Diablo III (PC)
Because impressions from the beta were somewhat divided, I held off on picking up Diablo III until early summer, when the hype for the game had died down to “acceptable dungeon-crawler”. Unfortunately, I commit the ultimate sin now by (mini-)reviewing it without having actually beaten it. After the wealth of customization, strategy, and randomness that was in Diablo II, its sequel came as a huge disappointment.

Despite more than two hours of gameplay, I had yet to make an actual decision for either character I made. Bizarrely, stats exist but are auto-allocated, and you are simply given a new skill (and occasionally skill-variant) at each level. Generally, new skills replaced old skills. I was incredibly baffled when people kept talking about Diablo III as if it had more depth than a flash game. It is, in my opinion, the western counterpart of FFXIII: All style, no substance.

Pros: Practically plays itself, without the tedious gambits of FFXII
Cons: If it plays itself, why does the player need to be there?

Crusader Kings II (PC)
On practically the opposite end of the gaming spectrum, Crusader Kings II is a sort of overwhelming take on feudal politics, diplomacy, and child-rearing. You play as the head of a land-owning family, and you often have to balance out your own desire for expansion and glory with the demands of both your liege-lord and your own vassals. You must pick strategic marriages for your clan and carefully choose your heir, since you can potentially be assassinated or fall ill at any time – and it wouldn’t do to have a ugly, arrogant dwarf as your heir, since that is who you next play as.

Crusader Kings II is where I spent all the time I was planning to spend on Diablo III. The vast array of situations which you are confronted with during each ‘lifetime’ keeps the game fresh, while the difficulty level is actually quite manageable much of the time. The only real flaw CK2 has is that empires often consolidate rather than fracture and can get to be a little bit too powerful for the average player to take on.

Pros: Deep, varied strategic gameplay
Cons: Occasional bugs/clunkiness, cliff-shaped learning curve, repetitive music

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy (3DS)
It was only a matter of time before Square Enix capitalized once again on the unending nostalgia for the Final Fantasy series. Theatrhythm is a rhythm game based on the series’ music, spanning from the first Final Fantasy to FFXIII (side-games not included). It doesn’t have the most complex rhythm-based gameplay, but what is there is entertaining enough to sustain the game for a good while.

Although I don’t like the direction the series has taken, classic Final Fantasy music is still a huge draw for me. Theatrhythm also has a leveling / stat system that brings it above the standard music game in my book – although it will not win you any songs you weren’t close to winning, careful management of characters and skills can get you a much better score.

Pros: Great set of music, fun leveling system
Cons: Some good characters and songs are hidden behind an unlock system, actually tempting DLC makes the game cost more

Mass Effect 3 (PC)
The first thing you’re likely to hear about this game is that it has a bad ending. In fact, it is the only thing I heard from gaming forums about the game for awhile, so I held off on purchasing Mass Effect 3 until the “extended cut” ending was released. Other than the ending, though, it is about what you would expect after Mass Effect 2 – a lot of running and gunning with cover mechanics and the occasional not-so-tough decision.

ME3 is in the small category of games that I play compulsively once I get started, then don’t think much of later. Although the first game was a fantastic foray into an interesting universe, each game since suffers from a bit more tunnel-vision. ME3, oddly, seems to have been tainted by its own lore – the insistence on inclusion of a character from the book series and the overarching importance, by the end, of the Cerberus organization which was tiny in Mass Effect, make ME3’s plot much less interesting. When you add in the also-sudden 60% adoption of homosexuality among characters, it really feels like Bioware was trying to make a statement rather than a game. Mass Effect went from “hey, here’s this cool world with interesting aliens and a sci-fi plot” to “marketing/writers insist we do x, y, and z, but I guess we can put in a few interesting aliens”. By far the most baffling decision to me is emblematic of modern Bioware (minor spoilers) – you are presented with a situation in which a previously unlikable character is actually sympathetic. Two hours later, he does something to betray you with no explanation or warning.

All that said, it’s still an enjoyable enough romp – but you will probably want to keep in mind that ME3 is much more a “AAA” game than ME1.

