#293 Yoshi’s Island

Posted: 18th December 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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388th played so far

Yisland_boxGenre: Platform
Platform: SNES
Year of Release: 1995
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo

We’ve been playing the Mario games out of order for a while, starting from Super Mario 64, but in terms of Mario chronology (as much as that exists) this is (pretty much without argument) the first. Rather than the game starring Mario, this time the game’s hero is his faithful steed Yoshi, while Mario is still a baby.

In other words, it’s probably time we play this. Also because Peter wants to, for his Before I Kick blog! Also, I love Yoshi.

Our Thoughts

Despite all the criticisms leveled at Nintendo – their at times odd hardware choices and trouble it causes for their business being a current topic of discussion – they make great games, not compromising on quality, and the Mario games often show this best.

Yoshi’s Island is the sequel to Super Mario World, although sequel only in the sense of it being the next Mario-franchise game released, as it has spun off its own series for the ridable dinosaurs. And as much as it might be occasionally marketed as such, Yoshi’s Island isn’t a real or full Super Mario game. Aside from the different protagonist, the game feels different in other ways too. The precise jumping puzzles are changed by allowing you to flutter, letting you cross greater distances, and a smaller general emphasis on platforming. Being hit by an enemy doesn’t shrink or (necessarily) kill you, instead causing you to drop the baby Mario that you’re carrying on your back, giving you up to twenty seconds to get it back, depending on how well you’ve done so far.

If you combine the above with the graphics – gorgeous hand drawn, the best Mario must have seen to date, but because of that coming across as childish and kiddie – it may seem as if it’s the simple game, the one for players not as used to the genre or too young to really have the right reflexes.

This is soon disproven as you actually play through the game. Although it starts easy enough, difficult elements sneak in early. The second level features chomp balls falling from the skies, with just a shadow to warn you on where they land. Don’t pay enough attention, or don’t get out of the way fast enough, and you will immediately die. The first castle features a lot of seesaws and lava pits that get incredibly difficult after a while.

On the good side, to encourage play, the game isn’t stingy with extra lives, to the point where it rarely felt like a limit on my progress. While these days I’d rarely expect lives to be a problem anyway, it felt fine already.

Another good part of the game is the amount of exploration it allows for. There are a large number of collectables to be found (about fifty per level, although some, like the starmen, are generally grouped, with you finding several at a time), not just hidden by having to go to a location, but also with more complicated triggers. Often, switches of various types are hanging in the sky, triggered by throwing an egg at them. These can cause collectables to appear or new paths to open, with platforms popping in out of nowhere. Levels can, of course, be easily replayed to improve your score.

Again, the variety of levels, most themed and switching up the graphics, helps with this, giving each level a distinct feel (sometimes even multiple at once – the chain chomp attack level moves into helicopter territory for a bit). The other interesting part are the different forms Yoshi gets. Unlike Mario’s powerups, these are temporary and for a specific part of a level only, but they change gameplay a lot. When you touch the right part, Yoshi transforms into something – a tank, a helicopter or similar. Mario is kept safe in a bubble for a while, while you do your thing. Get to the end bubble and Mario joins you there, else you get pulled back to restart the section. Not overly harmful, more a fun diversion, that works well in the game. Another (rarely appearing) item turns baby Mario into Superstar Mario, allowing the baby to run around and attack for a little while.

Although not entirely true, this is a glorious goodbye of the Mario series to 2D games, moving into 3D rendered games (even if otherwise 2D platformers) after this. The game’s art is gorgeous, blending together well, feeling hand crafted and pleasant.

On the whole, Mario games have always shown a lot of attention paid to them, and this is no exception. The game plays well, with a bunch of interesting new ideas and loads of new set-ups (Shyguys are back! As main enemy! Inventing stuff!). Way too much fun… if only we could get a few levels further.

