I started off the interview by asking how the shift to 3D changed the way they approached development.  He replied that since Fallout 3 had already developed the engine, most of the tools they needed were already in place and that development was very intuitive.  Since they already had that leg up, they were able to focus more on making the environment work for quests and story.

I followed up with a question about what his favorite part of working on the project was, and he emphatically answered, “showing it off at E3.”  He said it is always a blast to see what fans have to say about games you make. In regards to the gameplay, he really enjoyed seeing the strip come to life in New Vegas.  He also really loved the improvements to the system like the new speech and sneaking options and the companion system.  He said that companions are now more like a “loyal sidekick” and have much more backstory and interaction with the player.

When asked about which vault is his personal favorite, he said he wasn’t sure which game it is in, but one of the vaults has a sort of Logan’s Run feel to it.  Its twist is that there are elections for the position of Overseer, and then when the term is up, the person is executed.  Naturally, the position actually has less appeal that way, and the propaganda posters try to make you NOT vote for the candidate.  “Don’t vote for this guy, he’s terrible.  Please vote for the other guy.”

I then asked about the setting for Fallout New Vegas; how did the team pick Vegas?  He said that the original Fallout 3 was to be set in Colorado, but when Bethesda pitched the idea of a Fallout game to Obsidian, they suggested Vegas.  That idea became popular and was greenlit very quickly.  When I followed up with where he’d like to see it go next, he said that it will really depend on who makes the next Fallout game.  If Bethesda works on it, it would probably end up on the east coast, but of Obsidian makes the next one, it will stay on the west coast.  Personally, he’d love to make Fallout in Hawaii.

As a last question, I asked what longterm fans of the series will be able to find as easter eggs.  He replied that the entire game is one big easter egg for fans.  The New California Republic and Caesar’s Legion both featured prominently in the first two games, and even the super mutants will be more familiar to fans because the species seen in Fallout 3 is different.  Fans might also be able to recognize a few characters or locations, but he didn’t specify which ones those might be.

On behalf of RandomNPC and myself, I’d like to thank Jason Fader and the entire Bethesda and Obsidian team for taking some time to sit down and chat with me.  Fallout New Vegas will be available later this October.

The chat began with someone asking how Birth by Sleep performed in Japan. Nomura gave a surprisingly lengthy answer to the question by saying that of the three handheld Kingdom Hearts games he has developed, this one is the most praised. He believes it is because the gameplay is so similar in style to the two numbered Kingdom Hearts titles. He also said that even though some people might regret the lack of Sora in Birth, it has sold approximately 750,000 copies so far in Japan.

The next question dealt with the differences in developing games for the DS versus the PSP. Nomura answered that the PSP is very much like a small PS2, and therefore it is very easy to develop games for. The main difference to him is that the DS does not have an analog stick, therefore it does not lend itself to the frantic gameplay that is possible on Sony’s systems. To overcome this limitation, Nomura used systems like the Panel system from 358 to make battles simpler.

I then asked how Nomura developed the story for the various Kingdom Hearts games. Did he have a grand vision from the beginning, or did the story evolve and grow with Sora? Nomura answered that while he was finishing up Kingdom Hearts, he was busy thinking up ideas for Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts II. When he was working on Kingdom Hearts II, he was working on the stories for the most recent generation of games. And now that he’s finishing up Birth by Sleep and Re:Coded, he’s now looking forward to future titles like Kingdom Hearts 3DS.

John followed up with asking about the differences between developing for handhelds versus consoles. Nomura said that the difference between them is growing smaller. The only real challenge is with storage capacity; Kingdom Hearts games require a lot of voice acting and CG. He cannot put as much in handheld games as he’d like just because there is not enough room on the disc or cart.

The next question involved Re:Coded. Would players be introduced to any new characters or mechanics? Nomura replied that since the digital world of Re:Coded is based on the events of Kingdom Hearts, players would not be introduced to any new characters. There would, however, be some new mechanics. Specifically, he mentioned something called “Bug Blocks” that the digital Sora would be dealing with as he traversed the many worlds of Re:Coded.

Another person asked if first-time players would be able to enjoy games like Birth By Sleep or Re:Coded. Nomura said that they should be enjoyable by just about anyone. He did point out that Re:Coded takes place between the events of Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, placing it just after the events of Chain of Memories.

The next question asked about the battle system. What sorts of improvements can players look forward to? Nomura said that with the PSP, he implemented two new systems. The first is called the Shoot Lock system, and it allows players to do special moves after finishing chains. He said that players will get a good feeling from it. He also said there is a new Command Style system that unlocks entirely new moves and commands after certain conditions are met.

With the interview drawing to a close, Nomura was asked if he is looking to bring Kingdom Hearts back to consoles. Recently, he’s been focusing on handhelds. He said he would very much like to bring Kingdom Hearts to a more powerful system, but now is not the right time. The team that finished Birth by Sleep is now working on Kingdom Hearts 3DS, and his other team is currently finishing up Final Fantasy Versus XIII. When he gets a chance, he will take advantage of the ideas he has been thinking about.

As a followup to this last question, I quickly got a confirmation that Kingdom Hearts 3DS is not, in fact, Kingdom Hearts 3. Nomura said that it certainly sounds like it could have been, but the 3 in the title only refers to the 3DS system. Kingdom Hearts 3 is yet to come.

John and I would like to thank Nomura-san and all of Square Enix for giving us a chance to sit down in this interview.

No discipline is flawless. At one level or another, we are all human, defective, stained with the deepest seeds of doubt and regret, shame and anger. But we can try, dammit. We can try. And this game, despite some technical flaws, tries. Dammit.

Nippon-Ichi have gone out on a limb in their attempt to bring this, the fifth installment in the Sakura Taisen series, to American audiences. As Lt. Shinjiro Taiga, nephew of… some guy from the earlier games, you’re sent to a very Steampunky 1928 New York City to assist in the operations of the Star Division. Upon arrival…

Y’know, I could go into more of the plot here, but frankly the game does it better than I ever could. There’s a lot of plot. This is, after all, very solidly in the “visual novel” genre. Most of the time. Suffice it to say, this particular imagining of 1928 New York has no difficulty rationalizing giant robots, air travel, cellular telecommunications, or digital photography. Soon you’re shooting enemy mecha out of the sky and restoring peace to the city after a host of demonic attacks.

Part giant-robot tactical combat sim…

Supporting you in these missions are the members of the New York Combat Revue, a cleverly-concealed fighting force in the guise of a Broadway theater troupe. Your interactions with these members, all of them lovely young women (we think), are facilitated by a series of multiple-choice text responses… most of the time. In a unique twist, your responses are timed; woe betide the indecisive. Or not. Timing out is always an option, and can lead to its own sequences of events. While the new-standard Large Character Shots above said boxes are well-rendered in their own right, Sakura Wars isn’t afraid to mix it up every once in a while by including lip-flap animation on what would normally be an static insert image. It’s a refreshing change of pace, and certainly serves to develop what would be standard RPG fare into something much more… animated, for lack of a better word.

Interspersed with those standard text responses are innovations such as the Analog response box, where you’re given one sentiment to reply with, but can vary its emphasis from a glorious battle cry to a low whisper. Also featuring in more skill-intensive sections of the narrative are events which challenge the player to accomplish a series of button presses or rotations in a set time, the success of which determines Shin’s aptitude at the task. All these serve to branch the story out in true visual-novel fashion, and to influence the good graces of the ladies on your team.

Now, in a normal dating sim, that’d be the crux of the mechanics. You make choices, influence people, and hope to date one of them. However, introduce giant robots into the mix, and you get to have more fun. The relationships you build influence the course of battle, as friendlier pairs team up for more effective Joint Attacks, and can sometimes negate enemy offensives. As such, it’s not enough for you to manage Shin Protagonist’s image and standing in the group, you must also concern yourself with the intrapersonal dynamics of the team, as well. Likewise, performance in combat does influence opinion outside of combat; nothing says “Let’s be friends!” like a timely heal or cooperative assault.

Part dating-sim-style visual novel. All New York.

I originally found the combat to be rather hand-wavey and simple, having already familiarized myself with much more in-depth offerings like the Front Mission series. While the fight scenes can be a bit of a cakewalk in the early game, by the last couple chapters it becomes crucial to use every bit of firepower in your arsenal. Further, the flavor of the game changes significantly between the terrestrial and aerial combat encounters, while some fights even hybridize the two, offering multiple fronts for a single operation. This game changed my mind. I underestimated it, I paid for my hubris, and I was rewarded with an enjoyable tactical experience.

