Looks like Resident Evil‘s gone the way of Kingdom Hearts. With the future of its main numbered series of games in question, Capcom took the franchise on the “spin-off” and “spin-off on handhelds” route while the brass flounders about with what they need to do to make Resident Evil 6 a success. I offer one tip: Don’t make it like Operation Raccoon City.

At least don’t make it like its single-player mode. Or cooperative campaign. Or whatever it was I played at the Sony booth. It was called “cooperative campaign”, but I could’ve sworn I was just playing by myself. There was nothing cooperative about it, despite a few human beings playing the same game (maybe?) next to me. No team-up attacks, no recovering each other, no helping each other out in any sort of way at all. But then if we did all that we’d be playing a lousier version of Left 4 Dead then, wouldn’t we?

So, what makes it lousy? It feels just like we feared it would: SOCOM with zombies. The exact same controls, the exact same layout, even the exact samey-same way levels are laid out. Hide behind chest-high barricades, shoot braindead zombies, occasionally toss a grenade out or change weapons once in a while. The same cookie cutter template that was prevalent all over E3 this year. Is this the only way to revitalize a flagging franchise? Farm it out to the West and turn it into a shooter?

Resident Evil fans may be happy to play a SOCOM mod of their favorite series, that is, if they’re fooled easily by nostalgic throwbacks like a word-for-word recreation of the intro from Resident Evil 2 and a guest appearance from Kendo’s gun shop. Hunters and Lickers return, too. That’s cool and all if you like nostalgia-mining, but then the camera pulls back and there you are controlling some new faceless jerk no one cares about, who spouts macho curse words out in true cliched modern shooter fashion. Nothing feels very Resident Evil about that, and unless it comes from Marcus Fenix or Cole Train, I’m damn tired of it.

Maybe I’m burned so badly because this was the number one game I was looking forward to most at this year’s show. Maybe I just played the wrong demo. There was no “co-op” to be found in this co-op mode. Capcom’s booth had a different demo, a competitive multiplayer mode complete with an announcer shouting out the play-by-play. I didn’t play that one, but I doubt I would have really garnered that different an experience from it. Or maybe that really is the mode to play! It’s not like I ever touched Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood‘s single-player, and I love that game. So, I’ll try and keep a more open mind about this, but the fact that I knew exactly what Operation Raccoon City was going to be before even touching it left me disappointed, and maybe even a little disturbed. Am I that jaded or have games become that predictable?

I can’t believe it.

What happens after Tomonobu Itagaki leaves Team Ninja?

They turn Ninja Gaiden into a casualized button-masher. A rep assured me they would keep the bone-crushing difficulty of the previous games, though the E3 demo indicated otherwise. Throughout the short one-level demonstration I button mashed my through each enemy easily. In previous games I would’ve been decimated immediately. Beating the previous games, even playing through half of them, was a badge honor. They were like playing fighting games, with each button press made a deliberate, conscious strategy. They (and the original 8-bit trilogy) were games to conquer. Instead I casually strolled my way through the entire level of this, mashing the Square button for each and every minute. The game even took control away from me to have Ryu Hayabusa perform scripted kills at random times. If I initiated those automatic attacks then I have no idea how I did so.

On top of that, QTE prompts were sprinkled randomly throughout each enemy encounter to keep things “fresh.” Quick Time Events in Ninja Gaiden. My god, have we come to this?

The only time that presented any semblance of difficulty was when the level got shrouded in fog and I couldn’t see an inch in front of Ryu’s face. Difficulty by visual obstruction, nice. That’s good when a game pulls pages from the Superman 64 playbook.

I managed to die once at the end-of-demo boss, a spidery mech with big glowing obvious metal legs to chop off. It did a big electro-shock wave thing that killed me. After that I just ran away each time it did that one move, ran back and button-mashed my way to victory.

Tell me this just a demo, and “it’s not representative of the final product.” Tell me Team Ninja just lowered the difficulty to ridiculous depths for the journalist crowd. Tell me Team Ninja had nothing to do with Metroid: Other M. Otherwise, I guess that’s yet another legacy franchise down for the count.

Kirby, Nintendo’s cute ball of murderous pink fluff, returns in a more traditional take than last year’s Epic Yarn. Less yarn, more difficulty and more friends find their way into Kirby Wii, a fun four-player action platformer that hews closer to Kirby Superstar and New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

Though I only played with two other people for the demo, players can select Kirby, King DeDeDe, Metaknight and/or Waddle Dee. I played as Kirby, who seemingly has an advantage over the other players, since the little fella can vacuum up baddies and absorb their powers, adding more options to his arsenal, which the other fellows are stuck with their innate abilities (MetaKnight always has a sword). He also had a more important role to play as he was the sole character who could suck up obstacles and shoot them out of the way, and even summon a giant sword to chop away obstacles that got in all of our way at several spots in the demo level. Since Kirby’s the one hoisting all the weight, sucking down enemies and things and clearing paths, does that make the other characters — and players — feel inadequate? I felt kind of bad for my human partners, who just sort of flailed about as I did most of the “work.”

Especially so during the boss fight, where I was only one granted a valuable bomb ability. I chucked bombs at the boss, who floated mid-air out of reach of everyone else, and everyone else croaked. I was the only left to claim victory. And yes, the adorable Kirby victory dance is back, as are hitching rides on friends’ backs and “kissing” each other to share recently-grabbed health items, just like in Kirby Superstar. It feels so much like the classic SNES title, it’s a wonder they didn’t just call it Kirby Superstar 2.