Final Thoughts

As inventive as most Mario titles tend to be, Yoshi’s Island sets itself apart with its own style in art and gameplay. The completely different mechanics made it stand out as not entirely being a Mario platformer and as mcuh as the style is endearing, it’s the challenge the game provides that really makes it worth playing through.

It is absolutely controller-throwing difficult, so not suitable as anyone’s first game in the genre, but it still stays an incredibly fun game to try.

#926 FIFA 2010

Posted: 14th December 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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387th played so farfifa10-2010Genre: Sports
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: EA Canada/HB Studios/Sumo Digital/Exient Entertainment
Publisher: EA Sports

After the release of the list’s second edition, 20 games were removed, with twelve of them unplayed so far. For completeness and because we wanted to try some of them, we decided to still play these twelve, but with shorter or changed write-ups. Today the twelfth and last game, FIFA 2010.

Yes, it’s finally done! All the games that have been removed from the list with the second edition have been covered. It’s been a mixed bag – there were a few games that I was happy to get to play after all, such as Gravity Crash, while others were less interesting (although understandable that they were still on there), such as MLB 09: The Show.

To me, FIFA 2010 is one of the latter. It deserves to be on the list – it is the big football game, as popular as they can be, the poster child of yearly releases (although you can ask yourself how much it always changes). And I was hoping it would work for me, but the yearly sports releases tend to be a bit hit and miss in this regard.

The main issue for us, as always, is accessibility, and it did lead me to think a bit further about how introductions to games work. Four days ago we posted about Picross DS, whose tutorial felt a bit slow and unnecessary, but was needed for first time players. You’re also, by playing the tutorial, playing the game, making it part of the learning process. When you look at it, many other games do this as well, and in more complex systems, elements of the game are introduced one by one. This can be done explicitly by pointing out more elements of a game through an introductory level – such as Mass Effect does – or even more often, by slowly introducing more elements into the game, giving you a chance to play with them, before assuming they’re fully in.

Super Mario Bros 3 is a good example of the latter. You follow a single path to the first level and press A to start. The first step is the strange creature (Goomba, as we know) that approaches you. Running into it kills you, with a bit of experimenting you can find out jumping on it kills them. Next there’s some question mark boxes – they first give you coins as you jump against them, then later a mushroom comes up. You jump against it and grow! A piranha plant shows up, spitting fireballs – with these hints, you realise you don’t want to touch it (and early on, you can find out you also can’t jump on top of them. They’re also not flat enough to make that logical). You may see your mushroom bonus disappear too, which teaches you about that mechanic without ever having to pop up a single word of dialogue. This goes on through the level, showing you the basics of koopas, giving you a tail to fly around (the first is hidden – you either discover it and feel awesome for learning, or else you get the chance later) using a nice flat stretch encouraging you to fly and having the first pipe.

The second level continues this, having the first easily accessible pipe, an obvious star and some other blocks it teaches you about. It goes on from there, showing some worldmap tricks – multiple paths as well as panels to give you bonus lives. Fortresses come in soon, and hammer brothers only after you beat the fortress. Even between worlds – only one powerup gets introduced on each world, if you ignore the mushroom as a powerup – the fire flower in the second, the frog in the third and so on.

If you look closely, this is a pattern that returns in other games, to a greater or lesser extent. RPGs hold back complex powers or characters and introduce them one by one. Simulations don’t require you to access more complex features until later. Puzzle games may not use certain complications until later. Shooters don’t immediately throw its more complicated monsters or weapons at you.

For sports games, this doesn’t happen. In part it’s because it’s difficult – you don’t want to lock off part of your options to players who know what’s going on. At the same time, it makes the game dense and inaccessible. Sure, the mechanics get explained in a tutorial, but this is disconnected enough from normal gameplay that it can be difficult to follow, especially since you can’t see how the consequences of your actions play out. Then, in the game, because you have all these theoretical options, but no real experience where to use them, it makes it overwhelming with a steep learning curve that feels daunting and frustrating.

