Oh, Mother.

Ok, so it’s been… ages since I last wrote on this here viddygame blog o’ mine. Why? Well, not only have I been playing less and less in the past years, but what time I have spent playing has been on games that, while enjoyable, have not exactly moved me.

So why jump back into this? Well, one game I played to completion recently has stuck with me for a few weeks after I stumbled upon its end credits, sending me into short reveries and odd avenues of thought the like of which I had not experienced with a game since, well, possibly Persona 3.

The game in question is Shigesato Itoi’s Mother 3, a game famous – or infamous – for not being localized by Nintendo despite all the Earthbound fans’ clamoring and begging. In what one might interpret as a very resounding “fuck you” from Nintendo to all the occidental fans who’ve actually bought their wares since they lost the number one spot in the games market.

Corporate idiocy aside, the game saw a fan translation that turned out to be of superb quality, easily putting any official translation I have been witness to in the past decade to shame.

The game, much like its prequels, is a celebration-slash-condemnation of modern world tropes and Americana. In what could amount to be both a love letter and a critique to the Western way of life as exemplified by the United States of America, Mother 3 takes the player on a journey through what a simple country life must be like in the US, culminating in a colorful simile of New York City, as viewed through the lens of a Japanese mindset.

As a fan of the original Earthbound - which just happens to be Mother 2 in Japan – I came in expecting more of the same quirky humor that made the one localized iteration of the series such a sweetheart for many SNES owners. I was pleasantly surprised to find an even better game, fraught with very mature undercurrents belied by the colorful visuals and humor.

Mother 3 is starts in the fictional rural village of Tazmily, located in an archipelago that, for all the info the player is given, encompasses all the landmass in the game’s world. The village is one where there is no economy and therefore not apparent materialism, marking it as a veritable utopia in many ways. The main characters at the outset are a family of a stoic cowboy dad, a loving mother and twin boys; Lucas, the whiney, frail sort, and Claus, the bold adventurous type.
The game quickly starts piling tragedy upon this family with the death of the mother and subsequent disappearance of Claus, the brave twin. In the aftermath of this, the father, Gin, is left hollow and miserable, constantly seeking out his lost son while neglecting the one still with him. As such, Lucas grows strong and resilient and becomes a rather self-sufficient youth.

All the while, the village of Tazmily is beset by several changes brought on by the appearance of certain figures that slowly turn the Utopic town into a slightly dysfunctional example of consumerism. The very changes to the town seem to expand to what may have been a blank template of a world beyond its borders, where new locations of technological veneer mark a stark contrast against the backdrop of lush forests and vast canyons that surround the once simple village.
As the story progresses and different characters with coterminous stories are introduced as playable characters, the evil empire that has grown while seeming benign becomes more tangible to the player, culminating in the joining of the different central characters into a miniature guerilla of sorts as they stand together against the now common foe.

The pacing of the story, despite the slight periods of level grinding that are still a feature of Japanese RPG’s, is very effective in creating a connection between the player and the main actors, to the point that I was nearly brought to the point of shedding a tear upon a couple of the game’s revelations.

The ending is easily one of the best I have ever seen. It achieves a certain poetic brilliance with its minimalistic use of exposition, a very rare thing today given the horrible parade of game endings plaguing the medium as of late.
It is a shame to think that Shigesato Itoi may not visit this series in the foreseeable future, as he has stated repeatedly that he is not interested in doing so and would welcome any developer wishing to embark in the production of a hypothetical Mother 4.

One wonders what a game such as this might be like on a current or next generation console, especially in light of the fact that Mother 3 was originally developed as a Nintendo 64 title. Personally, I think that the change to GBA as its platform for release was a good thing, as the limitations inherent to the now-defunct portable system only made the stylistic design choices all the more poignant and charming. Perhaps, though, today’s consoles could provide a plausible home for such a game where the quirks of its style can be effectively converted to the high definition detail now commonplace in our living rooms.

I truly do wonder.

Lego superheroes and Japanese Highschools

A month removed from completing my first playthrough of Fallout 3 and it's pertinent DLC, I reflect on the experience and find that it was one of the most involving gaming experiences I've had in recent years. It is evident that the current - though new to me - generation of video games is being very good to me.

At the time of achieving the toppling of the Enclave's power center in the DC area I had logged over 150 game hours. The gameplay experience in the FO3 is addictive to say the least. What I did find missing is the narrative that made the previous two so endearing. My guess is that some of those missing elements may return in the next chapter of the series, New Vegas, since many key members of the first two's development team are in the fold.

