The original “fat” model PS3 sits similarly on my shelf.

Last week I examined the Xbox 360 and my experience with it. The week before that I took a look at the GameCube. This week shall be PlayStation 3′s time to shine. The PS3 had a rough start, launching at a very high price point relative to the 360, and also coming out a year after the 360 launched giving up a crucial head start. But what those disadvantages did to hurt Sony, the pack in of the would-be dominant HD movie format, Blu-ray, would handsomely compensate for them. Priced between five and six hundred dollars, the PS3 was not a cheap game console but in 2006 it was a cheap Blu-ray player and consequently found itself as many people’s only means of playing that format. Sony’s gambit on the media format would pay off, eventually trumping the rival format HD DVD. The games for the PS3 would also benefit from the higher capacity disc, as PS3 games have yet to require a multiple disc game whereas the 360 has required, in some cases, up the three discs to the PS3′s one. Being a Sony console, and particularly one that follows up the RPG haven of the PS2, I would look to the system for continued RPG support. However this generation, and not necessarily any one console, was not particularly supportive of RPGs. However, some gems did come down the line this generation, including the very special Valkyria Chronicles.

Sega’s beautifully cell shaded semi-realtime strategy RPG released exclusively for the PS3 in 2008. The game would instantly win my heart with its perfect mix of top town strategy, turn based movement, and realtime battle mechanics. But when I realized they had slipped in a few charming Skies of Arcadia references I was over the moon. The game gives the player control of a squad of units to move with a limited supply of action points to do so. When moving, that unit then has his or her own action gauge that limits their actions and movement range on the field. While moving a unit around, the game snaps into action as all enemy units will take fire when the unit is in line of sight. Stop moving and they stop shooting. In some ways it is akin to a Fire Emblem game, but with out the grid lines, and with guns. These games may actually be a bit more different than that, but I digress. The most striking feature of the game, and why I lament the movement of Valkyria Chronicles 2 & 3 to handheld screens, is the aforementioned cell shaded art style. It does not simply add a black outline on characters that have flat colors, as many cell shaded games aping Wind Waker have done. Instead it goes for an almost water color appearance, or hand drawn look. The effect is hard to describe but amazing to behold. The game also offers its share of challenge but not nearly the level of difficulty my next game provides.

Even Demon’s Souls‘ promotional art features a beaten and defeated knight. Ah, what fun!

Demon’s Souls. The name should make any gamer quiver. Not the considerably easier, but much more bemoaned, spiritual successor Dark Souls. No, I speak of the original. The game that, in response to the player dieing multiple times in a world, increases the health and damage output of the enemies in that world. The game that halves the player’s HP when they die for the first time. Yes, From Software’s Demon’s Souls released in 2009 is the truly hard game that gamers have allegedly been clamoring for. A seemingly straight forward action game, Demon’s Souls asks patience and observation of the player before they go barging into a room or encounter. A steady pace and a keen eye will be the best tools of any player with the perseverance to see this game to its end. The combat system, which uses the right trigger buttons for light and strong actions on the character’s right hand and the left triggers for the same on the left hand, is also deceptively simple. Most actions cannot be canceled, and following through or committing to an attack can be the player’s downfall as much as their key to victory. Upon death, all of the player’s souls (which can be spent on item purchases or on upgrading character stats) are deposited on the ground where they died. Should the player die again attempting to recover them, those souls are replaced with another blood stain containing the current souls on hand. And therein lies the greatest source of frustration and anguish a Souls player will experience. But when it happens to me, I try to remember that progress in this game is not numerical, it is psychological. When the world resets upon death, I now know how to avoid that last mistake. And in this I take solace, for what else can I do in a game as punishing as this?

My overall experience with my PS3 has been a highly positive one. As a competent and reliable machine, not host to the horrid breakdown problems of the 360, I would always opt for the PS3 version of any cross platform titles. In fact I purchased a few games a second time just so I could play them again on my PS3. The greatest asset of the PS3, however, is the free online services of the PlayStation Network. Whereas Xbox Live requires a subscription fee, and I therefore never took my 360 online until much later, the PS3 would become my first real foray into online gaming. Unfortunately the PS3 looks to be the first and last well supported and readily online console with a free online component. Be that as it may, the PS3 still stands as the console that may not have over taken the 360 (though it is close as both systems recently reached eighty million units sold worldwide) but it has done a lot to claw its way back from rocky beginnings.

