to Karis as well (who is the daughter of Ivan, another character from the original). After a tutorial dungeon you set off with the latter three characters to begin your adventure, meeting other party members at various points throughout the game.

One of the things that I really liked about this game that I haven’t seen done much before is the way that Dark Dawn handles weapon critical hits. Rather than the classic style where you get a chance to deal more damage, here they offer what the game calls weapon unleashes. Each weapon will have a set of abilities that will do different things, usually 2-4 per weapon with some being shared across weapons. Every now and then the weapon will “unleash” one of these abilities when using a standard attack which will do things such as attack multiple enemies, increased damage or apply a status effect. With each ability having its own animation, some of which are really quite impressive, it adds more excitement to the standard brawler class and variation to the standard attack.

The Djinns in the game are Golden Suns equivalent to summon monsters from other RPGs, but here they provide a much more important role both in the games story and with battle mechanics. Djinni can be one of four elements (Venus, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter or earth, water, fire and air respectively) each having their own ability, which can be attack powers, buff abilities or healing. There are 72 Djinn in total that you collect throughout the game, with 18 of each element, you equip them to characters of your choice so that they will be available for them to use, also depending what combination of Djinn you have equipped, it will change the characters inherent class and abilities. Here is where things get different as each Djinn has 2 modes, active and standby, while active the Djinn provides a bonus to your characters stats, but when you use its ability it will go into standby and you will lose the stat bonus. Of course there are advantages to this, first being you get to use the ability but there are also more powerful summons that are available to use which require certain Djinn on standby, for example to summon Daedalus you will need 3 Venus and 4 Mars Djinn on standby, meaning that you are constantly balancing what to do with your Djinn in battles.

 Another thing that this game does differently to other JRPGs are its dungeons, there are still random battles as you explore, but by using certain Psynergy powers (this games equivalent of magic) on the field you will be able to affect the environment in a number of ways. The developers have done a great job here as they have created very puzzle like dungeons, not unlike that of the Legend of Zelda series, so there are things such as block moving puzzles and element based puzzles (i.e melting ice with fire) which require some thought to complete. While none of these puzzles are particularly difficult it provides a whole other aspect to this game which helps to make it unique, another nice touch is that in heavy puzzle rooms there appears to be no, or at least a severely reduced amount of random battles.

There are also some other smaller things that I believe are worth a mention, one such thing that I like is the fact that your PP will recover as you walk around, so you will likely never find yourself out of mana,  keeping you from getting stuck in some places. I also approve of being able to save anywhere you want and that the save menu also shows what your next objective is, so if like me you sometimes find yourself not playing a game for while, you can find out exactly what it was you were doing just by looking here, which is extremely useful.

Saying that though there are also some things that I did not like about this game, included in this is a absolutely pointless emote system which you use to respond to characters with, as Matthew is a mute hero, no matter how you respond I don’t think it changes the game at all, and some of the emotes are ambiguous in what they mean. Another thing is that the game ends on a really weird note, you defeat the boss and after that not too much happens, some character wrap ups, but the story is left almost completely open, this is obviously  leaving it for a sequel, but it is annoying none the less.

I’m sure people who have played the original games are reading this and thinking “Hang on a sec, this sounds exactly like the first games” which brings another of the things that I noticed while playing the game. Throughout the whole game, the gameplay is pretty much identical to the originals in every aspect (including the hidden boss monsters), from what I can tell there are no new mechanics or anything. This is not exactly a bad thing, as the originals were excellent games, but if people did not enjoy the other Golden Sun games then they should look elsewhere, as this does nothing to attract a new audience.  

