Final Fantasy XIII-2 Review

"Linear." A word hurled at the original Final Fantasy XIII without relent, and rightly so. The game funneled players down a hallway for more than 20 hours while it told a provocative story of defying the gods. No matter how you felt about its battle system, you still had precious little to explore.

When word of a sequel spread, the fear of that linearity persisted. But it seems the developers at Square-Enix wanted nothing more than to prove the gaming populace wrong with the same level of defiance Lightning and her friends showed the gods. Final Fantasy XIII-2 showers you with choice and branching paths. The battle system functions faster and includes several new features like tamable monster allies. But with these improvements, the story sheds much of its focus. Characters act without clear motivation, and the only driving force is to find Lightning. Without question, it's a better game, but Final Fantasy XIII-2 makes costly sacrifices to its narrative in order to achieve mechanical advancements.

Much like Final Fantasy X-2, this sequel approaches storytelling with a lighter heart. It still leaves plenty of room to get serious, but much of this emotional weight bears down towards the finale. In the beginning, Lightning somehow finds herself guarding the throne of Valhalla, a realm of chaos unbound by time. She fights a dark-haired man named Caius and -- in the midst of battle -- meets a stranger from a future age named Noel. She tasks Noel with traveling through time to find her sister and bring her to Valhalla, as Lightning can't leave the realm unguarded.

You acquire full control of Serah, Noel, and the systems that power them an hour or two after the opening sequence; a stark contrast to the slow build of the original. As soon as the two heroes leap into the flow of time, Final Fantasy XIII-2's open nature shines through.

Environments no longer follow a single path. With webs of rooms to explore and treasure chests hidden off the map, Final Fantasy XIII-2 encourages you to take your time and look around. You can access these environments, which dot the timeline, in more than one order. While a general flow from one place to another moves the plot along, the freedom to sidetrack greatly enhances the explorative flavor.

More impressively, you can unlock the ability to close time gates and start the area from scratch, correcting mistakes or just trying something new. This functions as a literal "reset button" mid-game. This sense of freedom, even if you choose to ignore it, helps Final Fantasy XIII-2 feel more like a traditional RPG where discovery dominates the experience.

At each new turn, battles separate Noel from bringing Serah back to Lightning. These battles share plenty of systems with the original, but Final Fantasy XIII-2 includes several crucial improvements, both large and small. One of the bigger changes: Serah and Noel are the only playable human characters in the game with the third party slot ready for a monster ally. Defeat a wild critter and you have a chance to tame it. Each critter has an inherent role in battle and a few special skills. Furthermore, each monster can level up along with the human heroes by consuming items.

Collecting monsters has a special charm, as a little-known franchise called "Pokemon" can attest to. This system gives you even more things to track down, tweak, and make your own. Also, there's a "cool factor" to having a Chocobo fighting at your side. Considering this, along with the many side quests and secret endings, you have much more content to enjoy.

The battle system also benefits from less obvious, but just as important, alterations. The action gauge returns with role-specific abilities that consume segments of that gauge. But Paradigm Shifts, the act of changing roles mid-fight, have been injected with adrenaline. Shifts happen so quickly the overall pace of battle feels much faster. Lastly, auto-battle returns and selects smart choices based on the information you've collected on your enemies.

The prevalence of auto-battle and the general effectiveness of your AI companions make most battles in Final Fantasy XIII-2 a walk down Easy Street. This has its benefits. In one way, it speeds battles up and eliminates much of the hassle from traditional turn-based affairs. Yet it also takes away the more intimate challenge of those same systems. Even though these automated, smart systems speed things along, they fail to deliver the same sense of satisfaction as the "old days" when each command required ample thought and manual input.

All these mechanics represent a fraction of the minutia powering Final Fantasy XIII-2. Other components, including a more streamlined, choice-driven level-up system, also demonstrate how the developers at Square-Enix have enhanced this sequel. Plenty of surprises also delight, including a vocal-heavy soundtrack with a shocking degree of variety from tune to tune.

With all the raw "good" here and a marked celebration of the non-linear, Final Fantasy XIII-2 loses focus when it comes to its story. In fact, you can safely say there's little story at all besides the singular motivation to find Lightning (and resolve paradoxes along the way). Even after witnessing the touching throes of its finale, Final Fantasy XIII-2 could have used more narrative punch. This lack of substance cuts deep into the end result.

In fact, the ending of the game offers no resolution whatsoever. For a franchise known for telling incredible stories, this disappointing conclusion hurts worst of all.

Closing Comments

Final Fantasy XIII-2 proves itself the better game, but it lacks the same focused storytelling employed in the original. It benefits from an improved battle system, open environments, and an overall level of polish that deserves a nod of respect.

Despite its severe lack of closure, Final Fantasy XIII-2 still deserves your time, especially for a few poignant moments set at the end of days.

by Ryan Clements

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Posted in: RPG

The Elder Scrolls V

I was stacking books on a shelf in my house in Whiterun, one of Skyrim's major cities, when I noticed a weapon rack right beside it. I set a sacrificial dagger in one slot, an Orcish mace in the other. They were on display for nobody but me and my computer-controlled housecarl, Lydia, who sat at a table patiently waiting for me to ask her to go questing. The chest upstairs was reserved for excess weapons and armor, the bedside table for smithing ingots and ores, the one next to the Alchemy table for ingredients. I'd meticulously organized my owned virtual property not because I had to, but because tending to the minutia of domestic life is a comforting break from dealing with screaming frost trolls, dragons, a civil war, and job assignments that never seem to go as planned. It's even a sensible thing to do; a seemingly natural component of every day existence in Skyrim, one of the most fully-realized, easily enjoyable, and utterly engrossing role-playing games ever made.

Part of what makes it so enjoyable has to do with how legacy Elder Scrolls clutter has been condensed and in some cases eliminated. In Skyrim, there's no more moon-hopping between hilltops with a maxed out Acrobatics skill. That's gone, so is Athletics. The Elder Scrolls V pares down the amount of skills and cuts out attributes like Endurance and Intelligence altogether. There's no time wasted on the character creation screen agonizing over which skills to assign as major. You don't assign major and minor skills at all, but instead pick one of ten races, each with a specific bonus. High Elves can once a day regenerate magicka quickly, Orcs can enter a berserk rage for more effective close-range combat. These abilities are best paired with certain character builds – the High Elf regeneration is useful for a magic user – but don't represent a rigid class choice. Major decisions don't need to be made until you're already out in the world and can try out magic, sneaking and weapon combat, emphasizing first-hand experience over instruction manual study, letting you specialize only when you're ready.

It contributes to the thrilling sense of freedom associated with life in Skyrim. Do a quest, kill a dragon, snatch torchbugs from the air, munch on butterfly wings or simply wander while listening to one of the best game soundtracks in recent memory. Despite the enormity of the world and the colossal amount of content contained within, little feels random and useless. Even chewing on a butterfly wing has purpose, as it reveals one of several alchemical parameters later useful in potion making at an alchemy table. Mined ore and scraps of metal from Dwemer ruins can be smelted into ingots and fashioned into armor sets, pelts lifted from slain wildlife can be turned into leather armor sets, and random books plucked from ancient ruins can trigger hidden quest lines that lead to valuable rewards. Skyrim's land mass is absolutely stuffed with content and curiosities, making every step you take, even if it's through what seems like total wilderness, an exciting one, as something unexpected often lies just over the next ridge.

Many times the unexpected takes the form of a dragon. Sometimes they're purposefully placed to guard relics, sometimes they swoop over cities and attack at seemingly random times. In the middle of a fight against a camp of bandits a dragon might strike, screaming through the sky and searing foe and friendly alike with frost or flame. Momentarily all on the battlefield unite, directing arrows and magic blasts upward to knock down the creature, creating impromptu moments of camaraderie -- a surprising change from what may have been yet another by-the-numbers bandit camp sweep. Dragons show up often, their presence announced by an ominous flap of broad wings or an otherworldly scream from high above. The scale and startling detail built into each creature's appearance and animations as it circles, stops to attack, circles again and slams to the ground makes encounters thrilling, though their predictable attack patterns lessen the excitement after a few battles. In the long run they're far less irritating than the Oblivion gate equivalent from The Elder Scrolls IV, can be completed in a few minutes, and always offer a useful reward.

Killing a dragon yields a soul, which powers Skyrim's new Shout system. These are magical abilities any character can use, you don't have to specialize in spell casting to slow time, throw your voice, change the weather, call in allies, blast out ice and fire, or knock back enemies with a rolling wave of pure force. Even if you favor sword, shield and heavy armor and ignore magic entirely, you'll still be able to take full advantage of these abilities provided you find the proper words – each Shout has three – hidden on Skyrim's high snowy peaks and in the depths of forgotten dungeons, serving as another reason to continue exploring long after you've exhausted the main quest story, joined with the Thieves Guild, fought alongside the Dark Brotherhood, or thrown your support behind one of the factions vying for control of Skyrim.

