Persona 4 Golden - part 2

While part one of this two post series was all about Persona 4 Golden as a story, this part covers it as a game. Ultimately its success doesn't come down to anything drastically surprising. It simply has damn good implementations of important game design principles.

1. Day by day

Here we ask a simple question: what enables Persona 4 to be a game of meaningful choices? Answer: time, or more specifically, time as a limited resource. Most things in the game require the player to spend their precious in-game time. These choices are made on a day-by-day, basis, with most days taking just a couple of minutes. Occasionally the game hijacks some days away from you due to scripted events and they usually take more time but that's fine too - these events move the plot forward after all (or in some cases they are just hilarious character buildings events). What's important is that no matter what you do, your days with the game are numbered. If there was a way to somehow get more days, the day-to-day routine would lose its meaning. At the same time, time is the most elementary resource in the game: it can be converted into anything else, but nothing can be converted into time.

To put all that in another way, it's not possible to grind to undo choices. In most RPGs if you misspend your resources, you can correct the mistake by farming more. In P4 you can do this for money and experience, but every time you make a choice on how to spend your time, there is no taking back. There are ways to save time of course - most of these available to players who have high understanding of the game and a strong sense of overall strategy. For instance, being able to complete dungeons in one day each requires some planning and preparation, but pays off by freeing days for other uses. Overall, the entire game is one huge optimization problem, where individual parts are small but interconnected. Fortunately you don't need to solve the entire problem before launching the game. Figuring out your schedule can be done as you go which is what ultimately makes the game interesting.

Of course, there are other ways to play the game. In truth, the first playthrough is more likely spent exploring what the game has to offer and getting familiar with stuff. However, given that this was the fourth playthrough for me, solving the optimization problem through day-to-day decisions was the biggest appeal. Whether it is for exploration or optimization, it remains a fact that the game has an extremely high frequency for meaningful choices. Considering that each day takes only minutes and most of them contain two time slots you can fill with whatever you want, you are very highly involved almost constantly. Ironically enough, I actually consider the player being more involved outside dungeons, even though they are touching the controls way less. Although you seemingly do a lot in dungeons, the stakes of actions taken are much lower. This doesn't mean the dungeons are boring. It just means your strategic, long-term decision-making is put on the backseat while in them - or you could consider them tests of how good your strategy is.

I have another example where limited resources lead to more meaningful choices when overall strategy is concerned. There is one major difference between Fire Emblem 7 and 8: the latter has random battles spawn on the world map, and also a challenge tower that can be attempted as many times as the player likes. Meanwhile, 7 is just a series of battles, each with a set amount of enemies. This means that experience is a limited resource in 7, and infinitely available in 8. Distributing experience to characters in FE7 is extremely important whereas in FE8 you can always put in more hours to correct your mistakes. The temptation to use your highest leveled characters to kill tough enemies is much higher if you can make up for the lost experience later whereas in FE7 you need to plan more carefully so that your weaker characters who need the most experience get the killing blow. Well, I did that in FE8 anyway because it saves time. Still, moral of the story: if at least one central resource is limited, choices regarding that resource are more meaningful.

This discourse gets quite close to one popular argument: are respecs good or bad (Diablo 2 is a central game in this argument). However, I don't want to go there as it is quite far removed from the topic. Just to wrap up, it's not just the limited nature of time as a resource in P4 that makes it so amazing; it's also due to the fact that choice frequency is staggeringly high in the game. One factor that also contributes that I haven't mentioned yet is that all days are not created equal so you don't have the exact same choices available each day. However there aren't too many unique days either, so for almost everything you can do, there will be multiple opportunities. So overall, the day-to-day structure gives the game a rather unique appeal and is a huge contributor to its charm.

2. Musings about chance

Time to go into broken record mode. This may, therefore, feel immensely familiar: enemies should be dangerous, while also quick to defeat. Especially in games where combat is frequent, nothing quite destroys a game like battles that drag. I want to talk about this again because Persona 4 is a good example of how things should be. Much like many other Shin Megami Tensei titles, enemies in P4 are really, really dangerous (at least on hardest difficulty). If you're unlucky or poorly prepared, they can wipe out the entire party. So, unless you want to chance it, it's best to give enemies as few turns as possible - ideally, zero. You don't exactly get to save all that often either, so getting wiped can set you back for like an hour. Saving between dungeon floors does become easier if you get a skill that allows you to go back, but if you go back during a floor, it always resets.

Typically, the entire process is fast. You either kill or disable most enemies in the first round, and usually the entire fight ends during the second round at latest. It may sound like a cakewalk, but it really isn't - it's just that battles are decided and concluded quickly. When there's hundreds of battles in the game, this is more than welcome. It's not as much about the challenge of a single battle, as it is about managing an entire floor's worth of battles (or more) because abilities that allow you to perform those lightning fast takedowns have costs, and those costs do pile up. Let's talk about two costs. The first cost is the cost of learning. In order to know your enemies' weaknesses, you have to try stuff on them either blindly or by making educated guesses. This means that encountering a new powerful foe is especially dangerous because you possess no certain knowledge of how to disable it quickly.

There's a sidetrack here. While I generally like that allies have been given more skill options through social links, some of the things Rise learns when you level up her S.Link are a bit too strong. At some point she can show you every detail about enemies for no cost, which takes away the cost of learning. Of course at that stage of the game you are probably kind of snowballing out of control anyway (see the next section). The second cost is the cost of certainty. As stated, it's not that enemies are guaranteed to kill you, they just have a chance of doing so. Which means you can take things slow and be more conservative with SP, but that means rolling the dice more. Using abilities generally means you don't have to take the chance - so, basically, you pay for the certainty of success. As a bonus you also end battles faster. This is a common design pattern in RPGs.

As such, the cost of certainty comes down to the essentials of game design: meaningful choices. When faced with a combat situation, you have to assess the stakes (e.g. how long has it been since you saved), the risk (how likely it is to actually lose) and of course the cost itself. In some cases there are more than two options, with varying costs and risks. Chance is an important part of this equation - the dynamic becomes different in a fully deterministic game - you would maybe choose between different types of costs, or instead of chance, you are betting against uncertain future (e.g. "do I need this resource more in the future"). In skill-based games, chance can be substituted with player ability (e.g. "can I pull this off"). However, in turn-based RPGs, most of the time such choices are made against the RNG. For an extreme example of how important chance management is, check my boss analysis of Digital Devil Saga's Demi-Fiend

Persona 4 also uses chance to give the player freebies. Most of the time these freebies allow you to use less abilities. The most common ones in P4 are follow-up attacks, which may occur when an enemy is knocked down. These generally knock more enemies down, except Chie's which instantly kills another enemy. P4G adds a few other similar freebies, all of which are welcome. Of course, critical hits are perhaps the most wide-spread general freebie, and in many games you can also manage your critical hit rate in some way (P4 - not an exception). While this may sound a bit like "random shit happens - I have no idea why", let me assure you that it's very welcome. It really helps in keeping battles interesting, and it does feel good to get a freebie - especially if you really needed it.

3. Option expansion

I have touched this topic several times in the past. It's a pet theory of mine that I've never quite put onto paper in full. I use it to explain why I think a lot of games - RPGs in particular - generally get easier and easier the further you are into them. At least if you have like half a clue about what you're doing. As the name suggests, the theory applies to games where the player is given more and more options as the game progresses - which, coincidentally, covers most RPGs as it's kind of a consequence of having all those character development aspects. So, in short, the available option space expands. This also means that the further we are into the game, the higher the discrepancy between choices made by different players will be. So, from the designer's perspective, the later the game goes, the harder it is to predict.

This puts the designer in a somewhat tricky situation. Not everyone utilizes the expanded option space as efficiently, and a lot of people play RPGs for their content. Therefore it's important that anyone can actually finish the game but at the same time it also very likely leads into a situation where highly optimized builds bulldoze through everything. Not to mention that - unless the system is quite simple - just predicting all the possible interactions between options is very unlikely to succeed. So, the theory states that it's near impossible to create challenges while at the same time accommodating multiple strategies and skill level. Games generally have difficulty levels to deal with these problems, but often they use some kind of numeric scaling - and as such, numbers don't actually matter that much if the player can completely ignore some of them.

You see, often it's not just that the number of options increases over time - usually the later options are also stronger. This further complicates things, especially in systems where the player has more control about the order in which they acquire their options. The Shin Megami Tensei franchise has one signature breaking point in skill development: Mediarahan - a healing spell that fully heals all allies. Before that point it may take multiple actions to heal your party to full HP, but after that point, one spell is 100% guaranteed to do so (unless someone died). Ultimately you also get a spell that heals all status effects as well, but as a leap it's way less significant than Mediarahan. This one spell completely shuts down any challenges that are designed to whittle down the party's HP faster than they can heal it.

There isn't anything particularly overpowered about Mediarahan, mind you. Many RPGs have some absolutely bonkers, broken shit that, once attained, becomes such a dominant strategy that the game might as well play itself. However, a dominant strategy is just an extreme instance of this phenomenon - it's a strategy that shuts down everything in the game. Usually, slightly too useful skills just shut down certain dynamics from the game. Generally, any options that completely negate something with 100% success rate inherently reduce the impact of certain types of dynamics to zero. It doesn't matter that enemies hit for, say, quadruple damage if all they get is the quadruple of zero due to players entirely avoiding the effects of the attack. There's a cornucopia of examples available (from various games) when it comes to skills that make actual numbers meaningless.

If you look at the toughest boss in Persona 4, Margaret, the first thing she does is to negate any immunities characters may have. This is a recurring theme with optional super-bosses. They simply have to negate some of the player's options entirely, because those options would make it too difficult to create an interesting challenge. Super-bosses are also usually designed for characters close to the maximum level, and access to all options in the game.They are often rather elaborate designs that tend to require very specific things from the player's strategy. In other words, in order to truly create a challenging boss, the designer needs to artificially cut the option space back to a manageable size. While this tends to create rather puzzle-like encounters, it's still welcome as opposed to players being able to absolutely destroy everything in the game with no resistance whatsoever. Of course such encounters should be optional content.

Conclusions

This post has been open so long in my editor that it's time to just release it. Admittedly I'm getting lazier with this blog, and I should probably change the way I treat games. Probably there were more things I intended to mention in this post, but as it stands it sums up the main points I had to say about the game pretty well. The thing about Persona 4, is that it's just incredibly enjoyable to play at every turn. A few sidequests aside, pretty much everything, every single moment, in the game feels meaningful. Although this post explored some dimensions, there's definitely more. There's just this sense of overarching quality that has succeeded in capturing my full attention ever since I started the game for the first time on my PS2, all the way to when I finished my fourth playthrough on Vita.

The re-release has its flaws. Rise in particular gains way too strong abilities if you level up her social link. Likewise the unique, ultimate powers of Chie and Naoto are clearly out of whack. The new very hard difficulty is a bit lazy (it's the same as hard, but you get less experience and money). The new optional dungeon is also quite stupid, and a bit lazy. The original game also had some flaws, like the fact you absolutely had to be on a second playthrough in order to access everything in the game. This is especially annoying for me because they retained this requirement in Golden, meaning I would have to play it once again... but then again, I have already beaten Margaret in the original game in it wasn't really the most challenging secret boss so not a whole lot is lost.