Pros: Good characters from ME1/2 return, smooth gameplay
Cons: Feels more manufactured than built, bizarre plot decisions

Analogue: A Hate Story (PC)
Analogue was the first Visual Novel to appear on Steam. Although it has appeared in a few sales, it hasn’t really caught on in gaming media and so hasn’t received much in the way of attention. Analogue is a sort of sci-fi/mystery game, in which the player is sent to investigate a long-derelict generational ship and discover what happened to it. The plot is mostly told through interaction with ship log entries and with the ship’s AI.

It may only be a couple of hours long, but Analogue presents a great story with a few entertaining characters – some of whom have, by the time the game takes place, been dead for hundreds of years. There are even a couple of “red herring” log authors, who have very little to do with the core plot and exist only to reveal more about the culture of the generational ship. As a clean, western-written VN, Analogue is in a good position to demonstrate to a Western audience how the format can work.

Pro: Lots of enjoyable writing, interesting premise, good music.
Con: No guns, little sex and violence.

Overall, 2012 has been a really great year for video games. Personally, I’ve been trying to limit the growth of my backlog while completing as many new and interesting games as I have the time for. What I found surprising was how well-represented the JRPG genre has been, as they have seen releases on consoles, portables, and even PC.

Anno 2070 (PC)
I barely played Anno 1701 on DS, partly because of its slow pacing and partly because I felt like I was playing a PC game with a console interface. Anno 2070 fixes both issues: the first with a fast-forward button, and the second by actually being a PC game I could get my hands on.

Anno 2070 is a post-global-warming based game which puts the Tycoons, who wish to harvest resources aggressively and build a strong corporate-based global economy, against the Ecos, who basically do the same thing but feel better about it since they drink tea and eat sushi. Although the plot isn’t interesting, the strategy is and as a simulation game it grows nicely in structure and challenge. The combat and troop management both feel very clunky and out-of-place in a game that feels more focused on city-building and advancing technology, but I am sort of a Sim City player at heart.

Pros: Simminess, Music
Cons: Evil DRM, clunky military, cheating AI

Final Fantasy XIII-2 (PS3/360)
This game likely needs no introduction, as if you haven’t heard about it you are probably living in a media blackout. FFXIII-2 follows up the already-incomprehensible FFXIII by adding time travel, a few new main characters, recruitable monsters, and so on. Pitched as a more open-ended FFXIII, it ended up being much of the same during my 15 hours playing.

While the recruitable monsters are a welcome addition, they level up via items which is the most annoying way to enforce grinding I can think of. Recruiting is random as well, and the leveling system is incredibly linear and breakable for Noel and Serah. FFXIII-2 is also still largely linear in structure if non-linear in stage design. Others with good taste seem to have enjoyed it, but you really need to be in love with the FFXIII battle system to enjoy this game,and I was not.

Pros: Music (subset that isn’t death metal rap), Graphics, Lightning is dead at the start
Cons: Lightning isn’t really dead, Time travel is silly, unlikeable main characters, unlikeable recurring characters

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2 (DS)
The 2nd Devil Survivor isn’t really a sequel to the first, but rather a sort of re-imagining with many of the same plot elements and mechanics. This time, the bizarre otherworldly invaders are evidently aliens rather than demons, and the friendship system is significantly more transparent and more like the Social Link system in the Persona games.

I really enjoyed SMTDS2 for many of the same reasons I liked DS1. It is sort of a Persona-lite with tactical RPG battles, a larger variety of characters, and a more coherent and serious plot. SMTDS2 doesn’t really add anything especially new to the mix, but it refines many of the systems that made the first game enjoyable while making things more freeform. I hope the next game is more transformative, but Atlus seems to have come up with some good ideas for the series.

Pros: Came out on DS rather than 3DS, generally good VA, great battle system
Cons: No major improvements over the predecessor, may be a bit too anime

Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)
From some of the same designers that brought Xenogears and Xenosaga, Xenoblade is a wholly unrelated game with considerably fewer religious references. It’s a lengthy RPG that takes place on a pair of enormous giants, each with its own set of life.