It’s hard to see what could be done here, but some slow build up during matches (“you’re about to take a free kick, do you want help?” prompt for the first time, and maybe once or twice more if you accept the help) could make a lot of it easier and avoid guesswork.

The other part of it is, as we’ve discussed before, that these games simply assume you’ve played previous versions of the game. Sure, there’s the tutorial, but at times even those can be focused mostly on the new features, without giving a nice ramp up in difficulty for new players. FIFA 2010 seemed especially bad in this regard. When we first started the game, we didn’t go to an introduction, a main menu, or a ‘set up your career player’ screen. No, the first title screen leads straight into something called “set piece creation”. This appears to be the new feature of the year, I guess to allow some specific manoeuvres, but seems useless and actively distracting for me as a new player. It made me feel unwanted and out of touch, and I was happy I could at least skip it instead of making a mess out of it. It felt too in-your-face “you’re out of the loop” for me though.

I am sure that the game is good to simulate a football game – everyone’s love for the game and the size of it says enough of that. It feels impressively detailed, in the detail put into players and their appearances, the statistics and individual options they all have, the amount of tactical options and tweaking you can do. It looks good when you’re playing (maybe not platform-pushing amazing, but that’s not what you need with this sports game). The commenters seem to be the right amount of annoying.

I’m just genuinely not sure whether this game allowed me to get the most out of it, or had the tools to really make me enjoy it before I would have wanted to quit from boredom.

#774 Picross DS

Posted: 10th December 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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386th played so far

11337Genre: Puzzle
Platform: DS
Year of Release: 2007
Developer: Jupiter
Publisher: Nintendo

If you don’t know what picross is – in short, it’s a game with a grid and, for each of the columns and rows numbers to indicate how many squares should be filled in (with gaps in between), obviously.

Picross DS is that on the Nintendo DS.

Our Thoughts

Picross DS pretty does what it says on the tin. There’s a few enhancements – when you finish the level, the image you just ‘drew’ gets coloured and animates for a bit and there’s obviously time tracking and scoring. It also checks for any errors and lets you know when you get a row or column wrong (but not individual squares, only when the full group doesn’t work).

The main advantage, though comes down to controls. The DS touch screen feels natural for controlling the game and checking/unchecking boxes as you go through and try to figure out the picture works really well. If anything, it feels like the puzzles work better, as being able to check and uncheck these boxes easily makes them easier to solve – better than having to use an eraser and getting overly cautious to avoid its use.

There’s a tutorial to explain how the game works. To me, knowing the puzzles, it seemed a bit unnecessary, and the slow speed with which it progresses felt unnecessary – although I can see how this wouldn’t be true for people who don’t know the system. A skip button would have been useful though.

In the end, the systems are simple, but the puzzles get fiendishly complex. The real win of the game is, then, how it was improved by being digital, making it ever so slightly more fun to play for me. There isn’t much more to say than that.

Final Thoughts

Picross DS isn’t the most complicated game, but it’s absolutely capable and makes the puzzle format a lot easier to handle than using pencils, erasers and all sorts of arcane symbols to distinguish different states. Denoting “empty because I’m not sure” and “empty because it has to be” without messing up the pictures is enough.

These days the game would undoubtedly be downloadable, at an appropriate price, but for now this serves as a good way of playing these puzzles. The sequel to this on the 3DS should be really interesting.

#975 You, Me & The Cubes

Posted: 6th December 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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385th played so farYouMeAndTheCubesWiiWareGenre: Puzzle
Platform: Wii
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: fyto
Publisher: Nintendo

After the release of the list’s second edition, 20 games were removed, with twelve of them unplayed so far. For completeness and because we wanted to try some of them, we decided to still play these twelve, but with shorter or changed write-ups. Today the eleventh game, You, Me & The Cubes, one of the games we didn’t want to miss.

