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When someone says "JRPG" to you, what do you think of? Long games of monotonous turn-based battles mixed with predictable plots featuring characters that are pulled along the path of the story with no apparent choice, as if they're forced to do the stupid shit you see.Despite this, we seem to like them. I can't explain why I like gameplay where it's walk to area, press X until fight is over and repeat until next plot point, but a bit of me hates it because I tend to be grabby about any RPG I can get my hands on. Lately I've stopped going after the bad JRPGs and gone with a few good ones; this is one of them.
For those of you who don't know this series, the premise is pretty simple. You're a silent hero named Ryu who's race has the ability to turn into dragons. You spend the entire game going around teaming up with other anthro characters such as winged girls and wolf men to defeat the looming evil that for some reason persecutes said dragon race.
The concept is simple, but I felt that Breath of Fire III lacked something that other JRPGs tend to have: a clear villian. Most of the plot is dedicated to Ryu, the last of the Brood race, journeying to ask God about a whole bunch of stuff. You find things out along the way but nothing is ever really resolved until the final area of the game, which made me wonder "Where's my motivation?" a lot.
It felt really drawn-out and tedious in going after this goal but luckily the gameplay more than made up for it in my eyes. Even though it played like a typical JRPG combat-wise, the systems attatched to it made it fun and more in-depth than the average Final Fantasy.One such system is the "Master" system. Scattered around the BoF3 world are a bunch of Masters who you can apprentice your characters to once you receive their approval (such as paying one all of your money once). Each Master adjusts the stat growth at level up, like a wizard giving more Intelligence but taking away Strength, and have a set list of Skills a character can learn after gaining a determined amount of levels. This allows the player to develop their characters how they want, which I more than took advantage of.
The aformentioned Skills are also an excellent bit. Very similar to Final Fantasy's "Blue Magic", where certain enemy spells are learnable and usable by certain characters, Skills are a little bit more open. Any of the characters you get can learn a skill by using the combat menu choice "Examine".You can only learn each Skill once, though, and only one character at any given time can have a Skill. I tend to love Blue Magic systems, so this was very attractive. I just wish that 8/10 of the skills weren't so useless.
Breath of Fire III also has my favorite mini-game I've played in an RPG yet: Fishing. With an easy-to-learn yet challenging system and the bonus that each fish has a purpose as currency and a combat item, it made it addictive. Spend some time fishing, buy a good weapon you can use until later when you can buy said weapon normally.
So not only could you get excellent equipment (including some of the best stuff for Ryu near the end), but some of the harder fish to catch were really useful in combat. In other JRPGs the player would tend to hoard items like a Mega Elixir because of how rare they were and hard as hell to acquire. With enough patience and skill in fishing, the player could have an entire bagful of excellent healing items, and didn't have to feel remorse if they wasted one because there were always more to catch.
For a game released in 1997, it looked rather good to boot. The game may have been 2D-sprite heavy, but the enviroments were built on a 3D-plane that the player could navigate which led to some interesting locations. Add the fact that you could hold R1 and adjust the camera to look around obstacles you normally couldn't see through and it led to some challenging puzzle-filled dungeons and a lot of hidden items.
Those same puzzles would have been tedious and boring too, but luckily the music of the game was excellent and totally helped with the atmosphere of each dungeon. I absolutely love the overworld theme as Adult Ryu, and the end credits song was awesome.
Overall, I love this game. It may have taken me 95 hours to get everything and, before level-grinding to get the last things, being in the high-thirties by the time I got to the final location but the way it was constructed didn't make it boring like a lot of RPGs I've played. If you're looking for a good JRPG to sink time into, get this. It'll be worth it, even if all you do is fish like I did.
I may have been a tad harsh when it came to my previous review on Bram Stoker's Dracula for the Genesis, but compared to some of the crap shovelware coming out nowadays I'll take that game in a heartbeat. At least that was a video game! Compared to some of the titles that Nintendo is letting companies like Ubisoft defecate onto their consoles, Dracula was awesome.
Some of the worst turds that I'm seeing now are nothing more than 3rd party duplicates of things like Wii Sports and Nintendogs. Granted I never gave a shit for the latter but apparently it did it's job well enough to have four thousand even lamer clones fired out of a rectum cannon to loiter noisily amongst the good titles the DS has sitting around.