It seems like not as many of you readers were 360 owners as I had thought. But perhaps you did buy the PS3? I should hope so, because any rational gamer looking to save money (read: not me this gen) would have done very well to buy a post-price drop PS3. As such, I fully expect you to regale me with your tales of love for the PS3 and your favorite games. Or tales of lament for not having owned one, which ever. REGALE! DO IT NOW.

Dark Souls offers a high level of challenge.

As the video games market has grown over the years, the difficulty has gone down. The mobile market has had a large role to play in this as well. It is not uncommon to spend an hour or two completing a free app, only to move on to the next one. Many new casual gamers have joined the market through Facebook, mobile phones, or buying a Wii. Adults can be found playing and enjoying games primarily aimed at children. Hand these same people anything more difficult and they will soon walk away in frustration, yet these people are now a significant portion of the consumer base. We are in an era where games are being developed for people who have no love of challenge.

This fact is highlighted in the recent Ni no Kuni. Over the course of the game the protagonist, Oliver, picks up new spells to solve the problems and puzzles that are spread across the world. Each spell has a very useful description that explains what it does, often making the solution to a puzzle obvious. This does not mean Oliver can walk up and just cast the right spell, oh no. Oliver has to interact with an object, then his companion, Mr. Drippy, will explain that Oliver has a spell that he could use in this situation before automatically bringing up the spell book. A game should not have to hold the players hand as much as this.

Some games have an average level of difficulty, but have paid DLC that can make the experience easier. Both Mugen Souls and Rainbow Moon are guilty of this. Both games have the option to power up characters for a price, or in the case or Mugen Souls, completely for free. The removal of any sort of challenge from a game leads to people moving from fight to fight in an effort to catch the next piece of story. Very little actual gameplay is left in this situation, leading me to wonder why they would pay for the game in the first place.

There are some games out there that still offer the challenge many of us desire. Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls both offer a challenging game to those that still desire it. Death is not the end of the game, but can be punishing if the player cannot get back to where they died before they die again. And die the player shall, often. There is no shame in failing to spot traps, because it teaches us be wary. Harsh lessons taught in games like these force players to adapt quickly and learn new skills.

Gambling everything on skill makes for addictive gameplay.

Taking the challenge one step further, there are games that force the player to start over when they die once. The rogue-like Faster Than Light offers different situations each time it is played. As each choice could reward or punish the player there is some luck involved, but the ship combat is mostly about skill as a player need to make decisions about how best to control their ship. There is no time to hang around either, as an alien army is chasing the player across multiple maps.

Lastly, I have to mention my Diablo 3 hardcore character that I wrote about last week. After reaching the level cap (no paragon levels though) and making it to inferno difficulty, he was killed by a champion pack of creatures. Despite putting in thirty-seven and a half hours of play into the character, he is now gone forever. This is the challenge that I seek though, and while there are a couple of games with this level of difficulty released each year, it is still not enough to satisfy the hardcore gamer. Challenge need to make a comeback.

Readers, what challenging games have you played recently? Would you enjoy harder games? Let me know in the comments!

This is how Nintendo view ALL of their customers.

Nintendo of Europe Restricts Access to Mature Content

Unbelievably, Nintendo has insisted on making the news for yet another week through the rolling disaster that is the Wii U. Nintendo of Europe has clearly identified their Wii U console as the laughably child-oriented Fisher Price play-centre that it so resembles, by locking eshop access to any and all mature rated content, be it game, demo, or trailer. Such material is only available between the hours of 11pm and 3am, effectively meaning that the majority of content supplied by Nintendo’s biggest third-party backers is inaccessible for all but four hours of the day. Then again, the cynic may suggest that such a dick-move makes perfect sense for a profit-driven company such as Nintendo, whose wares consist exclusively of all-ages appropriate software. For twenty hours of the day there is literally no competition for New Super Mario Bros. U and Nintendo Land. Any attempt to buy Electronic Bioturd’s Mass Effect 3, download a demo for Ubisoft’s Zombi U, or stream a trailer for THQ’s Darksiders II will result in the error message: “You cannot view this content. The times during which this content can be viewed have been restricted.” The best thing about it is that the error message does not even inform would-be customers as to the hours whereat their desired content will become available for purchase.