That said, the combat shows a number of the technical flaws which keep Sakura Wars from achieving greatness. In particularly explosive scenes – and, for that matter, in a couple parts of the game outside of combat – the stereo sound has holes you could drive a giant robot of death through. Occasionally, your attacks will land completely silently. (This tends to occur most commonly in aerial skirmishes.) Further, particularly in later boss attacks, the video can lag quite horribly, causing massive A/V sync issues and, in particularly egregious cases, can leave your Wiimote whirring provocatively for 10 seconds at a time, with absolutely nothing happening on the screen. Even in the “adventure” segments of the game, sometimes a vocal segment will be completely lost, drowned out by overzealous background music.

It’s not bad background music, mind. Lots of smooth, slow jazz, with Japanese influences in just the right places. (Though the gestalt may be a little MIDI-heavy for a period piece.) And the English dub, courtesy of our friends over at Bang-Zoom, is capable, if a bit overacted at times. (It was refreshing to hear a Texan accent that was not being used to approximate Kansai dialect.) The character who sounded like a Mexican 9-year-old straight off of Sesame Street… was meant to sound like a Mexican 9-year-old. Could this be an echo of the uncanny valley? One immediately notices how “off” the lip-flaps in the more cinematic shots… but, were this anime, would we really notice?

That brings us to the crux of it. The “game,” if one can call it that, is much better understood as a 7-episode anime series, with all the schmaltzy plot, cheesy musical numbers, and feel-good endings one would expect from an early-to-mid-90′s giant robot show. The difference is that you, Joe McPlayer, get to direct sections of the character development, and conduct the battle segments as you see fit.

… That’s the mechanical side of it, at least. However, there’s a large part of this game that isn’t mechanical at all. Perhaps because of the limited “gameplay,” a huge part of this game is about understanding the stories of these people, coming together in this city. I realize it’s rather divorced from what most people are looking for in something that purports to be a tactical RPG… but in this case, it’s the truth. This isn’t so much a game with a story, it’s a story with game-like mechanics. If you’re just looking for the challenge, you’re going to end up missing what is, in truth, a fantastic narrative, one which changes as you play it and makes you want to go back and try things again… and again. It’s been murder on me to actually try to get this review out in a timely fashion; I keep wanting to go back and play one more scenario.

There’s a lot of joy in this game. There has to be. It’s a game about saving New York, using giant robots and the power of musical theater. It’s told in the style of admittedly-retro anime. It’s about as campy as you can possibly get without attracting the ire of Fred Phelps. (Well, aside from the crossdressing scenes. Move over, Miss Cloud! Peppermint’s taking over New York!) This game manages to be greater than the sum of its parts by achieving a truly harmonic balance. Perhaps it’s because it’s designed, much like the theater troupe it portrays, to lift hearts and weary spirits.

To quote Winston Zeddemore in Ghostbusters, exclaiming from the top of Central Park West after banishing Zuul and defeating the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man…

“I love this town!”

Played to completion using a copy provided by the publisher.

The game starts off on a train while a narrator explains that the past thirteen days have been chaotic.  As the scene proceeds, we are introduced to protagonists Lightning and Sazh Kilroy.  Suddenly, Lightning springs into action and singlehandedly defeats every soldier she comes in contact with, and Sazh follows her somewhat like a lost, complaining puppy.  Naturally, the train crashes and the pair are greeted by a giant mechanical monstrosity.  After destroying it, the pair is thrown into a conflict that the player has almost no way of understanding.

This is, perhaps, the game’s greatest flaw.  Final Fantasy XIII chooses to throw everyone into a plot that has been in motion for thirteen days with zero backstory.  Instead of explaining even a little what strange terms like Fal’cie or l’cie mean, players must push forward and have the plot revealed in pieces over the span of the game.  The bulk of the story is explained by the time players reach the third or fourth of the game’s thirteen chapters, but the beginning is quite jarring.  Even a short intro text, possibly like what you see at the beginning of Final Fantasy VI would have made the beginning flow a bit better.  Regardless, once the plot gets going, it is a thrilling tale from beginning to end.  There is also an in-game encyclopedia which fills in the gaps for the player as you play, which really helps to make the game make more sense.

Where do they get off calling ME a bridezilla? THEY are the ones that brought white geese instead of the SWANS I specifically asked for.

The six playable characters are split up, and the game constantly switches between as many as three separate stories in an almost Quentin Tarantino-like fashion that happen simultaneously. This split storytelling method is seen for about the first half of the game, and much like with the plot as a whole, this makes the characterization start off kind of slowly.  Since we’re only introduced to characters for little bits at a time, it can take a while for some characters to grow on you.  In a bit of a catch 22, you finally have children in an RPG that actually act their age, which makes them much more believable.  At the same time, they act like whiny, emo, teenaged children.  Fortunately, everyone grows up a fair bit by the end of the game, so everything gets vastly better by the time the game reaches its conclusion.

As with any RPG, one of the most important features is the battle system, and this is where Final Fantasy XIII really shines.  Initially, most of the battle system is locked, but once you get to chapter 3, the battle system opens up to be one of the best and most innovative ones yet.  In all, you will only control your main character, and any support characters will act automatically, similar to the Gambit system from Final Fantasy XII.  This lack of control sounds disconcerting at first, but the AI is surprisingly good.  Most times, your teammates will do exactly what you would have told them to do in the first place.  And not only that, but you can have the AI suggest actions for your main character as well. You can go with your own commands if you want, but in general, the computer is pretty smart at figuring out your best course of action.  How does the computer know what to pick?  For instance, you can scan a monster to find its weaknesses or, if you’d rather save Technique Points (TP), methodically test various attacks to find it out the old-fashioned way.  The AI will pick up on what works best and will use the most effective attacks automatically, including picking up on small details like the type of physical attacks to use; Commando units can use attacks based on strength or magic stats.

And that brings me to the most important part of the battle system: Paradigms.  Every character can have one of six roles.  Although each character will eventually gain access to all roles, everyone has three roles that they will specialize in.  Each role has its own abilities and will bestow some bonus to the party as a whole.  Commandos get a boost to attacks and help maintain Stagger chains.  Ravagers specialize in attack magic and quickly build up Stagger chains.  Medics heal and revive allies.  Synergists and Saboteurs wield stat-altering spells that help the party or hinder enemies respectively.  And finally, Sentinels are the tanks that aren’t able to dish out much damage, but they can absorb massive hits and thus protect other party members.  From these six roles, you can make up to six decks that assign a role to each member.  For instance, you might have a Paradigm with one Commando and two Ravagers to quickly stagger opponents, or you might go with something more defensive like a Medic, a Sentinel, and a Synergist.  Ultimately, it will depend upon your play style what method you prefer, though the game does skew itself toward staggering enemies as the primary strategy.  Enemies are staggered by filling up their stagger gauge, at which point it will slowly drain.  When an enemy’s stagger gauge is full, they’ll be temporarily weakened and take extra damage from attacks. They can also be launched into the air in this state, increasing the damage bonus and rendering them helpless.

So once you build your six Paradigm decks, you’re ready to begin combat.  At any time, you can switch between your six Paradigms, which will be necessary. Even though a character may have abilities from multiple roles, they can only use abilities when in that role.  So even though Vanille is an excellent mage, she cannot wield all types of magic simultaneously.  When someone is weakened, you’ll have to switch Paradigms to allow her to heal.  She’ll immediately sling some curative magic your way, and then you can immediately assume an offensive stance once again.  During boss fights, expect to have to change Paradigms frequently, sometimes every couple seconds as the needs of the battle change.

There are a few other major changes to the battle system that need to be addressed as well.  At the end of every battle, everyone is restored to full HP, including those that fell in battle.  This might make it sound like this would make the game overly easy, but it actually makes things harder.  Since you’re always going to start at full health for every battle, the developers made random battles significantly more difficult.  Expect to die.  A lot.  But unlike in other games, death comes with no penalty.  You merely restart right before the battle began, and you have full access to your Paradigm decks to change up strategies as needed.  You might also be able to ambush your opponents by sneaking up on them from behind, and if a fight is going poorly, you can restart it rather than wait for your lead character to be killed.

