Crystalis - Nintendo

If you asked me my ten favorite games of all time Crystalis would definitely be on the list. It would most likely make it in the top five. Probably my favorite NES game of all time, and certainly the one that I remember the most. I remember this game vividly from my childhood, the graphics, the music, the gameplay, everything about this game brings a rush of nostalgia to me.

Here's the thing though, I've never actually beat Crystalis. I don't know how many times I've played Crystalis before, I would guess at least five, but I've never been able to make it all the way through. One of the reasons I started this blog was because about 85% of the games I played up until about three years ago I've never actually beat. I would start a game, then something new and shiny would come along and I would put down the old to usher in the new. That's why I wanted to go through my old games, to actually beat some of these games that I never made it through.

I hadn't planned on playing Crystalis yet, I was holding off on some of my favorite games. Figured I would go through the ones I hadn't really given a chance to. Then I joined a discussion about Nintendo games that you wish were longer, there were quite a few people saying Crystalis. They were mentioning that it was only about five hours long. This made no sense to me, I guessed it was at least a twenty hour game. I remember spending a ton of time as a kid playing this game. I wondered if it really was a five hour game, had all this time I not finished a game that could probably be done in one sitting?

I sat down with Crystalis and it just made me smile. I knew every note of music, I knew pretty much everything people in the first town would say to me, I knew the map like the back of my hand. I played for a good four hours the first night... and that's when I noticed something weird. In those first four hours I had played through a lot of the game that I remember... and the second night when I played again for about another three hours? I made it through to where I had stopped the last time I played the game. The next time I played the game? Well, I beat the game. This game that I had played at least five time since 1990 that I had never managed to beat was actually about eight hours long. Here's the funny part: Crystalis has two save data slots. I used one and left the old save alone, after I beat the game I loaded up that old save to see where I had quit in the game last time. Turns out on that save I was only about 15 minutes to a half hour away from finishing the game. If I had stuck with it for another half hour it wouldn't have taken me twenty one years to finally beat this game.

Crystalis is a really good game, and I don't think that's nostalgia talking. It's a great action RPG with a decent story. It's one of those underrated gems that if you like these types a games and haven't played it before you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. It's one of those games I wish had become a series, or at least had a sequel. Do yourself a favor and find and play Crystalis.

Squid.

Big Sky Trooper - Super Nintendo

I have very good memories of playing Big Sky Trooper on SNES. I never owned the game but I do remember renting it more then once. I also distinctly remember playing it when I was big into ROMs when I was a teenager. I loved Big Sky Troopers. One of my favorite genres is Action RPGs and with the mix of that, it's uniqueness, and brilliance of LucasArts I remember thinking this was an absolutely amazing game.

When I first started doing this blog one of the first things I did was buy Big Sky Trooper, I figured I should really beat a game that held so much nostalgia for me. I didn't play it right off the bat because I wanted to kind of mix favorites with games I had never really played. Finally I figured I should get around to playing a game I remember so fondly.

Then it all went horribly wrong. Big Sky Trooper was exactly how I remember it. The humor was there, the art direction was there, there was just one thing missing: the fun.

It wasn't that I was remembering the game differently from what it was, it was exactly how I remember it. It's just that in the decade since I had last played it apparently my wants and needs in a videogame had changed.

The controls were the first thing I noticed, they were absolutely awful. When you entire combat is based on shooting lasers at a slimes you better make it as good as possible. Unfortunately they didn't. Shooting slimes can actually be somewhat difficult. Any direction you shoot it's rather difficult to hit them and for the most part you have to get so close to the slime you end up bumping into them causing you to lose health. Shooting and killing things is actually somewhat difficult and can be frustrating. And flying the spaceship? It was like trying to navigate a aircraft carrier through a slalom.

The levels were pretty bad as well. You're beamed down to a planet and are given a small area of land to eradicate slugs from. The land is much like old Warner Brothers cartoons, everything is on a repeating background. You go to the bottom and come out the top, you go to the left and come out the right. This got real old real quick. Instead of making a couple large planets to explore you get a bunch of really tiny planets to do the same thing over and over on.

Big Sky Trooper is actually kind of confusing as well. This could just be because I didn't have a manual, but there were quite a few things that I had no idea how to do and basically just kind of had to trial and error figure it out myself. It wasn't a big deal but quite a few things that I feel should have been explained to you just weren't.

It was odd, I never have run into this before. This was a game that I had a lot of nostalgia for, a lot of good memories about, and yet I wasn't having fun. It was almost a complete reversal of what I was expecting. I just wasn't having fun.