Nintendo makes a virtual dog raising emulator and next thing you know series like the "Petz [Animal]z" are camping out next to the Imagine [Profession] series of "games". I'm trying to find a good deal on a used DS game shelf, and I have to toss aside failures like "Bratz Kidz: Slumber Party" to try and find a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for under $25.
And as if it wasn't bad enough, the same thing's happening to the Wii! Everytime I go to look at the Wii games, the stock is 80% mini-game collections that rip off Wii Sports like Babysitting Party and shovelware games that are making stuff like Kung Fu Panda actually look good.
I don't suppor the PS3, but even it's meager collection is looking better than the giant collection of crap that Nintendo is letting companies like Ubisoft spray all over it's waggle-heavy console like a pent-up torrent of diarrhea. As it stands, I'd much rather pay more for a console if it will further solidify itself in saying "We don't have as many games, but you won't have to wade through shit like the stuff flying out on the Wii."
This is why I fully agree with Noi-sama here when I say that Nintendo needs to get their shit together, and fuck Ubisoft. We have to deal with hundreds of horrid titles like that when companies can't get their shit together, deal with some minor profit gains, and give the gamers good shit that we want. Things like english translated official ports of Namco x Capcom or anything from the Super Robot Wars series we haven't received yet.
Yeah, I realize that it'll cost a lot of money to do that. Any more money that shitting out 30 different clones of a single game that all suck? At least gamers WANT those games, not Nintendogs clone #390 with extra waggle action.
I'm going to be blunt when I say that some companies shouldn't make games. Either that, or all companies should be required to create and develop games to a standard of quality. The following game, by just about all accounts, wasn't.
For those of you who don't know (and I seriously doubt there are many of you that read this that do), Bram Stoker's Dracula was released in 1993 by Sony Imagesoft for the consoles of the time, and was developed by Traveler's Tales. Traveler's Tales is responsible for a handful of movie & tv show game adaptations in the past fifteen years and more recently the LEGO Star Wars/Batman/Indie series.
Unlike the LEGO games, which are actually fun from what I've experienced, Bram Stoker's Dracula was boring and badly-coded. This is something to be expected from books turned movies turned games, but I was willing to give it a shot considering how awesome the source material was.
1. Plot
What can be explained here? It's based off of the Columbia pictures movie adaptation of the classic novel, except formatted to fit into a 16-stage action platforming game. Not much to explain beyond that. Something I didn't learn until after looking up the movie, however, is that Keanu Reeves played Johnathan Harker in the movie, and you play as Harker throughout the entire game.
2. GameplayHere's where the game goes bad. The developer must have been in a rush to get the game out, or just didn't care to release a good game because this platformer just generally isn't above mediocre. It has the classic staples: Form of close/long range combat (Harker's sword and projectiles), lives, a hit point system (show as red-filled vials instead of a bar), and a useless score bit.
It may have sixteen stages, but they're all rather short for a platformer. On top of that, combat is dull. Harker's sword hit box is a tad small, and is absolutely useless for hitting enemies beneath him while moving at a downward angle.
Basic concept of each stage depends on what kind of stage there is. The quicker ones have you look for Van Helsing, which causes projectile items to appear on the stage, then find the exit. Even quicker stages than that are ones that remove the Van Helsing bit and just have the end. The third type replaces finding Helsing with fighting a boss.
That brings me to my next irritation: how absolutely easy the bosses are, not to mention how vague it is as to who they are. I had to look at a walkthrough to find out that the first boss was Dracula's carriage driver, for example. Before that I had assumed it was just a really bad shot at one of the Belmonts from Castlevania. But yeah, the difficulty. When the final boss of a game can be defeated by sitting at one side of a plain rectangle room and spamming your sword until Dracula runs into it enough times to die is just pathetic, even with the bad hit detection and small amount of life you get. The platforming of the game is harder than any fighting involved.
3. Graphics
They were alright for the time, but could have used some more time in making them.
4. Music
Eh, what can you expect from something that could be considered yesteryear's shovelware? I just didn't care for it.
Overall, it could have been a much better game. However, it's a general unwritten rule that movie to game adaptations generally just suck. For what it's worth, it was a change of pace from a Castlevania game, and had some different bosses in it. Like a fifteen-foot tall man wrapped in bandages that vomited spiders at you.
Final Score: 4.0
A month ago I came into a bit of money. What I did with it is the same thing that I usually do when I come into such an amount: I go game shopping. So I went down to the local music & game shop and browsed around for pre-owned games, then I walked out with Viewtiful Joe (GCN) and Castlevania: Curse of Darkness (PS2) in my possesion for only $25.