I hope this two part series was useful for understanding why Persona 4 is the perfect fit for me. That way it should also shed some important light on my other posts about other games. I haven't actually played that many games recently, so I have no clear idea what I'm going to write about next.

Dragon Age: Origins (and a little bit of Mass Effect) - Part 1

Time to do another package deal. I have never written about Mass Effect in this blog even though I have played the first two. I'm pretty sure it happened before starting this blog so I'm not exactly obligated to according to my own rules. Dragon Age on the other hand is a game I have played quite recently, and it has a lot in common with Mass Effect. Might as well throw them all together. I have touched the topic of BioWare games earlier but now it's time to dig a bit deeper into one specific title. As usual I took forever and a half to start this game. I think I first wanted to play it as soon as it was released. I ended up playing it in 2014. Back then I didn't own a very modern PC, and I feared the PS3 version would not give me the same experience. I also had quite recently played a modded version of Baldur's Gate, and figured I might want to mod Dragon Age a bit too. "A bit" turned out to be about 30 individual mods, although most of them were simply graphical or environmental improvements.

1. Can you hear the dice?

For people who didn't like Mass Effect's rather close relatedness to first person shooters, Dragon Age was refreshing news. It promised to return back to the good old times of Baldur's Gate, giving the player control of the entire party from a bird's eye view. Although BG was a bit tedious to play at times, I was still looking forward to this. Although the game draws its inspiration from BG, a lot of things have naturally been modernized. The combat system is also BioWare's own instead of ye good old Dungeons & Dragons (well, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons back in the day). It's not that far removed from, say, the fourth edition of D&D really. Generally it's fair to say that things have been streamlined all over the place. Inspiration has been drawn from my all time favorite source (sarcasm detector says beep!): MMORPGs. Abilities are now cooldown-based with stamina/mana cost added on top.

Back in the day, most abilities, including spells, had limited uses per in-game day. This led to hilarious amounts of resting at times, but as a system it wasn't all that bad. Cooldowns on the other hand are often more spammable, and unfortunately this shows in their design: they are really lackluster. It's nice and all to have a bunch of skills, but you know what's nicer? Skills that have an actual noticeable effect. Sure, most of the higher level skills have noticeable effects, but that still leaves a ton of relatively irrelevant skills to fill the player's action bar. I do like to think there's a reason for this - at least in the source. Having an action bar (or two) full of active abilities gives the player something to do while their character is auto-attacking endless mobs in MMORPGs. Whether pressing buttons in a sequence is interesting or not is another question in itself.

Looking back to Baldur's Gate there actually are not nearly as many active abilities - and most of them have use limits much stricter than cooldowns in modern games. Indeed, most of the combat is about looking at characters auto-attacking mobs. The difference between a modern MMORPG and BG? Well, there's at most six characters for the player to control in BG. The tactical dimension of moving them around more than makes up for the fact that they are mostly just doing basic attacks. So, what happens when we add few handfuls of active abilities with small effects to all characters? Well, mostly it just becomes more tedious to play. When the impact of a single ability is close to zero, activating it feels a lot like an extra hoop to jump through. It's also important to note that impact is not a static property of an ability. Instead, it also depends on the game's enemy and encounter design. More about that a bit later.

As stated, there definitely are abilities in Dragon Age that have a clear impact. Higher level mages can clear mobs with powerful area of effect spells, given suitable conditions. Likewise, higher level rogues have skills that actually increase damage output significantly enough that it can be called burst damage. Yet most abilities are only weak buffs, debuffs or disables etc. They certainly have a statistical effect but its presence is hard to notice in a real-time battle system with 4 party members. The only sensible way to use all these small abilities is to set conditional statements for the AI to use them - at least for the other three party members, but it certainly doesn't hurt to do this for everyone. After these meaningless little skills have been automatized the player can then focus on activating the bigger abilities at opportune moments. However, at this point it's rather questionable to include such meaningless abilities in the game at all.

Basically it comes down to decision-making. If the difference between using a skill off cooldown (i.e. as soon as it comes available) and using it at opportune moments is not significant, then the choice of when to use the skill is not meaningful. There are many ways to deal with this problem: you can turn these skills from active to passive, or proc-based; you could increase their impact and the cost of using them; or you can just remove them. The "how" is ultimately a matter of game balance. The important part is having a suitable amount of meaningful decisions in the game and minimal amount of meaningless decisions. The latter are just noise, and they make the game irritating to play. That's the noise of the dice being rolled way too many times during a simple combat encounter. I guess there is a general phenomenon here at work, somewhere: making it appear like more is happening by dividing all actions into smaller units. Doesn't work. At all.

2. Iconoclastic Hammer of Infernal Devastation (+1 damage)

The rant continues and I'm afraid it won't be done by midnight. I have went on about this topic at least once before but I have the perfect excuse to revisit it. Let's compare equipment in BG and DA! The comparison is slightly unfair as BG enjoys a certain amount of familiarity bias from an old school AD&D nerd like myself. Equipment in DA is very - you guessed it - MMORPG-esque. Well, to be fair, they are a bit more interesting than that. Closer to Diablo 2 I'd say, of all the games I have played and actually remember. There's a lot of numbers. I didn't count exactly, but I wouldn't put 15 different numbers on one item beyond the realm of possibility. Generally speaking, more numbers equals more dimensions along which to compare pieces of equipment. One-dimensional equipment systems are incredibly boring: two pieces are either exactly equal, or one is simply better than the other.

As dimensions increase, player choice increases with them. I might want to wear weaker armor, because it grants other bonuses that I rate higher. However, if multiple dimensions are parallel to each other, meaning diminishes and overt complexity is introduced in its stead. For example, critical hit rate, critical hit chance and percentage-based bonus damage are often different ways to increase average damage per attack. Percentage bonuses are more stable, but over time the net result is the same: a double damage crit with a 15% chance equals 15% bonus damage with enough repetitions (in a simple system at least). Although it might be somewhat up to taste whether you want a higher crit or just more damage, to make an informed decision you'd need to whip out a calculator when two weapons are near enough each other in average damage. Or, you know, just don't give a damn and use the one that looks cooler I guess.

Situational bonuses (e.g. elemental damage, bonus vs enemy type, damage type resistance) are another beast entirely. Strictly speaking, they can be an attractive way to make more items legitimate choices. I mean, if a weapon is better against dragons than any other weapon in the game, it remains situationally useful, does it not? Well... it depends. A lot, actually. In a sense, actually using the item in its situational context is usually not a real choice (after all, it is the best option). However, there may be strategic decisions to make if there is a cost to equip the item - for instance, in Dragon Age the player may have two weapons equipped and swapping them is effortless. In this case the "cost" of equipping any given secondary weapon is that it takes your only secondary slot. So there is a decision: what to equip. Meanwhile, switching between primary and secondary weapons is free from the game mechanics perspective.

The overall cost of messing around with equipment also includes an external cost: effort cost, i.e. how much additional effort the player needs to expend in order to make the switch. For a very simple example, let's say switching to my anti-dragon sword kills a dragon approximately 15 seconds faster. If it takes 20 seconds to actually bring out the damn thing, it's not worth it. Even if it's close, or even slightly faster, it may feel too much of a hassle to be actually bothered with. On the other hand, if the effort cost is zero (e.g. alternative weapons are bound behind different, equally reachable action buttons), it's also a non-decision. Generally speaking, all sorts of effort costs are detrimental to choice, and should not be used as balancing factors in this context. There are other contexts where effort costs are valid balancing factors, especially if they have a skill component.

To summarize: situational equipment only makes sense if  the player has to make meaningful decisions about which to use. Probably the most common approach is to have a limited number of quick access slots coupled with a real cost for reconfiguration (e.g. inventory cannot be opened during combat). In conclusion, situational bonuses are certainly a dimension, but only a secondary factor in deciding a character's main equipment kit. Despite the flood of numbers, most equipment in Dragon Age falls on a neatly tiered scale so ultimately not a whole lot of choice is involved. Although, some armors are so goddamn ugly that I occasionally just had to use a slightly weaker one. Then again, for female characters, that's almost every piece of armor in the game. Which brings us to another important factor that influences equipment choices: player experience.

Let's face it. Despite occasionally having cool names, a collection of numbers doesn't really cut it when it comes to items being cool. So for all their numbers, pieces of equipment in Dragon Age just aren't all that interesting. This is where the AD&D background of BG comes into play - especially in BG2. We can even argue that comparing a sword +1 to a sword +2 is not all that different from comparing two items in DA - the difference is just made more obvious. At the same time, the scale is more visceral. However, the really interesting stuff comes in the form of unique magic items. Named items that clearly differ from anything else in the game. A lot of these items give the player new abilities and truly unique mechanics that are not available anywhere else in the game. The amount of oomph is simply superior to a collection of numbers. While in DA a sword is always used in the same way, in BG a sword might have abilities that create entirely new strategies.

Furthermore, as most of the items come from the well-known AD&D and Forgotten Realms lore, they are already iconic - and their names have meaning. Some of them are also batshit insane, like the Deck of Many Things - an item that's almost a sidequest in itself - or the talking sword (name forgotten). Whether there is more meaningful choice considering equipment in BG is debatable though, as they still mostly fall on a rather tiered scale. However, they are definitely several magnitudes more exciting. They are also much harder and time-consuming to program. It is easy to see why developers these days prefer collections of numbers. Once you have the system down, generating equipment is just a matter of drawing up some numbers - which is something computers are very good at. It's also easy to balance, and effortless to re-balance. Just tweak the numbers.

Sadly, the oomph is gone - equipment has become just another piece in the mathematical character optimization machine. While making choices based on numbers is still meaningful, individual items are not memorable at all, and the excitement of finding new equipment is massively diminished. That's the sad reality as RPGs become games of numbers. In closing, a couple of examples. Borderlands 2 walks the border of numbers and uniqueness quite successfully. While most of its items are indeed just numbers, truly legendary weapons have unique properties that make them behave like no other weapon in the game. Another one is Dark Souls. If you only look at numbers, the equipment system seems really one-dimensional. However, each weapon is truly defined by its attack animations - its player experience - so that choice is first and foremost based on play style preference.


3. There and back again - travel time: eternity and a half


This pretty much continues where I left off with the Tales rant about ridiculous detours in games. Detours are not as much of a prominent problem in Dragon Age. Granted, every faction the player needs to visit to get them pledge their allegiance demands a series of quests before agreeing - so it's basically business as usual. In the very least these are actual subplots with player choices, and in many ways feel much less like hoops to jump through. So what's there to rant about? Well, very briefly: dungeon length. I have touched the topic in the past, but if any game has truly tried my patience with long dungeons, it's Dragon Age. It doesn't even necessarily mean the problem is at its worst here, it just means it feels most aggravating. This is due to several reasons, one of which is the combat system deficiencies outlined before. On its own, even that would be fine though.

The real problem then? The sheer amount of encounters per dungeon. There's a fight in literally every fucking room and corridor in the game. Which, again, in and of itself is not aggravating - just incredibly annoying. I've had my share of these in games before (like Xenogears, omfg). What really makes it toxic is that there are like three different enemies in the game. The variety of encounters is mindbogglingly low, and going through the motions again and again is really tedious - primarily because the game has a fuckton of meaningless abilities and the NPCs tend to have a really hard time staying where you want them to be (or if they do, they don't do anything at all). Although you can make combat more interesting by increasing difficulty, it becomes so time-consuming that it's just not worth it. Most encounters have the same structure anyway: sneak up on soft, deadly targets (mages, archers), then mop up the rest. Rinse and repeat in every room and corridor. Later on in the game you can fortunately use broken AoE combinations to kill enemies before they even reach you.

