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- Retrospective: Final Fantasy IV Remains a Masterpiece After All These Years
- Martial Soul Online (CN)
- Nintendo Gets More Serious About Online With the Nintendo Network
- RaiderZ (KR)
- 1UP’s Best of Tokyo Game Show 2011
| Retrospective: Final Fantasy IV Remains a Masterpiece After All These Years Posted: 30 Jan 2012 06:30 AM PST Final Fantasy IV has become so ubiquitous, so overly repackaged, so frequently and redundantly remade, that it can be difficult for one to put the game in its proper perspective and remember exactly how big a deal it was 20 years ago. The fourth chapter in the Final Fantasy series was a significant departure from its predecessors — not to mention the greater role-playing genre as it existed in 1991 — and not simply because it leapt ahead to the powerful Super NES. FFIV wasn’t as much as game of firsts as it’s sometimes treated in glowing retrospectives, but that shouldn’t be seen as a lack of innovation. Other games certainly paved the way for FFIV; Phantasy Star II blazed a 16-bit trail, while Dragon Quest IV broke new ground by recontextualizing the grand, sweeping quests common to RPGs into a character-driven linear odyssey. What made FFIV so engrossing is that it rounded up the best ideas put forth by its competition, reworked them into a new whole, and in doing so owned those concepts. From the opening moments of the game — literally, as a cart with no save files on it will boot immediately into the introductory cinematic — FFIV has a story to tell, and it isn’t shy about showing off a little as it presents that tale. Ominous music plays as a fleet of airships (not the single airships of previous Final Fantasy games, a whole flotilla of them!) advances in formation. The landscape speeds past below. The scene shifts to the player’s avatar, Cecil Harvey, captain of the Red Wing air fleet, pride of the Kingdom of Baron. Right away, this sets the tale apart: Cecil isn’t a young kid, a nameless nobody, or a feeble amateur. He’s a leader, an elite soldier who’s risen through the ranks as a Dark Knight to take command of an entire nation’s military powerhouse. Neither is Cecil a blank slate; he’s conflicted about his actions, torn between duty and morality. Cecil’s clearly defined personality and uncertain musings fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that role-playing protagonists should be voiceless blank slates onto which players can project themselves. Rather, FFIV takes a page from the growing influence of film that was taking root in gaming as the ’80s came to a close. Rather than simply lean on stale tough-guy dialogue in the fashion of something like Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden games, though, FFIV looked to Hollywood and Broadway as much for staging and structure as for flash, thanks in large part to designer Takashi Tokita’s history in theater. FFIV’s characters didn’t simply spout one-liners or relay plot-essential information; they conversed, they shared their feelings, they existed as characters. Sure, they were shallow little caricatures of real people whose motivations and interests could easily be summed up in a single sentence, but even that surface-level kind of writing was a stunning revelation in a video game of that vintage. So while it’s easy to look back unkindly on FFIV’s contrivances — the betrayals, the fact that one major party member’s only real role in the story is as a hokey damsel-in-distress plot device, the way the casualness with which characters volunteer to sacrifice their lives is matched only by the ease with which they somehow manage to come back from the dead — you’d be remiss to downplay the impact the game had on anyone who played it contemporarily. It was one of those rare works that represented a tremendous leap forward in the role of narrative within the medium, like Zork, Donkey Kong, or Half-Life. The roller-coaster plot was only a part of its success. Had FFIV merely been another stodgy Dragon Quest clone, its storytelling ambitions would probably be overlooked — or at the very least, it would remain a somewhat obscure footnote in the genre, like Phantasy Star II. The real innovation in FFIV was that it managed to make its role-playing mechanics feel as lively and unpredictable as the melodramatic tale that played out around, between, and even during battles. Thanks to its cleverly revamped battle order system, FFIV transformed the turn-based RPG into a pulse-pounding test of nerve and on-the-fly planning. For all that FFIV’s staged drama inspired other RPG designers to rethink how they approached the idea of exposition and plot as game structure, its Active-Time Battle combat system completely transformed the concept of RPG combat. Prior to 1991, role-playing games clung to the Dungeons Dragons style of turn-based battles, with fights broken into rounds. Generally turn order within a round was determined by the combatants’ agility or speed rating, though not always (the first three Final Fantasy games essentially used agility to determine the number of blows a character could land per round). FFIV stripped away the division represented by rounds, recognizing that it had always been an invention of necessity for ease of play in tabletop games. The ATB system went a step beyond that, though, disposing