Pimping Level-5

It’s a bit early to tell, but there’s a definite chance that there may be a new kid on the RPG block. Square’s been around for almost 20 years (Starting waaaay back in 1987 for you kids that care) and truthfully, it’s been getting a little long in the tooth. Final Fantasy, while still a great series, has become, like so many success stories, a Franchise, an Intellectual Property, and as such, has all the attendant restrictions placed on it because of branding and marketing concerns so as not to upset its audience.

But here comes some new blood in the form of Level-5, who are already making waves in Japan and look set to possibly take up the mantle that Square has held almost uncontested for the last few years. There just may be a new RPG heir to the throne, and it could be these guys. They made waves initially with their cel shaded Dark Cloud series on the PS2, but they made their big debut when Square-Enix hired them on to create Dragon Quest VIII for them. Now they’ve got a new game that’s just been released in Japan and is likely due to hit English consoles by March.

The game is called Rogue Galaxy, which I’ve mentioned before, and man, the more I find out about it, the more I really, reeeeally want to get this in a way that supersedes even my interest in Final Fantasy XII.

The thing that first caught my interest is the world the game is set in. It looks like someone over there must have really dug the whole galactic swashbuckling motif of Treasure Planet because the entire game is based on a similar premise of the 18th century style nautical life, writ large on a space-faring scale. There are many worlds to explore, many characters to meet, but all of it in a weird Science-Fiction/Quasi-Victorian sort of way.


















Like the upcoming Final Fantasy XII, but more similarly, like Kingdom Hearts (Not too long now for Kingdom Hearts II, by the way, that’s also due for release next year, in summer, I believe) the combat in Rogue Galaxy is not turn based, but twitch based, meaning the success of your fighting will be far more dependent on your reflexes than your character’s current level, or equipment, though those obviously factor in. You will need to physically manuever around, jump and hit your opponents. But you can also pick them up and toss them into each other, and some bosses only have certain vulnerable points that will require you to jump around and gain access to them since the bosses can be FREAKIN’ HUGE.

Like Dragon Quest VIII, the graphics are cel-shaded so it looks like a classic anime yarn, with the usual assortment of exotic characters, and like DQ VIII, it also has an alchemy pot system of sorts, although in this case, it’s not a pot, it’s a purple talking frog. Yeah, I know, I got weirded out by that too, but apparently it has two MASSIVE cheek sacs, so you pop items into its mouth, and it moves them into its cheek sacs and then starts “gargling” them together like mouthwash to form your new item. The future is a strange and uncomfortable place.

I’m really looking forward to this one now. It has the feel of something new and excited about it, kind of like Square did back in the day. The Japanese have already been going nuts over the game, which is a good sign for RPG fans in other countries, so here’s hoping that the localization process to English goes by FAST. Level-5 has already hinted that they don’t want to get lost in the avalanche of Square RPG goodness coming in the summer with Kingdom Hearts 2, and more importantly in the fall with Final Fantasy XII, so spring seems to be the most logical time for them to release what will likely be the first RPG hit of 2006.

Keeping going, Level-5, we’re watching you, and we like what we see so far…

Last Minute Article

Well, it shouldn’t have been last minute, but it ended up being that way since I’d almost entirely forgotten about it. For some reason, some one from the local magazine Female wrote in and asked me if I’d be interested in doing an article for them based on my take on Valentine’s Day. I said sure, and they said they needed it by December 11, which is a Sunday, and that seems darn strange, but hey, maybe they like starting the work week early…

So I promptly forgot about it until a few hours ago and when I realized it was due manically pumped it out. The irony of it is, the article isn’t even true. Well not for me, anyway. I figure they wanted something about the insensitivity of men and how confused they are by Valentine’s Day and what a frightful experience it is. To be honest, Valentine’s Day for me isn’t even really that big a deal, but then I think that’s because the Wife is one of those girls that actually doesn’t buy into the scam that the day is.

I did however learn some interesting things about the day itself, like the fact that the exact origins of the day are unclear. It would seem that there are at least THREE Saint Valentines in Christian history, and all of them died martyrs. Some myths and legends persist that one of these Valentines actually did stuff like help arrange marriages with Romans when marriage was temporarily banned, but there is no clear root for why Valentine’s Day is celebrated as and when it is. This makes me feel immensely better about world building in Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, because usually when you introduce some tradition or ritual, most people will insist there be some logical origin to explain it. Now I can always say, “Explain Valentine’s Day” and whoever I’m talking to will suddenly realize that he or she has no explanation at all for it.

Man, what a crazy world…

Burbly Friday

Not too much happening, just lots of little things. A little writing on articles, scripts, some gaming, both review related and Dragon Quest VIII related, some shopping, and I’m finally privy to one last RPG on the Playstation 2 that I’m really looking forward to other than Final Fantasy XII. It’s called Rogue Galaxy it just came out in Japan, and it’s done by Level 5, the same guys that did Dragon Quest VIII for Square-Enix. It’s a good time to be an RPG fan if you own a Playstation, this hasn’t been a bad year for games. And my cat hurt himself running into a door. Twice.

