Finished Genso Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki

suikoden hyakunen world mapI’m not in the habit of giving numbered ratings, but if I did for Hyakunen no Toki, it would be: first half, 2/10, second half, 7/10, Total score 5.5/10 (yes, I know the math doesn’t add up, that’s why I don’t do number scores).

I must apologize for the long delay between posts. I was almost finished with this game a week ago when I foolishly, foolishly decided to get a FAQ and collect all 108 Stars of Destiny. If you ever play this game (and I do moderately recommend it if you understand Japanese and like a good story), don’t bother getting all 108. It does make a difference to the ending, but not enough to make it worth wasting 5-10 hours collecting everyone.

On to the review proper… is what I’d like to say, but I’m tired of this game. The story did improve tremendously after 15 hours or so, and although the ending was rather weak, the final boss’s motivation was a letdown and the writers did get a little twist-happy and reveal-happy in the latter half, it’s still one of the better JRPG stories I’ve read. There are one or two things I wish they would have changed, though. The main one is the time travel gimmick. It is tedious, cheap, largely unnecessary and leads to confusion near the end. And as I mentioned in an earlier post, it makes my party look like chumps for always relying on their ancestors.

Do please go on, this is most interesting →

Suikoden: Hyakunen – The story is really good, but the game itself…

suikoden early partyFinding the right time for a major reveal is never easy. Too soon and it lacks impact. Too late and no one notices because they’ve all gone away. In an ideal world, game writers would get the timing right every single time, but if they must err, I believe they should err on the side of ‘too soon’.

I was this close to dropping Suikoden: Hyakunen because it wasted the first 10-15 hours when I still had energy on inconsequential junk. Now they’ve finally gotten round to the real story, but my patience has already been worn to shreds by the slowness and dreariness of what went before. I’m still interested, certainly, but I don’t have half the enthusiasm I would have had if things had gotten underway sooner.

Of course, part of that lack of enthusiasm is rooted in an absolute lack of faith in the writers’ ability to bring things to a satisfactory conclusion. The world in Hyakunen faces a serious problem, one of the most serious I’ve ever encountered in an RPG, and if the game had any intention of tackling it seriously they would have started way earlier. Right now my party is doing the equivalent of fixing a window while the house burns down. For storyline reasons we can’t put out the fire until the window has been repaired, but I fear we will spend so much time (and Konami’s budget) on the lesser problem that we will end up fixing the larger problem in a cop-out “We beat the boss and everything magically worked out” kind of way.

I debated with myself long and hard about whether to spoil the story right here and now or to wait until the game is complete and I can see how things turned out. In the end my wiser, more jaded half prevailed. After all, the game has been sucking 90% of the time. It won’t do to get excited just because they pulled off one or two interesting twists. If they can wrap things up well, I might be able to forgive the slow start. And if they mess things up, they’re already in my bad books so they don’t have that much further to sink. Therefore instead of speculating here on what story Konami should write, I’m going to get back to the story they did write and save any further discussion until I’ve finished it as best as I can.

EarthBound, Suikoden: Hyakunen and some other stuff

Short updates on four games, since I haven’t done that much gaming this weekend.

EarthBound: I’ve kind of lost the plot, so I’m just plodding on from town to town seeing the sights. I just got to Fourside after the lengthy Threed saga. Now I think I have to go back to the desert and check if the digger I helped has found any gold yet. Personally I wouldn’t mind keeping the Runaway Five captive for a little longer so I can watch their funky concerts at any time. I’m seriously loving the soundtrack to this game, and the rest of it isn’t bad either. I may have accidentally hit a glitch though, when I was fighting Master Belch. First turn, Polly hits him with Freeze B for 200, Ness throws the Fly Honey at him and he grabs it, Lewis (Jeff?) hits him with the Big Bottle Rocket for 650. Master Belch has been defeated. …Wait, what? Bit of a lucky break there, I guess.

The only issue right now is that I still can’t play more than 30 minutes or so at a time. Given the way Ness’s Dad not-so-subtly urges him to stop playing all the time, maybe the game was designed to be consumed in small doses. Or maybe his Dad is killing my will to continue with his incessant nagging. Chicken or egg, chicken or egg? Anyway, I’ll keep going, I’ll finish eventually. I was supposed to play Dark Cloud 2 this month, but first things first.

Doukyuusei 2 (J) (NP)Doukyuusei 2: “Classmates 2” in English. A SNES visual novel I read when I don’t feel like playing EarthBound. Has a highly unlikeable protagonist who is a rude, violent, lazy, ungrateful, wannabe-playboy slacker. Also has more girls than I know what to do with. I’ve met at least 10 in three in-game days, and this is just the Prologue. Unlikeable MC aside, it’s pretty well-written (as well-written as a galge can be, anyway) and makes a good time-waster. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it, though.

Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki: 17 hours and still counting, but barely. It’s shockingly boring for a game with such an interesting premise — imagine how different history would be if we could go back to 1913! — but I’m not ready to give up yet. I have a fairly good tolerance for outright bad games, but when a game is so weak, so lukewarm, so namby-pamby, I seriously don’t know what to do with myself. The voice of experience tells me to quit now and not come crying 10 hours down the line when it still sucks. At the same time, hope springs eternal in the human breast. I’ve only managed to kill one of the Crimson Axe honchos and there are at least three more, then I have three or four Aonians to polish off as well, so it’s going to be a long, long journey. I should really just give up, but no, no. I’ll hang in there a little longer.

Arc Rise Fantasia: Just cleaning up some odds and ends, putting a few bonus bosses in their place. I bought all the Casino weapons and hideous Casino outfits. I did a few extra Arena battles, but I can’t bring myself to fight my friends. I got all the “Ultimate” weapons, but apart from L’Arc’s, Rastan’s and Serge’s, they’re not that good. I was making my way down the Allwise Maze and was almost at the end when I ran out of steam. What happened was I was halfway through the final stage with all the Feldragons when I was called away, and now I don’t feel like doing it all over again. Maybe I’ll save him for another playthrough one day.

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And that’s the gaming situation heading into this week. I might be able to finish one of these this week if I really try, but I doubt it.

Suikoden: Hyakunen – So far, so-so (slight spoilers)

Genso_Suikoden_~Tsumugareshi_Hyakunen_no_Toki~_Cover_ArtThe full title is Genso Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki, which has something to do with time spun over a hundred years or something like that. Sounds more impressive than it really is, seriously. If I hadn’t played Shining Blade already, this would be my blah-est game of the year. I’ve had a pretty good 2013, all things considered, but I knew I couldn’t get away without a few clunkers.

Story so far

I’m only 12 hours in and just got a strategist, so things might change. My protagonist lives in a world where deadly monsters show up every 100 years and, of course, this is the 100th year. Finding the monsters too much for them to take on, they warp back into the past with the aid of a magic tree and get training from the heroes of 100 years ago on how to fight the monsters. It then turns out that a group, the Crimson Axe is manipulating these monsters with the aim of overthrowing the Aonian Empire. MC and his gang don’t trust either group, so they strike out on their own to defeat the Crimson Axe and their monsters and bring back peace to the world.

It looks nice on paper, as stories like this tend to do. But just like business is all about location, location, location, stories are all about execution, execution, execution. Once my party discovers how to travel into the past, their solution to every single problem is always “Travel back 100 years and get someone to help us fix it.” It makes them look weak and lame when they can’t stand on their own two feet and are constantly running back crying to the heroes of yesteryear. That leads to:

Problem 1: The older heroes are far more colorful, far more heroic and far, far more reliable than my gang of wet-behind-the-ears village kids. It’s not because they’re all at level 50; they just happen to be better characters. Cheerful, easy-going Troward is a much better main character than dull, goody two-shoes Trunks (not his name, but I should totally have named him that). Troward’s best friend Rolf is a much nicer fellow than cranky tsundere mage Myura. And so on it goes for the whole cast. The reason why the game immediately rules out importing any of those ancient heroes to the future is because that’s the first thing any sensible gamer would do. There’s simply no contest.

Do please go on, this is most interesting →

EarthBound, the early days

EarthBound_BoxThe game doesn’t keep an hour count, but my MC (Ness?) has reached level 20 and I’ve just gotten my second party member, so this is as good a time as any to write something about EarthBound. Except I don’t know what to write, because it’s more Earth-Bland than anything else right now. I’m liking it well enough, but nothing really pushes me to play it. I might have left it a little late, in that it doesn’t seem that fresh or interesting to me because I’ve played a lot of Dragon Quests and a lot of Pokemons and this seems like a cross between the two. Blasphemy for EarthBound fans, I know. I’ll see myself out…

…but before I go, what I’m liking about EarthBound, at least:

– The rolling HP gauge. Totally saved my life when a tree randomly exploded on me.
– The NPCs are very amusing.
– Best Dad ever, but how did he know I’d got Polly in my party? Is he spying on me?
– The penalty for being KO’ed is pretty light. I’ve played enough DQ to know enough to keep all my money in the bank, so death is a slap on the wrist.
– The cartoony graphics are cute.
– I kinda like the music.

So far, so good, really. I’m sure it will pick up tremendously once I have my whole party together. Right now I have a dilemma to solve involving a wad of bills, a singing troupe in debt and a tunnel I can only pass through while playing funky music. Hmm, how to put the three together? <_< >_> I don’t know a single spoilerrific thing about EarthBound, and I intend to keep it that way, so I’m grateful that the writers make it easy to figure out what to do next without holding my hand. I’ll report back once I’ve gotten a little further.