So, yes, a good time was had (finally!), but I do worry that players who don’t pick Kirby might get left out of a lot of the fun.

At first glance, I wasn’t even aware I was looking at Final Fantasy XIII-2. The incredibly bland character design of Serah and Noel, the new character who tags along with Lightning’s sister, made me think I was looking at some B-tier Tales game, not a AAA Final Fantasy title. But it ain’t the’ 90s anymore, so Final Fantasy probably belongs with the rest of the second stringers at this point. I doubt XIII-2, which now has More Stuff to Do than its predecessor, will change that.

To make the game more appealing to old-time fans there’s now a moogle named Mog who follows Serah and Noel around. He functions as a hidden treasure detector, and he also appears to transform into Serah’s bow and arrow weapon that she uses in battle. Go figure.

There’s also a Mog Clock now, which appears at the bottom of the screen when monsters are around. It acts as an indicator for battle initiation — smack the enemy while the Mog Clock’s still green and you’ll enter battle with advantages, like the enemies’ Stagger gauge will be filled from the start. Smack the enemy while the Mog Clock’s yellow and battles will proceed normally without any changes, and when the Mog Clock’s in the red, the enemy will have the advantage. Seems like it’s just more bells and whistles for something that Persona 3 summed up with hit enemy, enter battle with initiative, don’t hit enemy, lose initiative. It just feels like More Stuff to Do.

For some reason, monsters like Flans and Behemoths tag along in the party now, though you don’t have any actual direct control over them. In the demo, it was unclear how they actually joined, or why for that matter. The Beastmaster class in Final Fantasy V and Tactics allowed the capture of monsters. Maybe it’s like that, but it didn’t look like there was any special technique involved. They just showed up.

In battle, a gauge will fill up once in a while, making it possible to activate some powerful monster attack via Quick Time Event button presses. There were QTEs all over the place. At one point, I don’t know how it was activated, but Noel ran up a giant’s arm in a God of War fashion and unleashed a bunch of lengthy attacks thanks to the timed button presses. At another point, airships showed up and attacked the giant thanks to more QTEs. It didn’t really impress, it just felt like … More Stuff to Do.

Otherwise, the battle system’s the exact same as XIII‘s, though I barely had to change Paradigms at all in the demo. The good thing about XIII was how fast battles flowed. They were over in seconds in most cases, and the game rewarded you on how quickly you won. I don’t think dopey QTEs are really the answer for the “mash X to win” complaints the first game received. So now we get to mash more buttons besides X?

And finally, the world has opened up a bit, with town-like hubs scattered with NPCs to talk to. The map is no longer a single straight line either. There are branching paths, places conducive to exploring. It’s nice to have that back, I guess, so long as the places to explore are interesting. In the demo, it was more hallways. The curious addition of jumping — the first time the mainline series allows such an action — didn’t enhance the experience in any notable way. Just More Stuff to Do.

Yes, someone at Square Enix has been taking notes about what people want — less linearity, more to do in battle, more “player choice”, more fanservice, etc. — but it still feels shallow, like “improvements” for improvement’s sake, regardless of whether they work well or are any fun. Just More Stuff to Do. And all of that stuff was done better in other games, some of those games Square Enix made. Unless leaps and bounds are made until its release I consider the fantasy finally finished.

Somewhere along the line during the last decade, Marvel realized that they were one of the most powerful players in Hollywood. Spider-Man was earning the kind of money comic book movies hadn’t seen since Tim Burton’s Batman, Bryan Singer’s X-Men had actually given superheroes a bit of class and critical respect, plus it seemed the public’s interest in superhero movies was like a cockroach, unfazed even after countless disasters like Daredevil, Elektra, X-Men: The Last Stand, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, The Punisher and Ghost Rider. (Spider-Man 3 was good, shut up.) Maybe it’s because Marvel got a boost from the titanic success of DC’s The Dark Knight, hinting that perhaps superhero movies weren’t played out yet, they just needed, y’know, quality in order to keep people’s interest.

Whatever the reason for Marvel’s Tinseltown clout, it had it, and it made it a desirable commodity. Disney purchased it and folded it into its diabolically diverse portfolio of entertainment companies, like Pixar, ESPN and ABC. Was it this new source of cash that gave Marvel the cojones to finally form its own production company? I don’t know, I’m no Hollywood insider! But that’s exactly what they did, charting a course beginning with 2008′s Iron Man to create an actual cohesive movie universe, with recurring characters and an ongoing storyline and everything. Finally, comic book movies would be as interconnected and impenetrable as actual comic books!

And so Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and, er, Iron Man 2 started to build up to… something! And that something is coming in 2012: The Avengers, Marvel’s version of the Justice League. But before that could happen, even more major players would have to be introduced, namely Thor and Captain America, staples of the superhero team. So now Marvel has the gall to ask America to pay $16 a piece (you want to watch them in IMAX 3D, right?!) for what are essentially prologues to the main event. Does Thor have any meat on its bones or is it a skinny shrimp?

Thor posits that the Norse mythology is actually about a race of immortal beings possessing science so advanced that it appears to be magic to us humans. These beings, Asgardians, live far away in space and travel between worlds via a “rainbow bridge” that is actually a wormhole connecting far-off points of space. A long, long time ago, another race of aliens, Frost Giants, were mucking around Earth causing havok, so the Asgardians went to war with them, resulting in the utter defeat of the Frost Giants’ leader at the hands of Odin, Asgardian king.

