RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

When Disgaea: Hour of Darkness was released in late 2003, it quickly became a sleeper hit, its offbeat humor and complex tactical RPG gameplay combining to make it a highly appealing entry in an underrepresented genre. Although none of NIS’s games have done quite as well in North America, Disgaea is still going strong, with a sequel and now a nearly picture-perfect port of the original game to the PSP, with a few minor additions. Although Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness purports to offer an entire post-lunchtime of darkness, what it gains over the original is honestly not that impressive, making this version more of an extended brunch. (more…)

In popular culture, portrayals of vampires as protagonists tend to swing towards the tragic. The dark, brooding anti-hero with the mysterious past and a serious case of ennui tends to be par for the course, but with Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines, the tragedy has less to do with the characters in its story than it does with the criminal lack of stability in its code. Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines is a game with some serious, serious issues, the worst of which will prevent a player from finishing the game, or even playing it at all. And this is a sad thing, because under the layers of bugs and seemingly unfinished sub-sections of the game, there is an unusually open, fairly well designed RPG to be played. Bloodlines has an interesting cast of characters, some solid voice acting, and a sense of atmosphere that, while somewhat cliché, still manages a few moments of genuine creepiness. (more…)

Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, gather ’round for this week’s edition of Current Quests, where we discuss the great issues of the day. Namely, what everybody’s playing at the moment. This last week has been somewhat light, as the staff attempts to put the finishing touches on a number of projects. We’re sprucing the place up a bit for Halloween, with a shiny new banner and a number of ghouls-and-goblins themed reviews. (more…)

Author’s Note: Due to some unpleasant wildfires in Derek’s part of the world, we’ve had to postpone some of the reviews that were going up this week. In the meantime, we have some Halloween treats for our readers, so stay tuned!

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner marks a bit of a new direction for the series, using a far more lighthearted tone and lighter level of difficulty to move it ever-so-slightly closer to mainstream RPGs. The game uses a story set in a recognizable period of history to present a unique and intriguing take on the series universe, but its new combat system, which exchanges the complexity of the Press Turn system for a simplistic real-time system, means that the game is somewhat less engaging than previous entries have been. Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner works best when the disparate elements of detective story, alternate history, and mysticism come together, but the somewhat clumsily-applied combat system hampers the overall effect. In the end, those with an understanding of the history involved and an appreciation for the mythology intertwined with it will get the most out of Devil Summoner. (more…)

Despite having some game-breaking bugs and a translation just this side of gibberish, Final Fantasy Tactics has gone on to gather quite an impressive following in the decade since its launch, and today it is widely recognized as one of the classics of the gaming world. With the release of Final Fantasy Tactics: the War of the Lions on the PSP, Square Enix has managed to fix some of the game’s more glaring issues, bugs and translation included. Of course, with this new version comes problems of its own, such as low sound quality and a slight but persistent amount of slowdown and lag. However, even with these problems, the new translation, added content, and a slight rebalancing of the Job Class system makes Final Fantasy Tactics: the War of the Lions the definitive version of this gaming classic, and worth a look to anyone with even a passing interest in tactical RPGs.  (more…)

The staff would like to apologize for the extreme tardiness of this review. Due to recent disputes over the ownership of certain reviews, we felt it necessary to afford ourselves a certain amount of protection under the law. Having reviewed the matter, we are confident in our ownership of the reviews in question. Unfortunately, this process took rather longer than we had anticipated. Thank you for your patience, and we look forward to bringing our readers the best in reviews of games both past and present.
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The basic structure of the traditional fantasy RPG is well established. Take one part youthful hero, add in one cheery female lead, one musclebound tank, and one wacky mage. Stir in knights, dragons, a mad god bent on destroying the world, and a hero gaining maturity and wisdom by way of a journey across the world. Incorporating all these clichés and more, Brave Story: New Traveler is about as typical an RPG as one could hope to see. (more…)

Odin Sphere is a game which goes to great lengths to look and feel like a child’s storybook. The game is presented as a series of stories being read by a young girl in her family’s attic, with each book being the story of a different protagonist, the whole tale coming together as their stories intersect. (more…)

RPGs as a whole have a penchant for history, often absorbing established historical fact piecemeal into their plots. Jeanne d’Arc takes this much further than most, taking more or less the entire history of Joan of Arc into its plot, altering 15th century Europe and the Hundred Years War to fit a fantasy RPG template, complete with Elves, Dwarves, and a race of animal people known as Therions. (more…)