Having burnt myself out on the Mega-Epic-Sized games - or so I thought for a moment there - I decided to tackle shorter games, nothing bigger the 20 hours or so. I first hit Fatal Frame 2, which I had left unfinished 6 or so hours into the story. 19 hours total and the game was ready to be buried in my closet again. Lego Batman is now safely in my sights as I intend to do with it as I did it's Star Wars colored brethren; collect everything!

But I couldn't possibly ignore the siren song of the perennial king of my videogaming soul: the RPG. I couldn't help but start up Mass Effect as it had been sitting in my closet since December when it was gifted to me. I must say, it starts slow despite the early action, but the implied depth of it is astounding. The quality of the character models, facially in particular, is nothing short of masterful. Only a couple of hours into it so far but it will be slow one for me as I must finish up other things before it...

Like Persona 3: FES which I also started recently but now have 12 hours logged and am absolutely obsessed with. Who knew and RPG/sim would drive me nuts like this? The fact that it's set in such a twisted yet compelling imagining of the Gekkoukan Highschool district certainly is the most likely reason why I've dug the whole schtick. The Dark Hour, as a concept, and all the details that accompany it is something that tickles my wicked fancy. Coffins that will revert to human form once the hour passes, creature that feast on the unwittingly immune to aforementioned transmogrification... I love this game. It further cements my love for the Megami Tensei universe and the Persona sub-series; it may very well be my favorite series of all time.

I just received Brutal Legend in the mail yesterday. Managed to play an hour or so - the introductory sequence - and found it amazing. The game is truly under-appreciated, it's a shame. The soundtrack is obviously great; a chunky helping of classic and not-so-classic metal that would make any red-blooded metalhead cream his/her pants. The action is seamless and very well balanced, so far, and I have yet to tire of the in-game banter. Also, I must state, the title screen is simply the best ever. Hands down. It captures the whole metal artwork and the usual love for vinyl records so pervasive among the rock crowd. If you need to see only one thing about Brutal Legend, it is the title screen...

The opening sequence of the game speaks true to a man like me, so hung up on artistic merit and the soul behind musicianship. The critique towards what metal - and most other genres, truth be told - has become in the hands of the record industry hits the nail square on the head. When Ormagöden makes its appearance it is an awesome thing to see. The way it's animated made tingles run up and down my spine. I must write a love letter to Mr. Schaffer, he has made me happy once again.

As of now, in a preemptive claim, I deem Brutal Legend the Coolest Game Ever and the Most Metal Game So Far.

Sifting through the fallout...

I mentioned in previous posts how I'd been trying to finish Xenosaga 2 with great difficulty given how horrible the narrative in the game is. Now that I am done with it I can say that it is a sad example of what a game looks like when developers try to cram too much plot into too little game. It felt like a synopsis of the game Monolith intended it to be. Soon enough I will plumb the depths of the third and final episode in the saga, but not for another month, at the least. Some detox is in order.

I have started my first journey through the Capital Wasteland of Fallout 3. The game sets a very good mood as the rich tapestry that is the post-apocalyptic ruin of Washington DC makes for a very enthralling setting. I love the little details one finds when exploring derelict houses: the bare skeletons of a couple embracing each other in bed made me wonder if they perhaps took some pills to die together before the nuke hit; another such skeleton in a bathtub, likely the product of slit wrists; the remains of a child lain for the last time in his bunk bed; a small bombshelter beneath an overpass with a medical room full of plungers and bloodstains, a lonely ghouls its sole inhabitant.

There are bizarre scenes, one such that made me wonder if it was intended that way by the developers or - the most likely scenario - the product of a glitch which served to heighten the utter creepiness of the dystopian game world. This one instance in the police station in Germantown where Super Mutants disembowel humans or ship them elsewhere - this mystery I have yet to unravel!. Here on a wall, entrenched, as if the wall itself had been built with it inserted, was a skeleton twitching uncontrollably in a Brothers-Quay-like manner; a veritable haunting by a hapless victim of some gruesome fate, the owner of the remains. A hand coming out of the floor and spinning on its own axis as if in performance of the danse macabre. I stepped across these and was damaged slightly by them. I saved on the spot so that I may revisit this and show it to friends visiting me whenever possible. I think this has been the most unnervingly impressive moment I have encountered in Fallout 3.

The Wasteland is veritably alive, the twisted fauna of it setting the barren sands acrawl with hostile aberrations. The sparse flora a stark reminder of what once was before the bomb. My experience, 20-odd hours of exploration, has been riveting. The hours go by entirely too quickly and I am finding the little free time I have sorely lacking in volume. Bethesda has done well with my beloved Fallout Universe. More impressions to come in the near future.

Closure in gaming.