Not only is this land under assault by dragons, long thought to be dead, it's also ripped in two by civil war. You can choose one side or the other, but so much of the allure of Skyrim is how, even outside of the confines of quest lines, the embattled state of the world is evident, and steeped in a rich fictional legacy. Lord of the Rings this is not, but with the release of every Elder Scrolls game, the fiction becomes denser, and the cross-referencing for long-time fans all the more rewarding.

Skyrim's residents are all aware of current events. They'll comment on the civil war, some sympathizing with the rebels, others thinking the establishment sold its soul. The peasants complain about the Jarls who control each settlement, the Jarls complain about the rebels or foreign policy, the overprotective College librarian complains when I drop dragon scales all over his floor; many characters feel like whole, distinct personalities instead of vacuous nothings that hand out quests like a downtown greeter hands out flyers for discount jeans. Characters stereotype based on race, they double-cross at even the slightest hint it might be profitable, and they react to your evolving stature within the world. It makes a ridiculous realm, filled with computer-controlled cat people and humanoid reptiles, demon gods and dragons, feel authentic, like a world that existed long before you showed up and will continue to exist long after you leave.

You can speed by all this if you want. You can drive directly through the main story content, see the conclusion and bail out, having never increased a skill category to 100 or read a virtual copy of The Antecedents of Dwemer Law. But to do so is to defeat the purpose of playing The Elder Scrolls. This is a world that rewards the obsessive and the adventurous, one where creative quest designs are the standard across primary and secondary storylines, not the exception. Primary quest lines may proceed in predictable fashion for a while, but only to lull you into a sense of complacency before the inevitable betrayal sends you scrambling in unexpected directions. The rewards are just as exciting, offering all sorts of unique gear and significant bonuses for dealing with the Thieves Guild, entering into the ranks of the magical College of Winterhold, or joining the battle-hardened Companions in Whiterun. These are the strongest storylines in the game, but even the shorter quests sprinkled all over Skyrim impress.

Random NPCs will run up to deliver notes in the middle of the wilderness, others whisper rumors in inns. Blacking out after randomly entering into a drinking contest, luring innocents to their deaths at demonic shrines or complying with the demands of a cannibal haunting a morgue are only some of the peculiar events you may encounter in Skyrim's non-essential content. You may see all of this, or after an extensive playthrough miss the quests entirely. Bethesda Game Studios' achievement isn't simply that there's well over one hundred hours of content in Skyrim, but that the content so frequently defies expectations. To have such an immense game where so little feels like a grind is incredibly rare, and a significant part of what makes this one of the best role-playing games ever created.

For such a complex game, Skyrim is surprisingly user-friendly. The Elder Scrolls' traditional leveling mechanics still apply. When you turn in a quest or kill a character, you don't receive experience points. Instead, skills level up through use. Cast fireballs and frost spells and your Destruction skill will go up. Craft armor pieces and your Smithing will increase, brew potions and your Alchemy will shoot up, and deflect damage with a shield to increase Block. After enough of these categories have increased, your overall character level notches up, allowing either Magicka, Health or Stamina to be increased. This is how you define your class, piece by piece, favoring Magicka if you want to use spells, Health and Stamina if you prefer weapons, or a combination if you don't want to specialize. It's an easy to use, sensible system, and the results are easy to see, a welcome change from the attribute system of old, which in retrospect seems cumbersome.

Influences from Bethesda's work with Fallout 3 can be seen as well, as each skill category is associated with a perk tree filled with unlockable powerful bonuses. One perk point is assigned every time your overall character level increases, but you don't have to spend it immediately. Points can be stored until you're absolutely sure about the best bonuses to unlock, which could be anything from a chance to decapitate enemies with a one-handed weapon swing, to a zoom ability while using the bow and arrow. With significant bonuses embedded into every perk tree, unlocking new abilities is always an exciting process, often resulting in tough decisions as you choose between unlocking dual-casting for your Restoration spells or learning how to create Dwarven armor, offering loads of incentive to replay the game with a different character build.

The Fallout influence can also be seen in the weapon combat system. By swatting at enemies with maces, axes and swords you trigger slow-motion death animations in the style of Fallout 3's glorified fatalities. It's a decent way to add a little flair to The Elder Scrolls' traditionally flat, floaty combat. Fighting with sword and shield feels more exciting in Skyrim than it's ever been, but it's still inconsistent. Many times it feels like you're slicing air instead of a mythical creature's flesh, though there's a certain adrenaline rush appeal to charging into a fight in a first-person perspective against a towering Dwemer centurion, mammoth or giant that fills your entire field of vision. Useful perks like a slow motion effect that triggers every time you block during an enemy's power attack gives depth to the close-range fighting, so while the system may be simple at first, it improves if you're willing to invest.

The spell system has received BioShock-like adjustments. When playing in first-person mode your hands hover at the sides of the screen with magic active. When you finally snap out of the mesmerized stupor brought on by gazing into the rotating blue cubes that characterize Alteration magic, you can cast from both hands. One hand can blast fire while the other shoots electricity. One can channel a heal while the other shoots a jet of frost at an advancing enemy. You can conjure a spectral sword and use the free hand to set fiery runes along the ground that explode when any hostiles step over. If you've unlocked the proper perks, it's even possible to combine the same spell into a more powerful version, letting you cast fireballs Street Fighter-style for better results. The system makes playing a pure caster the most fun it's ever been in The Elder Scrolls, and opens up useful hybrid options, letting you swing an axe while actively channeling a fire spell or healing effect. With a greatly improved visual presentation and the always entertaining physics system that takes hold after a target dies, tossing magic in The Elder Scrolls has never felt this satisfying, as a well-placed fireball can send a charging bear tumbling helplessly down the slope of a stony mountain.

You don't have to be alone during combat, either. You can summon magical creatures or hire NPCs to tag along. Followers exist all over Skyrim, and if you do them favors, they'll be willing to venture outside towns and deal extra damage during a fight. Followers can even be given simple movement and interaction commands or saddled with extra gear, though don't expect to interact with them to the degree that you can with party members in BioWare games. The followers are meant to be tools of battle instead of ever-evolving personalities, but some still stand out, such as a boundlessly self-confident Khajiit in Winterhold's College, or, if you're into Conjuration magic, a summoned demon warrior that can't help but insult any hostile that walks into range.


As more enemies join a fight, things do occasionally get awkward. During large scale battles, pathing around Skyrim's environments can be problematic, as summoned creatures and followers get stuck on pieces of geometry. The drama of climactic moments, like when the screen is cluttered with soldiers as you overtake forts in the civil war quest line, tends to occasionally be undercut by the erratic movement patterns of enemies as they run around like over-caffeinated toddlers. Even during less hectic interactions such as conversations, problems exist. At times characters won't be in the right positions after you say hello, so you'll wind up talking to a wall or watching as an NPC inexorably slides down a staircase while delivering lines of dialogue. At least the conversation interface is a big improvement from Oblivion, where time flows naturally while characters talk instead of mysteriously freezing, and the voice acting is of a generally higher quality as well, though still sounds forced in some cases.

The visuals have also been dramatically improved over the last Elder Scrolls game. The sense of adventure and discovery is strong enough in Skyrim given how many cool items and quests there are to find, but the addition of beautiful scenery makes the inclination to obsessively scour Skyrim's landscapes irresistible. Mountains shrouded in mist ring every tract of open field, forest and marsh, and if you're willing to walk, you can eventually climb their slopes and view the rest of the world from above. Waterfalls tumble from high cliffs and split off into smaller tributaries as they wind through the rocks below, flowing across terrain that feels realistically varied. You'll see foggy mornings and crystal clear days, take in polychromatic aurorae streaked ribbon-like across night skies, rainstorms and near blinding blizzards, making it easy to drop what you're doing and survey a scene just to appreciate its beauty.

Weapon and armor designs are fantastically detailed, to the point where the increased damage or armor bonus for a new piece of gear is usually less exciting than the opportunity to marvel at its design. Playing in first-person gives you a close up of the weapons, like the curvilinear patterns built into steel war axes or the spiny surface of a demonic mace pulsing with glowing-green glyphs. Bethesda seems to recognize its talent at creating flashy items, since anything you pick up can be examined in your inventory from all angles, from every piece of Glass armor to a purple mountain flower. For the best view of armor, though, you'll want to switch out to third-person view, which in Skyrim is a far more viable way to play than it was in Oblivion. I still prefer the traditional first-person combat and interaction for the sense of immersion it provides, but the third-person mode isn't the vanity mode it once was.