It wasn't until the last week that I actually started playing CoD though, and now that it's beaten I have a few thoughts on it. Thoughts on topics such as...
1. Plot
Compared to other Castlevania games - you are Belmont, Dracula is alive, go kill him - Curse of Darkness breaks the trend a little by instead starring another supporting hero, this time in the form of one of Dracula's two "Devil Forgemasters" (with this being the only time ever hearing of them). Hector, as he is known, had betrayed Dracula sometime during Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse and gone off to do his own peaceful little thing. Some time later the other Devil Forgemaster Isaac orchestrated the death of Hector's fiancee Rosaly via burning at the stake.
Isaac then plays cat and mouse with Hector as Hector struggles across the cursed countryside - another departure from Castlevania's tradition of just a giant castle - to kill Isaac and avenge his lost fiancee. Along the way he meets various characters such as the monk-like Zead, the enigmatic Saint Germain and Julia the witch. He also ends up encountering Trevor Belmont - the hero of Castlevania III - several times throughout his travels. I won't go into details or spoilers here but even though the cutscenes are spaced out farther than I would have liked, the plot does have it's share of twists and is quite good. And to top it off, I find Saint Germain to be an excellent character.
2. Gameplay
The meat and bones of the game, and what you're purchasing the media for. Unlike a bulk of the Castlevania games - 2D action platformers or "Metroidvania/Castleroids", Curse of Darkness follows in it's precursor's footsteps in being an action game set in a 3D enviroment. Unlike Lament of Innocence though, Curse of Darkness deviates even farther away from the typical whip + sub-item attack scheme that so many other Castlevania games have.
For example Hector fights in a system more akin to a Dynasty Warriors game, with one button being standard attacks and another being more powerful combo-finishing techniques that are used after the standard attack button has been pressed X number of times. The differences don't end there though, as Hector gains several different weapon types - ranging from swords to spears to even a guitar - and each type has it's own moves, pattern and speed.
However, unlike a normal game where you gain different weapons by finding them, Hector forges his own weapons using the items he gains via enemy drops or by stealing. Some of the best weapons in the game can only be forged by stealing from the proper enemy or boss, and a few of them are quite difficult to obtain. Death's item is especially a pain in the ass but is worth it in the end. This is because each enemy has a certain time when the item can be stolen from them (shown by a purple cursor instead of green when you've locked onto them with R2). Each enemy has a different window of steal availability with some being rather easy (Skeletons) to others being incredibly tedious (Death).
Another addition, and a bulk of the gameplay, is the Innocent Devil system. Representing his Devil Forgemaster status, you collect and raise various species of Innocent Devils to aid you in both exploring the areas around Dracula's lands and in combat. They range from the fairy species (seen previously in Symphony of the Night), which can heal you as well as provide other player-aiding abilities, to the Battle and Bird species which help with heavy doors and large gaps respectively.
With these expansions onto the usually run and hit of the 3D Castlevanias, the gameplay does get repetive and a tad boring after awhile. Much more detail could have gone into the areas that Hector explores and they could have dealt with being a tad less linear, especially Dracula's Castle. So many bland and empty hallways that existed for the sole purpose of running down could have been dealt without. And like I said earlier, combat does resemble a Dynasty Warriors game quite a bit. Could have been better, but still good overall.
3. Graphics
I'm not really much as far as opinions go on graphics. I'm a guy who still enjoys SNES and Genesis titles afterall, so the overall look of a 2005 PS2 game is that it looks good. The cutscenes look detailed and nice, and the character models during gameplay are decent. Backgrounds and level design is repetive though and flat, so it doesn't do great in that respect. Overall, it's good, but not much better than that.
4. Music
Finally, the music. Every Castlevania game has an incredible score worth listening to, and Curse of Darkness is no exception. Where some other aspects of the game may fail, the music is there to help you deal with it and still have a good time. The music has all of the old Castlevania appeal, but with the addition of the electric guitar in many songs - something that was missing from a few previous games. Personally, the battle theme that plays when you fight Isaac is my favorite.
All in all, I enjoyed the game for what it was worth but I think there could have been several improvements. It's still worth picking up and trying out though, so it shouldn't be just tossed aside in favor of one of the Castleroid games.
Final score: 8.0
Until the next save point, Sobou's out.