My journey into Dragon Age: Origins as a Dalish Rogue is now ended. It has been a couple of weeks since I completed my first playthrough and I am quite satisfied with the way the game wraps things up after one has defeated the last boss. I have also started the origins of every other character type combination I hadn't hitherto and am very pleased with those. Every origin is very well thought out, so far my favorite, however is that of the Dwarven Noble.

One thing Bioware does well is endings. For every game since Baldur's Gate to DA:O, the closing scenes and accompanying narrative have been handled with great care, making sure the player gets the most out of the decisions he/she made earlier in the game. I wonder what sort of surprises the Awakening expansion will hit us with...

Finishing off Xenosaga 2 from my pile of backlogged games. The gameplay is scant and the game seems to have been shortened greatly by way of montages, especially at the end of disc 1 and starting disc 2. This way of presenting the story reminded me of the way Xenogears' second disc was handled, i.e. narration by one or two of the main characters with little to no involvement from the player. Can't say it's a bad game, but if does feel like much was left out for the sake of releasing it on schedule.

The original Persona on PSOne is trickling slowly. I've taken it for a spin only once this year and a short spin at that. Once Xenosaga 2 is out of the way I'll be hitting this baby as my DA:O alternative and making sure I keep up with my resolution to play through all Persona's before the year is through.

On a sad not, Crispy Gamer is no more. I will miss this site dearly as I only discovered it 3 months ago and have personally found that most gaming journalism sites and magazines are sorely lacking in editorial content. The Escapist Magazine is the only other such publication of that kind. Let's see what sort of thing comes out of the refuse there...

The Dalish playthrough coming to a close and the year of playing Persona.

So, 40+ hours into my Dalish Rogue playthrough of Dragon Age: Origins and I've had a few surprises. for one, I only recently discovered that the town of Lothering, somehow, became a ghosttown. It got wiped out completely. It seems I somehow neglected certain quests or missed events that would have prevented the town from dying. Interesting, non? I am about to embark into the mines of Orzamar, a section of the game that seems to turn off a great many players or so I've read in many diverse forums, and find my enjoyment of the game still going strong. It has been nothing short of awesome and it makes me pine for the days when I could spend a barrage of hours sitting in front of a screen with little care in the world save for the basic needs and perhaps school or work somewhere on the horizon.

As I am writing this, I can't wait to get back home and plunge back into the realm of Ferelden and do away with the darkspawn. It is only with great effort that I am able to pry the controller from my hand and remove my stiffening frame from the place where it rests. Maybe I'll get back to my evil mage playthrough on my laptop sometime soon...

As for new year's resolutions, I came across those at 1UP in an article where the staff listed their game related vows for the newborn year and decided to follow through on something I intended to do anyways. I will retake the playthroughs of Persona on PSone as well as Innocent Sin and continue onto Eternal Punishment, Persona 3: FES and 4 to cap it all off. It will be the year of Persona, with a few games in between these. This is my gaming goal for 2010.

Have at you!

The Ongoing Adventure of the Current Gen Neophite

And so it continues; my foray into the wily world of the 360. I've played little other than Dragon Age for the past couple of weeks with what little free time I've had. This means that the games I'd been playing or re-playing (Breath of Fire 4, Persona, Innocent Sin, Fatal Frame 2, Okami, Pikmin 2, Xenosaga 2) have taken a back seat to the electronic crack-cocaine Bioware concocted for the sole purpose of dooming me. It had been years since I'd been wishing I were home playing rather than out socializing, Final Fantasy XII being the last game in a very long time to have garnered this honor.

I'm 30-odd hours into the story and have squeezed every last lead for a quest out of my Dalish rogue. Every night when time allows some amount of play time I tell myself that I'll only play for an hour or so only to find myself 3 or 4 hours later struggling with my own self to put down the controller and go to sleep. Some allowances have been made due to the custom of December being a month given to excess and the general bending if not outright eschewing of rules. Hence, I don't feel all that bad about the exercise I'm skipping out on, but come January this must end. How will I manage, I despair. Well, only one way of finding out. I do intend to go through the game at least 6 times; one play-through for each origin. I don't know how many endings there are but I've read that the number generally accepted is 4, minor outcomes pertinent to player characters notwithstanding. A Herculean task simply in the sheer volume of time that I will gleefully plunge into the game.

I got Mass Effect as a gift from my sister for Xmas. It brings the DLC episode that adds a little to the story (on an extra disc). I tried playing it last night but was so gassed after a day careening after my daughter that I would repeatedly fall asleep controller in hand, waking up to find several minutes had passed in the interim. After a couple of such episodes I dispensed with the notion of actually enjoying my gift that night and hit the sack forthwith.