While it may have pleased Nintendo to lie about returning their focus to core gamers, the truth is that bone-headed measures like this put paid to that notion. Mature content restrictions are just another hassle in a long line of Nintendo’s Wii U cock-ups, which unambiguously mark it as a kiddie console – not fit for serious gaming. Unambitious hardware, three hour battery life, lack of dedicated voice chat functionality, lack of [useless] achievements; the evidence of Nintendo’s deceit only seems to be gathering pace in these weeks following the launch of the Wii U. Meanwhile, Nintendo of Europe for their part have only provided the watery response: “Dear customer, we would like to let you know that Nintendo has always aimed to offer gameplay experiences suited to all age groups, observing carefully all the relevant regulations regarding content access that are present in the various European countries. We have thus decided to restrict the access to content which is unsuitable to minors (PEGI) to the 11pm – 3am time window.”

Note how Nintendo cite European regulations as the reason for restricting adults from accessing entertainment: even now in their personal missives with customers Nintendo cannot keep from telling blatant falsehoods. There is no regulation restricting the hours of the day that digital adult content is available for purchase, as evidenced by the fact that PSN and XBL face no such restrictions anywhere in the world. There is no legitimate reason for Nintendo to paternalistically control the content that is available to their adult customers, and there is no logical reason for them to do this at all, other than in an attempt to drive up the sale of Nintendo’s own first party titles – but then Nintendo titles have never had a problem with outselling the competition ten-to-one. It is utterly inconceivable to imagine that the absentee parents of Europe actually have a legitimate claim to restricting the hours of availability for content simply to compensate for their own laziness, and it is also completely bonkers to think that an 11:00pm curfew will be sufficient to block access to youngsters who have the unfettered run of their parent’s credit card. Moreover, this should be absolutely redundant, given the fact that Nintendo has been compelling Wii U owners to pay a fifty cent fee in order to prove their age bona fides. At any rate, one hopes to see a brick-and-mortar storefront analog to Nintendo’s digital policy, requiring mature titles to be kept behind the counter in nondescript paper bags, just so that adult customers can know that what they are doing is properly unclean and shameful before they slink away, shame-faced, like pornographers into the night.

One cannot envision a future wherein this screen does not play a large part in the next Dark Souls game.

Dark Souls Receives Sequel

Dark Souls, like Demon’s Souls before it, was a robust game. Complex and sprawling with catacombs and hidden byways, yet intricate in level design and gameplay systems. The world was well developed and immersive, while the gameplay itself was finely balanced, and renowned for its difficulty. It is fair to say that Dark Souls was a very ambitious title for a modest studio like From Software, which is why, when it barely sold over one million copies, the franchise was doomed to obscurity, and had to be mothballed seeing as everyone knows that AAA console games need to sell at least five million copies in order to be profitable – or rather, that is what would be said if that myopic industry sob-story were actually true.

Dark Souls is set to receive a sequel due to the reality that selling over one million copies of a well-made game is in fact a respectable and eminently sustainable figure to achieve. Electronic churn-mills like EA may wish to refute this claim, owing to the fact that their perverse mutilation of Dead Space was ostensibly done in service to the requirement of selling five million units just to break even, but this is either an admission of gross incompetence or an outright lie to cover for their obscene and ham-fisted greed.

The announcement of Dark Souls 2 has been the cause of much in the way of celebration among gamers, yet it has also occasioned some disquiet within certain quarters of the fanbase. This is because series director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, has been relegated to a supervisory role, while Tomohiro Shibuya will be filling his directorial shoes. Shibuya has previously worked on the Monster Hunter and Resident Evil Outbreak series, which has provoked fan concerns that he either will not be capable of delivering such a finely balanced hardcore experience as Miyazaki, or worse, will attempt to broaden the game’s appeal, and in so doing will flush the qualities that made the series unique down the crapper. Shibuya himself does not look to have done the project any favours when he stated: “I personally am the sort of person who likes to be more direct than subtle. [Dark Souls II] will be more straightforward and more understandable.”, but then talk of greater accessibility was had when From Software first announced Dark Souls, and that certainly did not appear to have any ill effect upon the quality of the game. Dark Souls 2 will be available on PS3, Xbox 360, and PC.

