Category Archives: Reviews

Gaming Review: Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories

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Disgaea 2 was released in North America for the PlayStation 2 in 2006. Its predecessor was published by Atlus, three years prior, but since then, Nippon Ichi Software had established a forward camp stateside, and so it was NIS America that handled localization and publishing on the sophomore game of what’s become their flagship RPG series.

Previous to 2003, this developer would probably have been best known for Rhapsody, their critically well-received and very cute musical RPG (the only one of the series to be released outside of Japan). But with four titles in the main Disgaea series thus far, multiple re-releases of most of them (Disgaea 2 has itself been ported to the PSP in an enhanced version prior to this PlayStation Network port of the PS2 original), plus several spin-offs (the Prinny side-scrollers, for example), this wonderfully weird developer is gaining some real traction here.

As well they should. The gameplay in this title is unusual and deep, following the best tactical RPG tradition while putting some unique spins on it; the story is wacky, but not without an emotional core that allows for some real player engagement. The localization is top-notch. The voice actors are great, and I can’t find any fault with the translation.

The story involves a young man, Adell, who is the last human being in his world, the rest having been turned into demons by the Overlord’s curse. Set in one of many Netherworlds in interconnected dimensions, our hero’s goal is to defeat the all-powerful demon and turn everyone back to normal. To this end, he ends up kidnapping/escorting the Overlord’s daughter, who leads him grudgingly to her father while plotting to kill Adell, though her feelings towards him become more complex, over time.

The whole world has something of the feel of InuYasha, with a bit of Rama 1/2 thrown in for good measure. The characters are frequently morally ambiguous, though not irredeemable, and the whole thing is light-hearted and cartoony enough that what might otherwise be considered black humour is fairly innocent. Jokey things, like explicitly referring to an enemy’s in-game stats (I think Etna was at level 10, 000), push at the fourth-wall without puncturing it.

The gameplay is almost entirely comprised of battle tactics. There are a finite number of battles in the game, each a carefully orchestrated puzzle with multiple solutions. There is no world map and there are no dungeons, thus, no random battles. So this game is essentially chapter-based, and thus very linear (though the player can replay any previous battle at any time for bonus points, prizes, and cash).

At first I missed the world map. The inability to explore freely seemed both constraining, and to take away from the sense of a larger world that our story takes place in. Over time, though, it didn’t bother me much. The break from repetitive random battles, at least, is a plus to me.

In-between battles, the player’s party is (usually) in the main character’s hometown. This is the hub through which every other aspect of the game is accessed. There are a few NPCs wandering about who will simply chat with you, but almost everybody else has a specific function.

There’s the tutorial guy, there’s the item shop guy, the armor guy, the hospital (like an inn, you pay them money to heal your party), and there’s the travel guide, to whom you speak when you’re ready to go to the next level.

There are also two interesting side-quests that the player can dump, potentially, much more time into than the main game itself. The Item World allows one to literally jump into their own items, fighting their way through one randomly-created level after another, with the aim of powering up the item itself.

These levels are randomly generated each time you enter, and sometimes are not actually beatable (i.e., sheer cliffs or large gaps might prevent your party from either reaching the enemies they need to defeat, or the exit to the next level), which means you should never play the Item World without taking with you an emergency exit pass.

The other potential time-sucker is the Dark Assembly. All kinds of character upgrades can be done there. Mana earned in battles (which is tied to each individual character and is non-transferable) can be spent on reincarnation, allowing the same character to be reborn at level 1, but with a higher base potential, or even as a better character class (of which several can be unlocked). Mana can also be used to create new characters.

Depending on what you want to do at the Dark Assembly, you may need to win a vote from the senators there (all monsters), by bribery or brute force. It’s all very complicated and, for the purposes of the main game, not necessary, but there’s plenty of opportunity for party customization if you want to sink in the time.

In fact, you can generally get by without supplementary characters at all. Over the course of the game, enough actual story characters will join your party, that the addition of additional character classes isn’t strictly necessary, though it might be helpful.