You, Me & The Cubes always seemed like an interesting game, from the first time I saw it on the list. While perhaps not high priority, it was a game I wanted to play, and one of the reasons I didn’t just want to ignore the games we lost with the second edition.

The game – as so many puzzle games – starts simple. You have a cube, or multiple cubes merged together, hanged balanced in nothingness. You throw small humans called Fallos on it, two at a time. Their weight acts on the cubes and moves it, and you need to keep the cubes balanced so they don’t fall off. Each game, your goal is to get one Fallos on each cube and to get a certain number of them on the whole thing, with none sliding off for a few seconds.

This is tricky enough on its own – while with a single cube the balance is quite easy to predict, the interplay between cubes can be more difficult to guess correctly once different heights get involved and the requirement to have at least one Fallos on each cube means you can’t just cluster them all around one spot. This is made trickier by the Fallos themselves. They’ll start wandering around the cube, partially trying to help your balance, but just as often throwing you off.

Then the special bonuses come in. White Fallos appear occasionally. Rather than helping you, they walk around trying to unbalance your cubes and throwing other Fallos off. The cubes themselves start changing as well down the line.

Just as much fun is multiplayer. The basic concept stayed the same, but instead of having to send two Fallos at once, you do it one at a time. This makes balancing more difficult, unless you manage to coordinate with your fellow player. White Fallos are replaced by others that require both players to work together to remove them. It got frustrating at times, but as a multiplayer co-op mode it works really well as a better challenge.

It’s a pretty good concept, fun to play with, and while the graphics are somewhat simplistic, they are functional. It’s clearly an indie download-only game, but if anything, that means you can focus on the puzzle solving more than on everything surrounding it.

#21 Warlords

Posted: 2nd December 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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384th played so far

Warlords_FlyerGenre: Shoot Em Up
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1980
Developer: Atari
Publisher: Atari

Today’s game is the third shoot ’em up in a row… and the third we’re using to finish some of the earliest games. We wanted to catch up a bit on our stats and knock off some simpler games, as these earlier games tend to be a bit easier to get through.

Our Thoughts

Warlords is fairly simple to start with. Four opponents (up to three of which can be AI-controlled) are in the four corners of a rectangle. Their coloured symbols are surrounded by a wall and protected by a rather Breakout-like paddle. One – and later more – fireballs fly around. They break down the walls if they hit it and when they get through to your rectangle, you lose.

It’s a simple concept, working great in competitive multiplayer, although not as often repeated as I’d expect for what is an enjoyable formula. As simple as the game is, it requires enough skill to be fun and has enough close calls to stay exciting. In fact, the game is easy to learn, just harder to master. More in particular, the AI is ruthless – probably set up to be near optimal – and will often get through your walls quite quickly if you’re not careful. That, too, shows the value of multiplayer here. You can imagine the blast you’d have playing this against several others.

Aside from the simple aesthetics, which have some nice touches, with the look of your fort and even, in a way, the dragon flying around. They’re mostly inconsequential beyond that: Looking at a later remake, using 3D graphics, it looks nearly the same, with not much further room for updates. As such, as promising as the game is, it seems like there was little scope for developing the genre. It came back in a way through tower defense games, but that’s still different.

Final Thoughts

This is one of those many games where the central concept has been used by others whether they be commercial or home-brew. In fact there was a game similar to this available on Neopets for a time. Whilst it is more fun to play this with a group of friends rather than muggins on their own it still has a great deal of challenge to offer in single-player. Since all the later versions did was up the graphics (really) it makes as much sense to try the original as it would to give an update a go.

 

#19 Phoenix

Posted: 28th November 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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383rd played so far

PhoenixGenre: Shoot Em Up
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1980
Developer: Amstar
Publisher: Centuri/Taito

Phoenix appears to be another Space Invaders-inspired vertical shooter. Brilliant.

More interesting, the name of the game is not because of the connection to mystical birds – at least, not at first. The developers were based in Phoenix, Arizona, which is where it seems like the idea might have come from.