One can always tell which archival screenshots were uploaded by former staff-member, Jenifer Biggs.

Rumour: Epic To Be Bought by Microsoft?

It is beginning to look as though Epic Games is about to be purchased by Microsoft or some other large corporate entity. This story comes not by way of an inside scoop from an industry deep-throat, but rather by putting two and two together, so it must be taken with appropriate amounts of salt. This week Mike Capps has stepped down from his ten year stint as president of Epic Games. This event would not be overly remarkable if viewed in isolation, yet it comes hot on the heels of the departure of Gears of War senior gameplay designer, Lee Perry, back in July, the resignation of Gears of War producer, Rod Fergusson, back in August, and the resignation of company mascot and Gears of War lead designer, Cliffy B., back in October – representing a fairly significant purge of senior Epic personnel. Similarly, Epic owned studio, People Can Fly, has lost Bulletstorm producer and designer, Adrian Chmielarz, along with Andzej Poznanski and Michal Kosieradzki in recent months.

It is theoretically possible that all of these very important figures within the company simultaneously came to the decision to move on within months of one another. It is also entirely possible that Cliffy B. suddenly discovered humility, and thus sought to flee the spotlight. It does however seem most likely that push factors have played a large part in their decision to step aside, with the most likely push factor being the knowledge that Epic is about to be bought out by a larger entity, and will subsequently be afforded less latitude in the game projects that it is able to pursue.

The situation resembles nothing so much as the mass exodus of talent back when Microsoft purchased Rareware. Moreover, Microsoft would be the predictable suitor for Epic Games due to their historically beneficial relationship, which has resulted in Epic Games developing one of the Xbox 360′s pillar franchises in the form of Gears of War. Taking ownership of the fourth iteration of the Unreal Engine would also allow for the Nextbox to get the jump on brand Playstation, though this factor may prove to be something of a double-edged sword, as failure to kill Playstation outright would result in Epic Games losing a tremendous amount of value if their engine can no longer be used for multiplatform games. Nonetheless, Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot due to their anti-competitive overreach is entirely in keeping with their corporate character. At any rate, this could all very easily be coincidence.

Saxton Hale supports hard mode!

Hello, readers, and welcome to this week’s editorial-word-thing! If my love of Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls were not a dead giveaway, I really enjoy difficult games. Sure, beating games on super hard mode gives a player a lot of bragging rights, and some games attach achievements and unlockable game modes to clearing the harder difficulties, but I, personally, just love the feeling of barely beating a boss or level. There are a lot of ways games can make themselves appear more difficult, and many new gamers fail to see a point in “hard mode” or “game overs.” Hopefully I can shed a little bit of light on both of these areas, after all, it is one of my favorite parts of any game.

So, why do games have “game over” screens? It seems silly that developers would pour months into making their games, praying that gamers can experience and enjoy the entire game, only to include setbacks and difficulty spikes that force the player into a game over, right? A good difficulty curve makes a game more memorable; a player is going to remember the ten game overs received in the final dungeon of doom a lot more than that boss the party killed in a few hits earlier. Any rewards from a difficult spot, especially cutscenes, are going to feel a lot more like rewards, and less like something the game throws at players to progress the story along. The biggest thing to come out of a difficult game, though, is the lack of hand holding the game does. We have all played games long enough to know what to do in most cases, and things like games forcing players through tutorials, pointing players directly to the next quest spot, or respawning players right where they died at simply feel like insults after all these years.

Grinding is never fun, but leveling up is.