The core of this game is still the battles themselves. You can take out up to ten characters per fight, and they don’t need to be decided in advance. The battlefield is grid-based, but includes a height dimension. Depending on weapons and attacks, your characters can damage one or more enemies at various distances. Enemies can also be reached via a lift and throw option that the stronger characters can manage.

It’s possible to stack up all ten characters on top of each other, like a totem pole, and to rapidly move characters across the field of battle in a single turn, via repeated lifts and throws. This can be critical when beating an enemy to the punch, or taking a key position early, can wildly change the tide of battle.

Enemies, too, can be lifted and thrown, perhaps directly into the path of another character’s area attack. And piggy-backing characters can also combo attack a single enemy, reaching further and hitting harder, while combination attacks also occur in other formations, with flanking characters jumping in to help a main attacker, offering free hits that don’t actually count as their own turn.

I haven’t even talked about geo effects, about which there is too much to say here.

Everything in the game, from weapons to special attacks to character types, is so customizable, no two people will set up their party or fight a battle in quite the same way. Perhaps it’s a little too customizable: since characters level up by defeating enemies and successfully performing actions, it’s possible to power up your party unevenly and hurt your long-term fighting power as a result.

But on the whole, this game is well-realized, polished, and simply fun to play. Though the depth is there, if you just want to complete the main game, Disgaea 2 can be tackled in a (relatively) casual fashion, which means I can recommend it for hardcore and more casual RPGers alike.

Article first published as PlayStation 3 Review: Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories on Blogcritics.

Gaming Review: The Cave

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The game opens with a brief monologue, delivered by none other than the living spirit of a magical cave. Yes, a talking cave. It makes dating hell.

The Cave doesn’t take itself too seriously, and neither should you. Booming proclamations and self-aware melodrama are used to good effect in this entertaining adventure/puzzler. There’s also more than a little bit of black humour.

Choose three of the seven characters hanging around at the title screen to begin the game. I don’t know if archetype is the correct word for this motley crew. We have “the time traveller”, “the hillbilly”, and “the monk”, for a start. But though each has their own quest to fulfill — true love, enlightenment, that sort of thing — what they all have in common is a willingness to lie, cheat, steal, and worse things, in order to get what they want.

The control scheme isn’t terribly important. This isn’t a game of reflexes, by and large, but of finding the right item and taking the correct actions at the appropriate time. The game’s available on every system and it should make no particular difference what console you decide to download it to.

The game is ultimately in the tradition of the old text adventure games of the ’80s, though updated with a graphical interface, much like Windows updated the user experience for PC operating systems. Actually, creator Ron Gilbert previously brought this type of gaming to consoles with the NES-era title, Maniac Mansion, and guess what? It still works.

It’s also pretty cool to see Sega, which has been exclusively a software publisher since getting out of the hardware game in 2001, getting some buzz on an IP that didn’t originate in the ’90s. Sonic the Hedgehog is great and all, but I like seeing something fresh from some of the old guard.

Each character has a special ability, required for their own quests but otherwise mostly irrelevant. Some of them allow you to cheat at the non-character specific quests, shortening aspects of certain puzzles depending on who you have. But for the most part, the game is one of switching between characters, collecting special items, and using them appropriately.

The puzzles are fun, challenging without being maddening, with the solutions making sense in retrospect, although they may not be obvious at first. There’s no dying, although the cave is full of dangers. Characters immediately respawn if eaten, blown up, or squashed, with no major time penalty to the player.

The Cave’s biggest flaw is that they designed the game for replay but hampered their own replay value. Having finished the game with three characters, you’ll want to select another three, so you can see their special levels. But now you have to redo all those generic levels again along the way.

Doing a second or third run-through is fine for sidescrollers, platformers, action adventure titles and the like. But not the tedious steps of “solving” a puzzle you’ve previously completed. That’s boring.