Mass Effects 1 and 2 suffer largely from the same problem. The amount of fighting really drove me insane - or, well, bored, actually. The problem is the same: there just aren't that many enemy types in the game. I think ME2 did best of the three games in this category. In all games the dungeons are just too long, and too repetitive. In Dragon Age the only real difference you seem to get between most dungeons is new textures in the environment, and new flavor for the same old enemies. I get it, we are supposed to be fighting darkspawn throughout the game because they are everywhere. Just, could there maybe be more than three types of them? No? Ok, I am exaggerating a bit, but three is not *that* far off, unfortunately. It's kind of the same in ME: there's this one race of enemies that forms the major threat in the game, and they have like literally three different types of units. That, and dungeons are effectively just long FPS corridors.

So, here comes the unfair Baldur's Gate comparison again. Admittedly the first Baldur's Gate suffers from many of the same problems (except it's composed of massive amount of outdoor areas and somewhat less dungeons) - largely because the level range 1-7 is in fact quite boring in AD&D in general. BG2 on the other hand is miles ahead. Taking advantage of iconic AD&D monsters, the game offers a far wider variety of challenges in combats. Many of its dungeons are also more interesting with devious traps and puzzles, or optional challenges that yield worthy rewards. Which is another point: if items are not exciting to find, why bother spending any longer in dungeons than is mandatory? Overall, the ratio of meaningful encounters to meaningless ones seems simply much better (or maybe it's the nostalgia talking). The number of enemy types is probably a magnitude or two higher too.

Variety of challenge is the key. In BG2, enemies have abilities that are absolutely bonkers and - as a consequence - very threatening. High level mages have ridiculous protections; vampires drain levels; beholders cast all sorts of crazy shit at you, including instant kills. It's even possible for characters to be entirely erased from the game, permanently. Think about that, and compare it to the watered-down enemies we get in games these days. Since player abilities - especially those of mages - are equally nuts, strategy choices have much higher impact. The games feel so different in comparison. To me, in DA it feels like most of my decisions increase my party's overall effectiveness by like 10%, whereas in BG2 the chance of winning can go from zero to 100% with good strategy. In a way, I could say that in DA everything progresses at a steady pace, whereas BG2 is incredibly explosive in nature - often literally.

All that, and I'm pretty sure BG2 also has shorter dungeons.

Conclusion

So, to summarize this wandering rant, these modern BioWare games - Dragon Age in particular - seems to suffer from everything being watered down. Certainly this makes it a more balanced game than Baldur's Gate 2, but at what cost? Going through the game feels like treading through some gray substance at a steady pace - a really slow pace at that. The game just throws these seemingly endless encounters at the player, each containing a mixture of the same enemies you just killed in the last room. Reaching new levels doesn't feel much like anything as most abilities lack substantial impact. Finding items is reduced to a sense of "wow, better numbers". Quantity over quality, it seems, and it just doesn't work. It never does, not for me. As a game of high fantasy dungeon crawling, DA is just garbage. If there's a mod that removes two thirds of all encounters in the game, I recommend using it - that just might make it work.

In the next part, I'll go through some reasons why I still managed to play through it.

Tales of Xillia/Graces f

Getting lazy again and doing two games at once! Well, there's that, and the fact these are quite similar in many ways. It's a normal series thing, kind of like Final Fantasy before FFX and later games started messing around with things more. So yes, both of these games have the same fundamental game mechanics and core systems. The biggest differences can be found in character development, combat system details and various subsystems. Tales seems to be one of those series that are kind of reliable, but nothing truly amazing ever seems to come out of it. That's just my impression, and I might be terribly wrong. It does, however, definitely hold true for these two games I have played. One distinctive feature of the series is that you can play battles with up to four players. This makes it ideal for social RPG marathons because there is no need for taking turns holding the controller. Which is why I picked Xillia up initially in fact.

I don't feel like doing a complete analysis. I'll just go off on random tangents instead. Wherever that may lead.

1. Detour gaming

Rant time! This applies especially to Tales of Xillia, as the game is my source of inspiration for writing about this phenomenon. The point is still valid for many games, and even other works of fiction. Xillia is just particularly obnoxious. There's some minor spoilers about the game's structure, but nothing specific really. The game starts with Milla trying to destroy a device. She fails and has to retreat. Then we get to follow how she attempts to get back to the lab, to destroy the device once more. However, there's a but. One does not simply walk into... well, might as well call it Mordor. The next twenty or something hours of the game are basically spent running into yet another obstacle that ruins yet another way of reaching Mordor. When we're finally down to the very last option, the game still manages to throw several hours' worth of hoops for us to jump through.

In other words, the story does not actually proceed anywhere in the first twenty or more hours of the game. There is literally no progress in the plot. There's just an endless ball of side plot threads, all of which are incredibly pointless. They just have to get the player to visit every corner of the world, no matter how lame the excuses to do so are. The first half of Tales of Graces f feels a bit like the same in the sense that it too has the player run across the world map before the plot truly starts moving ahead, but at least it moves. Xillia just kind of spins in place. Ironically, once it actually gets somewhere, Xillia's plot is fairly good. Naturally once it gets to the good bits, it starts to move too quickly. It's kind of the same for Graces f, but at least it is somewhat more balanced with its pacing.

I stopped watching The X-Files because the series just throws bucketloads of fillers at the viewer. Same thing happens in anime a lot. Typically, not only does the main plot stand still for the duration of an entire episode, often interpersonal relations of the main cast do not develop either. Even if the individual filler episodes are great from time to time, it is still really annoying when the fiction does not grow. I love growth. These days I very rarely watch movies at all because they're hardly comparable to the massive arc of growth offered by extended works of fiction. I also expect this growth from such fiction, and get upset when it fails to deliver, choosing to unload filler after filler instead. That said, I haven't really found anyone who actually likes the kind of structure Tales of Xillia offers. So perhaps this is not just a personal quirk of mine at work in this rant.

The incredibly subtle parallel here is that I consider the hoops (subplots) in Xillia as something very similar to filler episodes. I think it's a fair comparison. In both cases, the main characters get diverted from their primary task into doing something less important (although technically it supports their main goal because it's an obstacle). The subplot often carries no weight beyond its own time frame either, which makes it a completely irrelevant event once it is over. It also often involves grinding down a horde of enemies that otherwise would have been left untouched. Yes, I do realize that by playing JRPGs I literally signed up for killing endless legions of enemies, but I'd rather encounter them while getting towards a worthy goal - otherwise it feels like I'm eradicating them just so that marketers can claim another +10 hours of gameplay in the box.

Games don't even need to necessarily have any stupid detours. Taking forever to get anywhere is just as frustrating, but it's a subject for another entry. Overall, I do admit my reaction to detour gaming these days is a lot stronger than it used to be in the past. The key factor here is time, or rather the ever-ironic relationship of time and money. Way back when I had all the time in the world, my ability to actually buy new games was rather limited. Back then a game had to offer a significant amount of gameplay hours to justify paying a full price. This made me a lot more tolerant. These days as I have a stable source of income and money to spend, the very fact of my employment kind of cuts into my gaming time. This has lead me to value my time all the more, and I have started to expect the same respect for my time from games. So, I feel a bit offended when they do not.

Perhaps it's a sign that I should finally ditch my long-lasting love for JRPGs. Or at least stop playing the titles that seem okayish, not great.

2. Real-time battle, almost there

The Tales franchise sports real-time battles, and they have been doing so for quite some time. At some point they switched to 3D battle fields, but to my knowledge the basics have stayed roughly the same throughout the series. As we have discussed in previous entries, real-time battle systems generally need to somehow control the flow of battle so that players cannot just mash buttons and hold enemies in stagger infinitely. In this regard Tales is a bit chaotic. Basic attacks generally don't offer much stagger and the stagger resistance of enemies didn't seem constant, or was dependent on their own state (e.g. they cannot be staggered mid-animation). I am not sure how exactly stagger worked in these two games - the system wasn't really all that transparent.

Of these two games, Graces f felt a bit more fast-paced, with more emphasis on tempo control. Although the games feel very similar on the surface, a number of differences contribute the difference in feel. For instance, Xillia controls ability spam through the equivalent of mana. Graces f does no such thing; instead it has a different point mechanic that controls the length of combos. It's quite similar to the system in Star Ocean 3. The end result is that while it's possible to hold an enemy staggered for the duration of an entire combo, at some point you'll simply run out of steam and have to wait a few seconds to regenerate combo capacity. This is the battle flow control mechanism that puts forces the player to play defense for a bit instead of brainlessly mashing combos in. In Xillia mana kind of acts as a similar mechanism: although repeatedly casting spells can hold enemies in place, you'll eventually run out of mana.

I did play most of Xillia as a caster so I cannot attest how it works for other character types. Overall I felt that the amount of control players can have over enemies is in similar levels; perhaps slightly stronger in Graces f. On the other hand, the amount of control players have over their allies is slightly higher in Xillia. In Graces f all other party members are almost completely autonomous; in Xillia, the player can choose to link their character with another character to have them work as a pair. Since we were playing with two players, we both had a link partner, whereas I'd imagine there would be more switching involved when playing solo because links between different characters provide different benefits and combination attacks. Both games have the option to bind a few abilities of non-controlled characters to buttons, allowing the player to invoke them when needed.

Overall I feel there's a bit of a redundancy problem in both games. They have a lot of depth, but fall short in utilizing it. With 3 AI controlled characters in the battle field, a lot of stuff is simply out of the player's hands. For instance, in Graces f you get quite significant bonus damage if you hit all of an enemy's weaknesses in one combo. There are so many different weaknesses that a single character can rarely do so, which means you have to hope that your allies have the sense to fill in the one's you cannot hit. It also requires a lot of memorization because attacks can have up to four different attributes, and the player has a combo tree of 16 attacks and another 4 attacks on top of that. You can always check the attributes in a pause menu, but it gets tedious. Xillia reduces the amount of available attacks drastically, and it also simplifies the weakness system to a more familiar element based one.

Another difference that may seem small but vastly influences the battle flow is free run. An interesting feature in Tales is that normally characters move in a 2D line in respect to their target (i.e. just near or far). Free run can be activated with a button, and it allows a character to move freely. In Graces f, free running depletes combo capacity, limiting it use heavily while in Xillia it's free. It follows rather naturally that you'll be using it a lot more, because it's the best way to avoid enemy attacks. In fact, since Graces f has a quick step dodge (also costs cc), there is very little use for free running. The end result is that Xillia involves a lot more running around and crossing distances is fairly quick. In Graces f evasions are done in a tighter space, and covering larger distances actually takes quite a bit of time. Xillia also has jumping which Graces f does not, and it seems very useless and mostly annoying. Jumps are slow, which makes accidental jumps quite dangerous.

