I don’t care what everyone else says. Akitoshi Kawazu is a genius. He work’s with an indie gamer mindset—unafraid of experimentation and rejection, and just making whatever game he feels like making at that moment. So, I’d like to talk for a little bit about the first SaGa game I played—Final Fantasy Legend 2.
Nothing like a good indie competition to get my blood boiling. The folks over at Eegra (which is one of the best gaming humor sites on the web) recently hosted an indie game competition, giving out some sweet cash prizes to all who participated. Some of the entries showed promise but fell flat (Color Wars) and some were downright outstanding (Go Beryllium!). I’ll be sharing my favorites soon enough, but if you just can’t wait, here’s the original article, and both Tim W’s and Derek Yu’s take on the winners.
Another Atlus game in the Shin Megami Tensei series (and spinoffs), Digital Devil Saga is bizarre. I don’t mean the regular kind of bizarre, which is what Persona 3 or Final Fantasy X might fall under. Digital Devil Saga is downright creepy in its employment of the surreal, creepy, and extraordinary elements of its plot. Perhaps the biggest element of this insane aesthetic is in the fact that you consume your defeated enemies. Not only that, but the enemies you defeat used to be human. So, in essence, Digital Devil Saga is about cannibalism.
Just some indie news, since I happen to be a HUGE independent game junkie. James Silva (who did Survival Crisis Z, which I happen to like so much) is gradually getting closer to the completion of his next project, an XNA game called The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai. He’s posted a status update on his developer blog, and it has some interesting things on it. For example, there will be a ranked story mode that is about equal to the hardest difficulty. There’s also going to be 3-play co-op in unranked story mode. Sweet. Check his post for his complete status update. I’m no uncouth enough to post the whole thing verbatim!
To put this into context, I tend to go through phases when playing videogames. It normally goes along the lines of first-person shooter, American RPG, Japanese RPG, Strategy RPG, Turn-based Strategy, Real-time strategy, and then repeat at FPS. This is just how I function as a gamer. There’s individual games within those genres that I always play, and there’s some genres that are always good to play at any time. For example, I always play shoot-’em-ups. I always play Team Fortress 2. And when it comes to Japanese RPGs, I always play Persona 3.
There’s just something that draws me in about Survival Crisis Z. I can’t quite place what it is, because there’s so many amazing aspects behind the game. I guess the biggest thing that compels me to play it would have to be the persistence of my character’s progress, even if the random generation removes the emotional attachment I have to the characters and the persistence isn’t really true persistence. The only person I really care for is myself, since eventually my party comes back and just leaving and reentering buildings respawns the characters. It’s a sort of let down, but I can understand why.
One of the more interesting Pokemon spin-offs, there were actually two Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games before the two I’m focusing on in this article; Red Rescue Team on the GBA, and Blue Rescue Team on the DS. The second pair, both DS games, are Explorers of Time and Explorers of Darkness (sometimes collectively called Mystery Dungeon 2 since they’re the second set). Please note, I never played the first two, mainly because I had no idea what sort of games they were.