Reviews

I bought Grandia (the PSN version) three months ago, as I figured a portable JRPG would help to keep me sane during my internship. It was originally released in Japan in 1997 (the same year as Final Fantasy VII, so a comparison between the two is actually quite fair) and has a pretty good reputation.

Basically, it had a lot to live up to.

Grandia does a good job of blending 2D sprites and 3D environments.

Playing as Justin, a young boy who dreams of being an adventurer, the beginning of the game sees you running around your home town on a fetch quest.  I found this pretty dull (and started to feel cheated out of my £5) but stuck with it because of what I’d heard.  Thankfully, the story does get going eventually — even if it is pretty standard fare for a JRPG; young boy sets out to discover the history of an ancient civilisation, yadda yadda yadda… and ends up saving the world.

One of the things that surprised me most about Grandia is just how well it has aged.  Whereas FFVII‘s chibi-style characters look absolutely ludicrous by today’s standards, and the constant back-and-forth between blocky chibi and detailed battle model is a little jarring, Grandia‘s combination of 2D sprite-work and 3D environments is superb, and ensures a consistent feel in both the field and battle.  Even in FMVs, characters are rendered in 2D as high-quality cartoons.  The battle and level-up system are also different enough from the norm to feel innovative even compared to recent RPGs, and I will give a basic rundown here.

Battles (of the “collide-with-an-enemy” rather than “random encounter” variety) are a mix between turn-based and real-time.  Between turns, characters and enemies cycle between three states (Wait, Command, Act) at a speed dependent on their stats, and the action pauses whilst issuing commands in order to give the player some time to think.  All the usual commands are there (Attack, Magic, Defend, Item, Escape), but Grandia also includes a Critical Attack option.  This doesn’t deal more damage than a usual attack (as one might expect) but potentially causes the opponent to stagger, interrupting them if they are in the Command or Act stages or increasing their Wait time otherwise.  If played tactically, it’s possible to time your Critical Attacks such that the enemy never gets a chance to retaliate — and this makes for some very interesting battles indeed.

Like in all good JRPGs, the world is teeming with monsters.

As for the level-up system, simply fighting and winning battles is not enough to make your characters stronger.  Use of a particular weapon or magic attribute will affect the way your character grows (every 100 Sword points will increase your Strength stat and Skill Points, whilst every 100 Fire points will increase your Wit stat and MP, for example), and this system is completely orthogonal to the experience you gain in battle.  Learning new moves and spells is dependent on this system (rather than your character’s level), and so without switching weapon types regularly, or mixing up the roles of each character in battle, you’ll find yourself severely underpowered before long.

Unfortunately, the game is let down by a few minor flaws.  The voice acting is pretty terrible in places; the dialogue can be pretty corny; and the plot doesn’t feel as epic as some other games in the genre.  Additionally, towards the end the game suddenly seems to decide that a consistent party line-up would be boring; characters decide to leave for no reason, or join for such a small amount of time that it’s difficult to become attached (or care when they eventually depart).

Nonetheless, Grandia is charming, challenging and (thanks to the PSN re-release) great value for money.  If you’re a fan of JRPGs, there’s really no reason not to play it.

Another weekend, another positively ancient game finished and out of my backlog.  This time, Final Fantasy: Dissidia, a PSP fighting game from Square Enix that features an assortment of heroes and villains from the first twelve Final Fantasy games.

I’ll admit that I bought the game not because I like fighters, but because of the cast — and it’s probably not surprising, therefore, that I initially didn’t like it much.  Like most fighters, I found it to be quite dull and repetitive, seemingly more about mashing obscure combinations of buttons and luck than tactics and skill.

I put the game back on the shelf and didn’t touch it for almost two years.

Did I mention that all of the characters can fly for some reason?

I picked it up again recently and took the time to actually read the in-game manual and tutorials before jumping straight back into the action — which made a world of difference.  Certain elements of the game that I’d dismissed as unimportant the first time around suddenly became the crux of my strategy.

Each character has two sets of moves; Bravery attacks (Circle) steal Bravery from your opponent (Bravery being the large number shown above the health bar in the screenshots) and adds it to your own; HP attacks (Square) “spend” the Bravery that you have stocked up to inflict the same amount of damage on your opponent’s HP.