He’s stupid, that’s all you need to know.

Comics & Cartoons

Amid the sea of games that have to be played there was also a meeting with the Nanoboy folks on the changes to be made to the next script. That went pretty smoothly and then after that an article that should have been a breeze took an entire day to finish ’cause I kept backtracking and wondering if I’d made the right decision.

I’m supposed to write a short piece about 5 essential writers in comics. After initially going on reflex as to the Big Three of Miller, Moore and Gaiman, I found myself doing a lot of shifting about the last two. I did resolve it eventually, but it’s just like any short piece; you wish had a ton more space to do the writers justice and in a perfect world, you’d be able to devote an article exclusively to each one so you can show the arc, the history and the analysis behind each writer.

I always get a kick out of the biographical data of these guys. They all seem to come from such diverse backgrounds but there seems to always be that one phrase, “And then they decided to write comics.” As if it was, in fact, the easiest thing in the world.

I can’t really comment on the difficulty of it or not as I’ve never actually seriously tried to submit anything to either DC or Marvel. It’s a foregone conclusion that my writing sensibilities could not give them what they require and I seem to lean far more heavily into the Vertigo camp of magical/mysterious/non-super hero stuff. Though I’ve never actually tried submitting anything to them either.

If at some point I had the opportunity to write a comic, I probably would do it, though I would never touch any of the existing big franchises. No Avengers, Justice League, Spiderman or Batman for me. I’d be a lot happier on the fringes with the likes of Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison and of course, Neil Gaiman.

But I guess I’ll worry about that on the day that I have to…

Too… Many… Games…

Here’s a pleasant problem.

I’ve been doing a bit more regular work for GameAxis and as a result, went down to meet up with a couple of the guys there to make a review run. I ended up getting flooded with a bunch of Playstation 2 games, and I’m kind of drowning in the dilemma of whether to just play the hell out of them or get back to Dragon Quest VIII.

In addition to a new RPG called Wild Arms: Alter Code F which is a remake of the original Wildarms on the Playstation 1–and one of my minor RPG favorites for that system–there’s also Soul Caliber III, Jax, and a handful of titles for the GameCube and Nintendo Dual Screen.

I played Mario Striker, the GameCube soccer game. I played it way, WAY more than I should have.

Speaking of which, I still have a review to write on it…

Right In The Middle

That’s my impression of the move Aeon Flux.

It’s a difficultl thing. I watched the Peter Chung’s original animated shorts and they always came off as brilliant, but positively loopy and entirely non-linear. Heck, the title character, Aeon herself, had a tendency to die a lot in these escapades only to return without explanation for another adventure that usually killed her off again. And let’s not forget the obscure dialogue; whenever Aeon or the other characters actually spoke to each other, it always seemed like this had been an ongoing series for years, and if you’d only just watched episode 22 of season 6 12 years ago (And by the way, that’s made up, the series didn’t last that long), that reference in the dialogue would have meant something, really.

It was one of the most unlikely of intellectual properties to bring to the silver screen and yet, somehow, Paramount decided to go ahead and turn this:

Into this:

And I really don’t have anything bad to say about it.

Or good, for that matter.

When it came time to actually turning such a bizarre animated concept into a movie, I, when I honestly thought about it, had no clue how to possibly even begin such a process. The animated character is an overwrought, fetishistic enigma that can contort herself into humanly impossible positions, and her relationships, alleigances and story itself were subject to constant change dependent on the needs of a particular episode. She lived up to her name in that regard, the series and the character itself were in a constant state of flux with no permanence or narrative reliability. When it came time to make the movie, it was clear that while they they kept the names intact, and some general characteristics (ie, Aeon Flux has dark hair and is a consummate acrobat and combatant) everything else was up for grabs.

In the end, it was a harmless diversion. One of the people I saw the movie with fell asleep 20 minutes into the film. I myself never felt particularly engaged or drawn into the characters, although I marveled at the art design. And from a photographic perspective it was a prettily shot movie. There were also some moments that had me cringing at how painful certain combat sequences looked, or marveling at how elegant some of the action/acrobatic sequences appeared, but, much like the original series itself, I found myself not particularly drawn to the story (Even though this time around, there actually WAS one) and sat back to simply soak in the spectacle. It was a harmless movie really, though not the kind of thing I’d be dying to add to my DVD collection, I might consider it once the price goes down as it makes for good visual reference material.

Xbox 360 & Nausea

It’s hard to decide whether to blame it on the food or the hype.