Flash forward and Odin has two sons who could possibly take over his throne: Thor and Loki. Thor is fearless and a skilled warrior, but he’s a total blowhard meathead. Loki is quick-witted and silver-tongued, but let’s just say he won’t be winning any arm-wrestling competitions. We catch up with Odin as he’s about to crown Thor ruler of the Asgardians, but the proceedings are interrupted by some Frost Giants sneaking into Asgard’s vault in order to steal back a precious magical frost weapon that Odin took from them in the war. They’re handily defeated, but Thor takes this as an act of war and won’t take no for an answer when it comes to wanting to kick in some Frost Giant teeth. Odin’s response is more measured and considers the matter settled, except that Thor still thinks a genocide is in order and sneaks away with Loki and some friends in order to cause some ruckus for the Frost Giants.

Naturally they get their asses handed to them after an incredibly awesome battle scene and Odin has to come save the day. He’s mortified at Thor’s childish behavior and on top of revoking Thor’s status as successor to the throne, he decides his son needs a lesson in humility and banishes him to Earth as a mortal, stripping him of his hammer, enchanting it so that only one who is worthy of wielding it can harness its power.

Enter Natalie Portman, a woman so homely it’s understandable why she had to become an astrophysicist. She’s charting celestial anomalies in the middle of nowhere when the rainbow road bridge spits out Thor right in front of her Jeep, whom she promptly hits with said Jeep. What follows is a story about humility and Thor’s amazing body.

No, seriously. Chris Hemsworth’s physical transformation for the role of Thor gobsmacked the audience of the theater I was in. There’s a certain scene in the movie where Thor struts around shirtless and holy shit, you could’ve heard a pin drop. It makes Daniel Craig in Casino Royale look like Gary Oldman in Hannibal. (Look it up.) And the hormonal reaction isn’t limited to the audience, either. Natalie Portman acts like a horny teenager for most of the movie. All Thor has to do is flash his super-white smile (Asgardian toothpaste must be amazing) and it’s clean-up on aisle 3. The relationship that builds between Natalie Portman and Thor during the movie seems based less on genuine intimacy than on two pretty people wanting to jump each others’ bones.

Which takes us to Thor‘s overarching problem: there’s just about zero character development. The movie attempts to have character arcs, but can’t seem to figure out how to get characters smoothly from A to B. Instead, all of a sudden Natalie Portman (whose character is so paper-thin I don’t even remember her name) loves Thor so much that she’s willing to risk her life for him. Out of the blue, Thor develops some mercy and compassion. How? Fuck if I know. When he says the Frost Giants shouldn’t be wiped out, he gets asked “Why?” and I had the same goddamn question. Why not, Thor? If he could actually answer that question in a way that reflected the events he’d been through while on Earth, I’d be impressed.

Although Thor seems to be lacking in the character department, that’s not to say the movie’s a failure. Although Thor’s character arc is unconvincing, Thor as a character is a hoot, slugging back coffee and slamming mugs into the floor, demanding more. Loki is also a much more interesting villain than I thought he would be when I began watching, as well. I thought I’d be watching yet another Jafar-esque scheming political villain but instead got a self-loathing man who had a very complicated relationship to his father. Of course his actions boil down to typical comic book villain mustache-twirling in the end, but the motivations were a lot more interesting than I was suspecting. And surprisingly, Anthony Hopkins DOESN’T choose to odinsleepwalk through his role as Odin. He brings suitable gravitas and nobility to the role in a way that I don’t think very many actors left today can project. But man, what the hell is Rene Russo doing alive in this movie?

Oh, and the special effects? Pretty good! We’ve come a ways from Neo turning into a Nintendo 64 character during segments of The Matrix sequels; Thor‘s superheroics actually look impressive and authentic on the big screen. Asgard itself is an art design triumph, looking like a cross between Rivendell from Lord of the Rings and the futuristic Esthar from Final Fantasy VIII. And there’s just a sense of fun that was sorely lacking from, well, all of Marvel’s unsuccessful superhero movies. Yeah, Thor is about serious subjects like genocide and father-son relationships, but it’s also about goofy Asgardian warrior-buddies and a beefy guy squeezed into nothing more than a pair of jeans. The director, Shakespearean thespian Kenneth Branagh, was able to attach appropriate respectability to the Asgardian proceedings while balancing the ‘splodey/cheesy elements that summer movie-going audiences crave. Hopefully Thor‘s box office success helps Marvel realize that they need to put fun into their comic book movies. I just hope they remember to give their characters some, er, character next time, too.

Colter Stevens is a very confused man. He’s a helicopter pilot for the American military working in Afghanistan, but one day he wakes up on a train talking to a beautiful woman he’s never met before who seems to recognize him. Wondering what the hell is going on, he makes it to the restroom only to find that a stranger is staring back at him in the mirror. He barely has enough time to process this before the train blows up, killing everyone on board.

Gosh, what a short movie! But wait, Colter wakes up alone, trapped in a pod. A woman appears on a monitor asking him who blew up the train. He has no idea, so she tells him he’ll have to go back again, trying to determine who it was that caused the explosion and how. And so he is somehow sent back into the train, into another man’s body, forced to relive the tragedy again and again until he’s discovered the cause behind it all.

I found the subject matter to be incredibly intriguing. There’s so many places it could go from a premise like that! Is it an action-y take on Groundhog Day? A science fiction movie dealing with quantum theory and parallel universes? A fancy Twilight Zone episode? A romantic drama stealthily disguised by its genre trappings? A little of all of them, actually. And shockingly enough, it works! The tension necessary to keep the premise interesting after the first few spins through the scenario is able to be maintained through some entertaining red herrings. There’s also the added depth that (possibly) was unintended by the screenwriter, of the movie being a bit of a metaphor for the PTSD flashbacks that military servicemen are suffering through after serving in the war on terror.