of the courtesy of waits and pauses in battle and moving toward something that resembled real-time combat. It wasn’t true real-time play — players still selected actions from menus, and each combatant acted in turns according to their speed stats — but it was a remarkable forgery. Tokita says that the game’s battle mechanics were inspired by F1 racing, the visual concept being that faster combatants would “lap” slower ones; this became more self-evident in later games, where characters’ turn order was depicted through the charging of ATB meters that filled at a different rate for each character. But even in FFIV, where those details were hidden invisibly away, fights were nevertheless infused with the excitement of a race. The element of real time to battle made for intensely strategic combat. FFIV attached a time cost to every kind of combat action, and learning to manage the delay on skills like Kain’s Jump or high-level spells such as Curaja or Flare became as essential to combat as simply selecting the proper commands. The introduction of ATB also allowed new and unusual additions to battle, such as the Doom spell’s death countdown or the infamous Demon Wall’s slow advance across the screen. Perhaps it was this facet of battle that inspired the game’s creators to explore the ultimate logical outcome of the combat system, using it to advance the story with small dramas that played out between combatants. FFIV used this concept to full effect, with characters leaping into battles packed with scripted dialogue. Whether used for tutorial information, character development, or general plot advancement, these pre-packaged fights broke through the barrier between story and battle and went a long way toward reuniting the limited computer RPG format with its free-form tabletop roots. It certain didn’t hurt that FFIV was the most impressively presented RPG that had yet been seen. Although previous 16-bit RPGs on PC Engine and Genesis had looked and sounded pretty respectable, FFIV blew them away. Its player character sprites were still tiny little munchkins, but everything else was rendered with remarkable detail. The game world may have been built of small, square tiles, but those tiles were rich in color and animation. Yoshitaka Amano’s monster designs were finally done justice, bursting with detail and color once freed from the constraints of 8-bit palettes. And Nobuo Uematsu’s score was astounding, tapping into the Super NES’s extraordinary sound chip to create a dark, swirling symphony of atmospheres, mood, and leitmotifs unlike anything previously heard. Uematsu shamelessly tapped the stylings of John Williams and progressive rock, but his borrowing lent FFIV an immense majesty unmatchable on competitors’ consoles. The one dark mark against FFIV was its English localization. The game was published in the U.S. as “Final Fantasy II,” but this was the least of that version’s issues. Square worried that its fans, having missed out on the relative complexity of the real FFII and III, would be overwhelmed by FFIV’s complexity, so they stripped out much of the game’s depth and decreased its difficulty considerably. This on its own might have been forgivable, but they also — less intentionally — saddled the newly rechristened Final Fantasy II with a nigh-incomprehensible English script. Not only was a significant amount of content and context stripped out to allow for ROM size limitations, the localization editing was seemingly non-existent. FFII read like a raw Japanese-to-English translation of the game had been shoehorned into it; about the only thing you can say in its favor is that its character and place names were consistent, which puts it a step ahead of Final Fantasy Tactics. Fortunately, the historical significance of FFIV means that Square has been only too happy to return to the well with it time and again. The game has been rereleased and repackaged more than half a dozen different ways in the past decade, and most of those reissues have made their way to the U.S. with revamped scripts and restored play mechanics. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a pure definitive version of the game; the DS edition has the most refined script but suffers from too much “buy the strategy guide, please!” design. The recent PSP remake is the most comprehensive, but it lacks the DS plot embellishments and has hideous graphics. To FFIV’s credit, though, it’s a good enough game that any version — even the original U.S. release for Super NES — should make for a memorable experience. Sure, it’s dated, and most of its accomplishments are diminished in hindsight due to how vastly influential it’s been. But isn’t that so often the case? Final Fantasy IV isn’t a standard RPG; it’s the RPG that defined the standard. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Posted: 30 Jan 2012 01:28 AM PST
Ok, enough with the apparent displeasure I have with the game. Martial Soul Online features 6 different clans, but so far only 2 has been revealed: Butterfly Valley and Mystic Ice. Players from Butterfly Valley will be the main healing and supporting class of the game, with summoning spells as well. Followers of Mystic Ice are basically assassins imbued with powers of the ice, killing targets silently and quickly. As you can see below, there are 4 clans yet to be released.
Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Nintendo Gets More Serious About Online With the Nintendo Network Posted: 29 Jan 2012 06:27 PM PST The digital and online spaces are two areas where Nintendo hasn’t been the most forward-thinking. But after a year where the company struggled to meet expectations, despite an uptick in 3DS sales in 2011′s final months, it now seems more serious than ever about providing a more robust online experience. President Satoru Iwata conducted a briefing for investors regarding its Q3 performance in Japan on Friday. For the third quarter in a row, the company was forced to lower its guidance to reflect lower-than-expected sales of Nintendo hardware and software. Noting the initial poor sales of 3DS after its launch, the ensuing price drop, and a lack of big games released in the first half of the fiscal year (April through September), Iwata said, “Our business performance will be the worst since we went into business in the video game industry.” This was expected after Nintendo announced in October that it anticipated suffering its first annual loss in 30 years. To help change things going forward, Nintendo won’t simply continue doing the sort of things we’ve become accustomed to — though it will do some of that, too, including releasing a 2D sidescrolling Mario game for 3DS in the next fiscal year, meaning it could be out anytime between April 1, 2012 and March 31, 2013. It’ll also stop selling the 3DS at a loss by the end of September, which will help its bottom line, as will the launch of the Wii U, which Iwata confirmed for release in Japan, the U.S., Europe, and Australia by the holiday shopping season later this year. Nintendo also seems to be understanding more and more the importance of online, both in its ability to connect gamers and to sell them games and content. Perhaps the biggest announcement Iwata had to share was the creation of the Nintendo Network. This name was seen just recently on the cover of Theatrhythm Final Fantasy in Japan, but its logo alone could have suggested it was merely a rebranding of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. It’s actually much more than that, with the Communities feature in Mario Kart 7 being the first example of something that goes beyond the typical Wi-Fi Connection offering. Nintendo Network will span both 3DS and Wii U — no word on if the two system’s Networks will be independent of one another — and is said to be more of a “platform where various services available through the network for our consumers shall be connected via Nintendo Network service so that the company can make comprehensive proposals to consumers.” That’s as opposed to WFC, which Iwata described as being focused on “specific functionalities and concepts.” Communication between gamers with Nintendo systems has always been lackluster, to say the least. Sending messages on Wii is limited only to friends and isn’t accessible system-wide. Swapnote for 3DS is great but is hardly a replacement for the ability to send messages to other users on Xbox Live or PlayStation Network. It looks as if functionality will be in place on the Nintendo Network, which is one small step in the right direction. What’s more exciting is the addition of a “personal account system” on Wii U. You’ll finally be able to have multiple accounts on a Nintendo system rather than a single friend code tied to the hardware regardless of who is using it. Friend codes have long been an annoyance for those looking to connect with other gamers; sharing a 12-digit code simply isn’t as convenient as telling someone your Gamertag. Iwata didn’t say whether this system would be based on friend codes or not — last year when Nintendo talked about providing a service more akin to Xbox Live, friend codes hadn’t yet been abandoned — but we can only hope they are gone. It would be senseless to finally incorporate this sort of account feature and then saddle it with the burden that is friend codes. Nintendo will capitalize on the Network to sell digital content as well. While the Wii, DSi, and 3DS all allow for downloadable games to be purchased, none offer the games available at retail (something that’s been done on 360, PS3, and PSP for a while now). Iwata said the digital distribution of retail games is being considered, and added, “This concept was built into the design of the Nintendo 3DS, and we already have the necessary infrastructure. We will prepare the same infrastructure for the Wii U.” Whether those games will be sold digitally day-and-date with their retail releases, Nintendo has not decided, as it does