Each battle earns you Experience Points (EXP), as well as Ability Points (AP) and money (Gil),  that help you to master new abilities and upgrade your equipment.  Equipping accessories can be confusing at first, but is an incredibly useful system — some accessories bestow certain benefits upon your character (e.g. Damage + 25%), whilst others act to multiply the effects of all other accessories so long as a certain condition is met (e.g. HP < 40%, 1.4 Times).  If this wasn’t enough, you can also equip Summons, a concept that will be familiar to fans of Final Fantasy RPGs. Some summons will appear on command (Right Trigger + Circle) whilst others will appear automatically when you’re taking a beating; either way, they can really turn the tide of battle.  Has your opponent just used a Summon to boost their Bravery?  Why not summon Scarmaglione and reduce it to 0?  Did your Bravery just increase, but not enough to inflict a killing blow?  Summon Ifrit — he’ll multiply your current Bravery by 1.5.

But wait, there’s more!  Pressing Right Trigger + Square (with a full EX Gauge) causes a character to transform into a more powerful version of themselves and eventually execute their “EX Burst” move — essentially a Limit Break/Trance/Overdrive move — to inflict massive amounts of damage.

In short, Final Fantasy: Dissidia is one of the best fighting games that I’ve ever played.  Its story is far more fleshed out than the traditional “you’re in a tournament for some reason” plot, with regular cutscenes; the levelling system allows obstacles to be overcome either through feats of great skill or by character upgrades, preventing situations where enemies are impossible to defeat simply because of their sheer power; and the battle system itself has great depth — it’s simple to pick up and play, but difficult to master.

Yes, they are Russian stacking dolls.

Stacking is a relatively new, downloadable, XBLA/PSN game.  Besides a few comments in magazines and on websites about how excited people were getting about it, I didn’t know much about the game before playing it.  If it weren’t for the fact that it’s available for free this month to PSN Plus subscribers, I probably wouldn’t have bothered getting it at all.

But I’m glad that I did.

Stacking is a game that is all about puzzles (with a little bit of humour thrown in), and as a result it isn’t weighed down by platforming sections, minigames or the untimely introduction of new features.

The story focuses on a very tiny Russian doll named Charlie Blackmore, who is tasked with saving the rest of his family (or “stack”) from an evil Baron known as “the Baron”.  The gameplay revolves (rather predictably) around stacking; Charlie can jump into any doll one size bigger than himself, gaining control of their movement and access to their individual special move.  This bigger doll is also able to stack into the next largest doll, and so on.

These special moves are the bread and butter of the game’s puzzles; some dolls can spot other unique dolls in the area; others can interact with certain elements of the surrounding environment; others can fart, belch or vomit on cue.  Each of these puzzles will have at least three different solutions, with the harder solutions typically requiring some lateral thinking and a combination of several doll abilities.

For example, early in the game the player is asked to empty a room in which a party is taking place.  There are a number of different solutions to the problem: use a seductive woman to distract the man guarding the door, before sneaking in and breaking up the party; use an engineer to sneak in through a nearby vent and break up the party; or use a fat man to fart into the vent and stink them out.  A puzzle doesn’t disappear until all of its solutions have been discovered, and this adds a significant amount of replayability to the game.

As with most games these days, there are also a number of collectibles that lead towards achievements/trophies.  The most interesting of these are hi-jinks, which are a sort of mini-quest that the player can stumble across whilst stacked with certain types of doll.  These quests are typically of the form “use doll x to do action y z times”, and the reward is simply aesthetic — completing a hi-jink turns part of doll x to gold. However pointless these seem, they are usually simple enough to serve as a small (and often entertaining) distraction from the area’s main goal.

So, what’s the verdict?

Well, the game’s visuals are simple, owing to the fact that all of the Russian dolls use an identical model with a different texture, but pretty nonetheless.  The music is neither great nor awful; it’s never jarring or distracting, but you won’t find yourself whistling it in the shower, either. It’s got five or so areas, and I’d estimate it to take somewhere between 10 and 15 hours for most gamers to reach 100%.

At £8.99 on PSN, 1200 MS Points on XBLA and free for PSN Plus subscribers, I’d say that Stacking is definitely worth a look.