But as entertaining as the movie is, I can’t help but feel that Source Code could’ve been more. My main complaint about Moon, if you’ll remember, was that it was good, not great. And I so desperately wanted it to be great. The same applies to Duncan Jones’ sophomore effort. He’s capable enough to assemble a good script, good actors (why don’t we see Jeffery Wright in more movies?!) and execute it all for peanuts compared to other bloated science fiction efforts. But the movie almost never breaks through to become something truly great that I can be passionate about. After leaving the theater, I wasn’t stunned by the movie’s quality, just satisfied.

I would worry about Duncan Jones becoming just another director cranking out solid but unspectacular movies, but something in Source Code gives me hope. The emotional climax of the piece delivers a moment of grace sublime enough that it frankly disappointed me when the movie continued (although I can see why it had to). But it let me know that the potential was there for Jones to step up to the plate and mature as a filmmaker, similar to the way that I didn’t really obsess over Christopher Nolan until The Prestige forced me to re-evaluate him. Hopefully Jones can get there in fewer than five movies, though.

My brothers and I got together last weekend to talk about something that’s been on our minds: The 3rd Birthday, the Parasite Eve series and what Square has been up to in general lately.

It was our first night together since Christmastime, so we were excited as hell to talk about this, and well, we started recording around 10 at night and we stopped around 2 in the morning.

So. We talk a lot! About a lot of things!

We cover the game with a fine-tooth comb from beginning to end, with plenty of (non-boring) tangents related to many other games (Resident Evil, Mass Effect, Illusion of Gaia, etc.) and ideas (sci-fi and art, etc.).

I was worried it’d be a rambling mess, but it’s kind of organic and coherent! Give it a listen why don’t you!

It’s in MP3 format, split apart into four segments (remaining two coming in the next few days) for palatable listening.

Part One.
Some Parasite Eve 1 talk and a lot about 3rd Birthday‘s premise and setting.

Spoiler Level: Low

Part Two.
All the gameplay and the entire plot up to the ending dissected.

Spoiler Level: HUUUGE

Part Three.
The entire ending under the microscope.

Spoiler Level: Monumental, and not just for The 3rd Birthday. PE1, PE2 and even Chrono Cross get spoiled.

Part Four.
Final thoughts, a lot of talk about recent and past (and future) Square games.

Spoiler Level: Minimal.

Hit the jump for “BEST OF…” video clips.

The Gameplay

The Ending

First Samus Aran, now Aya Brea. In Parasite Eve and Parasite Eve 2, the former NYPD detective kicked monsters up the Bronx and down the Battery with her mitochondrial super powers and customizable weaponry. Now, in The 3rd Birthday she’s kept locked in a prison cell and only let out to get her clothes ripped off.

How the mighty have fallen.

The same could be said for developer Square, which disappointed the entire damn world Internet for their recent Final Fantasy games, not to mention the Final Fantasy games stuck in development hell and Final Fantasy games with goofy titles. Square and I had our run-ins in the past (I like Final Fantasy VII just fine, by the way, did that not come across?), and I’ve defended them many times before (Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light is a damn good time), but that gets difficult when something like The 3rd Birthday comes along.

Announced way back in 2007 for Japanese cell phones, it made the leap to PSP in 2008 before landing with a thud here in the present. That’s an awful long time, longer when you consider Parasite Eve 2 came out in the year 2000. So, it’s been a decade. And this is what we get.

The 3rd Birthday‘s story gets my goat the most. A terrible time travel “mystery” story, Aya’s back in an apocalyptic Manhattan, invaded by tentacled monsters called the Twisted that only she can defeat by traveling backwards in time to affect specific battles in hopes of changing the present for the better. The story and gameplay mechanics are connected, which is something that Square’s always been good at (Materia in FFVII, Aya’s powers in the original Parasite Eve), as Aya actually “dives” into the soldiers who fought these past battles, and then dives between them to stay alive during gameplay. It’s like Quantum Leap if all Sam did was leap into soldiers with dumb AI.

It’s an interesting premise, but nothing is done with it beyond a dinky nod to Groundhog’s Day. This is no Chrono Trigger. Hell, it’s no Timecop. Typical of scripts from Square these days, the writing is nothing but empty-headed buzzwords and vague nonsense masquerading as deep (cheap) emotion. There are no characters in this story, only blank cut-outs. There’s a character named Blank. Not that he matters, since he and everyone else around Aya appear and disappear without warning. Did that person just die off? Who was he? Who knows? Who cares?

And it’s all presented so poorly. You know immediately who the Big Bad is, especially if you’re familiar with Square games (beware the long white hair), and seemingly huge events happen off-screen, while many others are explained in staid, boring exposition. The ending takes the (birthday?) cake, when in the game’s exasperating final minutes there are four or five revelations heaped upon each other one after the other. It’s horrendous storytelling that will confuse many and absolutely infuriate anyone familiar with Aya Brea and her past exploits.

What happened to the mature, realistic woman we were promised? Instead we get another submissive doormat who cries and whines and whimpers the entire game, and yes, there is an actual reason in the story for that. And it’s awful.

The actual game’s pretty awful, too. No one who’s worked on 3rd Birthday has actually played a video game before. Or at least a video game released since 2007. If they had they’d realize what a frustrating bore it is. Maybe they looked at videos of Resident Evil 4 or Gears of War, or heard of them, but they didn’t get what made those third-person shooters work. They’re empowering, well-paced action experiences. 3rd Birthday does everything it can to keep the player feeling weak and unrewarded.

