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franpaccio-blog · 8 years ago

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1UP Reblog: Four Reasons to be Excited for Pandora’s Tower

Pandora’s Tower was released in the US a couple of weeks ago. Just as I suspected, It didn’t make a lot of noise.

But If you own a Wii (or a WiiU) that’s just sitting there collecting dust, stop complaining and get it. It’s really good. If I had to review it, I’d give it a 7.5/10. A real 7.5/10, not a fake one that you give games nowadays to say they’re bad without saying it.

Anyway, here’s a thingy I wrote for 1Up a year ago. I thought editing it a bit and reblogging it would have been a nice idea. I hope it gets you interested in the game.

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The Last Story is about to thunder across the U.S. skies; the beautiful Xenoblade Chronicles has struck. While the incredible community effort of Operation Rainfall probably isn’t entirely to credit for the U.S. release of these games, it certainly didn’t hurt. Operation Rainfall comprised three games, and unlike the first two the third – as yet unannounced for American audiences – has met with a tepid reception in Europe: Pandora’s Tower. The Last Story and Xenoblade came from established creators Hironobu Sakaguchi and Tetsuya Takahashi, men who built their reputations with titles like Final Fantasy and Xenosaga. Next to such legacies, Pandora’s Tower seems comparatively diminished and unattractive – and its clearly limited budget certainly doesn’t help.

But beneath Pandora’s Tower modest looks beats the heart of a great game.

The Scar

The game’s plot revolves around two lovers, Aeron and Elena. The former is a deserter, running from the horrors of war. The latter is a kind girl who has been struck by a horrible curse that transforms her into a beast that feeds on human flesh and is thus wanted by the Elyrian Kingdom army.

For an action RPG, Pandora’s Tower has quite an immense and detailed world… one that you won’t visit but throgh well written dialogues and forgotten documents retrieved during your adventures that will certainly tickle your imagination, making the tale’s setting unbelievably genuine.

The game takes place entirely in a very small environment, a complex called “The 13 Towers”: A forgotten fortress held afloat by 12 chains pierced into the surrounding cliffs. These chains prevent a huge chasm that scars the land of Elyria from widening and opening a path to the netherworld.

The tale starts when the two fugitives find refuge in a observatory used in ancient times to monitor the arcane experiments taking place in The 13 Towers. Little do they know that their escape has kindled the flame of war across the entire continent. And even if these events are nothing but a distant echo, the story will change significantly according to the couple’s actions, leading to multiple unpredictable endings that will not only affect the fate of the main characters, but also the balance of the entire world.

The Hunger Game

Pandora’s Tower is a very delicate game, but it can also be brutal. It knows how to reward the player, but at the same time knows how to punish mercilessly, and Aeron and Elena are the ones who pay for your mistakes.

The cursed mark on Elena’s back slowly sends her through a horrible transformation that seems to have come straight out of David Cronenberg’s nightmares. When she mutates, even the plants alongside her suffer, becoming grey and sickly. To keep his beloved sane and stop her metamorphosis , Aeron has to explore the tower and obtain monster flesh to feed her. The detail that went into creating realistic pieces of dripping monstrous meat and the cutscenes that show Elena consuming them are hands down the most disturbing thing that you’ll ever see in a video game. Some are so horrible I had to skip lunch while playing – and meatballs, my favorite food, were served that day.

What’s worse is that, as the game progresses, the heroine begins to enjoy her meals, leading to sickening moments that almost outdo the famous scene from eXistenZ in which Pikul enjoys his Chinese “special.” According to Toru Haga, the game’s director, this idea came while eating lunch on a train to work. Eating is, after all, such a normal action, part of everyone’s daily routine, and transforming it into a disturbing, painful experience is a smart way to both impress the players and help them empathize with Elena.

The game is a love triangle with death.