I slightly preferred Graces f's gameplay, primarily because its controls are more stable. Accidental jumps aside, Xillia also has an annoying habit of characters not facing the right way after free running, which results in a lot of spells cast off-target. Neither of the games get to the same level of enjoyment as my long time favorite Star Ocean 3. Tales combat feels quite entertaining, and most of the time it's fast - a massively important factor in a game with hundreds of battles. Unfortunately enemies do not vary all that much, which makes stuff a bit repetitive. There are some alleviating factors however, and we're about to move on to them.


3. Character design musings

In both games, all characters have their own unique mechanics. I find this commendable, as opposed to games where all characters can be made into carbon copies of each other. These mechanics felt more emphasized in Xillia though, and were not that big of a factor in Graces f. There clearly had to be a reason why I chose to play just one character though, so let's look into this a bit. First of all, one problem I have with both games is that all character upgrades come in very small pieces from a system that has hundreds of nodes to activate (the systems are a bit different, but the rewards are not). A +3% conditional bonus here, a +2 stat bonus there etc. This means it's really hard to actually make any sense of a character's play style and advantages in just a glance, and it takes quite a lot of fights to grasp it in practice too. Arguably this could also been seen as a strength.

There is however something to be said about the actual impacts of different playstyles on characters. If you look at Dota 2, there's 108 different heroes and all of them have a distinct impact on how the game plays out. Meanwhile, in tales, it felt like I could have any party of four characters and the combat experience was no different - unless I would have purposefully avoided taking a healer with me, but that's just stupid. So, while each character may feel a bit different to play, the overall combat flow remains largely unchanged. I acknowledge that I did not particularly explore my options, because I largely had a "whatever works" attitude. The reason for this is the lack of variety in enemy design - the game very rarely forces its player to adapt. In Graces f I also didn't feel like memorizing a new combo tree too often so I stuck with the main character.

I don't often change characters just for variety. I only change when the game throws a curve ball my standard roster cannot handle, or if I feel combats are going too slowly. Sticking with the main character usually works well enough, because they're generally designed to be quite straightforward to play and still effective, and also the most well-rounded. I don't like playing healers or supports that cast buffs in real-time combat systems, because usually the AI is actually better at these roles (healing a low HP character or refreshing an expired buff are both very simple rules) - and it's usually more boring. In a cast of six characters there's typically one healer, one buffer and four others who usually do either physical or magical damage (or very rarely both but they're usually worse than focused characters). This leaves four feasible options to choose from.  

Because I don't trust AI in these games, I generally aim to play the character that is the most crucial for my strategy to work. Admittedly it's a bit unfair to make comparisons to Star Ocean 3 because I sank some three hundred hours into that game and experimented with everything. However, even on my first playthrough I felt more pressured to change my controlled character throughout the game. It would seem that for all their unique mechanics, characters in either of these two Tales games don't really have that different impact - some are just more tedious to play than others. It kinda comes down to the fact that there are just multiple ways of doing the exact same thing. If you compare to something I have hyped less, like Xenoblade, even that game had more pressing selection criteria for characters because they actually did different things.

Might be this is just my impression, and the system actually offers more than I got out of it. I also do commend the effort. It just really feels like - as long as you've got the basic requirements covered - there really isn't much of a difference between party configurations. It's also worthwhile to remember that it's not necessarily a problem with character design; it could just as well be a problem with enemy design. Ultimately it's always the game's challenge that drives players to adapt and make good use of their options. Certainly there are players out there who appreciate options just for the sake of having variety, but for me it feels like waste of interesting character design. In one regard Tales does fine: non-active party members still receive a lion's share of experience, so they at least do not fall behind.

Conclusion

Although there are a lot of individual minisystems in both games that are kind of curious, I will cut this post short here. Overall both games are decent JRPGs, but not really special in any regard. This really hurts them a lot, because mediocre JRPGs seem to be all we're getting these days - especially on home consoles. They're hurt by sloppy storytelling. All of their good ideas also kind of blend into a grey mix where nothing seems to really matter a whole lot. The end result is an experience that is kind of bland until you have put enough hours behind to develop some affection for the characters and their antics. This is actually another commendable thing about the series: it has a lot of (optional) banter between characters. Although it's quite cliched, it's highly entertaining and brings life to the otherwise mediocre characters. Some scenes - particularly in Xillia - are just downright absurd.

Overall, I might have loved this series a lot more had I played it like ten years ago. It was entertaining enough for these two games, but I'm not really dying to get more. Maybe for a full 4 player cooperative experience? Xillia 2 is out there, but it seems like yet another mediocre game, with just one benefit: recurring characters - but that's a topic for another day.

As a final note, maybe I should re-visit Star Ocean 3 and see if it's actually as good as I remember it to be.

Valkyrie Profiles: Lenneth & Silmeria

I'm doing two games at once because they are pretty similar in many ways and it also makes it easier for me to compare them. I actually played Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth quite some time ago - like, two years or more ago. It was the first game I bought for my PSP, and one of the main reasons for buying the console in the first place. I finished it once and started another playthrough in order to get the true ending but then I bought Persona 3 Portable and couldn't resist starting it. I bought Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria also quite a while ago but given that my PS2 has mostly been gathering dust I hadn't gotten around to actually playing it. However, there's an old TV in my room at my parents' so I took my PS2 with me for Christmas holidays - and of course, Silmeria. After finishing it I felt like giving VP: Lenneth another go.

1. "It shall be engraved upon your soul..."

Both games have a Valkyrie as a central character and they take place in the same timeline (kind of, it's a bit complicated...) Silmeria as a game is more akin to traditional RPGs as it shares their basic structure: the player follows a linear plot, traveling from one dungeon to another in a world map. Lenneth is a bit different: the player is tasked with collecting souls of the dead to fight in Ragnarok. Each action the player takes brings Ragnarok a step closer. There is no real plot progression, because the premise holds throughout the game. Most dialogue in the game concerns how the recruitable souls died. It's worth notice that the player is not forced to make any choices in the game; there's enough time to do everything in each chapter. Maybe forcing the player to make some actual choices would have increased the game's replayability and made the coming of Ragnarok feel a bit more urgent but honestly the structure works just fine as it stands. The game has a hidden storyline which progresses alongside the Ragnarok plot, but we're going into that a bit later.

As the terminology suggests, both games are a bastardization of Norse mythology. I did like the setting because it's an interesting mess of standard issue JRPG stuff and respects its mythology a bit more than the average JRPG. The games also share a lot of mechanical stuff. This here is a quick overview of their similarities - I will go into detail about some of these systems in a moment. Dungeons in both games are basically sidescrolling 2D platformers and - especially certain hard mode dungeons in Lenneth - pretty puzzle-oriented. The player even has enough tools at their disposal to make some actual platformers pale in comparison. In both games souls of the dead - einherjar - are meaningful to gameplay. They differ from typical NPCs in one important way: the player is expected to release them from their service. In Lenneth, the game ends badly if the player doesn't send quality souls to Valhalla in each chapter. In Silmeria there is no pressing need to release einherjar but upon release they leave behind pretty delicious stat boost items.

Of the two games, Lenneth has a much faster pace. Battles are shorter, and the protagonist runs much faster in dungeons. There's also less dialogue, again largely because the Ragnarok plot itself has nothing to talk about. Lenneth (the character) talks very little. In most scenes she only appears at the end to claim the einherjer's soul. Like the game itself, she's pretty much the no-nonsense, all-business type of heroine. Once recruited the einherjar don't talk much either (it would be kinda tricky too because there's no telling which ones the player has in their party given that most are optional to recruit and almost any of them can be sent to Valhalla). The games are of similar length though, because there are more dungeons in Lenneth. Another big difference is the main character. Lenneth is the heroine of her own game, but Silmeria's situation is a bit different - she shares a body with Alicia, a human princess. Therefore it is Alicia the player is controlling. It was a bit of letdown honestly because instead of a badass Valkyrie we get a whiny princess.

The change in perspective does give Silmeria a more human feeling and the central characters are overall fleshed out fairly well. Still it feels like just another JRPG whereas Lenneth felt like a more unique game in its genre. Besides, the plot in Silmeria makes next to zero sense. Coming to think of it, that's something it shares with Tri-Ace's another PS2 JRPG... (Star Ocean 3). Storywriting really isn't Tri-Ace's strong suit anyway.

2. "I shall cleave into your flesh..."

Fun gameplay on the other hand is definitely Tri-Ace's strongest suit. Both games share the same attack mechanic: in combat, each of the party's four characters is assigned to a button. Each character has a sequence of one to three attacks. When their button is pressed, they release an attack from the sequence. This happens in real time, allowing two or more characters to attack at the same time. On the surface it sounds like a button mashing festival but there's a bit more depth to it. On top of regular attacks, each character has a special attack that can only be used if the energy meter reaches 100 in a combo. Each attack raises the meter but it also decreases quickly if the combo is dropped. Therefore timing attacks is essential to keep the combo going. To make matters a bit trickier, attacks can launch the enemy into the air or knock them down - and a lot of attacks only hit a certain height. The order and timing of attacks is therefore crucial to get right because poorly timed ones will just whiff. Attacks also have all kinds of delays to make things more fun.

I really like this combo system for a couple of reasons. First of all, I like figuring out combos in general. Most of the time when I'm in the practice mode of a fighting game I play around with different combos. Unfortunately my technical execution sucks so I'm really bad at the most combo-oriented fighting games like Guilty Gear. The system in Valkyrie Profile is really easy to execute because the player just presses a button. The challenge is in figuring out the combo and it's not enough to figure out one combo either because, especially in Lenneth, the party changes in every chapter. Enemies are also different. Small ones in particular are tricky to combo against because timing is much stricter. Second, the system does allow for mid-combo adaptation. Attacks are pretty fast but not too fast. Assuming the player is aware which attacks from each character have not yet been used, some correctional measures can be taken to salvage a combo that is about to fail. At least the player can clearly see which attacks did not connect and can adapt in the future.

In terms of finer details, Lenneth puts a bit more emphasis on sparing attacks - especially special attacks. Using just enough attacks to finish an enemy allows the rest to be used against another one, possibly taking more than one enemy out in a single turn. Special attacks have a varying charge time and they cannot be used while being charged. The characters also cannot use items or spells while they have CT. The dynamics are a bit different in Silmeria. While Lenneth has one battle screen where all the enemies are, Silmeria's battles are divided between two modes. In map mode, the party moves freely in a 3D view. When an attack is initiated the game moves to an attack screen that is similar to Lenneth's battle screen (which I just described). There is only one enemy at a time. In addition to the number of attacks each character has, attacking is also limited by a meter that is regained by spending time on the movement view and also through killing enemies and obtaining purple crystals from them. Special attacks can be used every time the combo allows.

A big part of battles in Silmeria is avoiding enemy attacks in the movement screen. All attacks have a visible area of effect. It becomes visible as soon as the enemy starts charging the attack, giving the player time to move away from the AoE. If any character is inside the AoE when the attack is ready, it is immediately carried out. This sounds very confusing when explained like this but it's a fairly functional system. For the record, attacks in both games *hurt*. It is often crucial to get the jump on the enemy. We've been through this time and again: it's usually better for enemies to die quickly but dish out serious hurt if given the chance. It keeps the game going. Anyway, back to the movement system in Silmeria. In addition to just moving, the player can use speed bursts to move quicker and finally divide the party in two. The game is paused whenever the player doesn't do anything so there's no rush.

