Dreamcast Retrospective Day 2: Grandia II

I have long had what you might call a love/hate relationship with JRPGs.

On the one hand, I am inevitably drawn to them over and over again.  On the other hand, they almost always end up boring me to tears. 

This struggle has played out many times over my game playing years.  Unfortunately these sorts of RPGs play simultaneously to the things I love most and despise above all else about video games. 

Only one JRPG has managed to overcome the tall odds, balance all of its elements correctly, and wind up on my list of completed games. 

That game is Grandia II.

I’m not even going to pretend that Grandia II was some fantastic game that blows every other JRPG out of the water.

It really wasn’t. 

What it comes down to, though, is that it had enough of its ducks in a row that it managed to remain charming, interesting, and, most importantly, fun to play over the entire experience.

JRPGs appeal to the part of me that likes an epic story.  They appeal to the part of me that likes to travel to distant lands, to explore uncharted territory, and to explore unseen worlds in a way not possible in any other medium.

The stories hook me with their grand scale.  The presentation hooks me with its high production values.  The worlds hook me with their vast size, dwarfing that of most other genres.

Then I actually play them and get tired of navigating menus for 6o hours.

I know one of the purported benefits of the genre is its supposed value for the dollar, the epic length of the adventurous tales these games tell, but there’s something to be said for quality over quantity. 

In many areas, Grandia II hits only slightly above par.  The story, for instance.  I don’t even remember much about it, to be honest, save for that it was serviceable, a little unoriginal, some of the characters were bland, and it featured a few of the same story elements that I despised many years later in Tales of Symphonia.  It wasn’t nearly as poorly told as the Tales game, but it wasn’t mind-blowing either. 

But it got the job done, moved the game along, and hooked me enough that I wanted to keep playing the game and see what was next.  It also featured a nice, healthy dose of charming, which helped. 

The graphics were nice for their time, full of color and fantasy.  The music was probably all right, but it’s not a soundtrack I find myself repeating over and over again in iTunes years later.

No, where Grandia II really excelled was in its battle system.  This is where a game in the repetitive JRPG genre really lives or dies, and this game nailed it better than any other game I have ever played.  It was the perfect mix of fast-paced action and strategy.  Never getting either too overwhelming or too repetitive.  You were always on your toes and always having a good time, not matter how many battles you had fought.

The game had other nice touches as well, such as the fact that you could see all the enemies on the screen and either avoid them or choose to do battle.  This is common these days, but it was relatively rare at the time.  The curse of annoying random battles has kept me from finishing many an RPG (including another big Dreamcast name, Skies of Arcadia) because they take control from the player and get in the way of exploration, which, to me, is the reason I’m playing the games in the first place, not the battle system.

With Grandia II, I got the best of both worlds: a battle system that was worth playing the game for coupled with a lack of random battles.

I was a happy gamer.

That Grandia II was such a terrific experience for me is actually a bit painful in a way.  You see, unlike some other JRPG series, Grandia has relatively few installments.  Essentially there are only three major entries that I am aware of.  The first is on the original PlayStation and, being a sucker for production values, I doubt it could hook me these days.  The third is on PlayStation 2 and, according to all reports I’ve heard, the story kind of sucks, taking away a lot of my incentive to play it. 

So, since it does not appear my Grandia II experience will be rivaled anytime soon, I’ll just cherish the memories I have of it.  It remains to this day one of my favorite RPGs. 

I place it on a very high pedestal and feel proud to call it the only JRPG I’ve ever truly finished.  The battle system is unmatched and the rest of the game is decidedly entertaining, even where unoriginal.

It absolutely deserves a spot as one of the great titles in the Dreamcast’s library.

Dreamcast Retrospective Day 1: Jet Grind Radio

9/9/09 will mark the tenth anniversary of the beloved but short-lived Dreamcast, which entered our hearts on 9/9/99.  As a tribute to this special console, Zestful Contemplation will be running nine days of nostalgia-tinted coverage of Sega’s last console.  Enjoy.

Remember when cell shading was revolutionary?