Our Thoughts

Phoenix initially follows the same setup as Space Invaders and Galaxian. Enemies attack you in waves, while you’re stuck at the bottom of the screen firing at them. The patterns are different for each level – showing how much the genre has already progressed – but it feels mostly like an evolution from this. On a similar note, enemies don’t just slowly come down, they fly down in fairly unpredictable patterns (but I’m sure the experts disagree).

The enemies themselves have a larger variety as well, some fairly standard birds that drop bullets, others that grow from eggs and, if you don’t kill them before they hatch, require multiple hits to kill. The formations and attack patters switch between levels too.

On the whole, the game is pretty tricky, but learnable. The enemies don’t come as fast initially, giving you time to come to grips with the controls and mechanics. It then slowly builds up the difficulty in the next few levels to become more difficult – we got to the fourth level in a few plays, but sort of got stuck there after it. It’s a shame, because we later found out the game only has five levels, and its boss is meant to be good. A separate level, where the big creature is supported by birds, but needs several attacks and different strategies to kill it, it’s not a matter of only shooting at it.

Cosmetically, the game mostly looks its age, although there are some nice touches – as bad as it sounds, the explosion when you get killed genuinely impressed us. The sound is pretty good too, with the background music being nice (or we thought so at least). It’s all decent, really.

Final Thoughts

The cool thing about going back to these older games is how quickly we can see games evolving in the early 1980s. A cool feature of this game over Space Invaders is how some of the enemies come in multiple parts i.e. you can shoot the wings off the birds first or just go for the torso. A small touch by modern standards but back then must have really thrown gamers for a loop. At only five levels long it’s good for a quick spin.

#16 Tempest

Posted: 24th November 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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382nd played so far

Tempest_arcadeGenre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1980
Developer: Atari
Publisher: Atari

Flashback time! We played the sequel of this game before, as Tempest 2000. Familiarity may occur.

Our Thoughts

With our other memorable remake, the rather deplorable and (to us) unnecessary Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, we played the original before we played the remake. With Tempest, due to how things went (it’s nearly 300 games ago, I don’t know what our thought process three years ago was, possibly random selection) we played the remake before playing the original game.

What makes this tricky to judge is that the remake seems to have been incredibly faithful. There’s some graphics polish and an increased number of levels, but the game plays more or less the same. Possibly the only notable difference is of practicality: Tempest‘s position input is through a spinner you turn left or right, which doesn’t translate well into the arrow keys or joystick motions of consoles and PC. It ended up pretty fiddly for us.

When looking at the game itself, it feels somewhat futuristic for its age. It uses vector graphics – not the first to do so, as we saw with Asteroids, but with some improvements – such as a lot more colours. The game still looks pretty abstract – not odd when you consider the game takes place around a cube or abstract tunnel thing that enemies are crawling out of. Right now, it keeps the game timeless.

The control system adds to this as well. Although not the only one to work with a dial, it’s unconventional and different enough that it makes it feel different and unique. It makes you wonder what the game would have felt like to the first people playing it.

Then there are some of the additional features that were novel at the time, worth mentioning now, even if they feel common place. Apparently, this was one of the first games with a difficulty select, in the sense that it allowed you to pick your starting level. We’ll see that later – another early game, Donkey Kong, did the same (at least when I played it) but tailoring your game to your skills was a new thing that must have felt better, especially for the players used to the game who just want to progress.

Still, despite all the additions and good parts, the game mostly feels clumsy in its mechanics. It’s interesting as a concept and control method, but feels just as much as a stepping stone.

Final Thoughts

As mentioned this game has already been improved and updated a number of years later with the release of Tempest 2000. They play pretty much the same minus the controller issue so, really and truly, it’s worth picking up the update rather than the original.