Although the system in itself is fine and clearly has some tactical depth, its big downside is making battles much longer than in Lenneth. Fortunately the player doesn't need to kill all enemies - killing the leader ends the battle immediately and gives the experience rewards of any unkilled enemies. Most of the time, if the player is able to get to the leader without problems, battles are over fairly swiftly. Other times though they can take quite a while. What makes this particularly aggravating is the fact that enemies respawn whenever the player re-enters a screen in the dungeon (in Lenneth they stay dead). Party splitting is not that useful either because moving two parties spends twice as much time, allowing enemies to attack more. Small tricks can still be done, like making a one member party to run into an AoE to absord all the damage from it instead of exposing weaker members to damage.

Although the mechanics in Silmeria are more complex and even better on paper, the fact that they slow the game down so much makes me prefer Lenneth's gameplay. With another iteration it could work really well because in a way, Silmeria is a tactical RPG where enemy attacks can be entirely avoided with positioning. Almost entirely anyway, because some attacks are still very hard to avoid. Then again, some enemies can be kited forever.

3. "I shall purify you"

Boss battles tip the scales in Silmeria's favor. This is largely because Lenneth's mechanics don't work very well in prolonged battles. The combo mechanic works phenomenally in normal battles where whittling down enemy numbers quickly is a high priority because a) one enemy can be killed in a turn and b) if they stay alive, their damage output is pretty hard to stand against. Having to dedicate characters to healing is quite catastrophic in Lenneth because it's harder to build energy to 100 and gain access to special attacks when one or two characters are not attacking. Against bosses there is no way to reduce incoming damage beyond killing possible minions. More often, incoming damage increases when the boss gets low enough. Either way, the system tends to become a bit slugfesty because of its emphasis on normal attacks. Support spells and items are used very rarely because they waste precious time.

Silmeria treats things a bit differently. Support spells, items and healing use the same meter as attacks do. This means that if you heal and then immediately attack, less attacks can be made and it's harder to get a full combo. Another restriction is a stricter one: using any of these has a global cooldown. When one character heals, no one can heal until the cooldown has passed. This means that support spells and items are just as useless as in Lenneth because usually whenever they could be used, it's time to heal. The only times they are useful are battles where enemies can be kited for a long time (e.g. heal, run to the other side of the map, cast spells, run around, cast more spells etc.). This dynamic makes resurrection in particular very costly and often not worth the trouble. Healing spells are also single target. Only rather expensive items are capable of healing the entire party.

All in all, AoE damage against the player's party in Silmeria is very devastating. This causes some quirky boss strategies to emerge. I found most bosses in the game much easier when I left the entire party behind and went in only with Alicia because she did the most damage and was able to heal herself. The remaining party of three could come in and throw a resurrect or dispel if needed. Other than that, they were there to avoid damage because most boss attacks dealth huge AoE damage. When taking healing limitations into consideration, the outcome is problematic. Put simply, healing cannot keep up with incoming damage unless there is only one character taking damage. I think the menu cooldown is too strict. It's fine to limit the use of items because item spam would be truly OP, but limiting spells is not a good call (spells are still expensive to use). For instance, Star Ocean 3 uses a similar cooldown mechanic, but only for items - and it works fine.

It's not like any of the components of this equation are bad - the combination itself is. Ideally I'd prefer it if bosses dealt less AoE damage and more single target damage. Either that or the suggestion in the previous paragraph. Healing is a tricky concept in general because too powerful heals tend to polarize damage. Either damage is negligible (because it can be fully healed with a single heal) or it is deadly (exceeds target HP). In a way Silmeria's attempt is commendable but the implementation was screwed up somewhere along the line. It would be better if the game was clearer about how enemy attacks work - avoiding them seems pretty random at times. For instance, sometimes when the player attacks, the enemy can counter even if no one was in the attack's area (implying that they get certain amount of time after the attack to turn) but sometimes they can't. Agro mechanics are also opaque so using party splitting to direct damage to tanky characters seems impossible.

Nevertheless, the fact that positioning matters a lot in boss battles makes them more interesting than slugfests in Lenneth. The first form of the last boss was pretty horrible though and I was very happy I didn't have to redo it. I think the system could be fine with slight adjustments or more transparency/consistency.

4. "Behold my godlike power"

Character development is overall more complex in Silmeria than it is in Lenneth. They share the basic concept: in addition to leveling up, characters gain access to skills. Both games also limit the amount of skills that can be equipped but they do so with different methods. Lenneth allows characteres to equip four skills total in three different categories. Silmeria uses capacity points - a familiar mechanic from multiple games - with each skill having its own CP cost. The bigger difference in complexity considering skills is the way they are learned. In Lenneth, the player simply uses tomes to learn skills and spells. Silmeria uses a rune system that I need to explain in some detail. Another aspect that is way more complex in Silmeria is equipment. The two are also linked.

Each piece of equipment has a rune and a color. Equipment consists of 5 gear slots and 4 accessory slots that are laid out on a 3x3 grid. The runes on gear are fixed - each weapon type has its own rune while head piece always has a head piece rune etc. Accessories can have any rune. If a certain rune combination is linked, the skill corresponding to that combination is being learned (takes a few fights). Runes are linked as long as they are on a continuous area of one color and not just any color because each color has its own rune combinations that result in skills. There's also stat bonuses for equipping as much of one color as possible. After skills are learned they can be used freely. Basically the system is a more complex version of a common one (e.g. in Final Fantasy IX): skills are learned from equipment. It adds another dimension to choosing equipment for each character.

Furthermore, particularly due to weapon runes, it's easier for some characters to gain access to certain skills than others. All weapons are also much more available in one color than the rest which further dictates what skills can be learned. It's very confusing at first and skills are pretty hard to learn at first because many of the runes are rare. Overall it scales pretty well, allowing weaker skills to be learned early on and more powerful ones towards the end. It also means that most accessories stay useful for the purposes of learning skills even if they do nothing. There's also a certain joy in finding new accessories because you never know when a new rune becomes available in this more flexible form. It's a bit tedious however because the same accessories need to be rotated through the entire party.

The equipment system in itself is fine in Silmeria, but obtaining the more powerful pieces is obnoxious. Higher tier equipment is "crafted" from components that are obtained from killing enemies. Sounds fairly normal, but there's a but: each enemy is made up of a varying amount of body parts and each fucking body part drops different items. Drop rates can also be frustratingly low. As a result, you may be fucked over twice by rotten luck when trying to obtain small drop rate components from tiny body parts. Actually, make it thrice: you also need to find the enemy that can drop the item. The game gives no hints whatsoever. Fortunately the game can be completed without any of this bullshit but the fact it exists makes me mad. In Lenneth matters are much simpler: the player can divine (buy) items, find stuff from dungeons and transmute some items. Most of the best gear is just found in dungeons.

Lenneth does have its own quirk in character development though. The game has a couple of accessories that give bonuses on level up. Most notably there's an accessory that gives more HP on level up. This is quirky because it encourages leveling your chosen endgame characters only after receiving these accessories. It was the same way in Final Fantasy VIII and its level up bonus skills. Early in the game, it's better to use characters you don't want to end up in your final party. This is further encouraged by event experience which can be freely used to level up any character in your party. Because of this, it's highly recommended to play the game on hard because all characters start on level 1 when you get them. For the record, characters in Lenneth are imbalanced as hell so it really matters which ones you choose to use for the endgame.

"Divine assault - Nibelung Valesti"

Although Silmeria has more complex mechanics and its systems show a lot of promise, ultimately all comes down to the fact that Lenneth is just more fun to play. The game has a very powerful aesthetic (in the sense it is understood in the MDA framework), and is very pleasing to play. Silmeria stumbles mostly because it feels more like a pretty regular RPG, but even more because it feels so slow. There are a lot of additional annoyances that simply don't exist in Lenneth. Although Lenneth's combat is not massively challenging in any tactical sense, battles are fun - and they are over quickly. All in all, Lenneth is simply the better game. I would still pick up Silmeria to experience its combat system though. I feel like it could have been something amazing and could serve as inspiration for a great RPG in the future. Lenneth on the other hand definitely takes its place as one of the legendary PSX JRPGs, alongside the likes of Xenogears and Vagrant Story.

Fun fact: I fell in love with Lenneth (the character) when her chibi version kicked my ass for the first time in Star Ocean 3.

Bonus: JRPG bullshit rant part 2

This is actually not the sequel I promised earlier - that will have to wait for (quite) a while longer. The topic is somewhat similar anyway. I want to talk about the true ending of VP: Lenneth. The game has three endings, one of which is just a glorified game over really (but it drops a hint). The existence of the true ending is not kept secret at least but actually fulfilling the requirements for it is some arcane fucking lore. It's not that complex to be honest but it's nigh impossible without a guide. In principle it's mostly about staring at one number: Valkyrie's seal rating (can only be seen in her status window, the one place players don't really need to ever look in the menu). More precisely, this number needs to be 37 or lower at a certain point in the game (the game doesn't tell either of these). The game also doesn't inform the player when this number changes which makes it harder to keep track of.

The biggest problem with this number is that there are only limited events in the game that lower it and majority of these events are available to the player from the beginning. However, if the player actually does them too early, they're screwed! Sending einherjar to Valhalla raises the seal rating by quite a lot, and is almost mandatory (the player loses rewards and possibly the game by not sending einherjar). In case you're wondering, the correct timing to do everything that reduces the seal is in chapter 4... the only reason I know this is, well, I read it in a guide. On top of keeping the seal rating low, there's a couple of places that need to be visited in certain chapters and once again nothing hints towards it. It's pretty much impossible to discover how to get everything correctly by just playing the game. The player might be able to figure out the seal rating bit (but not its target value or timing) but beyond that... just, no.

Endings with obscure conditions are disturbingly common in Japanese games in general. Silent Hill as a series springs to mind for instance, or the first Shadow Hearts. The fact that the seal rating is at all visible in Lenneth is actually generous. More often than not, similar variables are entirely hidden from the player. Star Ocean 3's character endings are another good example: a lot of things in the game affect the protagonist's relationship with each of the other characters, but the outcomes are nowhere near predictable. I guess they often call these endings "hidden" for a reason. Hidden in the sense that you'd actually need to look at the game's code to figure out how all the variables work - or if you're lazy like most players, just look up a guide. There could be some joy of discovery if players were somehow able to actually discover these things. Right now there just doesn't seem to be any point beyond selling guides... which most people get from GameFAQs for free anyway.

Jeanne d'Arc

I'm continuing my excavation of JRPGs you have likely never heard of (still going through this list). The latest title in this series was Jeanne d'Arc, a tactical RPG from Level-5. As the name suggests, it's a heavily rearranged fantasy version of the famous historical figure's story - i.e. it probably has next to nothing to do with the actual Jeanne. No matter, I didn't come here for the plot anyway - I find this a rather health approach to most JRPGs unless they have been specifically lauded for their story (e.g. Nier). I want to get some stuff out of the way before diving into the game's mechanics: my opinion is probably slightly biased due to the game's artistic style which I found a bit repulsive. I also don't have much love for Level-5 RPGs.