Remember when nobody had seen it before?  When a little game called Jet Grind Radio burst out of nowhere and showed gamers a brand new art style, unlike anything seen before?  

Remember how wickedly cool it was?  Remember how you marveled at how much like a 3D cartoon it looked?  

Remember when the technique wasn’t only reserved for crappy licensed children’s games and could actually be considered a desirable art style?

The prominence of cell shading today is all thanks to Jet Grind Radio.  

The glory days of cell shading may not have lasted long, as the style quickly faded into the realm of novelty except in exceedingly rare circumstances, but Jet Grind Radio showed us the style done right.

I don’t honestly remember whether Jet Grind Radio was technically the first cell shaded game on the market.  It’s certainly the first one that I remember and I believe it was, but that’s not really what important.  It’s not even worth looking up.

Why?

Because what’s really important is that Jet Grind Radio is the first cell shaded game that mattered.

More importantly, it was one of the few 3D games of its day to display a truly unique art style.  With the PlayStation 2 came enough polygonal fidelity that it was actually possible to differentiate one blocky, multidimensional game from another.  No one confuses Okami for Metal Gear Solid 3.  

But Jet Grind Radio was one of the earliest examples that 3D games could truly innovate artistically; that they could bring something unique to the table.

These days artistic style is all the rage.  Throwing more and more polygons has become so difficult and so expensive that developers are finally starting to focus on what really matters: the art style.  From Braid to Shadow of the Colossus to Prince of Persia to Valkyria Chronicles, games are trying harder than ever to differentiate themselves from one another artistically.

For me, though, Jet Grind Radio was the first time that I was really convinced that my beloved medium of games could really do anything interesting artistically, though I admittedly might not have been able to put it quite as nicely at the time.

It didn’t hurt that the gameplay was just as unique as the art style.  Large, open environments to wander around in provided a thrilling mixture of exploration, platforming, action, and even a little puzzle solving.  

Anyone who ever got truly hooked into the game could tell you how much replay value it had, too.  There was tons of stuff to collect and unlock and always another reason to pick the game back up and give it another go.

That was one damn hard game, though.

I have no shame in admitting that some of my most fond memories of the game come not from playing it myself, but from watching a close friend play and show off his far superior skill.  We spent a ton of time together playing this game and it wasn’t even multiplayer.  We just enjoyed watching each other explore the worlds.  

Though it was usually him playing.  He was better, what can I say?

Ok, fine, we used the occasional cheat code.

I said the game was hard.

Our love for the game spilled over to the much-ignored Xbox sequel (and in fact we’ve probably logged more time into that one than the original), but there’s something special about number one.

The soundtrack is like that of no other game I’ve heard before or since (save for the sequel).  The gameplay still remains unique, even in the current gaming landscape full of open worlds begging to be charted and exploration to be had on every disc.  There’s just something different about this one and the blend of disparate elements it offers.  It’s more than the sum of its parts.

Incidentally, Jet Grind Radio featured perhaps the only implementation of a quick time event style gameplay element that I actually genuinely enjoyed (so much so, in fact, that I lamented the more streamlined gameplay of the sequel that cut out the feature in favor of more speed).  Painting that stylish graffiti with button taps and circular motions was far more enveloping than simply holding down a button to paint, especially when you had a gaggle of bumbling cops quickly approaching.

Jet Grind Radio got me to truly like a button-matching gameplay segment.

I told you the game was special.

Dreamcast Retrospective Day 1: Crazy Taxi

9/9/09 will mark the tenth anniversary of the beloved but short-lived Dreamcast, which entered our hearts on 9/9/99.  As a tribute to this special console, Zestful Contemplation will be running nine days of nostalgia-tinted coverage of Sega’s last console.  Enjoy.

There is quite simply nothing like the original Crazy Taxi.

There have been plenty of imitators, mind you; the franchise’s own sequels, to name a couple, both of which sucked.

But the original Crazy Taxi is still something special.