Aya’s main power, the ability to dive into other soldiers, goes unexplored after the first two hours. It’s neat at first, diving from one guy to the next to move them to strategic spots on the battlefield, or to gain access to new weapons like sniper rifles and grenade launchers, but that’s it. Beyond the first boss encounter, which requires diving between guys on two different floors of a parking garage, that’s all the game does with the system. There’s nothing interesting done with level design, as it’s all flat arenas with the occasional upper tier for that sniping position. But those go away after a while for the sake of more dull monster arenas.

It’s possible to dive into enemies after “staggering” them, but only after pumping them full of lead for far too long. Enemies, and the bosses especially, have a shitload of HP, so fights aren’t difficult, just laborious. One boss encounter, where Aya floats in space and can only shoot — she can’t move — just had me pressing the L and R buttons forever, waiting for the damn thing to die. It’s possible to dive into other bodies, but there was no need for most of the time. I was aghast at just how big of a slog it was, and to have that same boss show up again towards the end was like a slow-motion kick in the face.

Besides diving, there’s shooting. Lots of shooting. And grenade tossing. And dodging. Normally all the makings of a fine game, except you’re doing this in repetitive dull environments (the New York City setting is wasted) while at the mercy of a finicky lock-on system. Often it would lock on to an enemy behind Aya while there are four bastards charging at her from front. When there are games like Peace Walker that offer a surprising degree of manual aiming on the PSP, it chaps my hide they’d go with a botched auto-targeting system. Besides that, every other cliche from the Modern (Warfare) Shooter Manual shows up: death ray satellite gun, long-winded and unwelcome vehicle sections, chest high walls everywhere, C4-planting tedium and locked doors that can be unlocked by killing every enemy in the room. Hum. Drum.

Not that it matters since Aya never feels like she’s stronger, but there’s a basic weapon upgrading feature, and a DNA augmentation board that grants random passive abilities during battle. It grants only the chance of stuff like critical hits and ammo regeneration happening during battle, and that part of the game isn’t even explained in the main story anyway. It’s clearly optional, and with no control over the abilities, it might as well not be there to begin with.

The much-criticized clothing-tearing feature has no bearing on the gameplay. Aya’s health is relative to the soldiers she inhabits, so she could have full health one moment, half the next, or next to none the next. The ripped jeans and bra-revealing tears really just comes off as otaku pandering. Nothing more. The useless costumes that unlock after beating the game confirms it. They’re great for anyone who likes to play Barbie, but useless for anyone who wants an ounce of substance from their games. Aya’s fetish costumes are not like the camouflage from the Metal Gear Solid games, or say, armor from any number of games. They don’t grant any advantages. There are no new skills, or spells to learn. Or anything. The game is the same at the beginning as it is at the very end. Yet Square wants Japanese players to replay the game an astounding 30 times to unlock Lightning’s threads from Final Fantasy XIII. Sounds like a special rung of Hell.

Unless you’re really curious (despite what the devs may have said in Famitsu, this is definitely a sequel to Parasite Eve 2), I’d avoid this barebones, threadbare shooter with what is probably the worst story Square has ever penned. It’s intolerable, one of the most joyless, unpleasant experiences I’ve had in a while.

And this baby only took ten years to deliver.

That hasn’t left a lot of free time to devote to making snide comments about A Troll in Central Park.

And that’s my fault. Luckily, Tim has been keeping Grump Factory FLUSH with content in the meantime, which I knew would be an advantage to sharing the blog with another esteemed author. So kudos to him!

So what have I been doing in the meantime, besides slowly killing myself in pursuit of a degree? Same as always: watchin’ movies, TV and playin’ games! Let’s see if I can quickly touch on the stuff I’ve seen and am not planning on writing up in greater detail:

House: No, not the “Holmes in a hospital” weekly procedural; I mean the 1970s psychedelic Japanese horror comedy. The first feature film of a visionary experimental film director, House is about a group of Japanese schoolgirl archetypes that visit an old woman’s country house during summer vacation, where they’re preyed upon by the woman’s ghost who feeds on them to rejuvenate herself. It’s an absolute scream of a movie (pun intended!), full of carnivorous pianos, flying decapitated heads and wacky special effects flourishes. Everyone should check out Criterion’s superb DVD and Blu-Ray release of it.

Tangled: Disney’s return to 3D after the quick two-dimensional detour of The Princess and the Frog. An adaptation of the Rapunzel fairy tale, it’s a slight letdown after its gorgeous, charming, hilarious predecessor. Is that to say that the movie is awful? Helllll no, it’s still a giant leap from classic Disney misfires such as The Aristocats, The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Pocahontas. Where the movie really shines are the hilarious and endearing sidekicks and secondary characters. Rapunzel and Flynn Rider are genial enough, but a little unmemorable. Where the real weaknesses lie are in the lack of memorable musical numbers and the weak villain. An overbearing mother figure? Ehhhh. Glad the movie wasn’t a trainwreck, but The Princess and the Frog raised my expectations for Disney’s releases from hereon out.

The Decalogue: From the director of the sublime The Double Life of Veronique came a ten-part series of short films focusing on the everyday, but compelling, moral difficulties faced by the residents of a Polish apartment complex. I’ve only seen parts 1-3 so far, and the results are… interesting, even if it confirms some of the American stereotypes about foreign movies. Often bleak, frustratingly vague and slow as molasses, there’s still an intriguing core to the exercise that I’m excited to see revisited in the other seven parts I have ahead of me.