1. Classes, rocks, papers and scissors

Since it's a tactical RPG, we should start by going through some of its core mechanics. The game has loosely classed characters - in other words, classes are primarily defined by the weapon they use and their stats. The classes bear a strong resemblance to Fire Emblem - each weapon has unique properties that defines where it shines. Swords are the bread-and-butter, the most average weapon there is - nothing special to them but no particular weaknesses either. Axes are less accurate but deal heavy damage - certain axe skills can also lower defense. Spears are less effective but they hit two squares in front of the wielder, and also have access to a wide variety of area-of-effect attacks and long range jump attacks. Bows are what you might expect from them while knives are more accurate and have a higher chance to crit. Whips are the only melee weapon in the game that can hit diagonally and so on.

Now, unlike Fire Emblem, there's no rock-paper-scissors between the types of weapons. Yet the game does have a very similar RPS system: spirit skills. These are passive skills that grant the bearer levels in either Sol, Stella or Luna. If you guessed that each of these is strong against one other and weak against the remaining one, you would be absolutely correct. In this case Sol beats Stella, Stella beats Luna and Luna beats Sol. Most enemies in the game have been assigned to one of these aspects. Since the aspect is tied to a skill that can be freely equipped by any class at the start of the battle, actual character classes do not play a role in the RPS system. It is kinda good and bad news for the game. On the one hand, the player can customize their favorite characters to suit each battle while on the other hand, there is no real need to ever level up any extra characters. In Jeanne d'Arc though, I feel this lands more on the plus side.

The reason is that - just like the Fire Emblem RPS - these aspects severely increase and decrease both damage and accuracy. Especially later in the game characters are next to useless against the aspect they are weak against. This means that the player needs to examine their enemies and choose characters that can best deal with each threat - and then distribute spirit skills accordingly. In some battles the player can get away with not having one particular spirit at all, and in most there will be one spirit that is generally more useful than the rest. It is also quite common for the boss of a level to be of an aspect that is different from rest of the monsters so that whoever is designated to take the boss down won't be as useful against the rest. Overall this effect is similar to what you get in Fire Emblem - a careful plan is needed to decide who goes where and who is going to fight who.

Although there are numerous similarities between Fire Emblem and this game, the cost of using things is more akin to Tactics Ogre. Skills are fueled by mana that starts at zero and then regenerates every round. In Fire Emblem every weapon and spell has a limited number of uses. This allows even powerful weapons to be given out sparingly early in the game and using one is always a decision with some consequences because eventually it will run out of uses. There is still a cost to using more powerful skills in Jeanne d'Arc, because only the most basic skills and spells can be spammed every turn. Missing with a costly skill usually hurts quite a bit. I am not saying that Jeanne d'Arc should use Fire Emblem's system (if it did, the games would be really similar) - just that there is a clear difference in how "resources" are used - and that it is caused by the game's economy model.

2. Heroes and heroines

One of the most interesting features in Jeanne d'Arc are armlet wielders - heroes and heroines with a bit of extra oomph. Armlet wielders can transform into more powerful forms during battle. It's not the transformation itself that makes this feature interesting though - it is one of the special abilities all these characters gain in their secondary form. The ability allows them to take a full extra turn every time they defeat an enemy. There's no limit to the number of these extra turns - as long as they can dish out enough damage, they can tear through an entire group of enemies. They can also conveniently "bounce" from one enemy to another to reach an otherwise unreachable foe. It is generally easy enough to figure out when this power should be used. Nevertheless it is that little something extra I feel these games often need to keep my attention.

In order to maximize the number of extra turns and thus the damage output of your entire party, other allies should weaken targets for the armlet wielder. There is a downside to this strategy though. Just like in Fire Emblem, in Jeanne d'Arc bulk of the experience is granted to whoever deals the finishing blow. Furthermore experience gains are scaled by level, which means that constantly finishing enemies off with armlet wielders is going to result in diminishing returns. Therefore mopping groups of enemies at once should be preserved for situations where it is absolutely necessary. Fortunately such situations do exist are even somewhat frequent as a result of quite solid level design. A downside to the armlet wielders is that they are quite simply superior to every other character in the game which makes them too obvious picks to pass. Perhaps it would have been better to limit this power to the main heroine who has to be in the party anyway.

The less-advertised benefit of armlet wielders is their ability to heal themselves to full HP through the transformation. Curiously enough, this is actually one of their strongest attributes. After all, healing always costs momentum - lots of it in Jeanne d'Arc - but transforming is free and subsequently increases momentum. Transforming also increases defensive attributes, thus increasing momentum even further. It is a definite tide-turner. Although it's just one feature, it defines much of the gameplay experience.

3. Formations

The importance of formations varies between tactical RPGs as do the mechanics involved. The basic concept of formations is to keep squishy characters protected and as much is true in most games. Jeanne d'Arc does go an extra mile to emphasize formations and positioning in general. This is achieved through two systems. The first and most useful of these systems is the unified guard. As long as characters are adjacent to each other they all gain a defense bonus that is relative to the total number of characters that are linked together. There is a drastic difference between being alone and standing somewhere in a chain of six characters in terms of damage taken. It even increases evasion, allowing characters to negate damage entirely. It is often more desirable to leave an action unused than it is to break a formation to down one extra enemy.

Another system that sees less use but is very powerful when it is used is called burning aura. Any normal melee attack against an enemy creates an aura directly behind the enemy. Attacking from this aura grants bonus damage. Auras only last until the end of the turn in which they were created which makes them sometimes hard to utilize - especially the super aura that is created when a character with an aura also makes a basic attack against an enemy. Once again the difference in damage output is quite drastic. This is especially useful against certain bosses in the game. Curiously enough, the AI of these bosses typically tries to put itself next to a wall to minimize the player's ability to surround it and make use of these auras. It is important to prevent them from doing so, because they typically have high HP regeneration.

As a side note, very high HP regeneration is an interesting mechanic to set the pace of a fight - the player needs to be able to sustain their damage output until the boss is dead. Basically all of the toughest fights in the game were reliant on this mechanic and I think it worked out fairly well.

4. JRPG bullshit rant part 1

As much as I love the genre, it has its share of bullshit. Jeanne d'Arc does not do any better. Let's talk about character development first because it's something the game shares with Fire Emblem. Here's the beef: stat growths are hidden information. Why this is bullshit? There's no way for the player to know the true potential of characters. Sure, there is a rule of thumb: the worse a character looks like when you get them, the more powerful they'll be by the end game. The problem is this is not a hard rule, and it is impossible to know when it holds. Even if this information was transparent this would still be bullshit because characters would not be very equal. Given that difficulty generally ramps towards the end or at least that's what you would expect (usually it's actually not the case - but in Jeanne d'Arc it is), choosing the characters who get most powerful by the end game is a no-brainer.

Then again, poor balance between characters is such a common problem that I've mostly given up on it - and I do prefer imbalance to too much balance any day. That said, hiding such crucial information from the player is just plain bullshit. At least the growth rates are granted in contrast to Fire Emblem where the rates are simply probabilities to have gains in a stat. Doesn't get much more bullshit than that. In Jeanne d'Arc I only learned about this by reading a guide after finishing the game and it turned out I had chosen my characters very poorly (more or less the worst wielder for each weapon). I still managed to beat the game but this still infuriates me because I could have just as well rolled a die to see how difficult the game is going to be for me. An uninformed decision is not any different from blind luck yet somehow I see this bullshit coming up in JRPGs time and again.

The nice thing about designing board games is that you cannot hide rules from the players because if you did, they could not play the freaking game at all. Here's another example from Jeanne d'Arc. There are several battles where enemies spawn and then get to act immediately. Naturally these are the very same battles where you have to protect a fragile NPC (one hit kills him). The game is giving you the finger, there's just no other way to describe this. There is no way to predict this happening at all, and if there was, there would be no information of when or where the new enemies will spawn. The only way is to take that guaranteed failure, wasting 15 minutes of your time and then doing the battle again from start. Fun times. This is like a douchebag board game owner who "remembers" a rule just before he is about to abuse the shit out of it. Seriously, game designers, some transparency plz.

This rant will get a sequel once I have finished what I'm currently playing. Stay tuned.

Conclusion

The usual JRPG bullshit and horrible graphical design aside, Jeanne d'Arc is tactical RPG that proudly stands on its own two feet. It has its share of distinctive mechanics, but most importantly its level design follows an optimal difficulty curve. Maybe, or maybe that was just because I had the worst possible characters in my party. The game does get a bit repetitive at times, largely because the pool of actually useful skills is very small, and most of the enemies can be dealt with using the same strategies. Still if you are looking for a solid TRPG and have already gone through the obvious choices, you could do a lot worse than Jeanne d'Arc.

There will be bit of a break in updates at least as far as digital game are concerned... the game I'm currently playing is effing long. I might write about some analog games next though!

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky

I have tendency to lament the present state of JRPGs as a genre. They have mostly escaped to handhelds because of budget issues and new, promising titles are few and far between. There's a definite silver lining though. I actually have time to dig into some less known titles and (remakes of) classics. Trails in the Sky is one such game. It is actually part of a franchise I have absolutely never ever heard of but one that I am willing to look into some more. I only heard about this game through blind luck - it was bundled together with Persona 2: Innocent Sin. We already know how that part of the purchase turned out, but what about this half? I finally ran out of more urgent games and downloaded Trails from the Sky. After about 40 hours of playing the game, I am ready to give my judgement.

1. Low-key story? In my JRPG? Unpossible!

Game writers often seem to think that their story lines need to be larger than life. This is especially true of the JRPG genre where almost every single title has you facing down a god or something with equivalent level of power (usually they are capable - or even about - to destroy the world). After rummaging my brain for a good few minutes I came up with one JRPG where the story is not ultimately about saving the world from some superhuman beast. One (that's Resonance of Fate by the way, and I might remember wrong)! Not that I mind too much, I am all for epic narratives and some of the best ones are indeed massive (think Xenogears). I just find it a wee bit odd that no one's ever considered how to make do with less. Almost no one anyway, because the writers of Trails in the Sky apparently have.

There's a clear upside to not having a cosmic plot. When a game story deals with human issues, it opens up all sorts of possibilities to handle, well, humans, in much richer detail. It also somewhat remedies the usual JRPG credibility problem of sixteen year olds saving the world because they in fact don't. What I mean by handling humans is essentially fleshing out the characters. Trails in the Sky has a ton of dialogue and - pay attention - most of it is just banter. From the perspective of fleshing out characters, the most important dialogue is usually that which doesn't advance the plot. And no, it doesn't mean that characters should be talking about themselves either (I am looking at you, Mass Effect); it means they should be talking about whatever is going on around them or in their minds.

Oh and for the record, Trails in the Sky spends a lot of time doing just that. There are segments in the game where you can go on for more than an hour without having to explore or fight anything at all. You just read, and then read some more. I would not be surprised if I actually spent more than half of those 40 hours reading dialogue. Most importantly, there was not a single moment I felt bored with it. The overarching narrative is also quite thin. The game is divided into a few chapters, and each has a clear story line of its own. It is much like watching a series of connected movies. It is a growth story in a sense, with the protagonists on a quest to complete their training.

The game also handles its pace very well. Here's another thing to take note of: a suitable duration for a dungeon (or equivalent) is not counted in hours. One hour is still fine, but any plural form is most often too much. It's not a hard rule and some dungeons can easily entertain for longer times. It is however highly applicable to maybe 99% of JRPG dungeons. Because most of the game takes place in human establishments, Trails in the Sky features very few dungeons altogether and those few are short enough. Only the final dungeon breaks this rule and does feel rather lengthy. It is also the only part of the game where the story fails to remain in check and goes on the side of cosmic a bit.