not want to step on the feet of retailers. With there already being pages for retail games on the 3DS eShop, it does feel like Nintendo has been contemplating this idea for some time. As much as I enjoy downloadable games on consoles, it’s on handhelds that they make the most sense. Carrying around a handful of game cards isn’t as pleasant as having your games all loaded up on the system to go; sometimes you just don’t know what you’re going to feel like playing. That’s one reason I was particularly pleased with the 3DS Ambassador games, as it means having no less than 20 games to choose from at any time. Although, let’s be honest, I’m never going to play Yoshi again. Ideally Nintendo will at least match Sony and the Vita by releasing all retail titles on the Network. Whereas Sony has talked about doing day-and-date releases at retail and PSN, with Nintendo it would feel like a milestone for it to do a digital release of a physical game at any point in time. I’d be shocked if this isn’t something we end up seeing a good deal of on Nintendo systems, as Nintendo stands to benefit perhaps more than anyone from providing easy access to its library of physical games. As one of the few companies whose games sell well over a long period of time — hence the reason it refers to them as evergreen titles — offering an easy place to find those games could only help to extend those long tails even further. That’s particularly true of the games it has published that become hard to find over time; Electroplankton, Tetris DS, and (at one point in time) Dragon Quest V all come to mind as examples. Even with Nintendo trying to become more serious about its digital offerings, Iwata offered up some reassurance that it doesn’t plan to nickel and dime gamers with downloadable content. Nintendo “does not plan to deploy businesses where our consumers cannot know in advance which item will appear as the result of their payment and they have to repeat the payments and, before they know it, they end up spending a huge amount of money in order to obtain the items they originally wanted to purchase.” It’s an admirable position, and Nintendo’s delay in getting into the DLC business has afforded it the benefit of seeing what has and hasn’t worked in the DLC market. It knows gamers won’t react well if it starts selling horse armor and cheat codes. It’s difficult to draw any solid conclusions about all of this without knowing a lot more. More than likely it won’t be until this year’s E3 in June — where Iwata reaffirmed we’ll be hearing about more details and seeing the “final format” of Wii U — that concrete details on the Nintendo Network and how it functions on Wii U are revealed. Last month’s system update introducing DLC support on 3DS demonstrates the company’s capability and willingness to provide new functionality for that system, and the reappearance of WiiWare demos are promising signs that this isn’t all talk. But its ability to provide a service on Wii U that begins to approach Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network will depend in large part on it being less insistent upon protecting gamers with things like the friend code system. If it continues to be stubborn in handicapping potentially great things — Swapnote sharing is restricted to friends; you can’t even exchange notes with a stranger through StreetPass — we might be in for another less-than-ideal Nintendo online experience. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Posted: 29 Jan 2012 06:27 PM PST
Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| 1UP’s Best of Tokyo Game Show 2011 Posted: 29 Jan 2012 01:26 PM PST Every fall, 1UP sends its finest folks to Japan for one of the year’s most anticipated events: The Tokyo Game Show. Find out what games were notable, which ones were forgettable, and what titles may soon be haunting our nightmares by checking out our Best of TGS awards below. BEST VITA GAME Sound ShapesSony had an impressively-large Vita lineup at TGS, with promising games like Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Gravity Daze, and Sumioni on hand, but we found ourselves liking the same game we gave our Best Vita Game of E3 award to: Sound Shapes. Jonathan Mak’s part-musical platformer, part-music creation software is creative and easy to use, but most importantly, a lot of fun and the kind of game that is a perfect fit for Vita. RUNNERS-UP BEST 3DS GAME Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime 3DThe 3DS had a decent showing on the TGS floor, although its appearance at Nintendo’s pre-show press conference was far more exciting. We