After about fifteen hours of play I just didn't really want to go on. I almost called it quits. Finally I decided to just pull out the Game Genie and power my way through it. With infinite health and a few other codes I was able to speed through the rest of the game, and you know what? It didn't get any better. I really thought it might pick up and get better, but it didn't.

Big Sky Trooper wasn't good or fun. Replaying the game just took all of the great memories I had of the game and shattered them. It went from a great, fun RPG to being a horribly frustrating, boring mess. It's a shame, but it's one of the reasons I'm doing this.

Squid.

Faxanadu - NES

I have an odd nostalgia when it comes to Faxanadu and I'm not really sure why. In my head I remember it from my childhood, I remember the first few screens and almost nothing else. The thing is, I have absolutely no idea why. There's a possibility that I rented it as a kid, but I don't specifically remember it. I also honestly only remember the first few screens, really the first town, after that I couldn't tell you one thing about the game. So either I rented it and played the first few screens and that's what I'm remembering or I've somehow invented the nostalgia in my head. Either way, it's about time I actually played and beat this game I remember parts of oh so well.

To show how little I (possibly) remember of this game, I didn't realize it was a side scrolling RPG in the vein of Legend of Zelda: The Adventure of Link. Honestly I've always kind of enjoyed that genre, I loved The Adventure of Link as well as Castlevania II. After learning this I was rather excited to get into Faxanadu.

Faxanadu isn't as good as either of the games listed above, but it still is a rather solid game. The story is a little light, but that applies to about 90% of all NES games so I can't really hold it against it. It doesn't add anything huge to the genre, and borrows nicely from the big names. It's basically in every way just kind of average. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I've enjoyed a lot of games like that, but Faxanadu isn't never going to reach that status of a game that just sticks out in your mind as a shining jewel of a particular genre.

One of the things I did enjoy about Faxanadu was the way it handled experience points and gold. In quite a few games I've played they've had it where if you die you lose XP or Gold or perhaps both, and in Faxanadu you do as well... but with a twist. There are experience levels in the game and when you hit that you maintain that level with XP and Gold if you die. It's hard to explain, but let's say you need 2000 XP to hit level two and 3000 XP to hit level three if you have 2300 XP and die you don't lose all your XP, you just go back to your previous level, so 2000 XP. It works the same way with Gold as well, you just go back to the set amount of Gold for your current level. So like above, you die and come back with 2000 XP as well as perhaps 500 Gold instead of dropping back to zero or just constantly losing some. It was an interesting way of handling it. It also is unfortunately rather exploitable. With a little bit of grinding I was able to hit the highest level which meant that when I died I came back with 15000 Gold. This meant that I could just buy all the armor and items I wanted and when I ran out of money I would just save and restart or die and come back with 15000 more gold to buy the rest of what I needed. Sure it was exploitable, but I always enjoy something new if it works.

Did Faxanadu meet my nostalgia memory requirements? Kind of. I still remember it in my memory, but what I played and what I remember didn't quite meet up. The first part was still how I remember it, but as I said nothing else rang any bells. Part of me wonders if I never really played it as a kid. There's a good possibility I played a little bit of it as ROM as a teenager or something and that's what I'm remembering it from.

Overall Faxanadu was fun, but nothing really to write home about. There weren't a whole lot of side scrolling RPGs (that I remember) so any game in that genre that is even somewhat decent is a welcome edition to my gaming library. Faxanadu was a decent game if you are a fan of the genre or even the RPG genre in general. If you like those types of games you should give it a try, but it's not amazing enough that I would suggest it to everyone.

Squid.

Blue Dragon - Xbox 360

I wanted to like Blue Dragon. I really did. I didn't go into it with a mindset of "I'm going to detest this game!" but over the forty-five hours I played it, Blue Dragon pushed me to that.

I really need to learn that when I say "It's ten bucks, how bad could it be?" that it really can be not worth that ten dollars. For every The Saboteur I get I also get a Jericho and a Blue Dragon. Games that despite the fact that I paid under ten dollars for I wished I had the time spent playing back.

Blue Dragon was awful. I'm just going to lead off with that.

I played the demo a while back and thought "This is really fun, I should pick this up some time." Apparently Blue Dragon isn't too awful in small doses, but the more you play the more the flaws shine through.

The story in an RPG is essential, that's pretty much the bread and butter of RPGs. Blue Dragon's is pretty much crap. Well that's not fair, the story isn't all that awful but it feels like they took about five hours of story and stretched it out through about fifty hours of gameplay... and that five hours is still kind of light. It's like you get about five minutes of story for every two hours you play. The story just seems incredibly thin and cliche, especially for an RPG. For the most part you do things without necessarily understanding why you're doing something, or at the most have a very flimsy idea why you need to do something. Which leads to my next gripe.