OK. Here’s the plan. All we need to win this fight is a couple snow speeders and MAYBE a Jedi.

And that’s the other main change to the battle system.  If your lead character dies, the fight’s over.  Though it sounds like this would be a major problem, with proper strategy, it is rarely an issue.  There is but one exception to this rule, and it is the last boss.  The last boss has an attack that cannot be blocked by equipping items, and if it is successful, it instantly KOs the target.  You could, for instance, spend nearly two hours repeatedly trying to kill the blasted boss, have it down to approximately 2% of it’s HP, have full HP yourself, and then have your game suddenly end because your main character was targeted by the instant death move.  And before you ask, yes, I am a little bitter.  In all honesty, the game mechanic works pretty well for 99.9% of the game, it’s just that the end is a little bit game breaking.  Ultimately finishing the game comes down more to luck than skill.

Another major factor that can influence the outcome of battle is the way in which you initiate the battle itself.  Enemies are visible on the world map around you, and it is possible to sneak up on them either by stealth or by using special aerosol items.  Making contact with an unawares foe starts a pre-emptive strike, which means that every enemy will be nearly staggered.  For some of the harder to kill monsters, this can mean the difference between a fight being over in 20 seconds versus a fight taking a couple minutes to finish.  This is important because the amount of experience gained depends on how quickly you win, and it can be worth the time spent restarting fights until you get that preemptive strike.  And some fights in the last third of the game may be nearly unwinnable unless you sneak up on your target first.

Once you win your fights, you earn Crystogen Points, or CP, which is this game’s version of experience points.  From about the third chapter on, you are able to progress your characters throughout their various skill trees by expending CP.  The system is very similar to Final Fantasy X’s sphere grid in that there are nodes that you activate sequentially.  Where it begins to be different is that unlike FFX, each node does not cost the same amount of CP.  In general, higher nodes cost more than lower ones do.  Also, some classes may have more expensive nodes than others.  One final difference is that every character has a unique Crystarium, even for the same class.  For example, even though Hope and Sazh both have the synergist role available from the beginning, Hope’s tree begins with skills that boost defensive abilities and Sazh’s skill tree starts off with abilities to increase damage.  Unlike earlier games in the series, the skill trees do not ultimately end up the same way, so all six characters will remain unique, even if you completely max out their Crystarium.

The other main purpose of the Crystarium is that it serves as a level cap for areas.  No matter how much you grind, you cannot get access to very powerful skills early.  At best, you would only be able to max out the ever-expanding Crystarium as it grows throughout the game.  The other extremely nice feature is that all characters gain CP, even if they are away from the current party.  So when the group splits up later, all CP earned by one group are automatically given to the others.  This keeps all six characters on exactly level footing, so it is impossible to have one character underleveled unless you choose not to spend their CP in the Crystarium.

If having a solid battle and character growth system were not enough, Final Fantasy XIII also excels visually.  Square Enix has taken the past few years to present what is possibly the best looking game of this generation.  Everywhere you look, there are little details that make the world of Cocoon come alive.  Also, Square Enix’s hallmark CG cutscenes are so well animated they are almost lifelike.  In a word, Final Fantasy XIII is gorgeous and will undoubtedly set the bar for some time to come.

Cactaurella’s plan to elope with Cletus was spoiled when her father caught them making their getaway.

These amazing graphics allow the game to shed itself of the world map, a long staple of RPGs as a genre.  In the old days, characters marched in place over tiles to go from place to place as a limitation of graphical ability.  Though many will miss the idea of an overworld map, you get around Cocoon the same way you’d get around your town.  Every aspect of the world is fully rendered.  One would think it would get boring pretty quickly, but the small size of the gameworld helps keep things interesting.  Terrains quickly change, and it never feels too contrived.

The other area where hardcore fans of the series may find fault is with the music.  It’s not that the music is bad.  In fact, it’s excellent. But it doesn’t sound like Final Fantasy.  You won’t hear the victory fanfare when winning fights, and don’t expect to hear the melodious crystal theme that we’ve all come to know.  Despite the fact that some purists may not like that some series staples have been omitted, the music is well suited to the game.  Many of the songs are quite catchy, and the lyrics to the Chocobo song seem like they always should have been there.

That brings us to the area of voice work.  In general, the voices fit the characters very well.  The only character that stands out in any negative way is Vanille.  She’s a little too perky, and for the first half of the game, her accent seems to change nearly constantly.  Aside from that, the voice work is generally superb, and lines are delivered in such a way as to make them more believable.  Final Fantasy XIII manages to do much more good than harm with the voice acting, which is very commendable these days.

Finishing Final Fantasy XIII can take anywhere from 50-70 hours depending on how much you want to grind and how many of the marks you hunt down.  Also, once you finish the game, your Crystarium exapands one final time, giving you the ability to begin hunting down the hardest marks.  Plus, there are weapons and equipment to craft, so it would be easy to spend another 20 hours or more on post-game content if you were so inclined.  Simply defeating the final boss is by no means the end of the game if you want to take your characters to the max.

The other issue with the plot that needs to be addressed is that the game is extremely linear.  Some people just will not like having every plot point laid out in breadcrumb fashion.  For those that enjoyed games like Final Fantasy IV, EarthBound, or The World Ends With You, the odds are, you will like Final Fantasy XIII. If you’re more a fan of open exploration, or even the 50/50 mix seen in classics like Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger, this might be a letdown.

As for the difficulty, in general, the game is pretty fair.  Some of the fights at the end can be punishingly hard, but there are very few fights that cannot be won by simply adapting your strategy to fit what is required at the time.  Random battles are certainly difficult, but considering you’ll start off at full health each time and you can usually begin with a pre-emptive strike, even the hardest fights can be won if you just figure out what you need to do.  All in all, it is one of the most balanced RPGs to date with the exception of the last dungeon and final boss, with its one-hit kills.

One last point that needs to be brought up is the baby chocobo that lives in Sazh’s afro.  It is one of the cutest mascot characters to ever grace a game, and quite frankly, every game needs more baby chocobo.  Every time you see it fly out, you can be relatively assured that it will be cute, probably funny, and it will undoubtedly leave a smile on your face.  It is hands down the best character in the entire game.

In the end, Final Fantasy XIII is a game that is nearly perfect, especially if you like linear games.  The battle system is fun, the graphics are breathtaking, and the music is catchy.  The frustrations of the bad mechanics at the end coupled with the convoluted plot that the player is just dropped into without explanation are the only real negatives to be seen.  It’s not even that the plot is bad; it’s just that for the first few hours, you will have no idea what’s going on.  When you add it all together, you get one of the best games in the series and easily the best RPG on PS3.  I can heartily say that it has been worth the wait.

This game was played to completion, including some post-game content and reviewed using a  copy provided by Square Enix.

The story centers around the nation of Ferelden, a collection of feudal territories under assault by hideous Tolkien-Ork-a-likes known as the darkspawn. Historically, an elite order of warriors known as the Grey Wardens trained especially to hunt down and destroy darkspawn, and the massive archdemons that lead them. The Wardens are few in number now, and the game opens with the Warden Duncan scouting for new blood to help combat the latest darkspawn blight. The titular origins are where you come in, playing one of six backstories that detail how Duncan takes you under his wing. One way or another you’re brought to the old fortress of Ostagar, where the local nobility, their king, and the remaining Wardens have amassed an army to head off the blight.

As with other western RPGs, your stats, skills, appearance, gender, and even voice are adjustable from the start. The origins don’t affect this much, though they do change certain events and character reactions down the road by skewing your perspective in an interesting way. For instance, a city elf rogue who spent her life in a ghetto isn’t going to know or care what an outlaw mage did in his past, while a mage of any race will see things differently when their paths cross. Dwarven politics will seem obtuse from the outside, whereas dwarf player-characters start neck deep in them. One minor villain is a short sub-boss encounter for most characters, but a human noble will have a serious bone to pick with him. To be sure, the majority of the adventure plays the same regardless of your origin, but there are big choices to make along the way and your character’s history may well influence your decision or open up other options.