#921 Football Manager 2010

Posted: 20th November 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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381st played so far

FM2010coverGenre: Sports
Platform: PC/PSP
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Sports Interactive
Publisher: SEGA

After the release of the list’s second edition, 20 games were removed, with twelve of them unplayed so far. For completeness and because we wanted to try some of them, we decided to still play these twelve, but with shorter or changed write-ups. Today the tenth game – Football Manager 2010.

If you’ve been reading this blog for longer, you’ll know that we’re not the biggest fans of sports games (apart from SSX Tricky which is amazing). There may be a handful we enjoy, but we tend to approach a game like NHL 10 or MLB 09 with fear more than anticipation. With that said, I’ve been looking forward to Football Manager 2010 more, for its management simulation potential. Dealing with the numbers and optimizing everything seemed like it could be more interesting. Unfortunately, as many other sports games, it did disappoint.

The first – and quite possibly main problem – is the same that plagues all annual games. The creators seem to assume you’ve played earlier installments and that you know exactly what you’re doing already. There’s no need for explanation or tutorial. There are a few hint popups, but they point to a few buttons, without really explaining the process. There were screens that took me a few months of in-game time to find, with menus not always marked clearly.

The second part, I guess, is that I don’t know football well enough. This is really just a problem in our specific situation, where we have to play games because they’re on the list, not because we’re necessarily into it. But it shows how much you need to rely on your own football knowledge, or else hope that playing with the default settings and relying on AI advice works, while hoping the numbers match up.

It’s probably the one thing where our blog, semi-review, doesn’t always match up with what a regular player would think. Were we not focusing on the list somewhat, we would not necessarily have been tempted to even touch this game. Now, however, we’re judging from the perspective of someone who doesn’t care about the genre. We tend to try and review ignoring these things and be unbiased, but in these cases, where the game doesn’t seem to try and explain what things are about, why it says someone is good in a position, it feels difficult. Sure, you can figure it out, but it makes it more time consuming.

That time consuming part comes back in other places too. Any match your team plays in is shown as a low quality replay, which you can at least set to move from highlight to highlight. However, it still plays out slowly enough, with enough highlights in there that it still takes more time than what is interesting to me. Especially early on, it felt useless, and when you look at the tactical options you should be able to apply, it really doesn’t tell me what difference they make. There are too many there anyway, and no real insight on what effect they have. To be fair, in real life it seems like the coach’s commands on the field don’t matter much anyway, so I guess it’s realistic there anyway.

As always, the game will be one that appeals to fans, and if you’re not a fan of the sport (and yeah, I’m not) it won’t have as much of an impact on you. Even so, if you think the management simulation angle may appeal to you here, it’s too generic and not explained well enough to make much of a difference. This game just didn’t seem to be for us.

#508 Kingdom Hearts

Posted: 20th November 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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380th played so far

5115412WYQL._SY300_Genre: Action/Role-Playing
Platform: Playstation 2
Year of Release: 2002
Developer: Square
Publisher: Square/SCEE

Here’s a game that has been long coming. I’ve been curious about Kingdom Hearts since soon after I heard of it, but never really had a chance to play it. I got close to having a chance to play it around the time we started this project, but its absorption into the big pile of games we need to play stopped us going further with it. After that, we got distracted enough it took us a while to get back to it.

This time, however, having obtained the game’s more recent Playstation 3 remake, we decided it was time and thought we should actually play it, and then see how well it works for us.

This is a game that I either owned or rented (I can not remember which one) and I got stuck pretty early on since I was not able to trigger certain events to happen as I roamed around. Now that I have more experience with games like this I am glad to say that this was not a problem…

Our Thoughts

Come on, the short description of the game sounds interesting already. A game that combines the Final Fantasy and Disney universes, an action RPG where you control a fairly standard Final Fantasy protagonist while having Donald Duck and Goofy as your support characters.

That Disney section is really what gives this game its unique charm. For the most part, you travel to different Disney ‘worlds’, based on the different movies and other Disney properties. The Final Fantasy characters are there, but are secondary to the plot of finding Mickey, and are often less interesting than the main story.