There's no real direction to the game. I can't tell you how many times I wasn't sure what I was supposed to really do next. There were several times when even after checking a FAQ I wasn't exactly sure why I was supposed to be doing what I was doing. This is another time when if the story had been better I wouldn't have been as lost.

This is a minor story gripe, but I'll still air it. Did five year olds write this game? Seriously. I haven't seen this many poop joke/references in a game since... well honestly I don't remember. The story is very simplistic and cliche, but on top of all of that you have poop joke/references littered throughout. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good poop joke, I'll be the first too admit it... but all of these seemed, well, juvenile. Not only are their "Poo Snakes" in the game, one of the final end battles is with a "Jumbo Poo". You also occasionally get the fun of searching through poop for items (with the included "squish, squish" subtitle). It all just seemed rather out of place is a somewhat serious RPG.

The save points... pardon my French, but fuck the save points in this game, fuck them in their stupid asses. I don't remember the last time I saw such horrible save points in a game. I'm not a fan of save points for the most part, I've said this before, but the save points in Blue Dragon are easily one of the worst uses of it I've ever seen. It's not uncommon to go for over an hour without being able to save, and the longest I ever went was just over three hours. Think about that for a second, if you die you have to replay three hours of the game. You also almost never get a save point before a big boss fight, you instead get a checkpoint. This seems like I an okay idea, but I'll explain why it isn't.

So remember that three hours between save points? So that happened in an optional sidequest dungeon. After three hours of dungeon crawling I finally make it to the end boss, I get the checkpoint... and then get slaughtered. I was under-leveled for that fight. So here I have three options: I can just quit the sidequest and waste three hours of my time, I can go back three hours to my last save and re-level to my current level as well as grind out a few more, or I can just keep trying to perhaps get lucky and kill the boss. If there was a savepoint before the end boss I could simply just go to it, grind some levels in the dungeon and try again... but because of their ludicrous savepoint/checkpoint system I can't do that. I ended up trying the end boss a few more times to no avail before just quiting the dungeon and cutting my losses. This isn't the only time something like this happened. Throughout the game there were times when I really needed a savepoint and just couldn't get one. It's frustrating when you need to do something else, or need to be somewhere and there's not a savepoint anywhere to save your game. There were times when I wanted to say go to bed but had to wander around for an hour looking for a place where I could save my game. It just gets incredibly frustrating after a while.

The battle system was rather odd too, not the way you actually did battle, but the way that who was picked to attack next was chosen. On many, many occasions the the order in which the enemies got to attack was completely nonsensical. In one fight that I remember a bad guy got to attack my party eight times in a row... for no real reason. Considering that this enemy could do about 120 damage per attack and my strongest character only had 400 health, he almost completely wiped my party... and I still have no idea why he got to go eight times in a row. If it had been just that one battle I would have called it a fluke, but it happened constantly. I don't know how many times I died in a boss fight because the order would say that the boss would get to attack next and then I was up, only to have the boss attack my party one or two more times without me getting a turn. I still have no idea why this happens, and as far as I recall it was never really explained in any battle tutorial. Overall it just got very annoying and felt rather cheap.

Last gripe, I promise. So I made it to the last set of boss fights in the game, only to have my team just get continually killed in one. I couldn't beat it. I could come close but due to the attack order mentioned above I just couldn't seem to beat it. That's when I decided to check a FAQ and see if it had any helpful hints. It did, it told me I should be at level 50-55 for this boss fight. Only one problem, my highest level character was 37 and my lowest level character was 32. Here's my problem with this. I would occasionally walk around bad guys to skip a fight, and I skipped a couple of the optional sidequests, but not many... and yet I was 15 levels lower then I should have been at the end of the game. I'm not saying that you should never have to grind in an RPG, but you know what? You should never have to grind that much. In any RPG you should probably never be more than two or three levels then you need to be if you're playing correctly and following the story path. In Blue Dragon to be the correct level I needed to be I would have probably needed to never skip a fight, do every single "optional" sidequest and still probably grind for a little bit. Boy howdy does that sound like fun. So here I am at the final battles and I have two options: go back to my last save point (about an hour and a half ago) and pretty much grind levels for probably 3-4 hours and then play to get back to where I was, or call it quits... so I quit.