Of course, hard games can feel a bit insulting or downright infuriating at times, too, depending on what methods the game uses to spike its difficulty. One of the main ways of making games feel harder, by increasing enemy levels by large amounts, and forcing players to grind, is not even a real increase in difficulty at all; a good RPG should challenge players by forcing them to modify old tactics and come up with new strategies on the fly, like the cliche elemental-weakness changing boss or Demon Wall, not by ripping players away from the story so that they can go punch slimes for ten more levels. Another poor method, which also happens to be from RPGs, is poor balancing of items and skills. Oblivion, for example, is horribly guilty of this; in Oblivion, characters who fight with magic or ranged weaponry are much weaker than a pure face-to-face melee character, and spend a majority of their fights running backwards, throwing spells and arrows at a single target, and the second two or three more monsters join the fight, players might as well concede defeat and reload their last save. To a somewhat lesser degree, games that employ skill trees, such as Breath of Death and Dragon Quest IX, can also cause players to put themselves in a tight spot; since these games give players various skills to pick from upon each level-up, it is possible to pick skills in such a way that characters are much weaker than the game intends for them to be by a certain level or area. In Breath of Death it is possible to give a certain character skills that only work in a single dungeon, while Dragon Quest IX will not say a word if the player tries to pour all of their skill points into a talent tree a character is not able to use. While it is possible for players to research the best possible character types and skill set ups for a game, it is no less frustrating when a player realizes fifteen hours into a game that they picked the wrong skill a few hours back.

Difficulty for action games is a little harder to pull apart. Recently, extremely hard action games have begun to carve out a niche for themselves with games like Ninja Gaiden and Demon’s Souls, and many other games feature optional insanely difficult modes, such as Resident Evil 5‘s professional mode and Muramasa‘s shigurui mode. The same infuriating, horrible, dirty methods of increasing difficulty in any kind of action game are the exact same methods that make these games what they are, . Instant death is easily the biggest issue, though; not only is it a massive slap in the face, but killing players outright removes the stress and fear that comes from being almost dead in favor of pushing players back to their last save point. Being left with barely enough health to survive the next attack, despite how easy the game may be, can make any situation feel like the hardest, scariest part of a game ever, one false step and the player might lose all their hard earned progress so far. Being almost dead is one way the fights in Dark Souls and Monster Hunter seem so fun. Another mixed method is limiting a player’s resources, which is practically a requirement for survival horror games, but in other situations this method can make games feel impossible. For example, the scarcity of ammo in Fallout 3 can put particularly trigger happy players in situations where they are out of bullets very often, there were tons of points in Dark Souls where I found myself wishing I had just one more potion, and Cave Story+‘s hard mode limiting the player to only three HP(read: not very much) makes the game nearly impossible.

The feeling of finally beating hard mode is always great.

Despite how much I may hate some dirty tricks games use to up the difficulty, I still love trying to overcome the hard parts, be it grinding, trying to fix an underpowered character, or limping through a dungeon with no potions left. I would love to see this “super hard mode” niche continue to grow for action games, and possibly even reach the more traditional-style RPGs, but in the meantime, there is always Dark Souls and the Shin Megami games to replay. Of course, there are many more ways games can be difficult, such as throwing players into unfamiliar situations, limiting the players ability to level above enemies in an RPG, and so on, but that is what the comments and future articles are for! What are some readers’ opinions on difficulty or favorite hard games? Does difficulty even make a difference, or does it ruin good games?

Demon's Souls!

By now, most console gamers have heard tales of Demon’s Souls and its brutal difficulty, with its horror stories of ruthless player-killers and impossible levels. Some gamers took these horror stories as challenge to their abilities, giving them a desire to buy the game and prove that it was not actually that difficult. At the same time, however, other gamers were turned off by the difficulty. While it is no cakewalk, Demon’s Souls is never unfair in its difficulty; all monsters have one or two major weaknesses players can exploit, and all of the traps, enemies, and bosses in a level follow easy-to learn-patterns. Thankfully, there are not any overpowered or underpowered classes in the game, instead players are given complete control over character progression, with all spells and equipment being available to every starting class. Sadly, due to Demon’s Souls being two years old, the game’s multiplayer function is not widely used, and those who do use it will be a much higher level than players just starting out. With Dark Souls having just been released the day before this review post, any gamers on the fence about picking it up should definitely try Demon’s Souls out first, and any gamers lucky enough to enjoy Dark Souls on release day should not pass up the original if they are looking for more demon hunting frustration.