didn’t really see anything 3DS-wise that broke the mold and instead gravitated toward polished examples of the familiar. Of the three long-running franchise updates we liked most — Dragon Quest, Resident Evil, and Kingdom Hearts — Dragon Quest feels the least played-out. Well, specifically, the Rocket Slime spin-off does. The 3DS sequel to 2006′s Rocket Slime is very much more of the same with some superfluous 3D tacked on, but when it’s “the same” as a whimsical, wonderful action RPG that appeared five years ago and left us wanting more, we’ll let a little lack of imagination slide this once. RUNNERS-UP BEST XBOX 360 GAME Project DracoWhen Microsoft announced a Panzer Dragoon-looking Kinect game at last year’s TGS, many got excited over the return of that type of game; this year we got to see it first-hand and confirm that, yep, it looks like a great evolution of what the Panzer games were. We’re a little worried that it’s going Kinect-only and won’t support the default 360 controller, but here’s hoping that makes for a game that really takes advantage of what Kinect can do rather than a game that feels like it’s missing controller support. RUNNERS-UP BEST PS3 GAME Ni No KuniOK sure, structurally this looks like a typical Japanese RPG, but it’s the “looks” part we’re particularly into. It’s a high-profile PS3 game (at least in Japan) due to the collaboration between developer Level-5 and Studio Ghibli, but more than that, it’s an incredibly pretty PS3 game with some of the most colorful graphics and smoothest animation you’ll find on the system. And now that it’s coming to the U.S., we’re finally letting ourselves get excited. RUNNERS-UP UNLIKELY GAME WE MOST WANT TO COME TO THE U.S. Bravely Default: Flying FairySometimes, games are just too damn Japanese for the American market. We saw three big, portable, high-quality RPGs on the show floor that seem doomed to languish in their native tongue, and that’s a shame. 7th Dragon is a sequel to cutesy, unlocalized RPG on the dead-in-the-U.S. PSP, and Capcom appears to have given up on popularizing Monster Hunter in the west (Dragon’s Dogma is basically their attempt to build a Monster Hunter for white people). However, it’s Square Enix’s Bravely Default that feels the most unmarketable here despite a seeming surplus of excellence. It’s an absolutely gorgeous game, but between its ridiculous name and the fact that it’s heir-apparent to Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light (which looks to have belly-flopped in the U.S.) we have severe doubts as to Square’s interest in localizing it. RUNNERS-UP GAME THAT WOULD BEST BE LEFT IN JAPAN Love PlusTGS was home to lots of game we want to play back home, but it also has a healthy share of games that we pray will never come to the U.S. Some of them were big-budget action games that feel like Japanese developers trying hard to cater to the west and forgetting their core strengths, while others are just the sort of thing that set us to imagining angry Fox news editorial screeds about moral degeneration. Konami’s Love Plus is absolutely the latter; it’s a game about having an imaginary girlfriend. Not that dating simulations are anything new in Japan; Love Plus is actually pretty tame among its contemporaries, though it has a reputation for inspiring an unusual degree of fanaticism among its fans. We’re not even passing judgment on the game. It’s just that of all the games that are massive, money-making goliaths in Japan, Love Plus is the one that’s least likely to play in Peoria. RUNNERS-UP BEST ANNOUNCEMENT Tomonobu Itagaki playable in Saints RowThere was a pretty healthy slate of news-making this week: Nintendo locked up Monster Hunter 4 for the 3DS (significant because, well, Monster Hunter is the only game where we see all sorts of people — even four young women during lunch — playing everywhere in Japan); Team Ninja showed that they are indeed making Dead or Alive 5; and the formerly “this is something I have to import, right?” Ni No Kuni will be coming to America after all. But nothing flat-out surprised us as much as seeing a virtual Tomonobu Itagaki (the former head of Team Ninja, now running things at Valhalla Game Studios) running around pile-driving bystanders and driving hoverbikes around in Saints Row: The Third. With Devil’s Third not hitting shelves until 2013, and Itagaki being a bit quiet lately, it’s amusing to know that we can have our own digital Itagaki to cause mayhem with when Saints Row: The Third ships. RUNNERS-UP Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
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