As far as character building goes, on top of improving base statistics, you’ll train up in a variety of general talents (persuasion, trap detection, herbalism, etc.) and class-specific skills. Each class has a set of subclasses which unlock additional abilities, and you’re allowed to pick two and even train your allies in them. There’s nothing stopping your rogue from wearing heavy armor if they’re strong enough, nor your warrior from building up their intellectual side to better resist spells. Some kits are more reliable than others – mages, in general, have it easy – but the flexibility afforded to you and your party is a big help in building up a well-balanced team over time. Your party even gains bonuses as you do things they like, either in dialog, through quests, or just by giving them gifts. It might be silly to smooth over misunderstandings with gems or a pair of shoes, but it is surprisingly practical.

The few bits of brain left in this poor mercenary’s head are probably wishing he’d studied harder at school.

Controls can take some getting used to. The interface take notes from both Mass Effect and Baldur’s Gate, allowing you to zoom between a top-down and floating third-person perspective. Movement is handled by simple point-and-click commands alongside keyboard controls, and pressing Tab highlights anything you can open, use, talk to, or loot. The camera can be a problem, as it sometimes gets stuck down low in tight quarters and doesn’t always pan far enough to be helpful. However, the ability to pause at any time helps smooth over a lot of would-be problems, as you can always stop and take the time to assess your surroundings or issue select commands.

And you’ll want to take the time, because combat ranges from easy to hard seemingly on a whim. Most early game fights pit you against a reasonable number of targets, and the ability to equip two sets of weapons – for instance, one for melee and one for ranged – helps you shift gears quickly. However, large numbers of enemies can quickly surround your tanks and heavy-hitters, forcing you to spam healing items and magic to survive. A few single enemies are annoyingly powerful, and some random encounters have you walking right into large ambushes; unlike Baldur’s Gate, you can’t escape from such encounters until the enemy loses track of you or all enemies are dead. Difficulty is thankfully adjustable in the game, and it’s possible to break the game in your favor with some character builds, but the gulf between easy and normal seems unusually wide.

Dragon Age‘s tactics system theoretically lets you assign commands to be carried out automatically, and it does help manage basic reactions, like triggering healing magic under a certain threshold or using shield cover abilities in response to ranged attacks. With care one can use the system to cover some micromanagement, but it doesn’t feel as comprehensive as, say, the gambit system of Final Fantasy XII. Battles depend as much on positioning as they do on tactics, and it’s on you to reposition your team to avoid being flanked or to bottleneck the enemy. Tactics can often backfire if you’re not careful, with abilities triggering when you don’t need them or characters simply stopping in place. One major saving grace is that your party will heal to full out of combat, and knocked-out characters will get back up, albeit with an injury or two you’ll have to cure manually.

There’s a recurring theme of two steps forward, one step backward with a lot of gameplay elements. Trap detection is automatic if you have a rogue to disarm them, but health regeneration makes traps a non-issue, as it’s quicker to just set them off and soak up the damage. Codex entries are interesting, helpful, and well written, but they’re sorted by number and not name, making it difficult to locate one in particular. Your journal keeps track of all quests, and objectives and quest givers are marked both on your map and in the game. However, the game throws so many similar sidequests at you that it’s very easy to lose track of what you need to do, and most of them boil down to typical assassin/scavenger hunt/FedEx fare featured in other RPGs.

My lords and ladies, if you would kindly clear the floor and provide us some music. ‘Tis time for these uncouth rogues to get… served.

Graphically, the game looks far better in motion than it does in stills, and it’s more impressive as more is going on. Quiet outdoor areas, for instance, are serviceable but fairly drab, with trees looking like they’re not rooted to the ground properly. By contrast, bustling market districts and gigantic battles look convincing, and the game is definitely not afraid to put a lot of characters on the screen at once. Animation is fine for the most part, though there are clipping issues, most notably with scripted killing blows; they look great for large targets, but man-sized enemies often don’t line up properly. And the blood splatter on your characters after a battle ranges from surreal to downright goofy. It looks more like a painting accident than actual blood, and tends to kill the drama when someone’s trying to say something important.

Sound fares better overall, and it’s here we start getting into the game’s true strengths. Weapons and spell effects sound meaty enough, and there’s no mistaking the screen-shakingly loud roar of a dragon. The soundtrack is more or less what you’d expect from a big-budget fantasy production, sounding lively, mysterious, or menacing depending on whether you’re poking around town or clearing out a dungeon. It picks up in a big way for fights, especially the many boss encounters; expect your first rumble with an ogre to sound suitably epic.

The real star, however, is the voice acting, and to a larger extent the characters as a whole. Both veteran actors and relative unknowns give great performances almost across the board, and players will undoubtedly recognize several; Simon Templeman, Kate Mulgrew, Tim Russ, and Steve Blum, to name a few. Your party deserves special mention, as it’s clear a lot of work went into fleshing out their respective backstories, some perhaps more interesting than others. It’s easy to point to the perpetually drunk dwarven berserker or the sarcastic stone golem with a pathologic hatred of pigeons as examples of unique and fun characters, and they are well written. To do so, however, overlooks the quieter moments of cleverness from the less auspicious Alistair, one of the younger Grey Wardens, or the healer Wynne. They act and react, they tell you more as they like you more, and they often get into colorful, biting, or just flat-out funny exchanges with each other.

To be fair, the story takes some predictable twists, and at times comes off as a ham-fisted swing at “maturity.” You can expect the guy voiced by Tim Curry to turn out evil, and anybody that looks away from a group of people and says something in a sotto voice is probably up to no good too. But it’s the execution that counts, and even when the plot isn’t taking you anywhere you haven’t been in other games, it’s still pulling it off with a lot more flair and polish than the genre is used to. And to the game’s credit, its established lore helps it feel that it’s always playing by the rules. Case in point, there’s much ado about mages being possible conduits for demons to manifest in the world, and the reason that armored Templars go to extreme lengths to guard them. That fact turns an ordinary search-and-destroy quest in a mage tower into a battle inside a demon’s own nightmarish realm, and yet it feels internally consistent.

If slaying a ten-ton lizard death machine doesn’t warrant a fist pound, nothing does.

The story can take a while to really get rolling, but it’s quality through and through, and the game doesn’t shy away from mixing things up. A prolonged dream dungeon is made much more interesting as you gain the ability to change forms inside it. Party members who seriously dislike the way things are going may leave or even attack you. The game’s final battle can change drastically depending on which allies and enemies you’ve made along the way, and there are several big decisions to be made in the eleventh hour. Granted, choices with delayed impact have been done better – The Witcher comes to mind – but between the origins and the various plot branches, there are many reasons to give Dragon Age more than one playthrough.

It’s hard not to notice the nagging little problems along the way, on top of what’s been mentioned already. Dungeons can run overlong to the point where they feel like hurdles keeping you from the game’s better parts. A nasty memory leak can make the game load slower the longer it runs. Your responses to NPCs sometimes feel inadequate, like you can’t explain to a wavering party member the holes in their own logic. AI detection is dodgy to the point where you can often pick off individual enemies at range without aggroing the whole pack. There aren’t enough unique areas to cover the score of sidequests, and it’s a little absurd that all your party’s personal quests are resolved in areas you’ll pass through a dozen or so times anyway. And there’s no escaping how odd it is that dangerous and seemingly time-sensitive problems that have to be solved right now will happily wait for you, with no ill consequences whatsoever.

And yet, focusing on these flaws is both selling the game far short and missing the point. This is a game committed to the adventure, and it’s more than happy to give you big, meaningful choices along the way. This is a game that cares about its characters, and wants you to care about them as well. This is a game with a detailed, believable world, where nothing ever really happens without reason or consequence. It’s packed with content in every direction and the world only promises more to come, and rife with references and shout-outs to Baldur’s Gate, Mass Effect, and other games; some so quick and well played that it would be spoiling the effect to say which. But you’ll know them when you see them, and they just might make you smile.

Dragon Age: Origins is big, bold, and backed by some of the best writing in recent memory. It’s not as new as it wants to be, but everybody should give it a try. It just might grab you longer than you think it will.

This game was played to completion using a publisher-provided user copy, with only the included “Stone Prisoner” DLC added after installation.

The game begins with a small group of high school kids playing at a Bloody Mary-style summoning ritual called, ironically enough, Persona. After the ritual succeeds, knocking the group unconscious, they are visited by a mysterious figure who calls himself Philemon. Philemon grants the group the ability to use Personas, a power which is quickly in great demand as their hometown is suddenly and mysteriously walled off from the rest of the world by a strange glowing curtain. They’ll have to contend with corrupt corporations, an alternate world, and a couple of creepy little girls in order to save their hometown.