That's right, Blue Dragon is now the second game I haven't finished. If I had liked Blue Dragon I would have suffered through the 3-4 hours of grinding, but at the end of the day I found it to be at best a mediocre game. It had potential, it really did. I enjoyed the shadow aspect of the game, I enjoyed the game world... but it just had so much working against it. I didn't even bother including things like timed missions and escort missions in my gripes because it already had so many things going against it I didn't think I needed to even bother bringing up more.

I quit and then watched the end battles that I missed on YouTube. That way I could at least tell if the story got interesting or at least better, and you know what? It didn't. It stayed the same stale game that I put forty-five long hours into.

A lot of people really liked this game. On many of the forums I visit no one had anything to say but great things about Blue Dragon. I found it to be mediocre at its best and frustrating and tedious at it worst. There's tons of great RPGs out there for the Xbox 360. This isn't one of them.

Squid.

P.S.

This is the song they play during every single boss battle in the game. Yes, that is the lead singer of Deep Purple. That song is three minutes and fifty seconds long. Sometimes boss battles will last twice that long. They just repeat it over and over until you win. It's practically torture.

Chrono Trigger - Review

Chrono Trigger is a hard game to review. Everything that could be said about the game has already been said, and probably a lot more eloquently then I could ever put it.

Chrono Trigger is one of those games I remember from back in the day, it's one of the true great RPGs I remember from my childhood. Chrono Trigger, Crystalis, Final Fantasy 3, and Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past are really the games I credit for getting me into the genre as a whole.

It's a funny thing though... out of those four games I've only beat half of them. I never managed to finish Crystalis or Chrono Trigger for some reason.

It seemed odd to me that here's a game that I rank as one of the better RPGs ever made and yet I hadn't even managed to finish it. I thought it was about time to remedy this.

Chrono Trigger is still a great game. As I've said in the past, RPGs from the NES/SNES/Genesis days still hold up fairly well in my eyes. I realize part of this is nostalgia, but part of it is there are just some very good games on those systems.

Chrono Trigger is one of the best. If you ask people the top five games of all time on the SNES I guarantee that Chrono Trigger is going to be near or at the top of almost everyone's list.

The soundtrack is great, there are really two soundtracks to video games that I would actually buy: Final Fantasy 3 and Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger's soundtrack fits the game perfectly, it's not just background noise it actually feels right for the game.

The story. The story for the most part is great. I will admit there's a couple places throughout the game where the story feels a tad disjointed, but overall it's a great, original story. It's something that you didn't really run into at that period of time in gaming. There were a lot of RPGs with a lot of hackney stories filled with cliches... Chrono Trigger didn't feel like that.

There were tons of different, unique characters across many different lands that all felt like they had a lot of time and thought put into them. All the character felt needed, you may not have used them in your main party, but they all felt like they were needed characters.

Chrono Trigger was also one of the first games I remember that had several endings. There might have been games out there with one or two different endings, but Chrono Trigger had I believe thirteen. Thirteen different possible endings depending on certain things you did throughout the game.

Overall the game is amazing. Like I said, there's nothing I can say about this game that hasn't been said before. It's simply just a great game. Pick it up for SNES, DS, or PSN but I highly suggest you play it.

Squid.

Chrono Trigger - Super Nintendo

What can you say about Chrono Trigger? Phenomenal game, possibly one of the best RPGs for the Super Nintendo. Great gameplay and amazing soundtrack.

Though I don't know if I ever beat it. About five years ago I broke out my Game Genie and decided to essentially give myself God mode to beat some of the games I had never gotten around to finishing. I just don't remember if I did this with Chrono Trigger. As far as I know I didn't.

Either way, it's going to be fun to finally beat this game.

Squid.

Borderlands - Review

When I first got Borderlands from Gamefly I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. I only knew one other person who had played it and he didn't have great things to say about it. But reviews were generally favorable so I figured I'd give it a go.

I'm glad I did, let me just say that Borderlands is a hell of a fun time and a great game. Plus you get to shoot midgets in the face with a shotgun. Name me one other game where you get to do that.

Borderlands is set on Pandora, a barren wasteland of a planet with small settlements scattered around it. You can choose between four separate characters, each with a different skill set. I decided on the sniper character because that's what I usually play as... but Borderlands did something that I didn't expect but greatly appreciated.

Snipers aren't the most robust of characters. Sure we're good at long range but what happens when you have a bad guy standing right next to you? Or two or three? In borderlands you can be proficient with any weapon. As a sniper I could use machine guns or even rocket launchers. Sure I didn't get the upgrade perks that say the soldier did, but I could still use them. Trust me, when you have four huge bad guys barreling down on you the ability to switch from a sniper rife to a machine gun is greatly appreciated.