As good as the visuals are in the Xbox 360 version of Skyrim, there are a few drawbacks. Even with the game installed, load times are lengthy and frequent. Every time you fast travel, every time you enter a building or town with a door, you'll need to sit through a load. You'll also experience framerate drops depending on how much happens to be onscreen. The PC crowd should be happy to hear that, assuming you've got a powerful machine, The Elder Scrolls V looks far and away the best. The draw distance can be pushed way back, letting you see clear across enormous spaces, and you benefit from a higher visual quality throughout, as well as dramatically shortened load times, to the point where they barely exist at all.

The only downside of the PC version is the interface, which is elaborately presented and a breeze to use on consoles, but is inefficiently laid out for keyboard and mouse controls. To cut down on time spent in menus with both versions you can assign almost anything – armor, weapons, spells, shouts, pieces of meat – as a favorite. This menu can then quickly be brought up during a fight, pausing the action, so you swiftly adjust to the changing nature of a battle without having to page through the main menu system, though on PC an option to also bind items and spells to number keys would have been appreciated. (Edit: It turns out you can do this, just hit the number keys over items with your favorites menu open. Sorry for the mistake.

As tends to be the case with games as large and complex as Skyrim, there are bugs. Some are minor, like dead bodies jittering madly or poking through walls. Your hands may momentarily disappear, equipping an armored face mask may actually turn you into an invisible man, and mammoths may soar into the air for no apparent reason. More serious glitches exist as well, such as those that prevent you from completing quests. How widespread these issues are is tough to say, maybe you'll have a glitch-free experience, but chances are you'll at least run into a few. Along with the occasional game crash, these issues can be periodically irritating, but given the overwhelming number of things Skyrim gets right, putting up with them is a small price to pay.

Closing Comments
It's difficult to ever feel completely satisfied with a play session of Skyrim. There's always one more pressing quest, one more unexplored tract of land, one more skill to increase, one more butterfly to catch. It's a mesmerizing game that draws you into an finely crafted fictional space packed with content that consistently surprises. The changes made since Oblivion are many, and result in a more focused and sensible style of play, where the effects of every decision are easily seen. Featuring the same kind of thrilling freedom of choice The Elder Scrolls series is known for along with beautiful visuals and a stirring soundtrack, playing Skyrim is a rare kind of intensely personal, deeply rewarding experience, and one of the best role-playing games yet produced.

by Charles Onyett

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Posted in: RPG

Lineage Eternal: Unleash: PC

Welcome to G-Star 2011, a breeding ground for MMOs, beautiful art, and even more MMOs. As the "Korean E3," G-Star draws a tremendous crowd of gamers from around the world to witness the efforts of the country's most prominent developers. Today, NCsoft revealed its latest MMO RPG: Lineage Eternal. The name "Lineage" might ring bells for western PC gamers, but Lineage Eternal brings a new twist to the familiar. It rocks out with a classic isometric view, huge battles with hundreds of enemies, mouse-based skills, and cute sorceresses. A winning combination if I ever saw one.

Lineage Eternal just emerged from its digital cocoon, so NCsoft only has a trailer to show the world. But this trailer highlights some of Lineage Eternal's most exciting features; enough to instill my impending desperation for a U.S. launch (which has not yet been confirmed).

Most of us know the third-person, isometric action that goes down in games like Diablo. It emphasizes the beauty of clicking voraciously on enemies and watching destruction unfold. In Lineage Eternal, this setup explodes with a serious interactive boost. Not only do physics and the environment play a huge role during combat, but you can literally draw skills on the screen with your mouse and assume much more control over your character's abilities.

Three classes (of a larger unannounced set) debuted in the trailer: a warrior, sorceress, and ranger. Each class boasted several skills that demanded more of your input than "press 1 on the keyboard." Drawing a circle around the warrior, for example, causes him to spin about, blade cutting into groups of enemies. The ranger, alternatively, unleashes powerful charge shots by drawing lines towards an armored opponent. This charge shot ultimately pinned two orcs against the wall with a satisfying "thud."

Of the three classes, the sorceress demonstrates these "drag skills" the best. Drawing a line across the battlefield causes the caster to unleash a wall of fire, which not only damages enemies but smolders the grass it sets ablaze. In the trailer, the sorceress draws three walls of fire around herself, creating a natural defense that forces enemies to approach her from the remaining side. In another instance, drawing a line causes an eruption of ice blocks, which blocked pursuing monsters long enough for her to cast a follow-up spell.

I had many other "oh, wow" moments while watching Lineage Eternal in action. Exploding barrels, knocking enemies off stairs, and tossing orcs over a castle wall felt more like action game moments than RPG fare. And with so many abilities that flex under your specific input, the amount of strategy in Lineage Eternal appears abundant. Though I have no official word on a U.S. release, this project seems too exciting to restrict to Korea.

by Ryan Clements

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Posted in: RPG

Faery: Legends of Avalon: PC

Have you always wanted to be a faery or elf? Alright, the answer to that question is most likely "no," but perhaps you've wished for the ability to fly? If your answer is still "no" then you probably think fairytales are for babies and Faery: Legends of Avalon is not the game for you. The more fantasy-oriented folks on the other hand, will find that Faery is an enjoyable role-playing game. Created by French developers Focus Home Interactive, Faery begins with an ominous tale: the fae worlds are fading and magic is being drained from the land, which surely means death for all who inhabit those realms. You play as a faery or elf, recently awoken from a crystal stasis pod by the King, tasked with uncovering the reason behind all the turmoil in the neighboring sections of Avalon.

 

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Flittering about four vastly different environments -- Avalon (the main hub world), the Flying Dutchman (ghost pirate ship), City of Mirage (city on the back of a beetle... seriously) and Yggdrasil (tree world) -- you'll investigate and solve the cities' respective problems. The story is told through conversations, but there's no voice acting in this game, so you'll have to read a lot of text.

Engaging in discussions with folks should look familiar if you've played Mass Effect. A very similar wheel of dialogue options pops up, and you can choose to be polite or more confrontational. Instead of becoming a "good" or "bad" character though, your decisions are limited to your relationship with that particular person. So, if you tick someone off, they won't help you anymore. This approach is refreshing and means you can have some fun exploring the dialogue without fear of becoming tagged as an evildoer.

Flying is cumbersome with the mouse and keyboard. Because the camera is tied to your mouse movements and it's such a large world where you can fly in any direction, you'll be readjusting constantly. There's no way to change the standard controls, but you can plug in a 360 controller and cruise the altitudes much more easily thanks to the analog sticks. As you explore the different areas, you'll see they each have an immense sense of scale. The City of Mirage is by far the most impressive, with two cities acting as the bread in a giant scarab sandwich. Compared to your tiny protagonist even a dung beetle is massive. But even with constant reminder that you're small, the worlds still feel limited as there aren't many places to go and interact with.

You'll explore most areas from a bird's eye view, so it can be difficult to spot important things. Focus tried to address that by highlighting characters with a spotlight and interactive objects with glowing red and orange orbs, but it can still be frustrating to find quest items.

Customization is a key element in this title and it's actually pretty impressive. As you level up your character you'll gain the ability to add to his or her physical appearance, which will in turn alter his or her abilities and powers. If you want a passive ability to dodge enemies on the battlefield you might consider giving your faery or elf a cat tail, or if you want to produce electric-based magic attacks, you'll add butterfly wings. You can also upgrade these powers, so increasing your dodge skill will make the kitty tail grow longer. The only problem with the system is that there's no way to undo your skill points and switch them out for something else, so if you accidentally give your character ram horns like I did, you're stuck with them.

Fighting is turn-based and the attacks you can use are dictated by action points. As you level up you'll gain more action points to use per turn so you can unleash stronger spells and physical attacks. The more powerful spells require a recharge time, so you can't spam them. One weird thing is that if you select an enemy to attack and he or she dies before you can unleash it, the spell won't default to the next enemy; instead you'll just skip the rest of your turn.

There are a lot of fights to pick, small dungeons to crawl and plenty of boss battles to engage in, and for the most part they're pretty entertaining. You'll also pick two different companions to join you on your adventure out of six characters you'll meet along your journey. Ranging from a baby dragon to a peace-loving troll, gaining the love of certain companions can result in a romance, though there's never so much as a kiss exchanged.