Persona PSP’s automap is extremely useful, but the dungeons still think you’re flying blind.

The overarching plot deals mostly with themes of duality, which is an odd choice for the Shin Megami Tensei series, which usually brands its characters with various levels of moral ambiguity. Given that the game deals with the idea of another self, though, it’s an understandable choice. Unfortunately, the concept is handled a little ham-fistedly, with a rather obvious conflict of good versus evil undermining the more subtle characterization often brought by shades of grey. The events of the story tend to feel a little forced, and the relative lack of character development is a bit of an issue. On the whole, the story isn’t terrible, but neither is it particularly subtle, and it tends to wield the huge blunt axe of moralizing a bit too much.

The combat system is an unusual combination of the turn-based, elementally focused combat that the Shin Megami Tensei series is known for, with the placement and area of effect attacks of a TRPG. Battle itself takes place on a grid, which is divided into the player’s half and the enemy’s half, with the area of effects of attacks stretching into the other side’s field of battle. The player can set up formations before battle and switch between them in combat, and modify those formations manually during combat.

A big problem with the focus on elemental weaknesses is that the Analyze feature doesn’t handle the huge variety of elementals present in Persona PSP very well, to the point where the feature is so inaccurate that it’s frequently misleading. For example, in one of the dungeons midway through the game, there are several monsters which the Analyze feature will say are weak against gunfire. However, what it neglects to mention is that different kinds of guns are in fact different elementals unto themselves, leaving the player to fumble around trying to figure out which of the four Gun types Analyze was actually referring to. Now, on the one hand, providing a reference without giving the player a gold-plated neon pointing finger from God isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but given that Analyze gives direct answers to most elemental weaknesses, the occasional inaccuracy stands out more as an error than an intentional design choice.

Persona PSP‘s biggest balance problem isn’t the inaccurate Analyze feature, however, but rather the way in which it distributes experience points. In a nutshell, characters are awarded EXP based on how much damage they deal in combat. Besides the fact that this makes it exceptionally difficult to use any defensively-minded Persona without falling behind in levels, this setup makes it practically inevitable that one character will become absurdly overleveled while the rest of the party suffers from EXP starvation. This is thanks in large part to the game’s focus on elemental properties, since equipping one character with a Persona that is particularly effective for an area means they’ll be getting the lion’s share of EXP from that area. Now, a player could simply equip lower leveled characters with especially effective Persona for each area, basically dictating who gets the most EXP from an area, but this requires intimate knowledge of each area before going in. Players going through the game for the first time are likely to get stuck with one or two Supermen, backed up by three Lois Lanes.

Perhaps in an attempt to update the somewhat outdated aesthetic elements of Revelations: Persona, Persona PSP mixes in new visuals and music with the decidedly old-school style of the original game. Visually, the majority of these additions are in the form of new cel shaded cutscenes, as well as a new opening sequence and menu design. These new elements tend heavily towards the pop art style of the more recent Persona games, which causes a bit of a visual disconnect. For example, combat still plays out on the isometric battlefield of the original, complete with cheesily distorting background image and somewhat muddy sprites. However, the battle result screen, where players are awarded EXP, money, and items, is a crisp contrasting mix of black and grey stars. There is a constant clash between the sleek design of the new visual elements with the confused, muddy design of the original game, leading to an inconsistent overall visual style.

A lot of this inconsistency is also present in Persona PSP‘s soundtrack. Like the visual style, the soundtrack takes elements of the original game and mixes it with newer elements, which are designed more with the modern pop art sensibilities of Persona 3 and 4 in mind. And again, like the visual style, the more modern elements clash rather badly with the original ones. Revelations: Persona had a rather traditional soundtrack, focusing largely on deep, foreboding orchestral music, making it very easy to tell which songs are new and which are old. Taken individually, the pieces of music that make up the soundtrack are quite good, solidly composed and effective in backing up their scenes. However, going from area to area can be rather jarring, with the heavy pop guitar of the overworld theme giving way to a strings-and-organ dungeon theme.

Monster and character design tend to be a bit more simplistic than normal SMT fodder.

Persona PSP‘s final time to complete can vary pretty wildly. The game offers three different endings; the good ending is available by answering certain personality questions about 20 hours into the game correctly, an odd requirement for a game in the Shin Megami Tensei line. Answering them incorrectly will get you the bad ending, which presents a bit of a poser; these personality questions are between 5 and 10 hours back from the point where the game can potentially end. It’s very easy to unintentionally get the bad ending and have to replay most or even all of the game in order to rectify your error. The third ending, on the other hand, is an odd bird. About midway through the game, the player has the chance to start an extremely lengthy side quest called the Snow Queen quest, which offers its own plot, cast of characters, and ending. This side quest will be new to the vast majority of gamers, since it was inexplicably removed from Revelations: Persona. It’s also significantly more difficult than the normal path through the game, and a bit longer as well. Where a run through the normal plot would take between thirty and forty hours, the Snow Queen path takes about fifty to sixty.

In the end, the localization debacle of Revelations: Persona may be one of the biggest ironies in all of gaming. The localization team, faced with a poorly balanced and often confusing game set in a country that would seem so far alien to players of the time as to be impossible to relate to, set out to repair the balance and make the game more easily accessible for western gamers; in short, to improve the product they were given. However, by fiddling with the encounter and EXP rates rather than the means by which EXP is doled out, they managed to make the game less balanced rather than more, and by retooling the characters to appear more western without altering the setting, they managed to pierce suspension of disbelief far more than the original Japanese setting would have done. However, without any meddling from third parties, Persona PSP reveals itself as a poorly constructed mish-mash of elements without any solid guiding principles. With a poorly conceived and executed combat system, a clumsily written story, and a fractured art style, Persona PSP‘s far more faithful take on the game is ultimately just as unsatisfying as the first version we received.

This game was played to completion using a publisher-provided review copy.

On a superficial level, the combat of Dragonica Online resembles the combo-based gameplay of LaTale. However, where combos in LaTale were really just long strings of skills slung at a grounded opponent, Dragonica Online‘s system encourages players to knock the foe down, kick them into the air and juggle them. Skills are generally geared more towards making it easier to link attacks into juggles or knockdowns, with only a few actually geared towards raw damage output. This system is at its strongest when players work together to create huge strings of combos, with one player knocking the foe into the air so that a second can juggle them, while a third waits to slam the monster into the ground with a giant squeaky hammer. Combat is very fast and active, and the variety of attacks helps keep combat fresh and interesting.

A seahorse scale is just one of the odd little points of interest to be found.

Dragonica uses a fairly rudimentary class system, with four initial classes branching out into eight advanced classes, after which players are locked into a third and final class promotion. The basic classes are extremely basic; Dragonica offers players the choice of a Warrior, Thief, Magician or Archer. Warriors can be promoted to the physically defensive Knight, or to a slow-but-devastating Gladiator; Thieves can become Tricksters, which specialize in area-of-effect damage and bizarre toys, or silent stealthy Ninja; Magicians can pick between the support and healing-focused Priest, or the more offensively-oriented Battlemage; and finally, Archers select between the crossbow and missile launcher-wielding Ranger and the more nature friendly Hunter. All in all, the game offers a solid variety of classes and styles of play, and for the most part, the variety is managed well. Almost all of the classes have a role to play in combat, and they do it well, but there is a significant tilt in the game design towards the long range classes.

During dungeons, known in this game as Mission Maps, players are sent through a series of small, mostly linear maps that very closely resemble the stage setup of some of the arcade beat-’em-up games of yesteryear. After defeating the boss that waits at the end of the Map, players are given a grade, calculated by how many combos the player had, how many times they attacked, the number of times they fell in combat, and most significantly, how often they were hit by an enemy. Long range classes have a significant advantage here simply by virtue of not having to be anywhere near the enemy in order to damage them, while not having any real disadvantage in attack output to compensate. This reward scheme, along with the lack of any way to grab and hold an enemy’s attention, also makes it extremely difficult for any class that tries to play defensively. As it stands, Knights, which suffer the double stigma of being a defensively focused close-range class, are extremely difficult to use effectively.