Aeron can interact with his belle in a variety of ways reminiscent of dating simulations, but Elena is not the typical damsel in distress, and does her best to fight her disease, while hiding the anguish of being in such a state to avoid burdening Aeron further. She even has a central role in the gameplay. Give her presents, and instead of just greedily accepting them, she will convert them into useful items: She can cook, sew bigger inventory bags, even translate documents from unknown languages.

Elena is a vivid character, beautifully portrayed by the numerous cutscenes…and these change depending on how your bond with her develops. It’s hard not to care about her, and developer Ganbarion succeeded in transferring the drama of the couple onto the player’s shoulders. You will want to make sure she’s okay.

But make her unhappy and… Well, you don’t wanna end up devoured in the name of love, right?

The Silent Protagonist

Aeron is a man of few words. His actions speak for his heart and cut through his silence. His feelings are always clear thanks to his body language, and particularly his deep, expressive eyes: Note his kind love and determination with each intense stare at the suffering elena, or the modesty that surfaces when he looks away away shyly when she is happy and grateful.

And yet, Aeron is as lethal as he is sweet. He can cut a path through horders of enemies using a variety of weapons with exquisite expertise - from swords to scythes, each with a distinct move set and stats that can be improved via forging.

The gameplay is simple; you can combine basic attacks together or unleash a number of special charge moves that differ from arm to arm. But what makes it fresh and original is the Vestran chain, a sub-weapon capable of interacting with enemies in a crazy amount of ways. You can bind monsters’ legs to make them fall, then drag them or strangle them; you can tie them to pillars to stop them from advancing, or even steal their weapons and lash back.

The game gives its best in the battles against the tower masters, often peaceful Shadow of the Colossus-like creatures – have fun with the moral implications – with interesting patterns to learn to expose their weak points via chain interaction.

Exploration is equally inspired, and the game doesn’t handhold the player, but lets him free to explore the environments and solve Zelda-flavored puzzles, often forcing him to rely on mere observation to understand the level layout and how to proceed. It makes Pandora’s Tower harder, but also gives the player the thrill of understanding every riddle on his own. If Castlevania’s developers would try this game and see how Gambarion made wise use of the Vestrian chain’s whip-like gimmick, they’d finally get an idea how to create a 3D title worthy of the series’ name.

Pandora’s Tower is a game with a lot of heart, and it makes up for its limitations with inspired art direction, a superb story, and pristine level design. Let’s hope that Nintendo presents the game at E3 so everyone can give it the chance it deserves.

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Of course, last E3 is long gone. But the game is out, why haven’t you bought it yet!?

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franpaccio-blog · 8 years ago

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Thoughts on Virtue's Last Reward and/or its sister title, 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors?

First of all, please be aware that this answer is going to contain spoilers, therefore if you haven’t finished 999 and/or VLR, bookmark this page and come back to it at a later time!

I think Zero Escape (that’s the name of the trilogy Chunsoft’s 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward belong to, kids) is in my opinion the best ongoing games series. I loved and hated 999 for…reasons. I couldn’t fully appreciate it because of how loose the endings were, but at the same time I couldn’t stop thinking about it. In a sense, you could say it was a complete success BECAUSE of that. I mean, can you think of other games that keep you literally obsessed for years, that force you to beg your friends to play them so you can share theories and suppositions?

VLR instead completely blew my mind. It tells a great story and has some truly memorable characters (Luna, Alice, Tenmyouji), and the way it’s layered makes for an unpredictable experience, to say the least. Uchikoshi filled the story with some of the smartest traps I’ve ever seen in writing. Think about Clover, why she’s in the game, what kind of thought process she instills in the mind of the player. She’s basically just a tool to hide another person’s identity, to mess with your perception of time.

I reviewed the game for an Italian website and gave it a perfect score. I noticed a lot of other sites gave it almost perfect scores, and I’m afraid that stopped the reviewer’s hands to take a little extra step when evaluating it is because it’s a text adventure, a genre that’s not exactly…easy to appreciate, especially nowadays, when everyone wants games to be multiplayer shooters with collectable loot, respawn points and repetitive tasks to accomplish.