Granted, Trails in the Sky is just the first part of a trilogy and its ending does hint at more of an epic scale in the making. Still about 35 hours of it is a very refreshing experience. It is an important lesson too: yes, it is possible to write a captivating JRPG story without destroyers of worlds and insane gods.

2. TRPG? JRPG? 

The game mechanics in Trails in the Sky are a hybrid of more traditional JRPG mechanics and tactical RPG mechanics. In combat all characters move on a grid which opens some tactical considerations. Being out of attack range is of course an important factor, but when overall strategy is considered, it is area of effect that matters the most. One curious attribute of this system is that when attacking enemies, the player does not get the option to choose where their character will move to perform the attack. Instead the character will always move the shortest possible distance. This means that movement (without attacking) does come with a price: nothing else can be done on the turn.

The player will usually want to avoid spending turns moving. However, AoE abilities and spells change this tendency. Against enemies with strong AoE attacks, it makes sense to quickly disperse - especially in the early game when there is no AoE heal available. In the later game with AoE heals and buffs available it can be more beneficial to stick together. This is however pretty hard to do against enemies that won't come to you because even ranged physical attacks are quite short-reaching. Of course the player can choose to only cast spells but as a strategy it is quite costly. There's no cheap mana regeneration available. Spells also have casting times which makes them slower to use than physical attacks.

The most important implication of this system is that positioning matters. The player needs to plan ahead a bit in order to get the most out of their buffs or to avoid insane AoE damage. It becomes a meaningful decision because the battle fields are quite small, and movement has a steep cost - it is one action where you don't heal, buff or attack. For major part of the game enemies actually are able to dish out some serious damage, so using time effectively is often desirable. On top of this, the game also introduces some timing considerations through bonus turns. Some turns in the turn track have a bonus attached to them - whoever acts on that turn gets the bonus.

This might sound a bit random. However, turn order can be manipulated to some degree. Most importantly, there's a CP meter which is consumed to execute techniques. If there's enough CP in the meter however, the player can also choose to expend all of it to jump to the front of the turn order and perform an s-break. This is the rough equivalent of Final Fantasy limits or similar systems seen in approximately one JRPG out of two. This is the easiest way to steal a bonus turn. Casting spells with short casting times can also be used to manipulate the turn order to get more bonus turns for the player. Enemy turns can also be delayed by certain abilities.

All in all the system works remarkably well. It doesn't get slow at any point because much of the movement is built into attacks and abilities. At the same time it offers a good deal of the core experience of tactical RPGs in the form of positioning. On top of it, there's the turn order manipulation that is inherent to active time battle systems from the Final Fantasy series (particularly FFX which has a very similar turn order system - just without the bonus turns). The game also reminds us how small things matter. One such thing is the ability to see where AoE spells will hit while they are being cast. This allows the player to react, and also perform some interesting plays like centering a heal on a character and then moving that character into the middle of their own formation.

3. Lines in an orbment

One last thing I would like to mention about Trails in the Sky is its ability system. It features something called battle orbments, which contain slots to put quartz in. This system serves dual purpose: each quartz grants bonus effects like increased attributes but they also grant "spellpoints" (no real name was given for them) of different colors. The latter determine what spells the character is able to cast - each spell in the game requires the character to have a certain combination in their orbment. However the shape of the orbment also matters because spellpoints are only combined per line. Therefore characters who have been profiled as spell-casters have orbments with long lines - the most potent casters have every slot of their orbment in one line. Fighter types on the other hand have really short lines which denies their access to the more potent spells.

The dual nature of this system is what I consider worthy of applause. There are two dimensions to consider when making decisions about which quartz to equip. I also think it is interesting that characters never learn spells permanently - spells are just "equipped", alhtough not directly. Trails in the Sky is not a unique game in either of these aspects. Dual-natured systems have been witnessed in other games, and spell-equipping systems are relatively common. In most systems though spells are equipped direclty, whereas in Trails the player equips enhancements that define which spells become available. Fortunately the game has a built-in list of spells that shows their requirements so the player does not have to try out different combinations blindly.

Conclusion

Trails in the Sky is an interesting game. Much of its appeal comes from its story or, perhaps more accurately, its storytelling. The way the game handles characters is what brings it to life. All in all, the story is surprisingly relatable for a fantasy RPG. Although charming, it is not a game to obsess over. A few hours at a time was the most I could play it. While the combat system is interesting by design, random encounters do get quite old quite fast because there is not that much to gain from battles. All resource gain happens kind of in the background, so the player does not at any point really feel they are gaining anything special out of the battles. They are just gaining resources of many variaties but that is all. It's just point points points. Likewise equipment in the game largely suffers from the stat boost syndrome (i.e., a better sword is just that - more stats).

Recommended for anyone who plays JRPGs for their stories. I just hope we will one day see parts two and three of this trilogy in English.

Xenoblade Chronicles

For a JRPG buff there are a lot of reasons to be interested in Xenoblade Chronicles, especially since it's been a while since its release. First and foremost, it has the magical Xeno prefix put there to pay homage to the other Xeno-games: Xenogears and Xenosaga. It has been created by Monolith Studios, who also created Xenosaga and (some of them) were involved in the creation of Xenogears. The reason this prefix carries so much weight is that as far as game plots go, both gears and saga are among the most complex. Particularly Xenosaga, which was originaly planned to run for seven episodes in total. Unfortunately it was cut down to three and it shows quite a bit. The third and final episode does tie together the main plot but leaves a lot of unfinished or hastily finished business in its wake.

Second, Xenoblade promised to honor JRPG traditions - the game has a large world and lots and lots of things to do. It also has epic length as I very recently discovered. Finally, the game has had a massively positive response in both reviews and among the gaming community. The biggest reason that was holding me back from playing it was honestly its platform: the Nintendo Wii. Let me just say that Wii is possibly the biggest disservice to the entire industry ever and a joke at best as a gaming system. Having seen how poorly The Last Story performed on the system I was not very enthusiastic towards experiencing Xenoblade Chronicles. Now that I have laid the game down, I will have to immediately say that this game is not worth all the hype. I will however have to admit that it was, in the end, a good JRPG despite its very slow start.

1. Timescale balance

The first topic therefore is what I think is actually quite a common issue in JRPGs in general: they are almost always more interesting after a good many hours into the game. Not always, but often - usually when this is not true, it is because the latter half of the game is botched horribly. What I mean to say is, these games have a tendency to start slow both story and game mechanics wise. Often the very beginning is actually quite fast storywise because something needs to happen to get things going. After this a lot of games start to falter a bit. Either they fail to introduce anything thrilling for quite a while because the characters are resolving the initial issue (which often is not the really interesting part of the plot - interesting twists later in the story are a norm in this genre).

This is what happens with Xenoblade too. The first half of the game is basically spent traveling from point A to B, through a cavalcade of points in between. For me it simply failed to inspire the sense of an epic journey - something Final Fantasy X did for me - which meant it was literally just a series of new places and rather lame subplots. Perhaps the biggest failing plotwise in Xenoblade was however that for the entire first half of the game you could easily guess what the plot twist would be after the destination was finally reached (it is the same twist I referred to in the earlier post about women in games). In a way it just fails to give the player anything to chew on. One of the major advantages of Xenosaga in particular was that it had the player going "wtf" from almost the beginning. Actually the saga's plot is so complex that the player might still be all "wtf" by the end of it but hey, that's another topic entirely. I like the sense that something bigger is clearly going on.

Another, once again rather common problem in all games that have some kind of character development, is that in the beginning the player has very limited options and therefore mechanics can become really boring. This happens in Xenoblade on massive scale - partly because I think there are some flaws in its combat design - in such a way that the game is not exactly the most thrilling to play for the first twenty or so hours either. Quite honestly if I had made this analysis halfway into the game, you would be reading some serious bashing. At this point I actually was of the opinion that the game is utter crap and massively overhyped. A word of warning: if you want to like this game, be patient enough to actually get to the likeable parts. Unless you like the design which I believe a lot of people do, because it is reminescent of another JRPG title that reviewers liked and I find outrageous.

The bottom line is, way too often JRPGs fail to truly spark any interest in the player for the first few hours - this is strangely forgiven by the time players get to the good parts. However if we stop to consider, some of the worst offenders are not particularly good before the player has put in enough time to have beaten most games in any other genre. That is not good design and it is no wonder the genre is no more massively popular. It also outrageously common to have a certain plotline in the game that requires the player to rummage through several dungeons or other places while nothing really happens to move the game forward. "Now we are prepared to face the villain... almost. We just need you to get four pieces of this ancient relic from opposite corners of the world." that kind of thing. Meanwhile, absolutely nothing happens.

2. The single player MMORPG syndrome

This is what links Xenoblade to one of my least favourite JRPGs I have played: Final Fantasy XII. This syndrome is exactly what the name suggests: the game borrows its tropes and mechanics heavily from massively multiplayer online games and tries to make them work in a single player experience. The problem of course is that they just fail miserably. The gameplay mechanics of MMORPGs are - on average - frigging boring, especially in the beginning when there are very few abilities to use. My guess is that they have been optimized for playing with latency and in general to be playable by people who are not so great with their keyboard+mouse-fu. In case you have somehow missed the World of Warcraft school of fantasy combat, it is built around abilities with cooldowns and aggro mechanics.

We will get to the combat in a sec, but first let's talk about another trope that is ubiquitous in MMORPGs: quests. Lots and lots of quests. So it is in Xenoblade; the amount of quests in this game is simply overwhelming. When there are so many quests, it is immediately clear that almost all of them will be of the simple variety: collect items or kill monsters. As if it wasn't enough to have a massive amount of quests, the game also has one annoying aspect: quests are given by people, and in some clumsy attempt to appear more realistic, the people are not always available. Instead some people are only available during certain hours, sometimes only in certain weather. I could maybe understand people missing from the streets at night but making it also dependent on the exact time of the day is just really frustrating. I was already flooded with quests so this didn't bother me that much, except when I tried to turn in some quests and the recipients were not around.

The game does feature the ability to at least fast-forward the game clock. Still this is just not the way to do things. The game also gives horribly little information about the quests - like for instance what god forsaken hours the quest recipient would be as kind to be available. This is one thing I have always hated about JRPGs: some stuff is hidden in such irrational ways that the only sensible way to go about finding it is using a guide. Usually side quests are particular to the area where you get them, but when they are not, the game sure as hell doesn't bother to give information about where it would be possible to find the required items. The world is very large, and each area contains a huge amount of different enemies, so trying to find things is a massive time sink. Which I ultimately opted not to do.

As stated, the battle system in the game is very MMORPG-inspired. Simplified yes, and somewhat conforming to JRPG tropes, but MMORPG nonetheless. The player controls one character while two other party members are AI-controlled. Characters attack automatically when close enough to a target. They can also use abilities called arts, each of which has its cooldown time. Positioning matters but only slightly: attacking from behind or sides affects how some arts work. Another thing that matters is aggro, which is used to determine who the enemies will be targeting. It's not a bad system, but it is kind of boring. There is not that much strategy involved because the effect times of most abilities are way shorter than their cooldowns. The best single mechanic is the break-topple-daze system that allows enemies to be disabled for a while and take more damage.