This was my favorite new game of 2012, and it was already years old when it came here after its release appeared impossible. With incredible landscapes, fantastic music, and strategic gameplay, it’s incredible to me that Xenoblade almost didn’t make it. The voice acting is very well done, and a Japanese option is available (though I think the English is better). I really recommend picking this one up if you have the time for it.

Pros: Atmosphere/design, graphics, music are all very well done
Cons: Gamestop exclusivity heralds ill news for future “obscure” games, it’s not always Reyn Time

Endless Space (PC)
A Master of Orion 2 successor of sorts, Endless Space is a constantly-improving 4X game with various factions, a strategic but coherent tech tree, and spiffy space-battle cutscenes.

I was really fascinated by Endless Space for a couple of weeks. It offers almost exactly the same gameplay as Master of Orion 2, with significant balance changes to systems that were easily exploitable (e.g. the ‘Creative’ trait). The “Hero” system (governor/admiral) and the planets-per-star concept are also inherited from MOO and somewhat improved as well. Ultimately though, I found ES to be feel a little bit too “samey” after a few games when I played it last (before the most recent set of changes), partly due to the AI which feels a little bit too deterministic for my tastes.

Pros: More MOO2, admirable level of balance and race variety
Cons: More MOO2

Dragon’s Dogma (PS3)
Capcom’s Monster Hunter series has been growing in popularity steadily. What could be a better idea than to blend Monster Hunter style gameplay with a WRPG world? Dragon’s Dogma combines this with a sort of helper-exchange system: players create a ‘Pawn’ or AI helper which they can share with other players (each player can have 3 total helpers at once). Pawns offer advice, change combat strategy based on what they have learned, and can have a distinct AI personality, voice-set, et cetera.

Dragon’s Dogma was somewhat under-the-radar at its release, and many compared it to Dark Souls and Skyrim while it’s not really much like either. While it has the wide-open world of Skyrim, it has no scaling and much better combat. Nor does Dragon’s Dogma have the linear level design or Castlevania-style progression of Dark Souls. It doesn’t really sit comfortably in the JRPG or WRPG domain, but is nonetheless definitely an RPG. The Pawn system is actually much more entertaining than it sounds, since players will design and edit their pawns to make them useful.

Pros: You can throw anyone, climbing giant monsters is fun, nonlinear character progression
Cons: DLC pop-ups on startup, can be difficult early on, repetitive merchant voicing

Many, many years ago I was an avid reader of Nintendo Power.  I had already developed a taste for RPGs, although they were a bit less numerous back then.  A bunch of them were bad – and often, even Nintendo Power was willing to admit that.

Regardless, I would read each article about an RPG with fascination.  When it was a game I knew, I would enjoy flipping through the various artwork and reading about the tricky parts.  Otherwise, I’d quietly file it away in a hidden corner of my mind, to play later.

I’m finally working my way through the last few of those games I filed away – recently Paladin’s Quest and 7th Saga, and a year or so back I played through a good chunk of Arcana.  All of these games I tracked down, purchased, and (with the exception of 7th Saga, which is too tedious) played on real hardware.  The only one left is Lagoon.

From this experience, I’ve learned a few things:

1.  I actually played most of the good RPGs of the time when I was a kid.  Paladin’s Quest is the only one of the set I’d play again.
2. Somehow, I still manage to enjoy even the bad RPGs.  The vast majority of RPGs at least have some optimization axis or story, and either one gets me.
3. Even bad RPGs are still pretty expensive by comparison (all of these were around $20ish).

This leads me to my latest game: Great Greed, a game released on the Game Boy in 1992.  As soon as I heard the name, I remembered reading about it in Nintendo Power and thinking that the description sounded really cool, and the artwork was kind of neat.  The context in which I heard the long-forgotten name was incredibly bizarre: a NeoGAF post about how the game asks you to pick your marriage partner at the end.  It turns out that the game allows you to marry another guy, an 11-year-old, and even the king or queen.