Life as a grownup gamer is certainly about balance. A game in its own right, really.

Better Late than Never

Living in my cave I've been able to ignore the noise and eschew the media onslaught of what is the current generation of videogame consoles. Indeed, I have successfully shrugged off the siren call of the HD gaming generation... or had until recently. It is no secret that I have been pressing a keen ear against the proverbial wall for any and all things Dragon Age; for about a year it has been on my radar, making me wish for the promised plunge into a world built by the master artificers at Bioware, the same virtual architects who made me spend hundreds of hours in the Baldur's Gate series and it's representation of Faerun. I must now admit that I caved in and have partaken of the current generation in the purchase of an Xbox360. Though I have not forsaken my soon-to-be-classic gaming ways, I had to eventually embrace the medium's actual vehicles.

My experience so far has been a mostly pleasant one. Having never owned wireless apparati (apparatuses sounds retarded, no matter what the official stance on it is) I struggled slightly with the 360's controller in that I couldn't get it to sync with the system. Normally the controller shipped with the console is pre-sync'ed with it, but since my purchase was a vicarious one, carried out by a friend, said friend tried out the controller on another console while abroad. The result was that the controller needed to be resync'ed to my console. A simple matter, surely, but one that eluded me for a few minutes as the manuals provided with the console did not at any point make mention of utilizing the signal button conspicuously placed near the shoulder button yet designed so that one might otherwise miss it if not actively looking for it. In the documentation I have there are no indications of said button existing on the controller in the diagrams therein. That issue circumvented, I set about creating my avatar. A few short minutes later, logging in to Xboxlive, downloading updates and the DLC for my copy of Dragon Age: Origins.

I must say, I've hit the jackpot with the Black Friday Deal I procured; Fallout 3, Ghost Recon 2, PES 2009, Street Fighter IV, Spiderman Web of Shadows, Sonic the Hedgehog, Lego Batman and Pure.

At the moment I'm mostly playing Dragon Age and have found it to be all it's cracked up to be and more. Bioware have certainly pulled an awesome job and what room there is for improvement upon the current offering is something to look forward to with great delight. My current playthroughs, one on the 360 and another on the PC version, are nothing short of riveting. On the former I play a Dalish rogue male, one whose allignment I've yet to settle upon so I'll leave it as a work in progress. On the latter I play a Human Mage Male of rather dubious intentions, though I play him in as machiavelian a way as I possibly can within the game's constraints; he is outwardly cocky yet incisive and well spoken and won't partake of or incur in any evil unless it outweighs the cons of choosing such an action, but is inclined to being self-serving rather than noble. I am enjoying playing both characters and have found the overlap in certain sections of the game to be interesting points of comparison rather than repetitious segments I must wade through. Perhaps it's that having been weened on good ol' DnD roleplaying I tend to carry this into what games allow me to play the role with some modicum of immersion.

I've played a bit of Spiderman and found it to be a fun beat'em-up reminiscent of 2000's Spiderman on the Playstation One. It speaks volumes on the direction the franchise has taken and the quality of it's offerings that the very first game in 3D is the only one I've actually enjoyed. Web of Shadows seems to be pretty good so far, an hour into the game. I won't be tackling it head on but will pepper my gaming sessions with some of its generally mindless action.

PES 2009. What can I say? I love the series. Truth be told I think Konami really needs to make a serious overhaul of the game, but I can't argue with the basic quality of it. I'm having a hard time getting used to the control scheme on the 360, having spent over 10 years using playstation controllers to play the game and the super nintendo gamepad on the game's first two localized iterations (International Superstar Soccer and ISS Deluxe).

Fallout 3. Been a hardcore fan of the series, owning both original titles in it. Played around with the intro and love the implementation of it into the narrative of the game. Makes you feel like you really own the character.

Lego Batman is pure unadulterated fun and fail to see the lack of humor cited by some reviews. That game's just plain fun.

PURE is simply beautiful as an off-road racer. Have yet to play more than a couple of races but I can already say I'll be playing the hell out of it in the weeks to come.

Sonic the Hedgehog. The runt of the little. Or the biggest turd on the pile. This game is abortine in nature. Nothing to say that would be constructive other than please let the Sonic franchise die... at least in 3D.

And finally Street Fighter IV. I'm in love. I've had a thing for the series since 2 hit the arcades back in the early 90's. 4 is the entry I'd been waiting for and more... I'm still getting the hang of the little nuances of the system but I must say I am absolutely pleased with the way the game got handled.

Well, I'm off to do some questing before heading to Redcliff. C'mon Freki (dog)!