As is often the case with free to play MMOs, Dragonica has a few issues with pacing and balance. The game’s level cap is extremely low — only level 60 at the moment — which leads to a great deal of weight being placed on individual levels. The difference between one level and another is frequently the difference between mercilessly slaughtering an enemy and being nearly incapable of landing a blow on it. This is less of a problem in the early parts of the game, where the levels go by fast and furious, but becomes a significant issue once the rate of experience points begins to drop off. As it stands, reaching level 20 and the first job class promotion is easy enough to do in a couple of evenings, but hitting level 30 is like smacking a brick wall. Quests dry up, and the player is expected to grind for the vast majority of each level. This becomes extremely difficult once the player has outleveled the Mission Maps, as the next step up, Chaos Maps, require players to collect a special kind of currency called Devil Soul Stones not only to gain entrance to the map, but also to buy special shields to protect them from the toxic atmosphere contained within. The practical upshot of this is that Dragonica essentially forces players to grind in order to grind.

In the end, Dragonica Online would probably have done much better to have a vastly higher level cap, in order to allow players to maintain the fast paced feel of the early levels. As it stands, the arcade-style action of the early levels is quickly drawn down by the snail-like grind of the mid to late levels. Given that Dragonica has no real overriding theme beyond the style of combat it presents, the sharp decline in pace is a significant disappointment.

The game’s wide variety of side activities does help to counteract this unfortunate loss of pacing. Dragonica offers player vs player combat, Daily Quests — which, as the name suggests, can be completed once each day, usually for a random, yet useful, reward — and a fair number of achievements, which present players with collectable medals for hitting certain milestones. The downside to this is that Daily Quests often have tedious or unusually difficult completion requirements, and achievements don’t really have much of an actual effect on gameplay. The side activities Dragonica offers are nice diversions, but they don’t do enough to mitigate the grind.

Dragonica derives its name from the backstory it presents, which paints a picture of an ancient world where humans and dragons co-existed. Of course, such a pleasant state of affairs could hardly be allowed to continue, and eventually humans and dragons went to war against each other. Fast forward a couple thousand years to the present day, and the player embarks on a quest, ostensibly to prevent the resurrection of an evil dragon, although you’d never guess that if the opening sequence didn’t come out and tell you so. The actual plot tends to ignore the backstory of the game, instead sending players on the long series of fetch quests that MMO players are now so well accustomed to. What little plot there is largely deals with the mutation of animals by a mad scientist, and the player’s attempts to join the Dragon Fellowship, a coalition of adventurers dedicated to helping the little guy.

As is often the case with MMOs, the plotline is thin to the point of being almost nonexistant. There are few characters with any real personality, and fewer still that even make it to being two-dimensional. The tale being told has no real theme or purpose to it, other than as an excuse to send the player out for ten Wolf Pelts or to kill fifteen of whatever monster happens to be hanging about.

On occasion, enemies you’ve defeated will get flung towards the screen, with comical results.

At first blush, the visual style of Dragonica Online will seem extremely familiar to most players. The super-deformed characters combine with a bright palette of colors to create a happy-happy style that a great deal of games use, but Dragonica backs it up with solid variety in area types and a surprisingly good eye for detail. As with so many games, Dragonica features wide rolling fields in the early parts of the game and deep, dank caves in the later parts, but the plains are packed with flocks of sheep and slowly tilting windmills, and the caves are full of elegant stalagmites, erupting lava pools, and bizarre glowing orbs of fungi. In short, although the game generally sticks to the tried-and-true when it comes to area concepts, the artful execution and attention to detail goes a helluva long way towards making each one intriguing.

The soundtrack of Dragonica is surprisingly subtle, given the visual style it has to mesh with. Where the visuals tend to stick to bright and obvious, the music moves with an unusual degree of grace, creating a very solid counterpoint between the two. The only real complaint here is that there simply isn’t a great degree of variety to be had. Though each individual area is technically self-contained, it shares a general theme with several surrounding areas, and therefore uses the same music. The practical upshot of which is that all six beach-themed areas use the same fairly short track, as do all four of the ruins areas, and so on and so forth. By the time a player finally exits a particular theme group, the song in question tends to have worn out its welcome.

On the whole, Dragonica Online isn’t a particularly difficult game, especially for Archers and Magicians. The game’s interface is effective and easy to use, and although the placement of some of the hotkeys are a bit awkward, it’s easy enough to reposition them. The only other thing worth mentioning is that Dragonica currently doesn’t have very good joypad support, which is a bit of a shame for such an action-oriented game.

What it all boils down to is that although Dragonica Online presents entertaining combat, engaging artistic design, and a solid amount of side activities, it is still bogged down by the same problems so many free to play games experience. A mind-numbing slog at higher levels, a flaccid and uninteresting plotline, and the same quest system and story progression players have seen a thousand times over, all of which drags down an otherwise quite enjoyable and fast-paced game. Still, Dragonica Online is still a very young game, and it will be interesting to see where forthcoming updates take it.

Devil Survivor‘s storyline deals with the sudden appearance of demons in downtown Tokyo, an event which triggers a government lockdown of the entire Yamanote Circle area. Our three young protagonists, Atsuro, Yuzu, and the silent main character, are locked in along with a sizeable section of the populace, given hand-held demon summoning computers called COMPs, and told they have seven days before all hell breaks loose. In true Shin Megami Tensei fashion, there are a wide selection of ways to deal with this problem, from simply running the government’s blockade, to tracking down and eliminating the source of the demonic infestation, to using this newfound demonic power to challenge God himself. SMT‘s moral ambiguity reigns supreme here, with a slew of factions and characters going quite beyond the traditional Law, Chaos, and Neutral alignments.

Taking out the center demon will destroy the whole team, but it’ll be much harder to do without defeating the side critters first.

All these characters and sides to keep track of means Devil Survivor‘s plot branches off and twists around to a surprising degree. When the player is not in a battle, they have more or less free reign to go anywhere they want within the confines of the Yamanote Circle. Players can freely converse with members of their party, scout out locations, and even do a bit of levelbuilding in Free Battles. Anything more major — such as playing through a plot-mandated battle, or advancing one of the game’s many sub-plots — will eat up thirty minutes of your time. Given that certain critical events take place at certain times and the overall time limit of seven days, proper time management is essential. This is especially true given that failing to complete certain events could result in missing some party members or even being locked out of some endings. Who the player talks to and when has a great deal of influence on how the story unfolds, causing the story to twist and turn unexpectedly.

For the most part, this unpredictability is one of the best parts of the game, but it does have a few unintended consequences. Since the game doesn’t often give the player the option of seeing all the events available in a specific time frame, some story elements become lost simply through a lack of time. The player has to carefully pick and choose which events to see, which helps build the sense of urgency that Devil Survivor really trades on, but it has the nasty side effect of fracturing the storyline quite badly in some cases.

The game’s combat system is a unique combination of a traditional tactical grid movement system and the particular brand of elementally-focused turn-based combat that Shin Megami Tensei has become known for. To explain; characters take turns based on an ATB-style turn queue, with each character or enemy taking their turn as a time-based meter fills. The meter is then expended as the character executes commands, allowing players some control over the turn order. When one character attacks another, the game switches over to a turn-based system where each side of the conflict is allowed one turn to beat the snot out of the other. An extra turn is awarded for hitting a foe’s weakness or scoring a critical hit, while hitting a resistance may cause you to lose any extra turns already acquired.

Each character is allowed a pair of summoned demons to assist in combat, the selection and fusion of which makes up a great deal of the game’s character customization. Demons can have up to three active commands, which include things like magic and special techniques, three passive abilities, which encompass stat increases and resistance boosters, and a racial ability. Racial abilities, as you may have guessed, are unique to each race of demon, cannot be inherited through Fusion, and are frequently powerful enough to build a unit’s entire strategy around. Unfortunately, in order to keep ahead of the difficulty curve, the player is required to constantly acquire new demons, making it exceptionally difficult to keep specific powerful racial abilities.

Humans, on the other hand, gain new abilities through the Skill Crack system. This system works by prompting players to select which ability each character will learn from which foe before combat. That ability is then acquired only if each specific character defeats the foe assigned to them. The end result is that both humans and demons have a great many options available to them in combat, and skill in constructing characters goes a heckuva long way here. Although the overall combat setup isn’t anything mind-blowingly original, Devil Survivor presents an enjoyable and engaging combat system in large part due to the huge number of character customization options.