As an episodic adventure, the story does feel short and the ending is abrupt. That said there is what seems to be a major decision to make at the end that could affect how the second game plays out, which would be a nice touch. Also on: PS3, X360

 

Closing Comments
Faery is a solid fantasy role-playing game, but the short tale means it’s not quite worth the $15 price tag. As part of an episodic endeavor, the first installment naturally leaves you feeling like the story is unresolved, but it’s great fun to fly around interesting backdrops. The massive character customization also makes your faery or elf feel unique, so if you enjoy leveling up and finding loot, you should check out Faery: Legends of Avalon.

 

by: Kristine Steimer

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Posted in: RPG

Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword: PC

If I had to sum up Taleworld's original Mount & Blade, I would call it the ugliest game you need to play. It was a strange blend of real-time strategy, economic simulation, role-playing and first-person action that, although aesthetically nothing special, offered a uniquely addictive and challenging kind of fun. You were tasked with rising through the ranks of fictional aristocracies through cleverly trading goods, doing favors and, most importantly, murdering thousands of peasants, bandits and soldiers on the battlefields. Around this time last year, Taleworlds released a standalone expansion called Mount & Blade: Warband, which added a couple new factions and a multiplayer mode to the game, and now the

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company has released another standalone expansion, Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword. With Fire & Sword is based on a polish historical-fiction novel of the same name, and for the first time in the history of Mount & Blade, Taleworlds has attempted to weave a sort of structured storyline into the game.

The adventure begins with an encounter in a small town between some noblemen and a group of bandits. You lend a hand in beating back the bandits, learning the basics of both swordplay and the newly-introduced guns. Then you're taught the basics of riding a horse and told that it might be a good idea to help the local village. After completing a couple simple tasks for them the trail of breadcrumbs disappears, and you're left in the middle of a world that vaguely resembles renaissance-era Northern Europe. Beyond the basics of combat, nothing in Fire & Sword is explained to you and only a vague goal -- to become a great leader -- is suggested.

Strangely, for the dedicated, this serves only to encourage you to become enveloped in the Mount & Blade world. It's a complex and ever-changing world, too. As you are gathering your small army and trading wool between cities, Polish Warlords are capturing Swedish territory, and bandits and deserters roam the world trying to eke out a profit. This can make the learning curve incredibly steep. There's nothing preventing you from being chased down by a pack of a dozen bandits in your first few minutes in the open world and having your only weapons taken away, making the up-hill journey almost vertical.

Even if you start off smoothly, progress in With Fire & Sword is slow. There are two numbers tied to your character that need to be raised before you can make any headway in Mount & Blade; your level (which is raised by gaining experience through combat and completing tasks for the various people in the game), and your renown. With every level you gain a point to spend on one of your four primary attributes, a point to spend on one of more than a dozen skills, and some weapon points to spend on weapon types (two-handed, firearms etc). Renown mostly determines how many people you can have in your army, but is also used to determine whether or not you can join a faction. Renown is gained only through winning large-scale battles where your character is still conscious. You get no renown for a massive battle if you're knocked out at any point during it, even if you ultimately win in a landslide.

is where Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword's biggest flaw rears its ugly, black-powder-filled head. The firearms added into the game are painfully realistic for the era -- they aim poorly and load excruciatingly slowly. That's kind of neat in a sense, because it makes guns viable only in special situations. They're also the equivalent of a tiny cannonball launcher, and if you hit someone in the head or face it's generally considered a one-hit kill. This includes when you are hit, and there are times when sheer bad luck results in you being knocked out of a battle by a stray enemy bullet before you even get close to the action (thus ensuring you get no renown). In fact, getting knocked out during fights happens a lot because of guns, which makes gaining renown prohibitively difficult until you buy excellent armor or level up specifically to get a lot of health, and you're not likely to get either of those without a good army, which you can't get until you get some renown. See the problem here?

There are also a lot of bugs. During many of my fights, the skybox wouldn't load, leading to a trippy, probably seizure-inducing graphical delay-effect where the sky should have been. While besieging a castle with my army, I got caught in a bug where all my troops had been defeated, the opponent had hundreds left, and I couldn't leave the "order your troops to attack without you" screen. When I tried to command my zero troops to attack, I got an error message that included the phrase "Divide zero" which is never good.

Even with the frustrations of bugs and firearms, With Fire & Sword's gameplay is so rich that I found myself whiling many, many hours away, slowly but surely climbing the hierarchal ladder of the Swedish aristocracy I swore myself to. I traded spices between nations to make sure I had the funds and the food to keep a strong, happy army, and I followed my leader, King Carl Gustaf, wherever he led me. But all the while I planned to overthrow him once I was sufficiently powerful. That's the beauty of the Mount & Blade format -- it's flexible enough, even with the added story elements of With Fire & Sword, that you can create and execute your own long-term strategies. Even in moments when the story elements kicked in, I was given the option to follow instructions, directly go against them, or ignore them indefinitely.

On top of the extensive single-player campaign is a multiplayer mode, with standard death-matches, team capture-the-flag, and other familiar game modes. It plays like a first-person-shooter underwater, with horses and spears thrown in as extras. Although the deliberate pace of multiplayer is certainly an acquired taste and takes a lot of practice to get decent at, the Mount & Blade multiplayer offers something that can't really be found anywhere else.

Closing Comments
Mount & Blade is far from the perfect series. It's buggy, ugly as sin and extremely difficult to advance through successfully, but it offers a huge amount of enjoyment to players who are willing to stick it through. That said, With Fire & Sword's storyline doesn't impact the core game in a meaningful way, and the addition of firearms, in my experience, is a detriment, making progression even harder than before. There's still a lot of good here, and if you haven't played Mount & Blade before then this is a fine place to start, but for fans of the series, Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword simply isn't a must-have expansion.

by: Nick Kolan

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Fallout: New Vegas -- Honest Hearts

During my time in the Mojave with Fallout: New Vegas there was one thing I'd hoped to learn more about: the Burned Man. If you don't remember hearing his story, the Burned Man was one of Caesar's (the founder and leader of Caesar's Legion) best men until he failed him in battle. As a punishment, Caesar sentenced him to a gruesome death: covered in pitch, lit on fire and tossed off the cliffs of the Grand Canyon. Rumors around the desert indicated that he somehow survived this brutal treatment, but nothing ever came of it. Luckily for me Honest Hearts -- the second piece of downloadable content available for Fallout: New Vegas -- sheds more light on the legend. This adventure is more typical "Fallout" than the last bit of content, Dead Money. You travel to Zion National Park in Utah with the Happy Trails Trading Group and deal with what's going on there. It's a familiar formula of exploration, choice, murder and a decent (but not entirely gripping) storyline.

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Some quick notes before you hit the road: you need to travel light. This means no companions (you'll have to tell them to go away yourself, they don't automatically leave you like they do in Dead Money) and 75 lbs of stuff on your back. There are ways to raise the poundage up to 100, but you'll need specific perks or skills to do so. If you're like me and prefer to have some backup, you'll be happy to know that you receive temporary companions during your stay at Zion.

The national park is a beautiful place filled with red cliffs, radiation-free water, plenty of plants to pick and stunning hand-painted murals on the bedrock. Although my feelings would differ if this happened in real life, I was pleasantly surprised when I got caught in a rainstorm. The addition of weather patterns is a really nice touch and at night the sky is bursting with stars. These details make Zion a really fun place to wander around in. Fast travel is also back (it wasn't possible in Dead Money) and that made me very happy.

There are two downsides to Honest Hearts -- the first is that the animals (a.k.a. target practice) aren't particularly interesting. The Cazador is still the most dangerous and annoying bug of all time (especially in its "Giant" variety here), while the geckos remain hilariously goofy. Basically, everything that can hurt you in the park is something you've seen before, and that's a little disappointing.

The storyline also lost steam after a couple of fetch quests and I eventually stopped caring about what was going on. Still, regardless of whether or not you give a damn, the ending forces you to make a moral choice that will decide the fate of the park and its inhabitants. There's no real black and white "good" or "bad" here, which I appreciate.