This is just as much helped by the choice of companions. Sure, Mickey might be more popular with some, but Donald’s anger and Goofy’s…. goofiness create far more human companions (despite being, you know…) and more interesting interactions with the world. Then again, it’s telling that (at least in the part of the woods where I grew up) the Disney magazine is named after Donald Duck, not Mickey, and features the angry bird more often. He’s funnier and more interesting.

The levels can feel a bit constrained at times – the impassable walls of inexplicably dense trees are common – but they’re lush and fairly varied. The cities especially have many secrets and there’s several nice touches. What helps is how there are bits that unlock only as you gain more characters and powers to explore the area, in part through small Mickeys dotted around that require them to proceed.

The battles are a bit more troublesome. Ni No Kuni‘s system seems to have been inspired by it, with its separate arena, having most of your helpers attacking as AI against some enemies (including some pretty big ones) and healing through orbs dropped during the fight. Once you get more in depth, the differences become more obvious. First, the game is far more action-based: there are no automatic attacks, instead you have to get close to specific attack points like in Shadow of the Colossus. Less climbing is usually involved, but there can be a lot of waiting for the right enemy attack to strike yourself.

The second issue – usually simplifying the game, but frustrating in certain tough battles – is that you don’t control your allies directly. You can give them some vague AI hints, but they mostly do their own thing. It’s easy at times, when they do the right thing and you can focus on what you need, while at other times it makes them useless (Donald especially can be suicidal). In the occasional battle, however, they can make the game clearly more difficult. And place where this clearly stood out was against one of the bosses in the Alice in Wonderland world called the Trickmaster. One of the ways to keep it under control is to keep it away from the fire in one corner of the room, as when he reaches it he starts throwing fireballs. It’s tough but possible on your own, but when your allies lure him to that corner while fighting, it actually makes the fight far more difficult.

The one annoyance, really, is related to that. As many other eastern RPGs, this game asks for a lot of grinding, starting even after the first quest when you’re joined by your allies. The next suggested worlds feel difficult from the start and if you haven’t done your exploring and leveling beforehand, you can get stuck there quite easily.

Still, battling systems are subjective enough that it’s not the reason we’re discussing the game here. The characters, worlds and story stand out as magical – the type of magic you associate with Disney, its movies and theme parks. The graphics and sounds match, from the introduction’s glorious stained glass windows to all the different large worlds. It seems worth it for that alone.

Being the one of us that is more into Disney the majority of the Kingdom Hearts playthrough fell to me (and I am also transferring it to my personal gaming pile for times when we are not blog gaming). The thing that I love most about the game (which is not the battling system since the Cerberus boss battle is just ridiculous if you come at it too early) is the sheer amount of references that are made. It is almost a pity that these games started to be made at the end of the Disney Renaissance since any sequels really didn’t have any decent material to work with.

The characterization of the Disney characters are spot on. Donald is mercurial and hard to understand. Goofy is adorably, well, goofy. Minnie is… okay let’s be honest Disney never created her as a strong female so Square didn’t have much to work with. This leads me to something that bugs me, where is the strong ‘good’ female character? Maleficent is strong but she’s evil so it doesn’t really count. Once again it’s three men off to save the day and the Princess of Heart. I hope when we see  Kingdom Hearts III we’ll see the inclusion of Anna and Elsa of Frozen as something more than damsels in distress.

Finally, there is the Gummi Ship. Cute idea but the having to play a shoot ’em up every time you want to double back on yourself and buy potions is just grating after a while. I know you can make new ships and do lots of customizing but it feels like game padding that did not need to be there.

Final Thoughts

I know I was fairly negative about this at the end but this is a game made for people who like Final Fantasy and Disney which means it does feel like it was meant for me and when it’s very Disneyfied this game is absolutely brilliant. The moment it delves into Final Fantasy territory it begins to weaken. I also which they went with a battle system more akin to Final Fantasy X because that would have really solved the boss battle issues.