The single player MMORPG syndrome is not a collection of aspects, but rather a general feeling. In Xenoblade it is very strong, and I think it is a bit lazy design. The biggest problem with the syndrome is that it is definitely not the combat mechanics that keep people playing MMORPGs. It is mostly the MMO and for some players the RP. The design of the G is actually not that exciting - at least not the combat part. I do know that in some MMORPGs the combat design is actually more exciting (e.g. Guild Wars, Tera) but the basic form seen in World of Warcraft is effing boring. It likely gets better later in the game as it eventually does in Xenoblade. However, over 20 hours is a long time for combat to be not that interesting.

3. Conservative RPG design

The real problem with combat in Xenoblade is not its similarity to MMORPG style but rather all the character development aspects that affect it. Xenoblade has a very conservative character development scheme in which advancement is carefully tied to plot progress. Higher levels in arts become available only when the player discovers manuals. Equipment is gradually upgraded in every area. Even the game's built-in crafting system puts limitations on how high leveled gems the player can produce at a given stage in the game due to the availability of materials. The problem with being so conservative is in the fact that it makes half of the things kind of redundant. The game does not really need scaling equipment because their scaling speed is about the same as character level advancement. This is something I have always had trouble understanding: if equipment is just better numbers, why have equipment in the first place.

Granted, there are pieces of equipment that have fixed games attached to them, which gives them special abilities that are usually slightly better than what is possible to produce at that time using slotted inventory and crafted gems. The gem system is mostly fine, although the crafting itself has unnecessary complexity. I found myself using the same two characters to produce every single gem during my game, and was more than happy with the results. The system probably has more to give but I didn't see any way to "jump ahead of the curve" - so to speak. The choices that really matter are which arts to equip and level up, and which gems to equip in slotted equipment. Skill trees are very simple, and the skills themselves are quite conservative in how much they affect the game.

It is not as bad as, say, The Last Story, but I still felt that my control over how my party fought was not the same level as I would have liked it to be. It is true that Xeno games in general have never been outstanding in this sense, but I do feel that some of the Xenosaga episodes did have more strategical options available. As far as options are concerned there is one factor that I found especially weird: practical party compositions are actually pretty limited. It is good that characters have different strengths and in Xenoblade every character has a quite distinct role. However there are two or three cases where this is simply taken too far: only one character can cast a shield against enemy talent arts; only one character can deal serious magic damage; and only one character is good enough at healing to actually have an impact.

The first and second are borderline fine, because there are not that many enemies where you would require their expertise, but the last one is really horrible. The way the game is designed, there tends to be only one way to fight: the slugfest - outlast your enemies. This topic was earlier discussed in this blog and I concluded that games where the slugfest is the only option are rather weak. In slugfests, when fights get prolonged, it is simply impossible to last very long without a healer. This makes that one character a requirement for any serious fights and with a party consisting of three characters, that only leaves two choices for the player. Granted, getting through bread and butter combat can be done without a healer but for every boss encounter you will need this character. There simply is no other way to reduce incoming damage.

Another problem with this whole conservative approach is that the player simply doesn't get the feeling of being in control in fights. There is simply not enough agency. There are some systems in the game that do increase the sense of agency - they will be discussed shortly. Nevertheless the sense of being in control is simply quite diminished. Although you control a character in real time, there is only so much you can do because none of the arts have really drastic effects. The designers have simply done too good a job of making sure the game is in balance - the result is overbalanced. Although the characters are different, the fighting experience is alarmingly similar with every party composition. The only exception is whether you have a healer or not. Controlling other characters yourself also gives a distinct experience, but the overall strategies remain the same.

Xenoblade does get more interesting around the 30 hour mark but it still is simply not as interesting as many other JRPGs that give a better sense of agency. That, and the mechanic itself is not that satisfying to play, largely due to its MMORPG influences. In lot of JRPGs tactical variance is in fact quite low, but usually the tactics are more satisfying to carry out. Often this is linked to how well skills combo with each other. This is another thing that Xenoblade does not do as much as I could have hoped. Monolith Studios does know how to build more intriguing skill systems into a game as was evidenced by Xenosaga 2 and 3 - they have just chosen not to do so.

4. One meter to rule them all

One central mechanic that the game itself somewhat underemphasizes is the party meter. At first I thought it was a bad idea but once I figured how to manipulate it better the game actually became quite a bit more enjoyable. The meter is more or less the lifeblood of your party because it does a variety of things. The meter has three segments, and most things cost one segment. The things you can do with it are: revive an ally; get revived by an ally (if there are no segments left, you lose the battle when the main character falls); warn an ally about an incoming art (see below); perform a tri-attack which uses all three segments. The fact that you need the same bar for both the combo attack and revival made little sense at first because it made combo attacks very suicidal to perform (lose 3 revives/warnings for a combo? No thanks!).

The warning system is noteworthy. Whenever an enemy art would incapacitate or put a character on very low HP or disable them severely, the player is given a foresight of the incoming attack and (usually) 8 seconds to react (12 if it is a talent art). If the player chooses to warn another party member, they can instantly cast one art with the warned character out of normal sequence. Most importantly, even abilities that are on cooldown can be cast, and casting arts from warning doesn't put them on cooldown. So, basically it is a free cast whenever something bad is about to happen. The player can actually warn both allies for the price of two segments. The system is in no way limited to defensive abilities, it can also be used to get a quick powerful attack in hope that it will kill the enemy. It can even be used to activate buffs that are on cooldown.

It is still slightly unclear to me what factors are involved in raising the meter. Three things raise it: critical hits, triggering special effects of some arts and seemingly random affinity moments. The last is a bit unclear because I did not experience anything that controlled when you get the affinity opportunities in battles. The first two are something that the player can actually build a strategy around by using characters with easy access to high critical chance or arts that have easy-to-trigger special effects and low cooldowns. These things allow the use of tri-attacks actually quite frequently. Furthermore, tri-attacks are usually used to cause a break-topple-dazzle combo which incapacitates an enemy for a moment. The daze can also be refreshed when it wears off (the window is quite short) which means you can follow a tri-attack combo with prolonged knockdown.

My basic setup was often able to fill two segments of an empty party meter during this period of daze. This allowed almost non-stop tri-attacks. Some enemies are immune to it though, because they are immune to break. Some enemies also have a defensive mechanism that makes them return a ton of damage when they are attacked while toppled. This effect can be removed temporarily, but only by one character in the entire game. The tactic is somewhat reminescent of Persona 3 Fes where it was possible to keep an enemy in an infinite knockdown loop but better in the sense that the loop cannot be infinite (I think, I haven't tried too hard). The fact that it doesn't always work also makes other tactics useful. Tri-attacks on the other hand are not very useful if they cannot be used to cause a daze, largely because without that temporary lockdown the player will be left entirely without party meter segments for a while.

Especially towards the end of the game, the party meter played a central role in tougher battles. The battle was then more about keeping the meter high, especially because of the warning system that allowed instant free heals for the whole party whenever someone was about to die. The warning system actually has a strong familiriaty to it - it reminds me of the boost system that was used in Xenosaga. It allowed characters to skip ahead in turn order and enabled both reactive plays and ability combinations to be carried out effectively. I am quite fond of systems like this one that allow the player to mess with the normal turn order. Although Xenoblade doesn't use turns what with being real-time and all, the warning system allows the player to ignore ability cooldowns.

5. World exploration

After playing the game I kind of know why it is held in high regard by many. Undeniably the world is interesting. Civilizations existing on top of two dead titans is a concept you don't see every day. Most importantly, this shows in the game. Look up and somewhere in the distance you can see a motionless metallic face. Environments are quite varied, especially on the starting titan. Most importantly, the local fauna on each area is credible. Enemies of very high levels can be found among the normal residents which makes it feels less like everything has been put there for the player. A similar choice was made in the largest area in Final Fantasy XIII. Like in FFXIII, monsters are visible to the player and can be avoided. Battle also takes place on the world map itself, like in FFXII, and prolonged battles can sometimes be joined by wandering monsters.

Enemies are divided into four categories based on how they get aggressive towards the player. The first category never does, they just exist and will only fight if attacked first; the second uses sight to detect the party; the third uses hearing (shorter range, but 360 degree detection); and the last type is drawn to magic being cast. Because the enemies can flock to battles that have already started, some consideration is required from the player before starting to fight. I have a divided opinion of this system - I find it fine when enemy patrol routes are not too long and it is somewhat predictable when more will join the fight. However in some areas there are flying monsters with monstrous patrol ranges that can just pop into a fight. I did find a rather silly way to deal with battles with too many monsters: hit and run.

Battles end when the player runs far enough, and characters recover their hit points very quickly outside of combat. Monsters also recover their health, but dead ones stay dead for quite a long time. Therefore it is possible to run in, kill one enemy and run away to heal. Rinse and repeat. Reminds me of the very old times with dungeon crawling games like Eye of the Beholder where you could literally run in, hit, and quickly run back (one step) to make any retaliation miss. In Xenoblade this strategy is brought about because escaping is quite easy, especially when all three characters are still alive. Once aggro is off the main character, the player can just run out of combat with no risk at all. Bursting down weaker enemies one by one in this way is an effective tactic but I did find it to be rather tedious. Fortunately it was not needed very often.

Unfortunately, besides monsters there is not much in the world to discover. Collectables are scattered here and there randomly (they also respawn randomly) but the only thing that truly drives the player to explore is the scenery. I have to say that I was quite positively suprised by the game's drawing distance. This made the scenery actually look quite impressive, despite the Wii's lack of visual processing power.

Conclusion

Ultimately the biggest issue I had with Xenoblade Chronicles was that it took so long for the game to truly get started. The first 20 to 30 hours simply were not up to the hype because nothing interesting was going on in the story and battle mechanics were not particularly varied yet. Once the game finally upped the stakes by a few notches I found it to be a solid JRPG. However it wasn't particularly spectacular at any point. Most aspects of the game are "only" good. Characters, plot, mechanics... none were really spectacular. Oh and why is that if there is a silly looking race in the game, they have to behave like idiots too? I can understand why a lot of people liked this game. After all, a lot of people also liked FFXII - which is possibly the worst JRPG I have ever played - and Xenoblade does have a lot of similarities.

Curiously enough, the fact that this game was for Wii did not bother me much at all. After the framerate nightmare of The Last Story I was prepared for much worse, but in fact most of the time Xenoblade ran just fine. It is possible that I would have liked this game more in the past. Now it suffered from rather high expectations and simply did not live up to them. The plot was nowhere near the complexity of other Xeno titles. Characters and dialogue were pretty standard stock, and I found voice acting - both English and Japanese - to be really tired. It was not quite as bad as The Last Story, but quite close. I guess the low budget of Wii development carries over to other aspects of the game too. The seriousness of the plot was also hurt by the fact that armor changed character appearance and at some point in the game the best armor - for a really long time too - was practically underwear.

Xenoblade did in many ways resemble JRPGs of the old times. It is just that it retained some things that could have been left into the past, but most importantly I think most of the modernizations were misses. This trend of likening single player RPGs to MMORPGs is a bad direction to head into. Sadly it is quite prevalent. Stop the madness and start making good single player games dammit.