Demon’s Souls is hard, at least on the first time through. The enemies and traps within levels always start at the same position, and the enemies’ attack patterns are usually very easy to learn. The enemies in each level do not vary that much, and almost always include a weak poorly equipped monster, a lightly equipped variation of the weak monster, and a very strong or heavily armored monster. Thankfully, due to the small variation in enemies, all of the enemies in a level end up sharing the same weaknesses, and after a few minutes of trial and error in each area players can figure out which weapons to rely on. For example, every enemy in the first level is weak to fire, even the boss. Fans of older RPGs or action games will have no problem figuring out enemy weaknesses and attack patterns.

Believe it or not, that is just a normal enemy.

Not every gamer can memorize the frame-by-frame movement of an enemy, though, and for those of us that have a hard time with it, the RPG elements of the game save the day, while reflexes and memorization take the back seat. Rather than leveling up and following predetermined class progression routes, players are able to add points to their character’s ability scores one by one, making it is possible for one character to wield every weapon and spell without investing much time into level grinding. Along with ability upgrades, players can take each of the game’s weapons through various upgrade trees, creating weapons that poison, burn, or pull their strength from dexterity or intelligence, rather than strength. Most character builds the average player will dream up remain pretty balanced, thanks to the weapon system, and even with high ability scores and a fully upgraded weapon, players will still find the game challenging. Any player looking to break the game wide open for an easy playthrough, however, should consider using a character centered on magic.

The best part of Demon’s Souls is definitely the boss fight at the end of each level. Unlike the long and difficult level leading up to the fight, most boss battles are very easy. With the exception of two fights, the bosses are usually large and slow moving, giving patient players all the time they need to slowly learn the boss’s weakness and chip away at its health cautiously. Like a death anywhere else in the level, dying during a boss battle will send a player crying back to the start of the level, and unlike generic level monsters, bosses hit extremely hard, making defense and evasion an absolute must. Each boss fight is totally unique, ranging from slime blobs, Ifrit-like demons, and massive Gundam-like knights. Sadly, there is no way to re-fight bosses without using the game’s multiplayer functions or New Game+ options.

Let's see a TF2 hat match this!

While the difficulty might be a deal breaker for some gamers already, Demon’s Souls has a few other small flaws. The multiplayer system, while innovative, can make playing with friends a chore; rather than forming parties in a hub city, like most online RPGs, players in soul form can be summoned to the worlds of players in human form, something which requires rare consumable items or the death of a boss to reach. The story of Demon’s Souls is rather simplistic, with only a handful of introductory cut scenes and dialogue to get the player up to speed with the affairs of the Nexus, and while each level has some introductory text to provide back story, the game lacks any active narration for players, meaning players must rely purely on the desire to crush the next boss in order to push themselves through the harder parts of the game. Once a player learns the patterns of the common enemies, the game relies on its levels for the difficulty, which results in some massive labyrinthine levels that require a great deal of luck to finish quickly.

Fans of the Monster Hunter series will likely have the patience to enjoy Demon’s Souls to the very end, but others will definitely have to rely on friends or self-motivation to push themselves through the game. Due to the similarities between Dark and Demon’s Souls, anyone waiting for reviews or price drops before picking up Dark Souls should instead treat Demon’s Souls like a demo for Dark, and pick up a cheap used copy in order to form one’s own opinions on the series, or to hold oneself over until the eventual price cut. For any readers that now find themselves scoffing at the claims of difficulty, or shouting “Entire review is by baby!” in a Russian accent, know that Demon’s Souls scoffs back and will offer anyone with this mindset a challenging surprise.

HERP A DERP DERP!

Today I’m going to talk to you about the difficulty of games. More specifically I’m going to talk to you about the fairness of difficulty in games, and the point at which we should draw the line between a good challenge and user-friendly game design.

It is not the intention of this editorial to critique and pass judgement on game’s like Devil May Cry 3 or Vagrant Story which make quite legitimate use of difficulty to offer a rewarding challenge, but rather to address games which take a dump on user-friendly game design in order to engender a false sense of difficulty.

