Stay away from Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria. Stay far, far away.
Just to be up front in the interest of full disclosure, I am NOT qualified to review this entire game. My play time clocked in at just over one hour, so for all I know every complaint I have may resolve itself by the end. But a) I highly doubt that, and b) it couldn’t possibly fix itself enough to be worth the pain of more of what that first hour was.
First off, the characters/setting. This is the one area I think might improve as the player becomes accustomed (read: as rigor mortis sets in). Maybe it is my just coming from a simple RPG with easygoing characters and infinitely better plot pacing, but dropping me into a random town with some wench playing host to a Norse god of some kind who is already apparently well on her quest to get somewhere to do something with Odin and Valhalla and her einherjar is not a way to ease a player into the game fiction. In fact, it holds me at arm’s length, not understanding more that 10% of what is going on, and after an hour of wallowing through it and not being given a reason to care, my motivation to do so evaporates.
Speaking of incomprehensible messes, the terrible introduction of the combat system just made me want to put a gun in my mouth. Battles seem to want to be real time, with free movement and attack ranges, but then have Action Points and enemies that wait for you to begin moving, usually indicia of a turn-based system. And when you finally do begin your attacks, they just consist of mashing a single action button per character, probably with the goal of having characters attack in a certain order for increased damage (not that the game cares to explain that). A friend of mine loved to [ignorantly] disparage console RPGs as not requiring much more strategy than “Hitting ‘Fight’ over and over again.” With games like this, sometimes I agree… And after complaining about Enchanted Arms’ amusingly slow way of introducing players to the various game mechanics, scrolling through pages of text and dozens of arbitrary tutorial instructions ultimately just made me stop caring.
I’m sure there is a great deal more strategy to the game’s combat system than I give it credit here — positioning yourself for attack, hitting specific parts, going for the leader, etc. The fact of the matter is, all games are trying to imitate real life in some way, and battle systems use artificial systems in an attempt to codify various aspects of real world “strategy.” So no game is immune from that. But where this game fails is in its oversimplicity in some areas, needless complexity in others, and terrible way of introducing the player to it all.
Add in the frustratingly 8-bit game world out of combat, which exists, near as I can tell, entirely in two dimensions with the player running, using enemies as platforms, and solving random jump puzzles. Rubbing salt in the wound is the visual gorgeousness of the world, one of the only areas of the game with which I have zero problem. Too bad it’s just mere window dressing on gameplay that could have been done in the mid-1980s.
Score: 3.5 / 10
[2] Comments
Say what you want about Ubisoft’s Enchanted Arms, it doesn’t try to pretend it’s something that it’s not. It’s a story-driven, turn-based Japanese RPG for the Xbox 360 that doesn’t break new ground in its admittedly niche genre. It takes production shortcuts left and right, has a soundtrack with only a scant handful of songs worth a second listen, and features a plot so linear you’d be tempted to call Final Fantasy open-ended. And it’s great!
The original Xbox, God rest its soul, suffered from a painful lack of quality support from the Land of the Rising Sun, which isn’t all that hard to understand when you consider how poorly the system sold there. Microsoft seems determined to remedy that with the 360, and the creation of Enchanted Arms probably arose directly out of that desire. While many aspects of the game — the static character portrait dialogue and limited, grid-based battle system — could have been done on any system since the Super Nintendo, its graphics inside and out of combat are like nothing any other console on the market even approaches. For as many corners as may have been cut in terms of side quests and barebones cutscenes, you’d be hard pressed to tell by its visuals that put everything before it, including any Final Fantasy or Xenosaga game, to shame. While the Playstation 3 (and the overbudgeted Square-Enix titles it will bring) will change all that, its Xbox Live access and rewarding Achievement integration, together with [currently] peerless graphical delivery and a compelling (if simplistic) storyline make it, in my opinion, the first step of this venerable console RPG genre into the latest generation of videogames.
It’s certainly not a perfect game, of course. Its characters, focusing on the dim-witted, young protagonist Atsuma and his quest to save the world and solve the mystery of his seemingly all-powerful right arm, are almost intentionally clichéd. Square did the ambitious hero, spunky princess with her stolid retainer, and bratty tomboy schtick and have long since moved on to exhausting the other combinations of the apparently only ten or so Japanese RPG character traits (see Cloud the ambitious loner, Zidane the bratty thief, Cecil the mournful retainer; Squall the UNambitious emo, rinse and repeat). However, Enchanted Arms does get props for the first openly homosexual, flaming and sexually in-your-face transvestite I ever recall seeing in a game, though to call just adding another painful stereotype to the mix a blessing is up for debate. Likewise, character development is a simple “collect SP points, spend on relevant stats” bag, and the Golem creation is more than a little reminiscent of the 108 Stars from the Suikoden series (both in its variety and the frequent uselessness it produces). Combat takes place on a mirrored 4 x 3 grid and its direct vs. ranged, counter-the-opposing element attacks are nothing fans of the genre haven’t seen before, but it manages to stay engaging and challenging enough till the very end.
With the notable exceptions of its stunning presentation and thorough Xbox Live support (for a single player RPG), Enchanted Arms adds very little new to the traditional console RPG. But in a niche genre increasingly populated with entries that seem to change things just for novelty rather than utility, this game delivers an excellent, “old school” gaming experience far more worthwhile and entertaining than today’s jaded critics give it credit.
Score: 7 / 10
No Comments
