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Feb 24th, 2007 at 05:29:38 - Soul Calibur III (PS2) |
For fighting games, I've pretty much given up swearing at the TV because I know that I suck horribly and will die 9/10 times anyway, so ignoring that, I've grueled on exploring the game features of Soul Calibur III. The store where you can 'buy' extra items and bonus features using money obtained by completing story-modes, regular matches, and levels in 'Chronicles of the Sword'. The aspect of unlockables presents nothing new, although the ability to purchase different parts and weapons etc. that you can use to make your own custom characters is rather fun.
More notably unique is the 'Chronicles of the Sword' mode of play. Unlike the typical 'Story mode' that consists of select battles vaguely contextualized and interconnected by crappy cutscenes and/or text read-outs--something fairly common in recent fighting games--'Chronicles of the Sword' uses the fighting game engine as a part of an interesting hybrid RTS game structure. The player has a roster of characters that they can customize and choose who to play with for each level/round. It feels like an RTS game, with set winning and losing objectives/conditions, played out in real-time; however, movement is restricted along certain set paths, much like a board-game. What makes this all the more intersting is the ability engage in combat with enemies encountered on the field through the Soul Caliber III combat system, allowing you to play out the battle yourself rather than having your characters bash at each other in small-sprite form.
While the storyline provided in the 'Chronicles of the Sword' mode is almost entirely through text, it is much more compelling and fun because it is a single extensive story, with the hero/heroine being a character custom-created by the player, making it much more interactive and compelling compared to the regular 'Story mode'. In the Story mode, each character's 'story' seems bland and uninspired, and many of the fights and cut-scene animations seem to be recycled. On the other hand, I've played through 14 chronicles in Chronicles of the Sword, I'm still not all the way through, and its got me hooked despite how horrible I am at fighting games.
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Feb 24th, 2007 at 03:28:26 - Soul Calibur III (PS2) |
Soul Calibur III is undoubtedly an addictive fighting game with a lot to offer; I've been playing non-stop puttting off writing this log because of it. At the same time, however, the game engine and control system follow the traditional standards of fighting games, making Soul Calibur III also another one of the multitude of games that makes me pull my hair out in frustration.
While the grahpics and attacks of Soul Calibur III look spectacular, I found that like virtually every other fighting game I've played, there is no 'real' tutorial that can help you pick up and learn the mechanics of the game. No matter how many fighting games I go through, every fighting game I come across throws me into combat with nothing but the instruction manual outlining basic control features and the 'practice mode' for you to screw around with the controls in. This is where--in my opinion--Soul Calibur III fails miserably. Like other fighting game series(like Tekken), in order to learn what move combos you can use, you either have to spend a massive amount of time messing around and experimenting, or take advantage of the 'move list' provided, which no beginner player can possibly digest and use to learn to play effectively. Thus, the gameplay experience effectively hinges on the intuitiveness of the control system, which, quite frankly, is not intuitive at all unless you have extensive experience in playing fighting games with the Playstation controller. What further more makes the control system unintuitive is how the commands are broken down into A, B, K, and G, which can be re-assigned to any of the buttons on the controller, making the exact controls confusing to identify and figure out which button does exactly what.
As a fighting game, Soul Calibur III fits into the fighting game genre as a game not aimed at being newbie friendly, intent on delivering maximum action to hardcore gamers who are already into the genre. However, some of the features in the game--originally intended as adding new challenges for experienced players--make the game-play experience for inexperienced players dramatically worse. Perhaps the worst was the Icey floor effect on a stage without guard rails fighting against an opponent that used a lance or spear. The enemy's weapon gives them a large attack-range, allowing them to smack me around before I can even get close enough to attack. Furthermore, I easily get knocked down and away, sliding out of the ring, unable to do anything to prevent it. To summarize what could be turned into a 20 page rant, that's just (insert cuss words here). While there is a certain progression of enemy AI and hadicaps implemented in Soul Calibur III, the learning curve remains much too steep, and the primary focus of the challenges in the game are made very difficult, targeting the hardcore fighting gamer audience. Consequently, such additional features in Soul Calibur III result in a more challenging gameplay experience, making beginner players even more distraught than they were before. In this, I speak for myself, as I have found that I truly suck at fighting games; I simply can't perform the speedy repetitive motion in the finders needed to time attacks properly in order to easily pull off special/complicated combos. It has taken me over a day in order to get vaguely proficient enough in the controls to jump around and pull off a few select combos that I've figured out how to use, and otherwise get my ass handed to me if I screw up... Thus I still (and probably always will) face the problem of learning how to play effectively with (what I find to be) a non-intuitive control system.
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Feb 10th, 2007 at 02:03:50 - Final Fantasy X (PS2) |
After playing some more of Final Fantasy X, I realized how long it would take to beat the game. Even though the game is progressing through in a roughly linear manner, through the overall linear structure of the storyline, the designers hold a fairly tight reign on how fast you can play through the game, although you are free to explore areas as much as you want before moving into the next one. What I have found rather irritating is that--much like shmups and many side-scrollers--you're forced through the storyline in a similar manner; once you proceed past a certain area, you can't return to previous areas. If FFX is similar to some of the older games, it will probably have a segment that unlocks free exploration later on, but the 'invisible hand' pushing me through the game at the moment feels rather pushy, particularly when I run into event trigger locations unknowingly and get pushed into the next area before I have a chance to finish checking out the previous area...