The irony is that what pushed me to go for a perfect score is exactly the gameplay. The way the interface is polished to perfection, and everything is streamlined to truly simply enjoy the story (the safe codes after all allow you to completely skip puzzles if you want to). The way the game breaks the fourth wall, and lets the player freely jump from bookmark to bookmark. It’s not just a great feat per se, but think about it. It’s an “ability” that is so subtly integrated with the story, you can’t help but be amazed once you get the hang of what’s really happening in VLR.

I don’t know if you liked the game/series or not, but I hope you played it. I hope everyone plays it, because games like these need to be played, experienced and assimilated.

When people tell me that this or that triple A game has an amazing story, and how this or that protagonist is unforgettable thanks to his or her deep and realistic characterization and his or her ability to climb ancient Italian buildings, I can’t help but giggle and think of Akane/June and realize that most people out there will never even cross their paths with her tale.

And then I get a bit sad.

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franpaccio-blog · 8 years ago

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Long Divisions

Do we really need a division between Japanese and Western videogames?

The modern market seems to think we do, and some people even say that Japanese videogames are losing polish, relevance, ideas, power. But as gamer, critic and journalist, I couldn’t disagree more.

I think Japanese games and developers will remain influential in the future simply because videogames’ quality doesn’t depend on what part of the globe a product comes from. Ideas are not bound by geographical boundaries. Even if the [western] userbase’s attention has been diverted to western productions, no matter what some cocky indie game developers might say, Japan still continues delivering great games for any available system. It’s simply a fact, and all you have to do to agree is look around you. Inazuma Eleven 2, Dark Souls, The Last Story, Xenoblade, Mario 3D Land, Gungnir, KOFXIII: some of the best games I’ve played in the last handful of months, and they are all Japanese. And I believe the future will keep bringing us the same amount of amazing titles from Japan - just like from any other part of the world. These are difficult and weird times for our industry, and Japan was hit perhaps harder than other countries, but the fact that some of the most important software houses have failed to overcome the challenges of the machines of this generation and reach the popularity of western titles developed by huge studios doesn’t change the fact that Japanese developers, from projects such as Valkyria Chronicles to Kid Icarus, have never ceased to do their part of the job to keep the industry - and creativity - alive.

And don’t forget to read more thoguhts on this topic on 1UP. I really loved last week’s cover story, Rethinking Japan.

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franpaccio-blog · 8 years ago

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I’m sorry I’m thinking about Wario Land again…

Confession time: I hate Super Mario Land 2. Ever since I was but a toddler I’ve found character’s “physics”, the jumps… incredibly irritating.

But when you’re a kid, you really don’t pay too much attention to these things.

I mean, you do, but your friends lend you a game and it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad; you end up spending hours and hours with it, just because you have a ton of spare time and everything feels so new. No time for disappointments nor complaints; you just have fun with what you got.

At least that’s how it was where I grew up.

Mario was, of course, as famous as he is today – maybe even more so, considering we weren’t exposed to all the shit that’s on the shelves today and we were not hypnotized by the internet or metascores. Even if I decided to avoid squandering the precious little money I had on Mario Land 2’s sequel, it still somehow managed to find its way to the slot in the back of my old grey Game Boy thanks to a friend’s generous enthusiasm.

It’s the summer of ‘94 and here I am, playing Wario Land instead of chasing skinny girls on the beach to try making out for the first time. No biggie – I was interested in the big boys anyway.

Recently I saw the game on the 3DS Virtual Console, and decided to get it to redeem myself for the mistakes of my youth: Wario Land deserved to be bought; I was wrong. Playing it again in this weird modern era is almost illuminating.

It made a big impression of me as a kid, but now, understanding games better and being able to dissect what was the cause of so much childish awe turned into an incredibly thoughtful experience.

Some games just do everything right.