Enslaved: An action/adventure title that slipped under just about everyone’s radar, Enslaved (along with Heavy Rain) rekindles my interest in Western gaming. Yeah, it has the typical God of War-inspired combat and upgradeable weaponry and skills and blah blah blah… What really makes this game special is the amount of care that got put into the story that the game hangs off of. Loosely inspired by the classic Asian story Journey to the West, Enslaved features a man named Monkey who escapes from slavers with a plucky young woman named Tripp, whom forces him to help her get back home by enslaving him with a headband that can kill him with the push of a button. It’s wonderfully told and acted in exquisitely-animated cutscenes, which really make you empathize with the characters. It was a bit of a financial flop, so finding it on the cheap should be easy.

Valkyria Chronicles II: The follow-up to my personal favorite PS3 game, Valkyria Chronicles II had a lot to live up to, and already had a few strikes against it for being downgraded to a portable system and for changing the setting to a military training high school. Even though the characters are not even half has likable as the original crew, there’s still a spark in some of the designs and the gameplay largely translated to the portable system, albeit with much smaller combat areas, due to memory restraints. With new units, unit specialization trees and a tighter focus on short and sweet skirmishes, it’s still a fine S-RPG, and one of the most unique on the market.

Kirby’s Epic Yarn: Kirby games typically come out late in a system’s life and are typically fantastic. Even though this didn’t start out as a Kirby game, this one keeps up the tradition by being an effortlessly charming platformer, full of inventive ways of making the player go “Awwww!!” and little twists on the simple platforming that spice up the very easy gameplay. It’s a perfect choice to just chill out and relax to, and it may well be one of the most gorgeous games ever released on the Wii.

Panzer Dragoon Saga may not have much cachet with gamers these days (what does, besides Call of Duty? olol), but make no mistake: the name used to be whispered amongst gamers beyond just the hardest of the hardcore. Sega’s last hurrah for their doomed Saturn game console. The bizarre RPG follow-up to a rail-shooting franchise. The pathetically small print run which ultimately led to its infamy. Panzer Dragoon Saga was critically acclaimed when it released, but its legacy afterward became the stuff of myths, due to the fact that it printed only 6,000 copies initially, with the final units shipped at the end of its production run totaling 30,000. Keep in mind that most games these days have to sell through at least more than 100,000 units in order to be considered successful. Panzer Dragoon Saga is something of a holy grail amongst video game collectors, a unicorn. One rarely spots a copy in the wild, and if one does, one must be ready to pay dearly for it.

I never, ever thought I would come across a copy outside of, say, eBay. But one day, I found myself on the end of an offer to sell me the game for a price which, while still quite high, I knew I would never beat. I grimaced, forked over the change, and waited for the copy to arrive in the mail. You readers already know full-well the joyous bounty of the package I received, but the question still remained: Is Panzer Dragoon Saga all it’s cracked up to be?

Panzer Dragoon Saga takes place in the same universe as (and chronologically takes place after) the first two games in the franchise. The world was devastated by some unspecified calamity in the past that decimated an ancient, hyper-advanced civilization. The survivors of this apocalypse could only eke out a meager existence and over the millennia humanity once again divides itself into factions, the most powerful being the Empire. Aggressive mutants also roam the landscape, making survival harsh. Bioweapon dragons also seem to exist, rare relics of the Ancient civilization.

Edge, the main character, is a grunt in the massive Empire and is currently assigned to guard an archaeological dig site out in the boonies. It’s a pretty quiet gig until one day, a rogue faction of Imperial soldiers led by a charismatic officer named Craymen attacks the site, stealing one of the recent mysterious finds: what looked like a perfectly preserved young woman buried inside the rock. In the ensuing chaos, Edge and his compatriots are shot and left for dead. Surprisingly, though, Edge survives the attack unharmed and happens across a mysterious dragon that takes to him. Using the dragon, he vows to take revenge on Craymen and discover the secret behind why the mysterious girl was so valuable.

It’s not the most original story in the universe. If you’re a keen observer, you’re probably already saying to yourself, “Oh this is just Castle in the Sky, that Miyazaki film from the 80s.” And you’d be right. The dopey young man thrust into an adventure bigger than he could possibly comprehend, the mysterious young woman with special powers, the mutinous soldier from the powerful, villainous Empire… It’s been done before. Especially by JRPGs. It seems like every other JRPG is just retelling the story of Castle in the Sky with a few tweaks here and there. But the story isn’t why anyone would want to play Panzer Dragoon Saga, though. No, the jewel in its crown is the battle system.

When I mentioned that this was an RPG sequel to an on-rails shooter, you were probably wondering how the hell that would play, right? Would they just have it be like a typical shooter but with hit points and stats? Would they turn it into a fully turn-based affair with enemies lining up on one side and your party members on the other? Instead of going with either lazy, uncreative approach, Team Andromeda, the internal Sega studio that pumped out the three Saturn installments in the franchise, decided to blaze a trail and try something so off-beat and unusual that it could only work in a game like Panzer Dragoon Saga. It all starts with the layout of each individual battle. It’s always just you and your dragon: no extra party members you pick up along the way or anything. Your dragon and the enemy unit are placed on a four quadrant circle where both you and the enemy can circle around each other. This is necessary because certain enemies have weak points behind them, or in front or on the sides (or consequently, may be immune to attacks from a certain direction), and it’s up to the player to position himself in the quadrant where he has the biggest advantage at any given time.