The icing on this cake is that downloading Honest Hearts boosts the level cap by five again, so you'll be able to kick even more ass in the wasteland. There's also some interesting loot to take back with you, including a Yao Guai gauntlet. Who doesn't want to run around with a mutated bear fist on their arm? That's what I thought.Also on: X360,PC

Closing Comments
When considering the $10 purchase, ask yourself these questions: Do I like Fallout, but need a new place to explore? Do I want a higher level cap? Do I want to know more about the Burned Man? If the answer to any of these is “yes”, then do yourself a favor and download Honest Hearts. It doesn’t change much of the Fallout formula, which is a good thing. The narrative could be stronger and there’s a lack of variety in terms of creatures occupying the park, but these are minor complaints about an otherwise enjoyable time.

by: Kristine Steimer

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Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising: PC

I'm a big fan of indie game developers. A lot of the most innovative games of the last decade have come from tiny teams where financial risk isn't really a factor, where pleasing major investors or shareholders doesn't enter the decision-making process. But creating a great indie game is highly reliant on not aiming for something beyond the capabilities of the development team. That's why games like World of Goo and Terraria work, and why Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising does not. If you read my initial impressions , it probably didn't take a whole lot of guesswork to figure out that I wasn't enjoying Gods & Heroes very much. Although there have been some updates and the most glaringly painful elements have been fixed, not

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enough has changed. There are some neat elements in Gods & Heroes, certainly, but they're obscured by so many broken features, bugs and poor design elements that the end result is a mess.

The player estate is a perfect example. Conceptually, it's where you're supposed to go whenever they're not sure where to quest next, or when there's some sort of interesting event playing out in the world. While I can't attest to the latter as there have been no interesting events yet, the former is highly under-developed. Quests you grab from the player estate send you all over the world map, but not in a good way. For every set of ten or so levels (1 to 10, 11 to 20 etc…) there are two zones to level up in. My guess is that this is to allow for replayability -- you're more likely to level up another character if there is stuff you haven't done before -- or to ward against overcrowding (which isn't an issue because very few people are playing). Unfortunately, the estate quests tend to send you to both of these zones, which means you either ignore some of those estate quests until later, or split your efforts between two completely different game zones. This can get very tiresome.

While quests often reference the Roman mythology, there don't seem to be very many ties to the overarching storyline which, from the opening sequence, is an invasion of the Telchines. The opening of the game focuses on this, and then every ten or so levels you might get another quest that references the Telchines, but they are few and far between and never seem particularly urgent.

The quests aren't bad, but they're not very good either. While they're mostly the fetch and kill quests MMO players have grown used to, and the number of things you need to kill or things you need to collect typically aren't terribly high, many of the quests are tuned strangely, or require very specific enemy kills. Several quests ask you to go into the graveyard area in Roma to complete various tasks, but due to the fact that it is considered to be within the confines of a city, you don't get the benefit of your minions, who can heal, tank or deal damage alongside you. The enemies in this area don't seem to be tuned any differently, so rather than taking on a level 15 enemy with two AI-controlled allies which ends up being a fair fight, you're taking on that same enemy by yourself. If you're a caster character who doesn't have a whole lot of defensive options like I was when I did these quests, you will probably die a lot more than is reasonable.

The minions certainly help in the open world, though. Or at least they do when they function properly. My tanky minions frequently stopped attacking enemies in the middle of a battle and would rarely use their taunting ability. My healer minions -- regardless of how they were set -- would stop and heal me while I was running through or out of an area, draw the ire of all the nearby enemies, and keel over dead. Reviving minions doesn't revive them near you if you're within a large radius, it revives them directly above where they died. As a result, when my healer would die beneath a group of satyrs, reviving him would result in him dying again almost immediately, drawing all the satyrs straight over to me.

Many of the issues with the combat I mentioned in my impressions -- particularly the way enemies completely ignored range -- have been fixed, but the issues with skills haven't. I have a skill that deals a lot of up-front damage, has a small cast time and a very small cooldown, and another skill that deals less than half of that damage, has the same cast time, and has no cooldown according to the tooltip, but in actual fact has a longer cooldown than the previous skill. Besides being a bugged skill, even if it were functioning properly it'd be almost useless. The skills I've been getting from my Deity are even worse. One of my earliest skills was an instant-cast spell that dealt a big chunk of damage and healed me for the same amount. Sweet! Ten levels later I got a skill that did less damage, didn't heal, had a longer cool down, a cast time and only a marginally smaller favor cost (50 rather than 60). Your Deity options are class-based, so only my class could have had access to this spell, a spell which is substantially weaker than all of my other spells.

Enemy AI is also screwy. Sometimes enemies will have enormous and instantaneous aggro radii, so that if you get within casting distance they will turn and attack you (as was the case with a group of vultures). Sometimes while you're fighting an enemy it'll just turn around, go back to its original position and continue to take damage from you without responding. Sometimes they don't respond at all in the first place. For a game where there's not much to do outside of basic PvE combat, more attention should have been paid to ensure that the combat actually worked 100% of the time.

The problems with combat really destroy the cooler things that Heatwave/Perpetual tried. A lot of the enemies have special combat animations -- a winged behemoth can pick up my character and throw him around, dealing a lot of damage, while a shade can grasp me in spiritual tendrils and choke me -- which, when they happen, can certainly impress. They can also kill you, as you're immobilized for the duration of the animation. The same goes for when you're playing a melee character that does special kill animations, which can result on your character being wailed on by five enemies while you can't perform any other action.

If you're a fan of group encounters and playing with friends, Gods & Heroes has very little to offer you. At level 20 I still hadn't encountered anything intended for a group, and I had heard other players within my Tribe (guild) discussing how heavily experience was penalized while questing in a group.

Then there are the issues with polish. I've found dozens of locations in the world where buildings have no clipping (so I can just walk straight through it), or where walls just don't render (so I can't walk through what appears to be an empty space). The player estate is a particularly heinous offender -- there are a lot of graphical and physical oddities, like a bridge in the middle of a field, half-planted in a house for absolutely no reason. There is even an area where I would get rubber-banded around any time I tried to enter it. In another zone I once watched a deer walk sideways up a tree. To be honest, that last one was actually one of my highlights of playing Gods & Heroes.

The massive amount of glitches and bugs really speaks volumes about what the small team at Heatwave was capable of handling when they took control of Gods & Heroes. The game they got was clearly in rough shape from the start, and with limited funds and limited staff I suppose they simply couldn't fix everything that needed to be fixed.

But it goes further than that -- there are elements of a game long-gone still present in Gods & Heroes. In Perpetual's version, I suppose instead of a massive sprawling player estate there was a tiny little camp. The map for that camp is still in the game's map menu as "Campus Olympi". Scrolls sold by a vendor in Roma say they lower the damage taken by falling great distances, but there's no fall damage in the current game. And there are several NPCs who talk about taking boats and flying creatures as fast travel, but as far as I can tell, all of that has been replaced by statues you can teleport to.

Finally, there are elements to Gods & Heroes that simply baffle me. The stats on my equipment keep changing, and sometimes have "+0" listed for a stat like maximum energy. Equipping a helmet made my character's beard disappear and hairstyle change. And the methods for regenerating favor, the resource used for god-powers, are either frustratingly slow or completely broken.

Closing Comments
I don't know what kind of state Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising was in when Heatwave picked it up, but it couldn't have been good. The current game is broken, buggy, and not very fun. The plans for the future of Gods & Heroes are noble, but the core game needs to be reworked first and that could take far longer than it's worth. Rome might be rising, but it looks like it probably won't be long until it falls and the world moves on.

by: Nick Kolan

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Posted in: RPG

Dungeon Siege III: PC

A dungeon crawler without good loot, like Dungeon Siege III, is missing something essential. If the prizes that pop out don't feel valuable, there's no slot machine appeal of opening chests, busting apart wooden barrels or slicing up monsters. Dungeon Siege III's bits of loot come with all kinds of statistical bonuses, and a multitude of special effects like elemental damage or chance to stun. But it's rare to ever get a strong sense that swapping one item for another has a significant effect, many items have near identical visual designs, and no piece is moddable. After not too long, scooping up loot begins to feel like garbage collection instead of treasure hunting.

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Obsidian Entertainment, which took over the franchise from creator Gas Powered Games, is more interested in offering satisfying combat mechanics than a tantalizing loot lottery. Each of the four character classes gets nine core abilities - three defensive, the other six offensive and split across two fighting stances. All the abilities can be evolved by gaining experience and leveling up, giving Anjali's area-of-effect firestorm a healing effect or Reinhart's glyph magic a chance to slow enemy movement speed.

Though the total number of abilities per class feels small and you're not forced to make significant either / or choices about which to acquire, you won't receive enough points to fully customize all of them, meaning by the game's end, another player's Lucas Montbarron build won't be the same as yours. The addition of ability mastery, whereby more powerful versions of abilities can be unleashed if you use them enough times, adds more variety to the system. More importantly, Obsidian did a good job of ensuring each ability serves a well-defined purpose, so there's minimal filler.