Overall, Devil Survivor presents a solidly cohesive package, with features that tie into each other fairly well. The game does make a few unwelcome changes, especially where the Fusion system is concerned. Rather than the traditional grid, which was a simple and reliable way of seeing what demons were currently on hand and what could be produced from them, Devil Survivor complicates matters by showing the player a basic list of their current demons. The game won’t show players what demons over their current level can be produced without using an overcomplicated search feature, which quickly becomes more useful than the basic Fusion screen.

The Demon Auction system by which players acquire new demons is a bit more manageable than the Fusion system, and it’s an interesting alternative to the negotiation systems of other SMT games, but it’s also a good deal less engaging. The Demon Auction behaves mostly like eBay, with multiple people — or rather, multiple AIs — bidding on the same demons. There’s even a Buy It Now feature. But frankly, this is one area of the game where the lack of online features stands out. Devil Survivor spends a large hunk of time talking about the myth of the Tower of Babel and comparing it to the Internet, mostly in the sense of both objects being a towering achievement of mankind whose construction required mastery of communication. The lack of online features or even local multiplayer is something of a glaring omission, and an area where taking a rather easily manipulated offline auction system and expanding it for online play would have made a lot of sense.

In the end, Devil Survivor‘s interface and system design seems rather basic. The game fails to take any real advantage of the touch screen, in fact barely using it at all, which, combined with the inadequate Fusion interface and often poorly organized menus, can make using some of the game’s basic features clunky and confusing.

The game’s relatively tiny soundtrack is its biggest issue where sound is concerned. Most of the sound effects are quite acceptable, and the lack of voice acting is nothing surprising given the system this game appears on, but the fact that there are only about two dozen tracks in the entire game causes problems with repetition. Composed by series newcomer Takami Asano, a relatively unknown composer presenting his first major soundtrack in an RPG, and his first video game related work in more than ten years, the soundtrack works a bit too hard to replicate the feel of a Shoji Meguro OST. Mr. Asano tends to go far overboard with overdriven electric guitars, to the point where individual tracks tend to be poorly defined and lack a distinctive style.

The Fusion system could use a fair bit of streamlining.

Though the majority of Devil Survivor‘s visual style is well-executed, it has some serious issues in the area of consistency. Nowhere is this more evident than in the portrait art used for the game’s many demons. Many of the returning demons sport the same artwork they used in previous incarnations of the Shin Megami Tensei series, which wouldn’t be such a problem if individual games in the series didn’t vary so vastly, visually speaking. Demon artwork from the very first Shin Megami Tensei game is plopped down next to art produced for Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, games separated by more than a decade and several shifts in style. Add to this brand new artwork for the game’s many demonic newcomers as well as completely original designs for the main cast produced by an artist new to the series, and you’re left with a visual style so jumbled as to be quite distracting at times.

Devil Survivor is fairly lenient in difficulty, largely due to the nearly omnipresent Free Battles, which allow players to levelbuild as much as they’d like at more or less any point in the game. The weight placed on level in damage calculation makes it possible to grind past the game’s difficulty curve without too much time or effort, which isn’t necissarily a bad thing given that most of the tactical challenge the game has to offer lies in the large number of “protect the AI” missions rather than in pummelling through waves of enemies. It’s difficult to tell how long Devil Survivor will take the average player given that it has no built-in timer, but the game feels slightly shorter than your average RPG, making twenty to thirty hours a fair estimate.

In the end, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor is a very solid game plagued by a few obnoxious faults. The game’s plot creates a wonderful sense of urgency and isolation, full of little things that genuinely make players feel as though they’re in a disaster situation. The combat system, though not particularly mind-blowing, is a unique and interesting take on the traditional TRPG setup, and provides enough character customization options to keep enthusiasts busy for hours. The major downside of all this is that players will have to come to terms with a blatantly fractured and distracting visual style, a repetitive soundtrack, and an often combative interface. The game’s unique concept and solid story, however, definitely make it worth the effort.

As with its predecessor, Devil Summoner 2 presents an alternate history version of Japan, where the Taisho Period has continued into the early 1930s. The game’s setting reflects this period of change in Japan with a combination of traditional and modern elements; for example, people walking down the street are garbed in traditional kimono and geta sandals, but also sport fedoras and the occasional three-piece suit. Cars share the roadway with oxcarts, and modern granite buildings stand quietly next to millennia-old temples. The story itself doesn’t deal a whole lot with the time period or the history of Japan as a nation, but the setting at least is compelling and intriguing.

Summoning two demons expands your options in battle tremendously.

The story itself re-joins the young Devil Summoner Raidou Kuzunoha approximately a year after the events of Soulless Army. As with all good detective stories, it begins with a beautiful young lady walking through the door of the Narumi Detective Agency, and begging Raidou to take her case. In short order, the player is gallivanting all over the capital city hunting for the young woman’s older brother, who has apparently vanished from their rural village. What isn’t made immediately clear, however, is that her brother is a renegade member of one of the most dangerous ninja clans in Japan, and has a nasty plan in store for the capital city.

The plot tends to be rather circuitous, and contains a good deal of filler and fluff that doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with the rest of the storyline. On the whole, it’s a better, more mysterious detective story than Soulless Army was, thanks in large part to a real sense of slowly-unravelling mystery the game creates. It also makes much better use of the individual Investigational Skills Raidou’s demons are imbued with, although the vast majority of brain-taxing investigation is to be found in the game’s multitude of Case File sidequests. The story isn’t bad, and it’s definitely an improvement over the previous game, but a traditional hand-holding railroad plot seems to defeat the purpose of encouraging players to think like a detective. Instead, it focuses more on the theme of luck and hope, the idea that people place such store in fortune that a continued streak of bad luck will cause them to fall into despair and lash out at those around them. It’s an interesting take on the rather overused theme of hope, and although the game tends to beat the player over the head with it, it isn’t terribly executed, and again, represents a significant jump over the plot of the previous Devil Summoner.

One thing the designers have put a lot of effort into this time around is introducing an alignment system. In other Shin Megami Tensei games, a player’s alignment counts for a lot; it can alter summoning costs, determine which side of the plot the player sees, even alter how certain characters will react to you. However, in Devil Summoner 2, alignment only seems to count for which ending you see, which is a bit of a letdown given how often the game puts alignment questions in front of the player. Even more of a letdown is the fact that despite the game’s three alignment choices — Order, Neutral, and Chaos — there are only two endings, and neither of them really have a great impact on Raidou himself. The fact that there is an alignment system at all is a step up from Devil Summoner 1, but for all the emphasis and drama the plot puts on alignment questions, the system doesn’t actually matter that much.

The biggest shift away from Devil Summoner 1 comes in the combat system. Rather than having control over just one demon, Raidou can now summon two at once. Although it seems like a minor change, having two active demons at once makes for much more complex combat, as players will effectively be managing three characters in active, action-based combat. The game also changes the way skills are used, completely abandoning the Morale system in favor of a much simpler skill management system, which has the player set which skills the demon will be using in combat and whether or not to repeat their use. The AI of Raidou’s demon allies, whose incompetence was one of the major complaints about the last game, has been vastly improved in this iteration, thanks in no small part to this skill system. The changes that have been made to the Magnetite system make a big difference in combat, too. In Soulless Army, Magnetite was used almost exclusively as a way of paying summoning costs; however, in Devil Summoner 2, it functions as MP. To keep Raidou from running out of Magnetite in a close battle, players will need to hit enemy weaknesses and follow up with physical attacks; for each blow that lands, players will be rewarded not only with increased damage, but also a small amount of Magnetite.

In the previous Devil Summoner game, contracting demons was accomplished simply by smacking a demon with an attack it was weak to, and forcing it into one of Raidou’s tubes via a short tug-of-war game. In Devil Summoner 2, Raidou will have to speak to the demons he wants to join his party, rather than just pressganging them. The introduction of a Negotiation system brings the game a lot closer to other SMT games, and although it does slow combat down a bit, it’s also a great deal more satisfying than the previous method.

Raidou’s heavy attack can be an axe, a spear, or a flurry of sword strikes, depending on what he has equipped.