Now that my nostalgia was back in action, I decided to order the game and play through it on my Super Game Boy.  And, sadly… it’s the worst of the lot thus far.

It’s not like the game doesn’t sound entertaining.  By the one-hour mark, I was doing a break-in on an abandoned record factory to get an old washed-up singer’s debut album.  Some professor specializing in genealogy named the album as his price to investigate the family tree of the Crab family, so that princess Cup Cake and I could prove that the mysterious politician “Crabby” was actually a fraud working for the evil Bio-Haz.

If I heard that description, I would think “wow, that game sounds incredibly wacky.”  And in a way, it is.  The next section had me infiltrating Oasis Castle so that I could reclaim it for the Kimchi Tribe, who would in turn give me Golden Pepper to defeat the dragon guarding a prison where Dr. Bromide was being held.  I needed to talk to Dr. Bromide because… actually, the game didn’t tell me why.  Or, more accurately, Cup Cake didn’t tell me why.

You see, even at its very wackiest, Great Greed suffers from a complete lack of explanation.  Maybe it’s intentional parody of the RPGs of its time, which seems accurate enough.  It would be in good company there, since Earthbound happens to be a perfectly good game in its own right.  But where Great Greed fails is in the execution.  While Earthbound builds an interesting, fast-paced battle system and has interesting dialogue, Great Greed has neither.  Its battle system is quick, but it only has one party member.  Assistants (like Cup Cake, Lolly Pop, Candy, and so on) have a special effect that triggers at random, but it’s never enough to make things interesting.  When the grind is factored in, one realizes that the game likely takes about twice as long as it could if it threw balance to the wind and let the player enjoy the silly parody.

Technically, though, the game is actually a little bit impressive.  It allows saving anywhere (like the Final Fantasy Legend games), but more importantly it actually has an auto-save function.  In 1992!  It saved me about 25 minutes when I forgot to save just before a boss battle.

Story-wise, it’s incredibly obvious what the story is about – the main character is an environmental researcher of some kind, summoned to an alternate world where everything is named after food, and the evil Bio-Haz is trying to pollute the normally prosperous land.   Some of the towns do have bizarre themes, but they always tie back to the quest.  For example, one town has a set of laws you can spend money to re-randomize (i.e. Don’t Talk to Soldiers, Don’t Enter the Armory).  I didn’t actually get thrown in jail, but I assume it wouldn’t have done much.  Once you reach the prison, you find out all the prisoners were gathered to do forced labor mining pollution-causing rocks.

If it were not quite so grindy, Great Greed would be a fun little game and I would finish it for certain.  Perhaps for an RPG on the Game Boy – where most of the competition was the various inaccurately-localized Final Fantasy games, it wasn’t bad at all.

Since it is, though, the most interesting part of the game is the section from the aforementioned forum post – which I am unlikely to reach.  Sometimes, even I have to admit defeat so that I can play something more enjoyable.

Recently, I finally beat Suikoden Tactics, the Strategy RPG semi-sequel to Suikoden IV.  As a long-time fan of the series, I had intended to beat the game for some time, held off by two things.  First, Suikoden IV wasn’t very good and the story never resonated with me.  Second, Suikoden Tactics has the much-maligned feature of permanent death for non-story characters.  When combined with the grid elemental system and a massive set of things enemies can do, it’s extremely difficult at times to predict whether a character will die in any given situation.

Since I beat Suikoden IV for the second time just a few months ago, the time was right.  I didn’t start the game with much gusto, but at about the 15-hour mark (~25 hours total in the game), suddenly everything clicked and I finished Tactics in two days.  There were two successive epiphanies I had:

1: Suikoden Tactics is totally unlike any other Suikoden game in that it is about 5:1 game:exposition ratio.  If you play it hoping for more plot, expect to be disappointed.

2: Tactics has an arguably better implementation of many Suikoden mechanics than the core Suikoden games do, for three primary reasons: complexity, variety, and difficulty.