 

Movement around the battlefield is just as important as proper ability use. Stance shifting to access different abilities is quickly done with a single button press, and the waves of enemies that swarm into battlefields force you to make frequent use of your dodge ability to get out of tight spots and slip away from magical projectiles. There aren't any potions in Dungeon Siege III, so your survival isn't based on stocking up at shops and spamming them when necessary. Fighting flows naturally, feeling more like action game than a traditional dungeon crawler. For example, Anjali can spawn a field of fire and summon a demon dog to help in her ranged form, then switch to melee and perform a spinning heel kick over the flames before jumping into the sky and slamming down to devastate enemies. If any remain alive, she can dodge back and skewer them with a hurled spear, or swap back to fire form and conjure a column of flame. Using the abilities in concert like this helps to keep up interest in the combat where the loot system fails.

Due to the lack of potions, Dungeon Siege III also doesn't make it feel like you're wasting resources by using abilities. Every standard attack you land builds focus, the resource abilities consume. By constantly attacking you can quickly gather enough focus to often use your most powerful stuff. The fun doesn't last the whole game, however. Even though Dungeon Siege III regularly tosses new enemy types at you throughout a variety of environments, leveling up after you've unlocked a class' entire ability set doesn't feel nearly as rewarding. All you'll be able to do is tweak abilities and talents, adding higher percentages to critical hit damage or reducing the focus cost of special skills, which isn't exactly thrilling.

Games of this type typically don't offer much in the way of story, so it's certainly welcome to see how much attention it gets in Obsidian's version of Dungeon Siege. Characters interact in conversation with a Mass Effect-style interface and decisions made throughout the course of the game can actually affect events later on. Those used to bland bubbles of quest text will appreciate this, though it's tough to really care what happens because the personalities, even the main villain, have little depth. These characters exist solely to play flat, plot-necessary roles, not to entertain with their dynamic personalities. Dungeon Siege III does a better job than many other loot games to establish motivations for quests and make it feel as though your actions affect the story, but it's not a story worth remembering.

It's also worth forgetting this game has a multiplayer component because of the restrictions in Dungeon Siege III's online suite. The game plays out entirely in two-character co-operative mode with the partner class of your choosing controlled by a capable artificial intelligence that will make use of a variety of skills and revive you when necessary. You have full control over the skill development of the AI characters and can equip them with gear, but as soon as you go to play online, none of this matters. By hopping into the game of another through the game's online browser you can't import your main character. Instead, you're forced to select from whichever character classes aren't already active in the game (two of the same class are not allowed), and won't have any control over skill development while you're disconnected. While this might work if you want to play with close friends, it makes Dungeon Siege III's online mode near useless if you're looking for a random partner to pair up with and make progress.

The rules of online play also aren't appropriately customizable either, since if you open up your single-player game for another to join, that random person can speed over to a vendor and sell off all your inventory items before bailing out. Such behavior isn't the fault of Obsidian, but failing to put in safeguards against this kind of thing is. Though four-player online play is possible, it's also a chaotic mess. The camera incessantly jitters as it struggles to follow the action, the spell effects, as bright and colorful as they are, make it overly difficult to discern what's actually happening onscreen, and the arenas of combat feel far too small to accommodate more than two.

Two can play the game offline with a drop-in co-op system, which can be good for a little while, but the inability to transfer your character, items and progress out of another's game for your own individual use is still frustrating. Dungeon Siege III also features no unlockable new game+ mode and swiftly funnels you through what amounts to one long corridor until you reach the end. It's not the type of loot game meant to be played over and over, does little to encourage exploration, and while it can be decent fun as you toy with the combat system, there's no long-term incentive to continue hacking away. Also on: PS3, X360

Though the PC version is by far the best-looking of the three with the appropriate hardware to run it, it does have downsides. The camera requires constant micromanagement to position properly, and for some reason you can't scoop up items or interact with NPCs with mouse clicks. Using the mouse and keyboard introduces a slew of irritations that don't need to be there. The issue is solved by using a gamepad, but that's not the best option if you're looking forward to taking advantage of the platform's traditional controls.

Closing Comments
Obsidian Entertainment's take on the Dungeon Siege franchise has some merit. The core combat system is well-designed, offering a small but useful set of abilities for each character class. The varied enemy encounters encourage the frequent use of abilities and the dodge mechanic, which makes the basic gameplay – whittling down the health bars of enemies – satisfying. But the rest of the game mostly falters, unfortunately, to a degree that overshadows its achievements. Dungeon Siege III is a dungeon crawler with a boring loot table, poorly implemented multiplayer, and little lasting incentive to continue running around the world once the tedious story ends.

by: Charles Onyett

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Ar Tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel: PS3

The Ar Tonelico series is well known for its rampant innuendos, scantily clad heroines, and overarching love stories that span epic narratives. The third title in the series, Ar Tonelico Qoga: The Knell of Ar Ciel, is the first title to arrive on the PlayStation 3. Full of quirky oddities that can mainly be chalked up to a difference in culture, this game continues the trends of its predecessors but changes enough elements of the formula to set itself apart, for better and for worse. The biggest problem the game faces is that the jump into this generation of console actually hinders certain game

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mechanics to the point of frustration. Additionally, the handling of intricate relationships often takes a lowbrow route that misses the mark.
You control Aoto, a simple construction apprentice who finds himself swept into a plot that takes him places far removed from his humble beginnings. He falls in the path of two mysterious Reyvatiels (the game world's version of spell-casters), Saki and Finnel, and must protect them as the team strives to discover why they're being pursued by the armies of Clustania. The overall story is a compelling one. There are memorable characters throughout and the twists, changes, and shifting loyalties remain intriguing from start to finish. It follows a long arc where you'll encounter branching paths and multiple endings depending on how you choose to play out your relationships at certain key moments.

The developers created a schism in the graphical department. The main characters are well designed and animate beautifully, but the crisp animations end up creating a stark contrast between the character models and the hand-painted backgrounds. The separation makes the characters feel as though they're floating around the world and not actually a part of it. Characters will run faster than their legs are moving on screen, they'll bounce up and down stairs, they'll jump awkwardly into the air at different times, and none of it feels as though there's a smooth balance between their feet and the world around them.

Combat has been completely revamped in this new take on the Ar Tonelico world. Rather than a turn-based series of button-combos, Ar Tonelico Qoga has switched over to a real-time combat system where your party is thrown onto a flat battlefield to fight soldiers, robots and any number of odd beasts populating the world. Your Reyvatiel holds her position on the battlefield and by fighting to the beat of her singing you'll build up powerful Purge spells and Burst attacks to unleash on your enemies. While it's a bold departure from its predecessors, the new combat system is bland, repetitive and wholly unsatisfying.

The problem with switching to a real-time system is that the combat ends up feeling like button-mashing. While you need to attack to the beat, you're only using a single button to attack with your Vanguard and mashing out three-hit combos. As you go, you'll synthesize new special moves, but they're all based on adding a directional arrow to your original attack button. After completing my first hundred battles (nowhere near the end), I already found the combat system to be overly simplistic, which is not a common trait to JRPGs. Attack, protect your Reyvatiel, Purge, repeat.

The battlegrounds are loose interpretations of whatever environment you happen to be exploring at the time, but they're always a flat, round, and boring plane that doesn't add to the overall excitement. The lack of obstacles and variety feel like a wasted opportunity. Especially the more powerful variations of the Purges show off just how empty the battleground is. Beyond the bland battlegrounds, the overall world feels empty, too. You'll wander long and empty sections of futuristic dungeons where every wrong turn will throw a chest full of goodies at your feet. The town segments are the best looking, with a variation of several locations spattered across the map.

The game features three key elements that all combine to augment how powerful your characters are in various ways. First up is the aforementioned combat. Second is the ability to have intimate conversations with your Reyvatiels at any point where you can rest for the night. The third element is diving into the mind of your Reyvatiels in order to help them with emotional hang-ups, personal insecurities, and growing their person from within. The problem with these components is that combat is by far the most developed, and the conversations and diving are limited to simple two-dimensional conversations and a board-game like map. I understand the conversation elements and do like what the developers tried to accomplish by allowing you to create a stronger bond between the characters. What I don't like about the system is that while talking and diving deal with high-level emotional issues, the majority of the dialogue falls upon sophomoric giggling and embarrassment over simple kissing. Granted, this is a common trait in the world of anime, but the game truly reaches touching heights by its late stage relationship breakthroughs.

While the game offers multiple difficulty levels, none of them truly present a challenge. Characters gain levels every few battles and without grinding you'll easily hit around level 50 by the time you hit hour 20. Additionally, the diving and crafting elements don't force you to go beyond a certain point, so their inclusion becomes a task for completionists rather than a requirement for growth. You'll constantly gather equipment and items from treasure chests, so you'll never be lacking for items or money.

