Why I stopped playing: Castlevania Double Pack

With the amount of enjoyment I got out of Order of Ecclesia, I definitely wanted to get into the rest of the series. So I was at the mall and saw Castlevania Double Pack--which contains Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow--for about $10 and picked it up.

It's a very big disappointment.

Harmony of Dissonance I spent the most time with. It's not a great game by any means, made even worse by the fact that there's way too much backtracking through two versions of the same castle. I found myself aimlessly wandering, and frankly, if I'm not sure where exactly to go, I don't want to spend ten minutes going from one end of the ugly graphics to the other. The music is awful; I don't like to play games without their intended soundtrack, so I won't just put on regular music, but this was ridiculous.

And the game contains the stupidest sidequest I've ever seen. You find a few items of furniture--a chair, a statue, some sconces--and when you go into a certain room, your character says something to the effect of, "This is a nice room, but it needs furnishing!" And you drop off all of your furniture items and they are arranged for you. You even get items like full-length mirrors and king-sized beds. The thought of a character traipsing around fighting monsters while carrying around a bed, only to furnish a room in Dracula's fucking castle is just...ludicrous, and in a very very bad way. It doesn't even pretend it's in a semi-scary game--it even bypasses camp entirely. And from what I've seen on gamefaqs, the sidequest...seems to give no reward whatsoever.

Aria of Sorrow fares slightly better, but it also has the problem of backtracking and not knowing exactly where to go. I'm fine with a huge sprawling castle, but I don't like wandering aimlessly. At least there are teleportation points in this one. Still, I didn't find the action nearly as compelling as I did Ecclesia. I liked the satellite areas as well as the castle in that.

I think the structure of Ecclesia with a slightly different flow would be an ideal game for me--where you have the gigantic castle and the other outside areas...except instead of, as in Ecclesia, you go from one area to the other linearly, you can explore all areas at once, collecting items at your leisure.

I'm going to give Symphony of the Night a try, since most people consider that the finest game in the series, and I'm actually very interested in Portrait of Ruin, but I'm not holding out terribly much hope.

I guess I just like a lot of focus in my games--I like to know that there are distinct goals for me to get. "Sprawl around this castle" is not a focused game for me--neither is "randomly investigate until you find stuff." Eccelsia had that focus: through the first part of the game, for the most part, you're chasing another character, and you go from location to location to find him. During the second half, you have Dracula's Castle, which is slightly more linear than its incarnations in Harmony and Aria; however, while it takes as much time to finish Dracula's Castle as it does the entire rest of the game, storywise it's set up as the climax. Rather than a sprawling world, conquering this one castle is itself a goal, and I like that a lot better. I guess that's why sandbox and sim games don't appeal to me--I want to be told what to do. And yet I somewhat disliked Bioshock. Go figure.

I beat a game!!: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

Excellent, excellent game. I'm not sure why I never had an interest in the Phoenix Wright series; I bought a copy of Trials and Tribulations for my friend who was in law school (I didn't realize that there was an overarching storyline through it), but never had much of an interest until I saw a friend playing Apollo Justice, and it looked fun as hell. It took me about a month to track down the first game, and it's one of those rare games that was worth the wait.

My criticisms are minor and mostly relate to the investigation portions of the game. The trials are goddamn exciting--battle motion lines and exaggerated reations, it's like an anime battle scene, made even more ludicrous by the fact that this is done in a courtroom. (I was on jury duty recently; it was a LASIK malpractice case, much lower stakes than the murder cases in the game, but I can tell you that this is how lawyers actually act.) One mistake too many and the entire case is lost. The investigation sequences are...much less well-paced--there's no tension, basically you're bumming around looking for clues. The trial sequences move forward of their own accord; here, if you're not sure what to do, the game grinds to a halt. Still, everything was well-designed enough that I only got stuck to the point of viewing gamefaqs twice--both times in the fifth case. (Once, I didn't pixel-hunt properly--there's a surprisingly awesome lack of that in the most part of the game, and I might have simply been lazy; the second time was because I got confused by the navigation and didn't visit an entire location.)

The fifth case is exclusive to the DS remake--the game originally came out for the GBA--and it's...kind of a mixed bag. The first four stories are much more obviously connected--they form an arc of their own--and especially at first, the fifth case seems to be just thrown in there as bonus content. Your main sidekick through the main game leaves at the end of Case 4...and is replaced by a character who looks very much like her (it's commented on in-game), and yet is incredibly annoying at first. (She grows on you.) However, they do manage to make the fifth case tie in a little more deeply to the characters' arcs--it explores some facets of their personalities, and ends up working well. And it is hard--I think I spent about as much time on the fifth case as I did the first four cases combined.