To expand on that second point, one thing I have always enjoyed about the entire Suikoden series is its underlying complexity.  III is a perfect example, perhaps a notorious one.  Your characters are split into three groups of two, of which only one can take a meaningful action each turn while the other will always auto-attack.  They’re ‘leashed’ to each other, and location matters.  Each character (of ~70 playable) has their own unique set of stats, including equipment restrictions and possibly in-built runes and available slots.  To top it all off, each character also has a set of passive skills they can master – each of which has its own leveling difficulty and mastery ceiling, and some are unique to particular sets of characters.  That’s something like 5 layers of complexity over the old-school Dragon Quest mechanics, and they will only ever matter if the player tries to win normally “unwinnable” fights for special rewards.
In Suikoden IV, then, Konami backpedaled a bunch and removed layers of complexity.  Four characters in combat, no silly groupings, no skills, and fewer runes/stats.  No “unwinnable” fights, save exactly one poorly placed treasure chest monster.  The game was pretty much bland combat with slightly-less-bland exposition, and was pretty much panned by disappointed fans.

Suikoden Tactics was a cautious re-emergence of complexity in a better forum for that depth.  A challenging tactical RPG made the perfect backdrop: Innate elements with affinities for each character, a simplified skill system, a sidequest system similar to FF Tactics’, and so on.  Tactics incrementally adds complexity.  As characters gain their first interesting rune abilities, skills start to matter and a mount system is introduced.  Characters have affinities for each other and certain ones get position-based combos.  By the mid-point of the game, the sheer variety of mechanics finally starts to dawn on the player – brought in bit by bit, each one seems like an annoyance to track at first.  Here was my epiphany: with its set of dozens of recruitable characters, its variable rune system and sets of interlocking, stat-boosting equipment, Suikoden Tactics plays like an ultimate game of chess (or Fire Emblem, or Disgaea, if you will).  It even eliminates 90% of grinding by taking a stereotypically Suikoden approach to leveling: each map has an effective level cap determined by enemies’ level and a base “stage level”.  A very low-level character gains levels quickly, assuming survival throughout, and will match the rest of the party within a few maps.  Meanwhile, no character will become over-leveled, necessitating their inclusion in any particular combat.

At the same time, Tactics also adopts standard genre features.  Fire Emblem, for example, has characters that are ‘multipliers’ – they don’t do any direct damage, but boost nearby allies or cripple nearby enemies.  Tactics has the standard treasure hunter, medic, attack-booster, item-monger, and so on.  None are necessary, and in fact a party that included all of these characters would be utterly worthless in pretty much any battle.  But one or two included, or swapped in mid-combat, would be more powerful than just a party of warriors.

Suikoden Tactics is mechanically an interesting take on the genre and on the series, blending the two in a way that creates a fast-paced tactics game.  It doesn’t bog down nearly as often as Fire Emblem, with its 15+ character battles where half the time is spent moving your entire host of troops.  Nor does it require dozens of hours of grinding in item-worlds like Disgaea.
The fun part, though, is over: it’s time to talk about the less fun stuff.

You would think that a series much-vaunted for its interesting and consistent atmosphere (if not great translations) would have another stellar plot, right?  Unfortunately, Tactics takes a substantial departure from the rest of the series by taking what should be an extremely personal journey for Kyril, and making it feel bland and like it doesn’t even matter.  In some games – strategy games in particular are bad about this – there is a scenario where a misunderstanding occurs, and you end up fighting the wrong people for a reason that’s totally irrelevant.  In Suikoden Tactics, this feels like it is happening about 90% of the time (probably only about 60%).  By the time your party ‘realizes’ who the enemy is, you’re so tired of the dim-witted repartee of everyone involved that it feels empty.