That magical blend of horribly grating music by The Offspring, funky controls that handled unlike any other game or real-world car ever created, and repetitive gameplay made for an experience you just couldn’t put down.

Even if you probably wanted to.

We give things the label of “arcade style” today, but we’ve largely forgotten what it means.  Crazy Taxi was one of the last true “arcade style” games that epitomizes what it means to be designed as a quarter-sucking arcade machine.

The play sessions are short.  The gameplay is shallow.  There’s a distinct lack of varied modes of play.  Your reward for playing is a meaningless score based on your performance.  The high difficulty and cheap tricks to make you fail will tempt you to hurl your controller at the wall.

But you won’t be able to put the blasted thing down.

Crazy Taxi is addictive as hell.  You’ll want to put up with its many shortcomings just to get that one more customer, just to boost your score that little bit more.

A few more minutes of play and surely you can do better.  Just watch.

It’s a wonderful feeling.

We call games “arcade style” these days, sure.  Dual stick shooters, such as Geometry Wars, seem to be especially fond of the label.  The increasingly meaningless branding is slapped on a great number of XBLA games.

But they’re all just imitators.

Crazy Taxi is an honest to goodness arcade title, and one of the last of its breed at that.  Street Fighter IV, from the very franchise that helped to start the arcade boom in the first place, is now slinking onto consoles with far more recognition than its largely ignored and poorly distributed arcade counterpart.  Other franchises have long since given up on the arcade entirely.

Crazy Taxi was the real deal.

There wasn’t much to it, and it wasn’t the type of game that would hook you for hours and hours on end, but it was the type of game that you would never truly get tired of.  You could always pick it up for “just one more game”.  

Even all these years later, I can still fire it up, have a go, and feel as comfortable as ever.  The Offspring screaming, “Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!” at me on the title screen never fails to bring a smile to my face.  I may listen to the song in other contexts, but this is the one it feels like it was truly meant for.

Part of me yearns for another try at a sequel, or a remake of the original game, or a port with shinier graphics, or even just the plain old original slapped onto XBLA or PSN; anything to make the fun more accessible so I can get my taxi driving thrills without dragging out the dusty Dreamcast.

But truly wishing for such things is folly.  They go wrong far more often than they go right.  There’s something unique about the original Crazy Taxi that I just don’t think could be remade.  

The crappy graphics, terrible control, and repetition of both soundtrack and gameplay are all part of what the game was.  Changing any of that would throw off the blend and make the taste tepid and bitter.

Maybe it’s best to just let it be.  

Not everything needs to be recreated, dragged from the muck and polished up again in hopes of drawing in a new audience.  Sometimes that just serves to make the cracks on the surface all the more visible.  

I like my Crazy Taxi just like it is, damnit, and I don’t think I’m ever going to get tired of it.

Review - Condemned: Criminal Origins

Bludgeoned with Thrills

There are approximately eleventy bajillion genres out there today, but if I were forced to pick just one out of the steaming pile and award it the title of Most Likely to Age Poorly and Become Forgotten and Sad Within a Frighteningly Short Amount of Time, it would have to be the horror genre.

The effectiveness of the horror genre is tied almost directly to the quality of presentation values to a degree not seen in any other genre. Going back and playing Resident Evil on the original Playstation is more likely to make you scream with laughter than recoil in horror.

A great design and a top-notch art style will take you a long way, but once a horror game’s graphics have lapsed into the territory of the aged, it quickly moves from exciting big budget thriller to the gaming equivalent of a laughable B-movie.

That said, I was amazed that a title as old as Condemned: Criminal Origins held up as well as it did.

Condemned thrusts you behind the eyes of SCU (Serial Crime Unit) agent Ethan Thomas, a man who has just been framed for the murder of two policemen and fired from his job. Seeking justice (and his job back), Ethan must run around the cramped corridors of fictional Metro City (clever name there, guys) and hunt the serial killer that is actually behind the murders, all while trying to figure out why the city’s population is being turned into murdering psychopaths.