I've been sitting here staring at this screen for about an hour now. I'm not exactly sure how to review Borderlands. I could tell you that it reminds me of several other great games rolled into one. I could tell you about how quirky the humor is or how cool the art direction is... but at the end of the day I'm not sure that matters at all.

Sure it, reminds me of other really great games that I liked. It reminds me a lot of a much more linear Fallout 3... but if you didn't like Fallout 3 that doesn't really sell it for you.

I find the humor funny, but that doesn't mean you'll enjoy Scooter talking about his "mama's girly parts" as much as I did. I thought the humor in it was very funny, but that's really subjective.

The art direction is kind of fun, and has a bit of a different feel then a lot of other recent first person shooters... but it's not like it's the first time we've seen it before.

Borderlands is a really fun game, that's what I'll tell you. I enjoyed it and founds myself wanting to play it for hours at a time. I would highly suggest it to anyone who is a fan of the FPS/RPGish type genre.

Will you like it? Hard to say, as I started this review off I said that the only person who I knew that played it ended up not really enjoying it. On the other hand I had a hell of a fun time playing it and once it drops a little more in price will probably end up buying it so that I can play it again.

Sure Borderlands had some flaws, I think enemies reappeared a little too quickly and the ending was somewhat sudden, but overall Borderlands was an awesome game that you should really give a shot.

Squid.

Borderlands - Xbox360

Another Gamefly game. God I love Gamefly.

This is a game I've been waiting to get my hands on for a long time. I first remember hearing about this a while back in OXM and really wanting to play it. I love RPGish First Person Shooters, add in an apocalyptic wasteland and I'm sold.

Squid.

Tales of Symphonia - Review

Just how long is too long? That's the question that I kept asking myself while playing Tales of Symphonia. In my opinion, when I finished it with 90 hours played, Tales of Symphonia was too long. 90 hours played, and keep in mind that skipping a lot of sidequests just trying to finish the game... I imagine that if I had done all the sidequest and done more exploring I would have easily put another 10 or 20 hours into the game.

Don't get me wrong, a game doesn't have to be a set amount of time to be enjoyable. I put 125 hours into Oblivion and enjoyed every minutes. Between my two playthroughs of Fallout 3 I've put in damn near 200 hours. I don't even know how many hours I've put into Morrowind between all of my different games. I enjoyed every minute I put into those games and not once did I wish they were shorter... but they're different. Each one of those games involves a ton of exploring, it's a free and open world and you're encouraged to explore it. And because of this freedom you can spend a lot more time with these games. For those types of games, essentially the skies the limit on how long you can play them... but there's always the knowledge that if you want to finish the game, the main quest is always there to complete. But what about when there is little exploring and the main quest is 70+ hours long?

So how long is too long when it comes to RPGs? It's a hard question to answer, and certainly varies from person to person. I asked my brother that question, he thought that an RPG should be about 25 hours long. I thought that 45 was a good number... though it all depends. I'd gladly play a 60 hour game as long as I enjoy it. But to me, 35 to 45 hours with the possibility of 15+ hours of exploring is a good number.

Along comes Tales of Symphonia. A video game that can easily hit the 100 hour mark... and yet at about the 50-60 hour mark I was really wishing it would come to an end soon. Generally not a good sign.

Let me get this out of the way. I really enjoyed Tales of Symphonia, I really did. I just wish it had been about 30 hours shorter. It was just too damn long for me. Towards the end I began to feel like some of the quests were not essential and could have easily been cut or shortened and still the game would have been good. In fact, looking back at it there seems like the game could have easily been shortened without losing too much.

There seemed to be a lot of going back to places I had already been, doing quests that I didn't feel I needed to, a lot of back story that seemed like it could have been part of side quests and not as much of the main quest... there's the other problem. I'm not 100% sure what was and wasn't the main quest. As far as I know I didn't stray too far from the main quest, but on the other hand I'm really not sure. I just kind of went where I thought I should go next, or followed the synopsis that they give you in the game. All I know is that it took me 90 hours to finally beat the game.

Like I said, despite the fact that the game felt like it was dragging on in parts and was way too long, the game was fun. I had a very good time playing it as well as beating it. The combat is great, the voice acting is good, the story is good, and overall it's a great little RPG.

Like I mentioned before I originally started playing this game in about 2004 or so and it was a whole new experience. I had never played an RPG like this before. It was like a mix of Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and a hint of Street Fighter during battles. And even though since I have played games with a similar battle system or similar gameplay this game still feels fresh and new to me.

Overall this is a good game and well worth playing, just make sure you have plenty of time to do it.

Squid.