For a perfect example, I have a few spoilers in this next part.  They only spoil the first two hours of the game (and to a lesser extent the premise of the rest).  The main character, Kyril, is traveling with his father Walter in the Island Nations.  His father is investigating Rune Cannons, an especially powerful weapon that emerged roughly 10-15 years ago still isolated to the region.  As they reach their goal, and come across (incidentally) the Rune of Punishment, the True Rune and focus of Suikoden IV’s plot, Walter is inadvertently turned into a monster by a faulty Rune Cannon and his right-hand man is forced to slay him before what-was-Walter kills his son.  Even typing this, I can’t imagine how you could possibly make the game feel impersonal.  It seems like a perfect premise for the beginning of Kyril’s personal journey three years later to discover what happened.  Well, I’ll spoil this much: you learn nothing at all about why this happened or what rune cannons are for about 20 hours.  You get baited around with small bits and pieces of plot.  Here, I’ll even outline them and at what point you find out:

• Where Rune Cannon Ammo came from, more or less irrelevant (4 hours)
• That Rune Cannons are some sort of monster, blatantly obvious in the opening section (4 hours)
• Nothing at all (15 hours)
• Suddenly everything at once, but not enough to satisfy curiosity (24 hours)

There is an optional sidequest that you can do for a little more exposition about Rune Cannons right before the end of the game.

Although in name you are investigating Rune Cannons, in fact you end up fighting in a proxy war between various factions of an empire with so little exposition it feels faceless.  In the end, Tactics fails plot-wise even at what its most ardent fans claim – that its additional exposition to Suikoden IV is worthwhile or even interesting.  There is absolutely nothing new there, aside from some name-dropping of the Scarlet Moon Empire.  The ‘alternate effect’ of Rune Cannons had absolutely no mention in Tactics’ predecessor and is almost certainly just ret-conned, and Kooluk is an utterly bland, lifeless country.
All in all, though, I’d still say Suikoden Tactics is worth a run-through.  Just don’t expect to get much of interest plot-wise, and simply enjoy delving the depths of its combat system.

Ever since these failed experiments, I wondered whether any of these methods really, truly could work.  I can report that under certain circumstances, you can fix a game by boiling it. I’m surprised and a bit baffled, but I tried it yesterday, and I can attest to the results.

The game in question Tekken 6 on the. I bought it (new and factory sealed) almost two years ago on clearance, but it turned out to be defective out of the box. I arranged to return it to Namco-Bandai for a replacement copy, but due to laziness I never sent it out. I completely forgot I still had it until yesterday, when I unearthed it during a spot of spring cleaning. Not wanting to throw it away, I decided I might as well try to see if something might get it to play. Since it had no scratches, I knew the toothpaste/Brasso approach would do me no good. The boiling trick, on the other hand, still had some promise. I still didn’t know what it was supposed to do to make a disc playable, and I suppose the sense of unknowingness convinced me it was worth a shot. I heated up a pot of water, dropped the disc in for a good three minutes, then let it dry in a hand towel. About an hour later, I placed it back in the console, and it started up immediately. No freezing, no hanging, no issues whatsoever. This was in stark contrast to its original state, in which the 360 couldn’t even recognize that there was a piece of media in its disc tray.

So tender you can cut it with a fork.

While happy to have a working product after all this time, I still wasn’t satisfied. I went online to find out once and for all whether there was any sort of science behind boiling an optical disc – and found the answer on the first page of Google results. Here’s what softpedia has to say about the method:

One of the reasons why a brand new disk can become unrecognizable for the drive is the exposure to condensation, a phenomenon that occurs within the plastic wrapped subscription, as water molecules trapped in the air turn liquid when the temperature drops, for example during shipping.

The thin layer of plastic covering all discs, meant to protect the readable surface, can expand and contract in the optical drives, where the temperature is much higher than in the room or on a store shelf. The simplest way to eliminate water from the disk is to boil it.

Makes sense I guess, though the explanation reveals that this fix is only applicable to discs that are dead on arrival, and only due to this particular phenomenon. If your game stops playing after you’ve played it for some time, boiling probably won’t do it any good. It also seems that, despite my results, it isn’t a good idea to stick your game directly into a hot pot on the stove – you can get the same results by heating up a shallow plate of water in the microwave, without risking having your disc melt.

Some will argue that buying Tekken 6 in the first place was a waste of money, but at least now it won’t be a complete waste.