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Saturday 12 January, 2008
GAMEPLAY:
The second half of the game was more of the same. When I finally found something remotely fun to do, at the arcade, it turned 11:00 and I was teleported back home, so I had to run all the way back to the spot I was at previously. The areas opened up a bit more so a bit of the claustrophobic feeling went away, but the game got even duller. The game went from being incredibly linear, to far too expansive. I found myself wandering around the same town over and over, looking for some random person to talk to that gave me some clue about the next area. I also found often that, once I finally got to the place that I needed to go to, I had to wait 7-20 minutes for some stupid shop to open up, so that I could talk to people. The character control was poor, every time I tried to turn around I found myself bumping into things and fighting myself just to turn a corner. The funnest part about the game was playing tho arcade game 'Space Harrier', but if you really want to play that it would probably be easier to just get out and GET space harrier.
DESIGN:
One thing I noticed about the game is that it seems like the designers put way too much detail into a few minutia in the game -- phone calls, arcade games, soda machines, miniature toy vending machines, and so on. The problem is, it feels like they didn't spend any time at all making the game actually... fun. The game did have its funny moments, but most of the jokes come at the expense of the main character. Watching Ryu kneel in front of a machine blowing all his money on miniature toys, declaring how much he loves them and how he feels like he should buy more, as well as forcing him to call directory assistance to make him flounder because he has no idea why he called can be extremely funny for a short period, but after a while it just gets stale.
There was no complexity to this game, and no challenge, outside of finding the people that you need to talk to. You only fight once, and you beat that by pressing 'A', then 'X', then 'Y', and then it's back to finding people to talk to. Basically, this game fails almost every test of being a 'game', based on our lecture last Friday. In the future, I would only play this game if I were being paid.
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