On the whole, the alterations Devil Summoner 2 makes to the systems of the previous game are almost entirely positive. The increase in commands that have to be made from the combat menu, as well as the new Negotiation system, does make combat a bit less fast-paced, but they also increase the overall complexity of the system and the number of options players have. Though the combat system does sometimes devolve into basic “what is it weak to” flailing, it is still a marked improvement over the previous game both in depth of strategy and in pure mechanical design.

The soundtrack tries to stick fairly strongly to Shoji Meguro’s normal SMT-styled faire, while adding in a touch of Big Band-era instrumentation. It isn’t entirely successful, and although a number of tracks do manage to feel strongly reminiscient of the time period, for the most part, the soundtrack is pretty typical of Mr. Meguro’s work in general. The heavy re-use of tracks from Soulless Army doesn’t do the game many favors, either. Also a bit mystifying is the continued absence of voice acting from the series, which would have helped a great deal in bringing the game’s characters to life, especially given the translation’s heavy use of early 20th century slang.

Visually, the game is more or less identical to Devil Summoner 1, to the point where a number of areas have actually been re-used with little or no alteration. This isn’t a terrible thing; Soulless Army wasn’t a beautiful game, but it had a visual style that served its purpose. It does contribute to a certain lack of amazement to be had throughout the game, though. So many areas, especially in the Capital City, come off as “we’ve seen this before.”

Devil Summoner 2 is one of the easier titles in the SMT line, perhaps even easier than its predecessor thanks to much improved AI and the ability to control two demons at once. The game’s length has been increased as well, but a large amount of that is due to sidequests and some of the more inane plot points. All tolled, the game should last about 40 to 50 hours.

Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha vs King Abbadon is a major step forward for the Devil Summoner series in terms of game mechanics; the new systems introduced in this game have the effect of fixing almost everything that was complained about in the first title. However, although the storyline is a bit of an improvement, the other aspects of the game could have used more of the same treatment. The heavy re-use of sound and visual elements from Soulless Army isn’t a death knell for the game’s artistic impact, but it takes a lot of the edge off of the game’s plot twists when the player ends up responding to the plot with “Oh, we’re going there again?” On the whole, the game is a good choice for players who enjoyed the setting and characters of the first game, as well as those who are looking for a solid action RPG, but in the end, it’s still not all that it could be.

While there are several new additions through the content, they are all attached to The Pitt and do not expand the core gameplay or story of Fallout 3. Thus, it will not be scored separately.

Simply getting to the radio beacon can be a challenge for the lower-level player, as it’s broadcasting from the extreme north edge of the wasteland, west of the Oasis entrance. Arriving there puts you in contact with Werhner, who claims to be an escaped slave from the ruins of Pittsburgh. The survivors are all afflicted by radiation poisoning, and have been enslaved by a man named Ashur, who claims to be researching a cure. Ashur has restarted an old steel mill and, through his army of raiders, forced the infected slaves to operate the mill and scavenge materials from the surrounding steelyards. Werhner’s proposal is blunt: help his people gain access to the cure, and he’ll reward you well.

“State of Independence.” The irony is not lost on me.

Getting in isn’t easy. The Pitt is only accessible by a train tunnel close to the beacon, and since the tunnels are intact and huge you’ll need Werhner to show you the way. Ashur has the city locked down, and Wernher’s convinced that only disguising yourself as one of the slaves will get you past the gate. Just getting across the bridge over heavily radiated waters (some have reported a similarity to the Liberty Bridge in Pittsburgh; this is unconfirmed) is a challenge in itself, as it is mined and clogged with derelict cars. Hostile scavengers and stray dogs test the player on the approach, and a squad of Ashur’s raiders bars the entrance to the city. Even if you shoot your way in, you’ll be jumped as you get past the gate. Everything about the city makes one thing very clear: if you want in, you’re playing by their rules whether you like it or not.

Unlike Operation: Anchorage, The Pitt is essentially its own little game world. It has a separate world map with functional fast travel, opportunities to rest and trade, and side quests. No matter how you get in you’ll be stripped of your gear, so you’ll have to make do with what you find on the inside. Although you’ll do a fair amount of fighting, there are options for diplomacy or finesse to make your life easier, and the main quest does branch at a certain point. Meds, weapons, and ammo are all scarce at first, and level 20 players used to running and gunning with an endless stack of bullets will have their work cut out for them.

The new additions are fairly substantial, adding quite a bit to the Fallout inventory and bestiary. You’ll get your hands on an improvised chainsaw, the Auto Axe, early on; diligent players may acquire a unique and more powerful variant. A variety of improved slave, worker, and raider outfits can be found or earned, while a custom set of power armor awaits the truly observant. Subquest rewards include excellent new guns: common and unique forms of a scoped automatic rifle with a silencer, and an energy weapon that functions a lot like a shotgun — see also Protectron’s Gaze from the Canterbury Commons quest. New perks have been added, all quest oriented. Some are simple skill or weapon damage increases, while a potential final reward is a permanent improvement to rad resistance.

Pfft. Welding masks are for chu-OH GOD MY EYES I COULDN’T BE IN MORE PAIN

Although some of the new areas are prefab sewers or the like, the vast majority of The Pitt is superbly designed. Across the foreboding and deadly Pitt Bridge, you find yourself in the cramped streets and alleys of downtown, where the slaves reside and are bombarded by Ashur’s propaganda. The adjoining steel mill is dilapidated, but functional and abuzz with activity most definitely not approved by OSHA. Beyond the mill is a derelict steelyard, a gargantuan maze of rusting buildings, burning smokestacks, and ramshackle platforms leading this way or that; scores of mutants known as trogs make the yard their home, hunting the slaves and raiders that attempt to scavenge there. And then there’s uptown, where Ashur’s men reside. Though still surrounded by the crumbling ruins of an industrial capital, there is life amongst the gutted apartments and broken, radioactive streets.

The sound rarely stands out, though it is serviceable. A lot of raider and slave actors are borrowed from the original game, though the handful of voices are paired with a decent script. Werhner doesn’t emote much, but he does show a bit of personality beyond just a quest giver. Trogs make for suitably unsettling enemies; they sound like feral ghouls as they lope around on all fours, but occasionally utter a weak “hunger,” or “thank you,” as you dispatch them. Ashur himself is the most believable of the lot, both through his propaganda and in person. Conscious of how easily he can be seen as a cruel despot, he takes pains to come off instead as a well-intentioned extremist; he refers to the slaves as workers, and constantly speaks of rebuilding civilization by combining their steel industry and medical research. It’s questionable whether he actually believes what he says, but the fact that there is a question is a testament to the skill of the actor and writers.

The only really scary thing about this image is what that ammo counter is reading. Fallout 3 players, you know what I mean.

Speaking of the writers, The Pitt shows just what a skilled pen can do when paired with talented level designers. While arguably not as complex as the best Fallout 3 had to offer, such as Blood Ties or Tenpenny Tower, it’s still a lot deeper than it appears at first glance. Many players’ first instinct will be to grab a gun and kickstart the revolution, though it won’t be that simple to start with. You’ll have to work your way up from scavenging steel ingots in the steelyard – easily the largest single zone in the game apart from the Capitol Wasteland itself – to proving yourself in a radioactive pit fight. Despite the brutality the raiders clearly show the slaves, your eventual confrontation with Ashur may be more complicated than the build-up prepares you for. Without giving anything away, let’s just say the quest for the cure isn’t so cut and dry as toppling a dictator and his private army.

There are a few minor issues, both contained within The Pitt and in the context of Fallout 3. The start of the steelyard section can be challenging, as trogs tend to attack in large numbers and you have little ammo and weapons with which to fend them off. The steelyard and uptown zones are complicated and mazelike, and your local map does little to show which path leads where. As mentioned, the same few people voice most of the raiders, so it’s not uncommon to hear a man apparently having a conversation with himself; this seemed less of an issue in Fallout 3, perhaps because raiders were typically hostile by default. Most glaring is that it still doesn’t extend the level cap or make any meaningful changes to the core game.

At 800 Microsoft Points, The Pitt‘s 4-6 hours of gameplay is reasonable, though this time the quest itself is the real draw. If Operation: Anchorage was a linear run-and-gun quest with some nifty loot, then The Pitt shows that Bethesda still knows how to attach an interesting plot and setting to the action. This bodes well for the upcoming Broken Steel content, which should finally address the original game’s biggest problem and give players a reason to bother with the game after level 20.