This becomes more difficult than it sounds when the player’s action gauge comes into play. Much like the Final Fantasy series,  in Panzer Dragoon Saga there’s several gauges that fill up with the passage of time that determine when and what actions the player can perform. Shooting with the player’s gun or using the dragon’s homing lasers uses up one full gauge, where some special attacks may take all three. And while the player is positioning himself in battle, the gauge stops filling up. So players who constantly shift position will have to deal with the enemy getting more turns to act, and vice versa. There’s a tension between keeping an advantageous position in relation to the enemy while also moving as little as possible in order to build up your action gauge.

When the player actually chooses to act, more complexity is added to the formula. You can attack with Edge’s gun, which is a one-shot attack that deals concentrated damage to one target. You can equip different gun types for different effects, such as extra damage to an enemy’s weak point. The other method of physical attack is using the dragon’s homing lasers, which send out lasers that lock on to multiple enemy targets at once, but deal less damage. This can work well with swarms of many weaker enemies or bosses that have more than one target on their bodies. Other options include the omnipresent Use Item or selecting a Berserk technique. Berserk techniques are what Panzer Dragoon Saga calls its magic system. As your dragon levels up, it learns new Berserk techniques from different disciplines: Attack, Agility, Defense and Spiritual classes. Each technique uses up “BP” which is the MP of the game. You need at least one full action gauge to use a technique and many of the more powerful techniques require two or three full gauges to perform.

There’s also a whole other aspect to how your dragon performs in battle. You see… your dragon can actually re-spec its stats on the fly. While you gain some stats uniformly as you level up in the game, you can redistribute the balance of them whenever you want to in the game, inside or outside of battle. If you want to take points away from your Spiritual power and Defense to create an agile, offense-driven dragon, you can. Or you can go the other way or mix and match between any of the other classes of dragon as you like. And as you do so, the appearance of your dragon actually morphs. At certain key points in the game, your dragon will actually morph into a new specialized class of dragon that has access to new techniques in its chosen area of expertise that other classes aren’t able to select. There’s also other tangible benefits to specializing your dragon’s class. When all your action gauges are full in battle, your dragon will be granted a boon based on its area of expertise. Defensive dragons have regenerating HP, Spiritual dragons have regenerating BP, Attack dragons will randomly counterattack the enemy’s actions, etc.  This aspect of the game allows for a lot of personal style on the player’s part as well as making subsequent playthroughs potentially tangibly different than the original.

As you can see, no other RPG has ever even ATTEMPTED what Panzer Dragoon Saga accomplished in using its shooter heritage in such a creative way as well as putting in some elements that are recognizably from RPGs. In the best RPGs, you don’t dread battles, you rejoice at them. Panzer Dragoon Saga engages the player enough so that it’s never as simple as mashing the attack button. In fact, several battles are set up almost like puzzles, where the player has to figure out the pattern of positioning and targeting in order to make the enemy vulnerable to attack. On top of all that, it also has a rating system at the end of the battle which determines item drops as well as the amount of experience and Dyne (the game world’s currency) it gives the player. Finish a battle swiftly and without a scratch and you can be sure you’ll have an Excellent rating. Merely scrape by without getting killed? Sorry, bud, booby prize for you.

In fact, with all this hubbub about the game’s battle system, it’s often easy to forget that there’s actually things you do besides get into battles! There’s on-foot as well as dragon-based exploration that you do in the game. But the reason that it probably never gets mentioned is because it’s bizarre and often unsatisfying. The dragon-based exploration is pretty standard. You have the usual flight controls of controlling your dragon’s elevation as well as its banking on turns while pressing an acceleration button. You fly around 3D environments and interact with objects such as switches, treasure chests and doors by targeting them with your laser. The extremely limited draw-in range for graphics means that unless you use the in-game map, you’re bound to get lost in some of the game’s more expansive dungeons. (I only found out about the map button a few hours before I beat the game. Read your manuals, kids!)

The REALLY awkward stuff comes with the on-foot exploration. The controls of Edge running around are… unsatisfying, to put it succinctly. It just never feels like you’re actually running around versus just changing position of a bunch of polygons in the environment. And the method of interaction with objects is… the exact same as it was on a dragon! Which means that whenever you want to talk to a villager or examine an item, you have to make a TARGETING RETICULE pop up, hover over the object you want to interact with, and click. Whaaaaaaaat. This has got to be the fault of limited memory on the Saturn not allowing for a separate interface for these sections. Even more bizarre is that everything has a “far away” description and an “up close” description, usually adding little to any relevant information.

While the cumbersome interactions with your environments may be glossed over in other reviews, you can’t scan through any Panzer Dragoon Saga article without hearing about the game’s unique aesthetic. And it’s all true. There’s an understated, asymmetrical beauty to the game’s art design. The rudimentary graphical potential of the Sega Saturn is worked around in order to craft haunting alien landscapes and creatures. In fact, the Saturn’s technical limitations were most successfully exploited in this area. It’s no secret that the Saturn has trouble rendering 3D graphics. There would be moments running through a hallway in a village in this game where the system would seem to slow to a crawl, as if it was hyperventilating, having to breathe through a paper bag in order to render the meager amount of polygons on the screen. This meant that villages couldn’t be crawling with NPCs for Edge to interact with, as the Saturn would most likely melt if more than two or three people were on screen at once. This lends the game a very isolated, lonely atmosphere, as if you can palpably feel that humanity is dwindling in the post-apocalyptic world. The dark palette of colors also gives the game an uncharacteristically moody feel for an RPG adventure.