The game retains the same tone and level of innuendo as its predecessors. The humor, the awkwardness, and the downright horror of certain scenes remain forefront in the game. The sexual conversations, the way "diving" is described, having to remove crystals from inside characters -- all of these things will either make you smile with their sexual-quirkiness or shirk in horror from what you're seeing. But for fans of the series, you'll feel right at home with the tongue-in-cheek references found in almost every conversation of the game.

The voice acting works pretty well, though the high-pitched naivety and innocence of the female stars in the English track certainly doesn't change as they grow from an emotional standpoint. And if you switch to the original Japanese soundtrack, often the recorded dialogue is blown out to the point of it sounding like a scratchy mistake. These sound foibles are accompanied by a great soundtrack, but one where key tracks are repeated too often during story-scenes. One of my favorite aspects of moving through an epic RPG is when the music takes a similar emotional journey to the high points of the drama. But even late in the game you'll still hear simple tracks that popped up just a few hours into the game against much lesser evils. That being said, the larger confrontations do present more interesting songs as the beat to which you'll need to attack becomes more important and prominent to the battle.

Closing Comments
If you’ve followed the Ar Tonelico series this far, I’d imagine you’ve already discovered the secrets of Ar Ciel and seen the heights of Clustania on Sol Cluster. But for anyone new to the series, make sure you know what you’re getting into. The first two games soared on charming visuals and mechanics of the great games from the 16-bit era. With all the technological bells and whistles driving this sequel, it ended up halting rather than evolving the series. Great animations set against clunky backgrounds, too much repetition in both the combat and music, and the lack of difficulty hold this JRPG back from being something truly special.

by: Peter Eykemans

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Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga: X 360

Divinity II: Ego Draconis, an under-the-radar action role-playing game developed by Larian Studios, was released very early in 2010. It immediately faced stiff competition from Electronic Arts and Bioware's masterpiece Dragon Age: Origins, and needed to do something unique to stand out. Divinity II was slow to get going and was plagued by early unbalanced fights, but if you stuck with it you were eventually rewarded by turning into a dragon and raining fireballs and extreme halitosis onto any unlucky peon to get in your way.

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Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga is a package deal where you get Ego Draconis and expansion content called Flames of Vengeance, along with a few extra goodies. IGN editor Charles Onyett already reviewed the core game so thisreview will concentrate mostly on the expansion pack and the overall package of the Dragon Knight Saga, which was recently released by Atlas on Xbox 360.

Flames of Vengeance opens exactly where Ego Draconis left off. In the interest of dodging spoilers, I won't say exactly what the premise is but the ending of Ego Draconis left the story open, and Flames immediately jumps into it. In fact, if you load up a save prior to the final battle of Ego Draconis (or start an entirely new game), you will enter the expansion content immediately after concluding the core game without even a credits screen or a "To Be Continued" splash. If you are so inclined, you can roll up a new character who starts at level 35, but that would be entirely missing the point of the core game (and wouldn't give you very many skill points in the first place, thus leaving you with an ultimately weaker character).

The smooth segue from the core game to the expansion is one of many nice presentation tricks that Flames uses to draw you in. The added fiction is a bit weak but acceptable for fantasy fare, and you will get to see how some of the other characters from the core game got along in the meantime, making the world just a bit more fleshed out and interesting.

Also helping matters is your own character's general attitude about his or her situation. As you advance through the main quest, your character seems to channel Deadpool more and more, breaking the fourth wall just enough to make you smile without completely destroying the suspension of disbelief. You will frequently deal with dialogue choices that all point to a cynical mindset, especially when your character starts complaining about having to do all these fetch quests for every random person that seems to be around. Everyone else has spoken dialogue that never strays too far into the cheese. Some characters, such as a trio of thespian ghosts or the quest-giving talking vegetables, speak in ridiculous accents befitting their characters, but even they seem to fit the context of the world perfectly.

Although the presentation is solid, Flames starts to fall apart once you begin the actual gameplay. Nothing is actually broken here—I never encountered a single bug or crash—but a number of problems from the core game have come back with a vengeance (no pun intended), and will leave you more frustrated or confused than genuinely intrigued.

There is only one major area to explore in the Flames of Vengeance expansion. It's the city of Aleroth, the final major location of Ego Draconis, and its immediate surrounding areas (defined as caves and tunnels built under the city). It's small enough that you can discover every landmark in under a few hours, and there really isn't much of interest here. The city is just a bunch of packed brown buildings amongst brown roads, and the caves all look similar with dark tunnels, torches, and cobwebs. Variety in Aleroth's buildings is pretty much defined as different lighting colors. Some shops and houses even have identical layouts, which we suppose is realistic in the sense that basic shops are not going to be architectural masterpieces, but it makes for a very boring (and possibly confusing) world to interact with.

Larian has attempted to pack the city with quests to give you something to do, and in truth there is enough content here to keep you busy for a dozen hours, which sounds about right for an expansion pack. However, a lot of that time is relegated to running back and forth like a demented postal worker. Aleroth is small enough that travel won't make you rip your hair out, but at the same time, it seems Larian intentionally designed the quest givers to be in the opposite corner of the city where the quest is actually executed. This artificial inflation of game length gets annoying, but thankfully almost all the side quests are available right away. You can basically run around and collect quests for an hour while getting used to the city's layout, then, with a bit of planning, efficiently burn through them all with a minimal amount of needless traveling. Still, that's a hell of a way to run a railroad: exploration and discovery should be more organic, but Flames makes it feel about as forced as possible.

The joy of exploration is further minimized when one ugly truth rears its head: Flames of Vengeance almost entirely eliminates your dragon form, and completely negates the purpose of your Battle Tower. These two factors were the very things that made Ego Draconis stand out: the latter because it served as a base of operations where you could brew potions and enchant weapons, and the former because, let's face it, getting to be a dragon is every fantasy fan's dream. Your Battle Tower does still exist and it serves as a dumping spot for your herbs, gems, and other crafting materials, but all its other services can be found in Aleroth itself. It turns the second-coolest part of Divinity II into a glorified storage unit that takes a couple loading screens to access.

Removing your dragon form from the equation is a much more impactful, painful decision. There is a storyline reason for your being crippled, but it's about on par with Superman 64 ("That mysterious green fog stops your powers and prevents you from seeing 99% of Metropolis!"), and Larian doesn't have the excuse of low-quality hardware to fall back on. To be fair, the one time you actually do get to switch into a dragon is absolutely epic. You get involved in a fight against insanely impossible odds, dodging enemy attacks from several dozen sources at once with a time limit, and with increasing difficulty the longer it lasts. Plus, Larian gives you all your dragon abilities at their maximum levels, and a new uber-power on top of it to handle the chaos. The whole sequence actually feels like it would be more in place in an Ace Combat scenario, except your dragon has the advantageous ability to turn on a dime. That one fight was almost worth the price of admission alone, and it showed how incredible Divinity II could be if it exploited its unique features.

Despite the dragon sequence initially feeling impossible in those opening moments, one extremely striking improvement showed itself in the process. Every fight in Flames of Vengeance, from the first encounter to the final boss, is perfectly in balance on the standard difficulty level. In fact, at first I was afraid Larian had swung the balance too far, because I was able to cut through the fodder enemies too easily. But then I encountered the first of about a dozen boss battles, and I realized that I was simply experiencing a fantastic balance that downplays the strength of the minions while putting more weight to the bosses. Make no mistake, there were several game over's, but in every single instance, it was either because my tactics were wrong, or I didn't get to those health potions in time. The final boss will absolutely test the extent of your character, and you'll have to use every ability at your disposal to reach the end.

That said, despite the balance being fantastic, combat itself is still pretty dry. There is no way to defend yourself other than dodging, so fights pretty quickly break down to you running around like a headless chicken. The problem is even worse for any ranged attacker, be it an archer or mage, who basically will spend 90% of every battle strafing to dodge return fire. It's inelegant and chaotic for the wrong reasons, and it feels more glaring because there is no dragon combat (save that one exception) to break up the monotony.


Luckily, Larian has addressed the issues with the combat for the Xbox 360 version. If you are surrounded and you activate any ability at all, your character will try to attack whatever you're aiming at first. If there are no enemies in the reticule, your character will instead go after the nearest thing he or she can hit. This means if you're surrounded in melee, merely spamming your attack button will be enough to hit everyone. This simple change completely negates the handicap of turning the camera just to attack, keeping the combat flow fast and smooth. Ranged combat works similarly, with your character automatically targeting the closest on-screen enemy to the reticule, ensuring you'll hit something even if you don't have perfect aim. The PC version was a lot less forgiving, even with the release of the expansion pack.