The developers would have been better off having all seven characters available (though only three per section), and making the game longer so that each level could be completed without repetition. Alternately, replays with new characters should allow the opportunity of skipping previously completed sections.

Another possibility suggests itself. If the characters’ special abilities played a greater role in level completion beyond collectibles and achievements, a replay might take on new meaning. The same level might have had to be played in an entirely different way based on the characters available, essentially meaning entirely different puzzles would be solved depending on who you play with.

Alas, it is not so. The choice of characters has little effect on how you play the game, which strikes me as a missed opportunity. That’s a shame, since going through the game the first time was such great fun, I wish I could enjoy playing it again.

Make no mistake, though. That first playthrough is just enchanting. I think everyone should check this one out just once.

 Article first published as PlayStation 3 Review: The Cave on Blogcritics.

LJ Reviews Roundup, Again

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Here we are again. I reviewed Sean Carroll’s The Particle at the End of the Universe, and my write-up can be seen here.

I took a look at The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible (hooray Oxford comma) by Lance Fortnow (whom I keep wanting to call Lance Fortran — computer science in-joke). This appears to be his first book, but it’s a good one, about an esoteric question in mathematics/computer science with wide-ranging applications — if it’s ever solved. My review is quoted (though not in full) here.

James Clavell and SF

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Any James Clavell or Harold Lamb fans out there? I have an essay up on AE, on the relationship between historical fiction and certain works and sub-genres with SF (alternate history is something I didn’t even get into). It’s entitled “Bleeding of Genres: Historical Fiction and SF“, and just possibly, if inspiration strikes, I’ll write more on the topic of cross-genre influences in the future.

Game Review: Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two

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In the last months of 2012, a well-known but failing department store chain called Zellers was acquired by Target. The inventory of Zellers’ stores had to be liquidated by their shutdown date, and I strolled its aisles with the other vultures, thinking to pick at the bones.

I went not once, but twice, each time seeing a pile of heavily discounted special edition boxes of Epic Mickey, for the Wii. Twice before I had almost bought a copy of the game, but for whatever reason hadn’t.  Here, once again I walked away, empty-handed. I had a few unfinished games at home already, and though I was intrigued, it wasn’t a must-play (if there still is such a thing for me).

The game’s been somewhat polarizing, and I think I have an idea why. Long-standing Disney properties bring a certain caché that can’t be whipped up out of thin air, and the company is careful how they leverage that. Putting Mickey in a mediocre game would be like making a bad sequel to a brilliant film. It’s pop-culture sacrilege.

Fan hatred is a scary thing. The mixed response to that first game meant that a sequel needed to fix everything that didn’t work, or replace it with something better.

I like the idea of this series a lot. I like that Walt Disney’s first cartoon creation, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, is Mickey’s bitter doppelganger, existing in a “Wasteland” of forgotten cartoon characters. There’s a very meta, self-aware quality to the whole idea of a real-life legal battle resulting in the fictional abandonment of a living intellectual property.

This surreal, self-referential conceit continues into the basic game mechanic. Mickey, a cartoon, wields both a magic paintbrush and a bucket of thinner, giving him the power to create or destroy the very fabric of reality as he knows it. Obviously this works well with the Wii, though you can also play the PS3 version with an ordinary controller (it’s Move-compatible).

This unique gameplay mechanic carries over into the sequel, but is paired with the abilities of Oswald, who has switched from antagonist to partner. He gets a magic remote, with vague electrical/machine-controlling powers.

I love the idea of this world. It includes familiar as well as little-known characters and half-remembered cartoons from the ’30s that I remember seeing as a kid, all transformed into black-and-white 2D sidescrollers. Unfortunately, they tend to be rather tedious.

The game is two-player co-op, whether you want it or not. Oswald and Mickey must work together to progress, combining their powers to solve any number of puzzles. If you don’t find a friend to play with you, the AI will take over, but there’s no solo version of the game.