It’s hard to find a really original story in the crowded horror genre, and Condemned isn’t one. As with developer Monolith’s other spooky first-person franchise, F.E.A.R., however, a lot of mileage is squeezed from themes you’ve probably seen before, making for an effective plot that serves its purpose of driving you through the game and providing spooky settings to traverse and creepy bad guys to bludgeon.

I will admit that I have played older horror games than Condemned that held up better than I expected them to, Fatal Frame 2 on the original Xbox comes to mind, but Condemned has a little more going against it than just its few year old age. Being a launch game for a console is rarely a good omen in terms of the lasting power of a game’s graphical fidelity (or its gameplay, for that matter), so I was not expecting good things here.

The age of the game certainly shows, mind you, but it also demonstrates how much thrill a game can throw at you while limping along on quickly aging graphics.

This is largely due to the game’s sound design. Audio has an equal, if not greater, importance than visuals in horror titles. Condemned nails this aspect, providing an experience full of convincing atmospheric noises, creepy wails and screams, and audio that really adds to the intensity of the experience. Other games may have done this better, especially since the game’s release (Bioshock or Monolith’s own F.E.A.R. 2, for instance), but Condemned is certainly no slouch and provides the audio quality necessary to really sell the atmosphere of the game.

Condemned uses its premise to provide a couple of key calling cards that it lays on the table to try and differentiate itself from its peers. One of these stems from your role as an SCU forensic investigator. You’ll get to pick up a number of nifty tools and examine crime scenes in order to find evidence and advance the story.

Unfortunately these sequences are usually little more than a virtual equivalent of hide and seek. The game holds your hand through all of them and it often feels as if you’re just going through the motions. That said, I still found them to be a compelling break from the action and a nice change of pace. Even as shallow as they are, I would rather have the information delivered to me this way than in a boring cutscene.

The other, more significant feature that Condemned boasts about is its combat system. This is not your run-of-the-mill first-person shooter. Condemned takes the rather risky maneuver of focusing its fighting on melee weapons rather than the use of firearms. Luckily the implementation is largely solid and the combat works terrifically with the game’s close-quarters, suspenseful nature.

Attacking is done with a press of the right trigger, while defending is done by tapping the left trigger. You can pick up any of a wide variety of items that you’ll find scattered throughout the environments around you, and each one of them has different ratings for attack power, defense, speed, and range. A little more variety might have been nice, but there’s enough to keep things interesting to the end of the game. Whacking somebody with the sharp end of the blade from a paper cutter just never gets old.

I do wish defense weren’t quite so clunky. Tapping the left trigger starts an animation where your character raises his weapon in defense for a certain length of time. Timing this block with an enemy’s attack seems more difficult than it should be. I don’t see any logical reason why I shouldn’t have been able to just hold the block button down to guard as long as I wanted to.

Most of the environments in Condemned are tight hallways and small rooms. Wandering through some of these well-realized, creepy environments with little more than a glorified stick to protect yourself really adds to the mood. It’s nice to see guns treated as a scarce item - a rare treat to break up the action every once in a while - rather than a reason for the game to exist.

The melee focus also plays into the game’s gritty presentation, as the bludgeoning is suitably violent. You even have the option of finishing off some enemies by pressing a button on the D-pad once you’ve knocked an enemy down for a brutal finisher.

With these two tricks, Condemned manages to vary the pace of its campaign and keep proceedings from ever feeling tedious or boring, right up to its impressive (albeit more than a little confusing) combat-filled finale. Still, this is a horror story we’re talking about here. The ending may be thrilling, but don’t expect it to make any sense.

Horror stories aren’t allowed to do that.

As I seem to have acquired a taste for horror games recently, it’s refreshing to come across games like Condemned that can give me that horror atmosphere I crave without the tired trappings of the stale survival horror sub-genre. Its story may not make a whole lot of sense and it may be a little dated and a little clunky, but it still manages to provide a tense, fun experience.

Condemned is honestly one of the scariest, most intense games I’ve yet played and it manages to provide this experience largely without resorting to the cheap tricks that have become so common in this genre. For that I give it high praise, despite some pesky unevenness.