#613 Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2

Posted: 16th November 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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379th played so far

230px-KOTOR_IIGenre: Role-Playing
Platform: PC/Xbox
Year of Release: 2004
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher: LucasArts

It’s been a while since we played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Since then, after it got to the top of the queue, I finished the game and thought it was time to try the sequel. As it, too, is on the list, that meant we had to cover it here too… Let’s see what it’s like.

Our Thoughts

While in some cases sequels can be samey or repetitive, using the same formula to continue the original, becoming weaker because it doesn’t get better, in others it can push the series further.

KotOR 2 is absolutely the latter. Although there are bigger gaps in the game due to pressure to finish the game earlier than Obsidian could deliver, it offers a better experience. One that explains why Obsidian is as respected as it is now. Although this is their first game, it was created by the people responsible for earlier respected games, like Planescape Torment and the original Fallout series.

The improvements are in a range of places. On the most basic level, the main character starting off as a Jedi, allowing you to focus on developing your character to follow that path, instead of having to split your development between a normal class and a Jedi class as in the first game. It feels a lot more satisfying and feels like there are less wasted points, abilities and feats. Beyond that, the list of powers and feats is expanded, giving you more options and things to play with, which is of course always fun.

An even clearer improvement, for me at least, is in the story telling. One of the big things that stood out to me was the storytelling (especially in the backstory) that happens through dialogue options, something I’ve rarely really seen. The player character has an existing backstory – where the character knows more than the player – and one of the ways it is shared is by mentioning it in the options you select. You can choose to mention (and this happens early, so isn’t really a spoiler) that you were a Jedi and were expelled from the order, but you can also skip the option and hide it. But knowing that you were one is enough information to go with. You get to explore more of it later in the game, but the way it sneaks in information that way is low-key and incredibly useful in telling you things without getting in your way as exposition. In a way, it shows how limited a dialogue wheel like Mass Effect‘s can be.

Another way it’s integrated is into the characters. In the first area you visit, pretty much the entire story is told through logs, bits of implied dialogue and some inferences you can make yourself – the full story gets told near the end, but you can work it out before then and easily piece bits together. It’s a lot more involved and a lot nicer than long cutscenes. More so, parts of this actually come through from the game mechanics. For example, at one point you need to use a droid’s ability to precisely replicate a now dead character’s voiceprint to get into a terminal. When you hack into it, you also notice it’s a terminal an order to kill some people has come from. You also discover it was sent after the owner of the terminal died.

There are probably more examples, but these show how well the story plays out, both for the main story and side quests. Absolutely engrossing, and simultaneously subversive enough that its grey was praised in the normally black and white world of Star Wars, although it was apparently less liked by its hardcore fanbase.

This is helped by the characters. While they were good in the first game, they feel enhanced here by having an added layer, some additional depth, with more of them going on than the archetypes that the first game featured. It’s mostly, again, a step up, but feels a bit better.

When it comes to technology, the game doesn’t feel like as much an improvement. The environments feel a bit improved and some of the models a bit nicer, but it’s a minor step up.

That’s minor, though. The game takes a large setting and makes it its own, telling a rich and complex story in a way that not many other games seem to accomplish. As much as it’s a clear sequel to the first Knights of the Old Republic, in the integration with the game, its sequel feeling from Planescape Torment seems just as important. And knowing what we know of a game like South Park: Stick of Truth, it seems like Obsidian may soon deserve another place on the list.

Final Thoughts

One thing that this game got me thinking about was the idea of canon. Since this game’s beginning spells out that the canon ending of the previous game was you betraying the Jedi and siding with the Sith the people at Star Wars HQ decided this game series was therefore not canon. Then they later started making a third trilogy of films which has made a lot of things that previously were canon non-canon.

I guess what I am trying to say is screw canon and just let Obsidian do what they do best.

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