This morning I went down with the rest of the GameAxis crew to see the big presentation to the press by Microsoft for the Xbox 360, which has already launched in North America and will launch in South East Asia by March, a fact that is conspicuously in total opposition to early Microsoft announcements of a simultaneous global release. But then it’s easy to see why they scrapped that idea when there are so few 360′s to go around that people that have pre-ordered it may still not get their consoles in America until January. So much for supply and demand…

The presentation was pretty much what you’d expect; slick, full of hype, with a lot of free food.

I have to admit, I was slightly underwhelmed by the whole experience. I know it’s because the games are first generation, but the games present at the press conference for play (Perfect Dark Zero, Project Gotham Racing and Kameo: Elements of Power) had the very slick, polished look of games that pushed an Xbox to the max. The true power of the multiple 3.2 GHz processors was nowhere to be seen in the demos.

I also got into a mild disagreement with the marketing guy, but that’s to be expected if you disagree at all. It was pointed out by my fellow GameAxis cohorts that I was indeed the Resident Skeptic of the group and have grave doubts about the system. When I was asked why, one of my concerns (There are many, but this is the first that came to mind) was the fact that Xbox 360 is still using DVD as its storage medium as opposed to going for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, both of which have much larger storage capacities and both of which are in contest to see who inherits the standard from DVD (Last I checked, Blu-Ray was winning). When I expressed my concern that sticking with DVD was a rather backwards decision, I was told, “Hey, who buys an Xbox to watch movies?”

Which kind of side-stepped the issue entirely and I had to explain my ACTUAL concern was one of simple math. Data storage space. The new consoles have greater processing power, meaning that they can render larger environments, more detailed characters and more complex cut-scenes. Up the polygon count, up the number of environmental effects and up the amount of voice-over work you’re going to require and it figures–quite simply, I thought–that you would need MORE storage for all that increased data.

I ended up having to explain then, that my worry was that if the PS3 were, for example, to come out with the lastest installement of Grand Theft Auto, with locales much larger by several orders of magnitude, more cutscenes, far more detailed characters, vehicles and buildings, etc… and it were to just barely fit on a Blu-Ray disc (Which is what the PS3 is using) then how the hell were they going to squeeze that data onto a DVD? Developers have already expressed concerns about this themselves, speculating that it means games will have to be broken up into multiple DVDs, or, more depressingly, they’ll simply have to cut down on “game assets” in order to get it all to fit.

When he finally got it, he said, “You think the 360 can’t do that?”

I replied, “It’s just physics.”

Then he said something about how Microsoft hasn’t revealed all the tricks up its sleeve.

I was sorely tempted to say, “So you’re saying you’ve lied to the public about the capabilities of your machine,” but after a moment of thought, went with the more diplomatic, “But the DVD player is built in, it’s part of your system specs, the only way you can provide more storage like that is as an add on peripheral.”

“If there’s a demand for it, Microsoft will meet that demand.”

At this point, it was a foregone conclusion that the guy didn’t really understand how the game industry works. Past consumer history has shown that the market generally HATES add ons to their consoles. Sega bombed with the Sega-CD and Sega 32-X. Microsoft itself learned this lesson from their competitor SONY, when Sony tried to sell an add on hard drive and the majority of consumers just didn’t go for it. Microsoft capitalized on that by pointing out their own hard drive was built into the console. Of course, with the new console, in order to keep costs down, they’ve removed the hard drive ANYWAY, and are selling it as… you guessed it, an additional add on.

To think that you can simply provide a new storage format, then go to your developers and say, “Okay, we’ve got an additional Blu-Ray drive for our Xbox 360, so, uh… even though we don’t know how many people will actually buy it, please try to support that format in addition to our current DVD delivery system” is naive in the extreme.

I finally gave up at that point and said, “But to be fair, it’s all about the games,” which we both agreed on, and I left it at that. Man, I wish people who tried to market games actually knew something about the games industry. Street credibility is still pretty important in the gamer community.

After that, I hung out with my friend James, who had been called up by a friend of his that was also attending the Xbpx 360 launch. We ate, and I promptly got food poisoning.

At least I think it was food poisoning. All I know is that I developed a steadily increasing case of nausea and about 15 minutes after I got home, promptly threw up and was laid out feeling wasted on the bed with a very sore throat from all the vomiting.

Too much information, but oh well… Back to Dragon Quest VIII…

Dragon Quest VIII Weekend

So much for doing work.

Went off to visit the in-laws who had just come back from a trip to Maine. They brought back some gifts, one of which was this:























SSX 3.

An oldie but a peerless CLASSIC. One of the most fun games I have ever played in my life. The music, gameplay and sheer insanity of the tricks you could pull off made me go for this even over the formidable Tony Hawk series.

And there’s still a script to write as well as Dragon Quest VIII to play.

I’m so screwed…

Dragon Quest VIII Weekend

I have work I should be doing.

Oh well…

Dragon Quest VIII Weekend

Hardcore gaming. No time–or to be more honest, inclination–to post.