And that’s important, because Panzer Dragoon Saga never feels like a carefree adventurous romp. There’s never an “I’M FLYYYYYYYYYIIIIIIIIIIIIIING” scene like in The Neverending Story or something. Everything feels so damn somber, probably due to the fact that the world ended and what’s left is a harsh life for most. If you’re looking to unwind with a game, don’t look here. Yeah, battles are fun and interesting, but the world just felt oppressive. Diving back into it for another play session seemed to take something out of me. Possibly due to the fact that if I looked at the grainy textures and aliased polygons long enough my eyes hurt. Seriously, half of the reason it took me so long to finish the game is the damn headaches I would get from my HDTV.  It’s only a 12 or 15 hour game!

Another big help in the brooding atmosphere in the game is the soundtrack. Haunting is a good word to describe it. Everything from melancholy backdrops to deserted ruins to anthemic tunes to cruise through the initial areas of the game with, the soundtrack is really unlike any other you’ve heard, and I recommend finding a copy of it online (to torrent, obviously). It also has a really great closing number, complete with vocals! 1998 was a really good year for that, I guess. Another component to the aural properties of the game is the voice acting. Cutscenes are fully-voiced, and in a really strange twist, you can control the speed of the delivery of dialogue in some circumstances by pressing the triggers of the Sega Saturn’s analog pad. Even more bizarre is that although the game purports to have a fictional language that characters are speaking, the majority of the game is actually in Japanese, subtitled into English. If you have an ear for languages, you can hear some passages that sound totally unlike Japanese, and then scenes where everyone in the room is speaking Japanese. A really odd thing, and I never found out if I was indeed right, or what the reasoning was behind who spoke what language and when.

With all the things that the game does well, and all the effusive praise that gets thrown it’s way, you might think that the game is perfect. It’s not. There’s weaknesses to the game besides the graphical limitations of the hardware it was made for. The story, whose premise is simple enough at the beginning, gets murky and surprisingly mired in the pre-existing Panzer Dragoon canon from the previous two games. It seems especially the story from Panzer Dragoon Zwei plays a big part in explaining some of the twists that come in the final act of the game that left me scratching my head. And the ending… hoo boy. It’s hard to remember, since diehard fans of Final Fantasy VII like to pretend the game was perfect in every aspect, but when it came out people were left extremely confused by the ambiguous ending to the game. It seems that Sega took a page out of that book for the ending to Panzer Dragoon Saga, where I was left asking myself, “Wait, did the game just END?” I mean, there’s a final boss and some cutscenes that follow… but they never carry with them any weight or finality to suggest, “That’s all you’re getting, move along now!” There’s also the remainders of 32-bit RPG design left in the game. Lengthy cutscenes you can’t skip? Boss battles coming one after another with no chance to save or heal? Cutscenes happening BEFORE these boss fights?! Check, check and double-check.

But while it’s not a perfect game, it is an extraordinary one. No one has attempted a melange of shooting and traditional RPG gameplay like this game has. Even after it achieved cult status and became the stuff of 32-bit legend, we never saw another game, not even in the Panzer Dragoon franchise, attempt the same style of gameplay again. To me, this is madness. You’d think every company developing an RPG would be looking for a way to set its own entry apart, and Panzer Dragoon Saga showed a terrific way to do that. So why hasn’t it been more influential? I think for the same reason other pioneering Sega franchises, such as Phantasy Star, ultimately were forgotten by the industry: no one really played them. To be influenced by a work of art, you have to have actually experienced it in some way, such as hearing a piece of music or seeing a painting. For a game, you have to actually play it to see what all the fuss is about. And with the Saturn’s already minuscule audience and criminally small print runs in the U.S. thanks to the Saturn’s even more precipitous nosedive in 1998, there was almost no chance that anyone who wasn’t specifically looking for this game would ever pick it up. Hell, it even wound up in clearance bins before it got disappeared from stores.  No one I know has actually laid a finger on the game. Apparently, Panzer Dragoon Saga never made an in-road with developers, to influence their game design into future generations.

One would think that simply re-releasing the game could help it garner the audience it always deserved, but there’s a few unfortunate roadblocks to that. First of all, Saturn emulation seems to either be extremely difficult or the Saturn is so unpopular that few people have ever bothered to try to emulate it in the first place. Secondly, the source code to the game was actually lost, which is a travesty. You’d think that a company like Sega could at least keep track of where its GAMES are, but no dice. Thirdly… is there even an audience for this game? Apparently, GameTap actually had the rights to put Panzer Dragoon Saga on its service, where it had a few other Saturn games, and declined to do so, stating that it didn’t think the demand was there. And since nary a ripple went through the Internet when that happened… are they right? Is Panzer Dragoon Saga so forgotten, so ancillary that its absence from the collective video game canon goes by unnoticed? Its funeral unattended?

Perhaps so. How many of you out there were even aware of this game before reading this article? Even now, what recourse do you have to experience Panzer Dragoon Saga? Sega Saturns are relatively cheap, but the game regularly sells for $150 and up on eBay. How can a curious gamer play this forgotten chapter of RPG history? I wish I could tell you that the game was worth any price… but $150 is ridiculous. Don’t pay that much for it unless you’re an obsessive collector of gaming ephemera like myself. If you have to question if Panzer Dragoon Saga could possibly be worth that much, forget about it right now. It’s an elegant, elegiac entry in Sega’s storied past, but it’s not the best game or even RPG ever. It deserves to be remembered and grieved, however… like a candle in the wind~