The upshot of this is that your partner switches between making the game tediously easy and frustratingly difficult. With the AI in control, you will sometimes bumble your way through poorly-designed puzzles without even understanding how you did it simply because one half of it was automatically completed for you. Of course, at other times you will want Oswald to do your bidding and get no help at all.

Either way, it can be frustrating to be left out of the driver’s seat.

There is a binary, morality-based system as in Knights of the Old Republic or Infamous.  Enemies can be defeated (and puzzles solved) through the use of constructive paint (good) or destructive thinner (bad), which I found frankly annoying, because it encouraged me to not make use of my full range of abilities.

They really upped the ante by adding more and more new ideas — more than they were able to deliver. The game is supposed to be a musical. In reality, it’s only the demented scientist (an enemy from the first game), who sings. Story scenes switch from being fully-voiced to text halfway through, as if they ran out of time or money.

I know they are trying to create a gameplay experience that is truly different, and a world that is completely immersive, but it doesn’t always come through. Ambitious is the word.  Ultimately, however, whatever difficulties there may have been behind the scenes, the result for the end user should feel finished and effortless, and instead, the whole thing feels unpolished and bland.

It is easy to make mediocre games by playing it safe. Here, they made a mediocre game that failed at greatness, and I think they perhaps deserve some credit for that, along with the blame.

Article first published as PlayStation 3 Review: Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two on Blogcritics.

Best of 2012

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Sleeping Hedgehog, like most art and culture mags everywhere, has been talking about the best of 2012 (with most of the entries running New Year’s Day). I wouldn’t say there were a lot of huge stand-outs this year. What’s perhaps interesting is that a lot of my reading did not come from the usual suspects, or perhaps even that I may not even have any current usual suspects. I did say, and I’ll quote:

As far as brand-new works go, 2012 saw worthy follow-ups to a couple of individuals with very strong debuts in previous years. I’ve quite enjoyed both Hannu Rajaniemi’s and Howard Andrew Jones’ series continuations. But I’d have to give the nod to Jones for best new title for Bones of the Old Ones.

But as good as my best new book of the year was, it didn’t manage to surpass its predecessor, The Desert of Souls, in my mind, which was all the stronger for coming completely out of nowhere from an author I hadn’t previously heard of. In other words, it’s tougher when there are already high expectations of you.

So that’s new titles, of which, despite my myriad review gigs, I haven’t read that many this year. Most of my reviews at AE, for example, were re-releases of Canadian-written SF originally published as much as a decade ago. What of the “new to me” stuff? I’ll quote myself again;

Best new old title? I’ve read a lot of back-listed material that has seen new editions this year. This has included one of the all-time fantasy classics, T.H. White’s Arthurian work,The Once and Future King, which has to take the prize. Runner-up: Robert Charles Wilson’s excellent 2001 novel, The Chronoliths, was a happy discovery.

Besides several from Wilson, this was also the year I discovered (via my editor at AE) Geoff Ryman (whose short stories I soon realized I had read and enjoyed previously). I also finally got around to reading Peter Watts, though only in the last few days of the calendar year (the catalyst being an upcoming essay for AE, which will probably be this month since I’ve already handed in my first draft).

And we can’t forget the non-fiction, of which I’ve ready plenty, but I won’t single anything out at the moment. I’ll do another round-up of my Library Journal science reviews in another month or so, as I’ve already written a couple since the last posting.

Film: I wasn’t really thinking of this, but someone did ask me recently. After a moment’s thought, I cited The Hunger Games and The Dark Knight Rises as my favourites this year. And I think I’ll stick with that gut, on-the-spot assessment.

More on The Quantum Thief

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If we were simply looking at Marlowe or Holmes in a genre pastiche, I’d say add it to the pile (though it may well be an excellent pile), but Arsène Lupin as a quantum criminal? That’s a new one on me.

You may recall that I’ve covered both this novel and its sequel during the last few months. Last week my editor, Cat, asked for a write-up on the series-in-progress as a whole. You can read it at the Green Man main page (for the moment), or go directly to my post here.