TL;DR

While Golden Sun: Dark Dawn offers nothing new from previous titles and is pretty standard fare in the realm of JRPGs, it’s still a solid game that doesn’t do too much wrong and is likely one of the best games that I have on my DS. With the main story clocking in at around 25 hours there is quite a lot of game to get through, and there are also bonus dungeons and hidden bosses to explore once the game is completed. I would have a hard time recommending this game to people who are not fans of either the previous games or JRPGs in general, but for people that do like such things you are in for a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

4.5/5

Portal 2 review

Back in 2007 Valve released The Orange Box unto the world, a device used to push some of Valve’s previous games as well as some new ones, one such game in this compilation was the hidden gem of the package - Portal. No one knew what to expect from Portal and it ended up being the surprise favourite, with its dark humour, good atmosphere, clever puzzles and the amazing character of GLaDOS, it became a huge talking point amongst gamers and has remained a staple of great games design.

Now a few years on Valve has released Portal 2, this time as a standalone game which some people doubted at first because if it was much like the first game, although amazing, wondered if it would be worth the full price of a retail release. Well I can safely say that these fears are not needed as the sequel outdoes the first and keeps on going, Valve shows us once again that they are one of the leading developers for a reason.

The coloured gels in this game are awesome additions, if only for the above use.

Portal 2 retains all of the mechanics that were a part of the first game; you of course have your trusty portal gun, which fires two different coloured portals that represent either side of a doorway, buttons that you will more often than not have to use the weighted cubes to hold down, as well as all of the physics from the first game such as retained velocity when travelling through portals. Using these mechanics the player will be given a puzzle room to solve, and when complete can move to the next room.

Along with all of this, the game introduces many new mechanics into the game that both help to increase the complexity for the puzzles, as well as adding more variety. This includes three different coloured gels that are orange, blue and white which make you speed up, bounce and create portal surfaces respectively. Other new mechanics are things such as redirection cubes, that will change the direction a laser is going in (often needing to be directed to a laser switch), hard light surfaces which are bridges that can be used to walk on or block projectiles, excursion funnels which act like a tractor beam and aerial faith plates that launch you in a specified direction.

While this does sound like a hell of a lot of new mechanics to get into, Valve have been smart not to have too much going on in one room, often featuring no more than three or four different things to keep track of at once. By having so many varying puzzle types it helps to keep the game feeling fresh, since as soon as you are starting to find one mechanic a bit tiring the game will then switch it up and offer you new ways to do things. This is a hard balance to keep considering the longer length of the game and is very well done.

Lasers are cool, so in turn laser puzzles are cool, right?

Speaking of game length the single player campaign took me around 8 hours to complete. I don’t really want to speak too much about the specifics of the campaign as it really is best left for you to discover for yourself, just know that the game has some amazing new characters introduced, with all of them having great voice acting, not one line in the game sounded weird or wrong. The game also has brilliant pacing in that it will switch up the puzzle type or area style just when it needs to and also has much greater narrative and direction that the game follows compared to the first game. 

Following on directly from the end of the single player is the co-op campaign; the idea of this is completely new to the series and is fairly well executed despite there being a couple of nitpicky issues that I had. In co-op player 1 and 2 play as two different robots named Atlas and P-Body respectively, each player has their own portal gun that shoot separate portals, therefore some working together is required to coordinate them. The robots also have a variety of humorous commands they can execute such as dancing, hugging or playing rock paper scissors to see who gets to risk their life first. The campaign is split up into different testing areas that can be reached via a hub world that you start in, with each area following a different theme (such as hard-light bridges or excursion funnels) and containing around 10 tests each. While this works well to cut the game into sections, I wish that they would’ve varied the areas a bit more, such as having the tutorial tests for each mechanic in one area then mixing up the tests for the remaining areas. The entire co-op campaign took us roughly 5 hours to complete, which is a decent length as it is more room to room challenges, rather than following a narrative like the single player.

What you don't see here is the emote where they tear eachothers heads off.....

TL;DR

In summary the game triumphs over the first in every single area, creating one of the most enjoyable games I have played, and with the co-op mode you have the added bonus of being able to argue over puzzle solutions with a friend while attempting to work together (which is a good thing), making a great addition to the single player campaign available. Although there will still be doubts of paying full price for what at least for myself was a 13 hour game with pretty much no replay value, I think that it makes up for it in character and pure enjoyment.

4/5