To criticize the legal system in the game as ridiculous is missing the point--of course it's ridiculous. Trials cannot last more than three days, defendants are guilty until proven innocent, evidence law can be covered in exactly two sentences, there is no jury, lawyers seem to concentrate mostly on pointing out logical flaws...and yet, it amounts to a more fun and interesting game than a straight legal sim would be. And I like the idea of a court that throws around confetti when a defendant is found not guilty. The localization is excellent; I grew up in the days of the NES and never managed to learn to take for granted that a tradition would not be all "A WINNER IS YOU."

About the only real hinderance to enjoyment I found was the text speed. Phoenix Wright is one of those games where the text types out one letter at a time. I've taken a few speed-reading tests online and generally score between 400-600 words per minute; I could read the sentences about six times in the amount of time it takes to type it out. They use the speed to great effect--excited characters type their text out very very quickly, and when a character is carefully musing on something, the text is slower--but still, it makes replaying sections tedious. I savescummed not because I thought the game was too hard, but because I didn't want to stay and read the fucking text over and over again.

I don't know if that was fixed or not in the sequels, or if navigation is made easier--but I'll spend another month hunting down the second game in order to find out.

OVERWHELMED

This weekend I made the mistake of buying three games--Tales of Symphonia (played about two hours of it as a rental a few years ago; was unimpressed, especially with the storyline, and then I read that the story is basically "cliched as hell for about five hours then turns INCREDIBLY screwy, so why not; I'm about five hours in and waiting for the screwy, though there have been some very dark notes here and there), Tales of Legendia (I wanted to try a Tales game, in any case, and I liked the idea of the setting of this one), and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (which I've been searching for for about a month; I saw a friend playing Apollo Justice and it seemed really cool.) I went to about five different stores on Saturday looking for any one of them and found Symphonia; I only bought the other two because I was at the mall with my parents and saw both and figured, okay, save myself future effort.

I started Phoenix Wright and am enjoying it a lot--it reminds me very much of the kids' PC game Eagle Eye Mysteries (I should give that another go, I have fond memories of it.) I'm about 5-6 hours into Symphonia. I played about an hour of Legendia, just so I could say I have; I'm going to hold off on that until I beat or give up on Symphonia.

So right now, I am in the middle of the following games:

PS2:
Dragon Quest 8
Persona 4

Gamecube:
Tales of Symphonia

Wii:
Zak and Wiki
Dragon Quest Swords (though I might move that into the "given up on" pile)

DS:
Retro Game Challenge
Dragon Quest 5 (I just have the bonus dungeon left to do)
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

(That list is completely out of sync with the list in the right sidebar, I know...)

On top of all of that, I preordered the snazzy red limited edition RE5 XBox 360 bundle, which comes out Friday midnight. I am completely overwhelmed by gaming. I ought to be able to knock off at least the DS pile by then, and I could officially decide to give up on DQSwords...and that still leaves 4 games, 3 of which are long-ass RPGs.

I think I need to take a week off, disconnect my computer and my phone, and do nothing but game. Or move back in with my parents and just play. That could be fun...

I beat a game!!: Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

I've never been the hugest Castlevania fan; if I'm playing a platformer, I want it to be based on jumping more than fighting enemies. Mario has enemies, but they're distractions between jumps; Castlevania tips the balance in favor of the enemies. At least, that's the feeling I got from playing the old games. The physics were off--I know it's impossible in real life to be able to change direction mid-jump, but since when have videogames been about real-life physics? The controls have always felt awkward to me. I haven't played a Castlevania game since III--maybe I played a little of Super Castlevania, I can't remember--and for the most part the series has passed me by completely.

But a friend recommended Ecclesia to me, and an episode of the Game Overthinker featured some footage and it looked AWESOME. For--I paid something like $20-25 for it--I figured I could take a chance on the series, and holy wow am I glad I did.

Order of Eccelsia is possibly the finest game I have played in a VERY long time. The day I got it was a Sunday; I logged about 8 straight hours of playing it. Yeah. I have not felt compelled to spend that long on a game in years. I was liking it that much. I played until my thumbs were literally in pain. And the next day--I was on a jury and there was a lot of time spent in waiting rooms--I logged another couple of hours. I played the hell out of this game. While I didn't get all of the collectables--I really rarely do in anything--I've seen all of the content I feel like seeing.

The closest thing to a flaw that the game has--and this will sound strange because everyone you've talked to is talking about how tough it is--is that the last few stages were not nearly as tough as the first few. I faced one boss SEVEN TIMES in a row, dying and immediately challenging him again and dying and immediately challenging him again. I didn't find that in the latter stages. I'm not sure if it's a balance issue or due to the fact that in the latter stages of the game I was finally able to afford potions, but who knows. There's always Hard Mode.