Other bugs and stability issues have been addressed as well. I did get stuck in the environment a few times while exploring, but it was mostly because I was jumping into bizarre corners or exploring the edges of the world; I never encountered a single hitch while running around the open lands. The lack of quest markers is still a problem for me, however. I'm all for exploration and discovery, but not everyone wants to go pixel-hunting in an action-RPG. Good and great RPGs—Fallout: New Vegas, Fable 3, Dragon Age: Origins, and Mass Effect 2 just to name releases from the last year—reward players for exploring off the beaten path with special quests and unique loot, but still show quest markers for storyline quests. Forcing players to look in obscure spots with absolutely zero information simply to advance the story is overkill.

There is one particular main quest in Flames of Vengeance that tasks you with finding five buttons spread throughout the streets of Aleroth that you must press to continue the story. Never mind that the game doesn't bother to tell you that two cannot be accessed until much later—which in itself is annoying—but one button in particular is hidden behind a bush in a corner of one street that the camera has no reason to look at. You basically would only stumble on the button by exploring literally every inch of the city or having eyes like a hawk. (One main quest, which is divided into five parts, has the horrific description in the quest log of "I need five clues to continue, but I don't know where they are, so I guess I better just look around.") Perhaps some players like the "challenge," but many—the ones only interested in the story and not collect-aholics—have better things to do than waste time looking for glowing buttons.

Ultimately, none of the quests break any rules established in Ego Draconis: the core game featured quests that could not yet be completed when you got them, as well as required objects or objectives in obscure areas with no hints to the fact. So for better or worse, if you didn't mind it in Ego Draconis, you won't mind it in Flames of Vengeance either. The expansion does bluntly tell you when the game is about to end, allowing you a last chance to make sure you've completed everything you want to complete, which is always appreciated.


Like the quest format and third-person human-to-monster combat, the graphics are completely unchanged. There's a bizarre effect where objects beyond five feet of the camera's focus tend to get aliased, even if they're part of the same model. For example, you'll encounter situations where a person's armor looks good and is stylized beautifully, but the person's head is jagged like an early PlayStation 2 or Xbox title. You probably won't notice or care during combat but it will make you a bit self-aware when you see it during interactions with NPCs.

There are new lines of dialogue and some new music for the expansion, but it's nothing epic or award-winning. There are no new powers (other than a special dragon power) in Flames of Vengeance, and no new effects for the ones already established. However, there are a few new item sets, including three sets you get immediately in the core game to help you blitz through it, but nothing particularly interesting.

The Dragon Knight Saga does give gamers who like the music a very nice present: every copy of the game comes with a soundtrack CD. Pre-ordered copies come with a book of artwork as well.

Closing Comments
The Xbox 360 version of The Dragon Knight Saga is a game slightly better than the sum of its parts. While its graphics are subpar for a modern game, the combat is fast-paced and fun. It feels much better with the 360 controller rather than the mouse-and-keyboard setup of the PC version, especially with auto-aim being this forgiving. Although the expansion is a bit weaker than the core game, the total package is well worth the price of admission. If you haven't touched Divinity II at all and you enjoy action-RPGs, you won't be disappointed with the Xbox 360 version.

by: Jon Michael

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The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky: PSP

Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky has been available in Japan for seven years now but it wasn't until now that we Western gamers were finally able to get our hands on it. It represents a branch of the larger Legend of Heroes tree which can trace its origin back more than two decades to the (Japanese release only) Dragon Slayer games. Although Trails in the Sky is the first part of this trilogy to come to North America, its habit-forming gameplay and strong story stake a bold claim for what will no doubt continue to be a very popular series.

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The game stars teenage siblings Estelle and Joshua Bright, two aspiring young Bracers (knights) living in the peaceful kingdom of Liberl. Just as they graduate and become junior Bracers, their father, legendary Bracer Cassius Bright, is called away by unsettling events and sooner than they expected they're asked to shoulder some very grown-up responsibilities.

Trails in the Sky's two-fold focus is storytelling and combat. The first is expertly done through amusing text-only dialog sequences and the second is handled through a turn-based combat system. Once combat initiates, characters have the choice to Move, Attack, use Arts and Crafts (magic or special attacks) or trigger a powerful attack called an S-Craft. This diverse range of choices makes for some dynamic fights, not to mention some hair-raising, skin-of-your-teeth victories. The system is flexible enough that you can try one tactic and if you lose miserably you can immediately try again using a different approach. There's a lot to get the hang of but once it sinks in there's a lot of fun to be had mixing different attacks, magic spells, and combat orders.

Fighting is admittedly the main point of the game, but there are plenty of other things to do so you won't get burned out on brawling. You can browse the Bracer Guild bulletin boards and do odd jobs to earn more money and experience but it's best to do this early because optional quests expire and become far fewer down the line. Side quests are also local to each city so once you've left one area you can kiss its quests goodbye.

Though combat and questing are both a hoot, at least half the reason to play this game is the storyline. Gamers who hate talking head sequences will likely be put off by this aspect of things but let's face it, this genre is known for its labyrinthine plots. Trails in the Sky's story is complex but extremely well-crafted and besides, the dialog is hilarious. With a flamboyant bard hitting on everyone in sight (regardless of gender) and the kids' mentor drinking like a fish, there's a good number of borderline-inappropriate laughs.

While Trails in the Sky's pacing is good overall, some gamers might find themselves getting impatient when the game goes all High School Musical for over an hour, focusing on a school festival. Some gamers also might dislike the game's obviously dated graphics and unspectacular sound which is characterized by repetitively catchy musical themes that'll be echoing in your head long after you've finished the game.

Closing Comments
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is the first in what promises to be a strong, entertaining trilogy. Although this first chapter is not the most original ever made, like any good JRPG it offers amusing writing, dynamic combat, interesting tasks, an absorbing narrative, and hours upon hours of gameplay. And while the game's 50/50 balance between combat and story may not be to everyone's taste, its charm and overall entertainment value make it well worth the investment.

by: Neilie Johnson

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Mass Effect 2: Arrival: 360

It's bittersweet to review the final piece of downloadable content for Mass Effect 2. On one hand, there's nothing left for our favorite game of 2010, but that also means Mass Effect 3 is ever-closer. While Arrival isn't the highest note that BioWare could have ended Mass Effect 2 on, I understand why they chose this piece as the cork in the bottle. Arrival is all about Shepard and the Reapers and it does give some (but not a lot of) context to what we've seen of Mass Effect 3 so far.

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Picking up after the Horizon mission, Arrival begins as a rescue initiative that you perform as a favor for your old friend Admiral Hackett. The woman you need to find, Dr. Amanda Kenson, has located a Reaper artifact with proof of their imminent invasion. The story is linear with no branching Paragon/Renegade pathways, though you can garner a handful of those points through scattered conversations along the way. I didn't mind the linearity here -- after all, most of the extra content has been presented the same way.

Arrival's twist comes in its combat -- you'll fight solo almost the entire time. Though you're down two squad mates, I didn't feel like it changed the game that much. Fighting through waves of enemies was slightly more difficult without others, but it never bordered on frustrating. There are some nice set pieces that you'll blast your way through (I won't spoil the locations) and it's still fun toying with your enemies by overloading a pyro and watching him explode or freezing someone then shattering him with bullets.

 

As fun as killing people is, the majority of Arrival consists of combat sequences and that's what I found disappointing. I love conducting conversations in Mass Effect, so the fact that most of this is running and gunning isn't bad, it's just not what I was hoping for. Arrival is on the shorter side and took me a couple of hours to complete, so I didn't have time to tire of shooting enemies with ammo and my biotic/tech powers.

While the new content doesn't technically have a lot of problems I can pinpoint, I didn't walk away "wowed" like I had with other content like Lair of the Shadow Broker. Arrival is still a worthy add-on with cool moments, but you shouldn't expect to feel butterflies of excitement in your tummy.

I had fun with Arrival, but I am concerned that people who don't buy it will be at a disadvantage in Mass Effect 3. Casey Hudson, executive producer of the franchise, assured me that that although Arrival will create differences in the player's Mass Effect 3 playthroughs, they would never "punish" players for not purchasing DLC. I guess we'll have to wait and see when Mass Effect 3 comes out this holiday.

Closing Comments
Purchasing Arrival means there’s more to do in Mass Effect 2, and that’s always a good thing. It sets up the tone of urgency that’s prevalent in the Mass Effect 3 trailer, but don’t expect it to explain a lot. If you don’t mind combat-focused, linear missions, it’s worth the $7 or 560 Microsoft points.

by: Kristine Steimer

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Posted in: RPG