They invite you in a mysterious world and then leave you there, free to learn about it and explore it pixel by pixel, secret by secret, at your own pace. At a superficial glance, Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land doesn’t look too different from its predecessor. Of course, the choice of turning Wario from insignificant villain to main character, and the almost complete absence of Mario (or any other common elements with the Mushroom Kingdom, really) from the title was a big deal at the time, and a sign of the brave changes this game hides under a superficially familiar package.

The first thing I noticed was, of course, those horrible jumps.

It’s an obstacle to my enjoyment of the game, but one easy to overcome. You see, Wario is a peculiar avatar for what tend to be considered the standards of the platform genre. He’s almost completely invincible, very slow, and definitely not accustomed to aerial acrobatics – even when he obtains power-ups that allow him to fly.

If Wario encounters some blocks on his way, he doesn’t jump across them as his plumber nemesis would: Wario CRUSHES them. Wario Land has yet to arrive at the formula of its sequels. Starting from Wario Land 2, it will remain fundamentally intact until the incredibly underrated Shake Dimension, the only exception being the Virtual Boy episode – their level design is focused on slow exploration of levels dotted with tiny environmental puzzles.

But perhaps that’s what makes this game so charming.

Its roots are too deeply burrowed in the familiar Mario Land 2 ground, with which it shares its worldwiew: that philosophy of secret levels and alternate exits.

But what draws a separating line between Wario Land and its predecessors are its lack of linearity, its unique atmosphere, and its economic twist.

The game’s objective isn’t simply to pummel enemy after enemy all the way to the final boss, but to accumulate as much money as possible to access a wide selection of possible endings.

The game’s economy is rough but interesting. Every level is full of coins to collect, but activating checkpoints, opening doors, and even accessing some special minigames at the end of a stage costs money: an interesting gamble gimmick that allows each player to significantly alter the pacing of the game’s progression. Of course this feature also enriches the platforming action, as it’s possible to earn extra cash by interacting with certain enemies in specific ways, often making use Wario’s ability to carry and throw items and monsters. Imagine tackling enemies to make them drop coins like a real bully, or feeding a poor li'l monster to a bigger one to obtain his gratitude and some money in return.

The best way to get rich fast is to thoroughly explore the levels, looking for coin-filled secret rooms and treasure chests – but the game cleverly conceals each of its most valuable discoveries thanks to a mutating level design. Completing certain stages can cause atmospheric or geographical changes in others: lakes run dry, cliffs are swallowed by high tides, and so on. It’s no different from what happens in Mega Man X, although amplified by the remarkable size of Wario Land’s world.

The game knows how to reward the player for time invested in looking for such areas, especially when it leads to uncovering one of the great, hidden treasures: the music fades out, and for a moment a chill runs down your spine as the air charges with solemn fear of what’s gonna come out of that massive skull-adorned chest.

Don’t think for a second visiting levels over and over is gonna be a tedious task: thanks to an unprecedented attention to detail and excellent monster design, each locale is unique and always fun to navigate. And the soundtrack is so hypnotic you will want to spend more time in certain areas just to enjoy some of the weird ambient tunes that replace the usual cheery Mario beats.

Power-ups play the expected pivotal role in exploration, and grant Wario all kinds of traversal abilities. Air dash, fly, increased jump distance, and even fire-breathing. Especially in the latter part of the game, these powers are exploited in interesting ways in concert with the areas’ layout. This is one of the things that makes the game so original: the main character’s weight and horizontality combined a smart vertical level design.

In my opinion, it takes a lot of courage and forward-thinking to do what was achieved with Wario’s first solo adventure. Wario Land is a first step in a new direction for Nintendo’s platform games, but its charm lays in the uncertainty of where to go, in the need to do something new but the lack of knowhow to separate it from what was done before. It’s almost a shame that things had to change so much once the weird villain found his true inner treasure hunter / minigame show host vocation.

Picture stolen from here.

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