Different from every other RPG that I’ve previously played, there haven’t seemed to be any rankings of strength for the weapons/armor. Not only that, but the equipment system has been stripped down to merely 1 weapon and 1 piece of armor, largely simplifying that aspect of the game. Probably more noticeably different, however, is the level up system, which is represented as progression along a sort of board-game, with each ‘level’ you gain being a space to move on the board and getting upgrades as you go, allowing a players to form their own customized web of character upgrades/abilities. This adds a new dimension of challenge and strategy to the game, in terms of choosing how you want to play with each character. At the same time, however, it leaves me rather confused and curious as to whether there is something along the lines of a ‘level cap,’ which exists in all other RPGs (that I’ve played, any way)…
Overall, in terms of progression of the game, the big ‘epic’ cut scenes and battles that ensue are definitely very exciting and fun to play with, especially when you can summon some powerful Aeons and inflict massive damage with ‘Overdrive’ attacks. However, the overall pace of the game feels very slow for the most part, outside of the big events, leaving me wanting both wanting to throw the game out because it feels like its taking forever, yet want to keep playing because the story being told is so interesting. I think much of what contributes to this is a large number of completely unnecessary cut scenes of film-like nature that drag out too long. While the character development in such cut scenes contributes to the story very well, I think that there’s just too much of it. The first few hours of gameplay were definitely by far the most exciting and inducing into the game because of the excellent integration of cut scenes with battles and its adaptation to the assumed player skill level on the standard learning curve. After those first few hours, however, the game play started to drag out and feel very slow, well reflected in the music, with comparatively very short cut scenes that actually drew me back into the game. For example, one of the boss fights had roughly 5 minutes of cut scenes, and took less than 2 minutes to beat with a double Overdrive attack using an Aeon grand summon, while it had taken hours and hours of running around and other boring cut scenes to get there. Personally, I would prefer a game that balances the cut scenes, story, and battles in a more equal manner. While addictive and fun to play, I simultaneously hate Squaresoft for making their stories so damn slow…
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Feb 9th, 2007 at 19:40:25 - Final Fantasy X (PS2) |
I borrowed a copy Final Fantasy X, which turned out to be the beginning of a long and arduous night. From the get go, the FFX gave a very epic, film-like feeling in the opening scene, showing what was--at the time--assumed to be the protagonist/hero party sitting around a campfire in a mysterious/magical land. This largely set the scene for the setting and type of game that it would be. The detail and quality in the graphics and animation was initially very good, setting the expectations for the game to be pretty high. Although impressed, I was slightly annoyed that when fading between two different camera shots, the previous shot froze while fading out and the new shot was fading in simultaneously--a minor detail that left me wondering why, even though it didn’t have any bearing what-so-ever on the rest of the game experience.
The game experience turned out to somewhat like what I’d expect from a Final Fantasy game, and an RPG in general. Many of the RPG standards were clearly apparent, with the tutorials of the combat interface, leveling up, and other game-specific features while assuming the player to understand the control system and basic UI, leaving it documented for reference in the help section but giving no formal instruction to the player. This poses a certain initial challenge to new players who are not yet familiar while being relatively easy for players experienced in the genre to learn--something pretty typical of the RPG genre. Progressing through the game, I found it to be extremely linear, with room for some side-tracking--which took place in the form of exploring areas other than the indicated target location, looking for extra treasure chests with some extra items in them--but remained for the most part, a game of progression, following the plotline laid out by the game designers. I did find there were a few occasional dialog options given to the player such as naming the player character and the different ‘Aeons’ (summoned creatures) as well as a few story-related options, including either winning or losing the first ‘blitz-ball’ tournament game--one of possibly several mini-games?-- which, as far as I could tell, only affect specifically related dialog or cut scenes but not make any evident change in the progression of the storyline.
While FFX, as an RPG, is a game of progression, each individual battle and mini-game plays out as a game of emergence within the RPG as a sort of sub-game. However, different from other RPGs that I’ve played before, not all of the battles were spatially segmented from the visual game-world. The prior RPG standard was to deliberately cut from a game-world map where the player can run around and interact with NPCs etc. to a battle screen where both random and event battles would take place, separated by some kind of screen effect symbolizing the initialization of a battle. In FFX, this was present in all of the random encounters and some event-triggered battles, but, in addition to those battles, there were battles that took place in between event-triggered cut scenes, which essentially cut directly from a moment in the cut scene directly to a battle with a small screen effect over the view to indicate the start of a battle, but with no formal transition, cutting back to the cut scene after the battle was completed.
This aspect of integrating battles into the cut scenes made the game feel like an interactive movie, where the highlights of the movie were shown in cut scenes and other smaller tasks and battles were made into intermittent activities for the player to engage in during the movie. While this was definitely an interesting concept that I found rather enjoyable, there was one thing that annoyed me to no end. The cut scenes were divided between cinematic and non-cinematic (in-game), and the game seemed to lack a distinctively effective separation between the two. This was largely because the cinematic sequences could not be skipped /sped up in any way, while you could skip through the text line by line in the in-game cut scenes. Largely this became a problem if you died in a certain part and had to repeat and view all of the cinematic cut scenes all over again, unable to skip them--and some of them are pretty long--making it rather tedious and completely unnecessary. This is predominantly the case because most of major event battles are in between medium to long cut scenes, often several sequentially. I would have included at least some way to skip through the cinematic cut scenes if you’ve already seen them before. Probably the worst case of this I encountered yet is in the tournament blitz-ball mini-game event, where you are given just a tutorial of how to play and no opportunity to practice, and then thrust into a long cinematic cut scene followed by an in-game cut scene followed by another cinematic before you can actually play the mini-game. Should you lose the mini-game, it doesn’t hold any bearing on the progression of the storyline, but in trying to win, I had to bear through the cut scenes 5 times, essentially compelling me to drop the controller and go refill my bowl of tortilla chips after resetting and loading up my save file…. Which I’m going to go do again before starting up again.
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EX has been with GameLog for 17 years, 10 months, and 9 days |
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