None of us should be unfamiliar with excessively difficult games. I would wager that the vast majority of the Lusipurr.com Otaku readership would be intimately familiar with the NES era of gaming; for many of you playing Nintendo’s ugly grey box will have been one of your first formative experiences with gaming, while younger readers have probably at least tried their hand at some NES emulation; the point being readers will be familiar with the difficulty incumbent to poorly designed games. From Contra to Battletoads the NES era was replete with ball-acheingly  difficult games; many of which owed their difficulty to unfair or malicious game design, with a small but significant selection which would require the mongloid intuition of an idiot savant to complete without using cheats. The vast majority of us let this slide however; we were kids after all, and similarly the game industry was in its infancy. Lessons have to be learned before they can be taken on board, and thus the eventual gaming success stories had to stand on the shoulders of the INDUSTRY’S numerous failures.

That was then, and this is now. Circa 2011. We have every right to hold games to a loftier standard given the highly competitive nature of the current gaming climate, so now we must ask ourselves; to what extent are we willing to excuse unfair game design? This question does not lend itself to a straightforward answer.

It must be said that one of my biggest pet peeves are the constraints placed on the gamer’s ability to save their progress. The constraints on the saving of game data were likely necessary at one point, but technology has long since progressed beyond the point where a game’s refusal to allow players to save at will can be justified under most circumstances. Picture if you will any JRPG that you have played this generation which featured save points, now realize that their only functional role in games today is based on the game designer’s hope that at some point you will run into an enemy you cannot defeat and have a chunk of your game progress wiped out by being sent back to the game’s nearest arbitrarily designated save point. Or at least in theory this is how it’s intended to work, though as often as not it is life which intervenes, and RL commitments will at some juncture demand your attention, at which point you can either leave your game on pause for protracted periods of time (not recommended for the power hungry modern leviathans of gaming), or you can elect turn your console off, wiping various amounts of progress for any game arrogant and anachronistic enough to utilize a time greedy save-point design in their game.

DUUUUUURRRRR HERP?

Save points in modern gaming is a pet peeve of mine, yet more offensive by magnitudes is the willfully obtuse placement of save points so as to create an artificial impediment to progression by denying the gamer access to a save point when they need it most. A prime example of this is Final Fantasy III. I have played very little FFIII myself, yet I have heard profligate accounts of the lengthy final dungeon’s only save point being located at its entrance. Even in normal circumstances most would conclude that this is some profoundly mean-spirited arsehole game design, yet add to that the fact that FFIII is often held to be one of the hardest games in the series, and then you just have yourself a bad game.

But of course Final Fantasy III has no monopoly on purposefully belligerent game designs, one recent game which brought me no joy whatsoever was Demon’s Souls. Demon’s Souls was a hard game, and that’s OK. I had heard it was difficult, and I was expecting a game of difficult GAMEPLAY. The gameplay itself is challenging but decidedly fair, the game heightens its difficulty by frequently springing surprises on the player, yet this does not manifest in any unavoidable hazard being dropped into the player’s lap. I have no complaints regarding the gameplay de jour of Demon’s Souls, but rather the sticking point for me was the game design which prevented me from spending any of my souls (EXP) until my progression to some arbitrary point in the game that I never reached. Demon’s Souls is a game which goes out of its way to kill you, and yet its designers were so profoundly bastardly that they deny you character upgrade facilities in your initial starting hub. This is why I put down the game. This is why I’ll not by another. It was supposed to be a sadistic game, sure, but this initial roadblock to my progression was just too much. I can only loose my incredibly hard earned EXP so many times before I feel utterly sick to my stomach, and find myself in a foul mood for some hours. Some people will argue that this design decision adds to the old-school charm of the game, but I contend that it’s bad game design.

So far I have only broached instances which I believe to be relatively clear cut in their awful design, yet one other save system design which I am a trifle uncertain about is the use of a deliberately limiting save system in the survival horror era of the Resident Evil series. One is not able to save their games without first possessing a quantity of ink ribbons for the typewriter (save point), and like all commodities in those games they are a finite resource. This essentially means that gamers are only allowed a finite number of saves, somewhere in the order of between fifteen and twenty-five. This would not be a problem in an ideal world where entire days can be devoted to playing the game and saving at appropriate points, yet once again life is rarely so accommodating as to make way for these demanding fucking games.

I am not able to play Resident Evil games as I would other games, it is not really possible to effectively play the games in order to kill a half hour before having to be somewhere, as your limited amount of progression is probably not worth wasting an ink ribbon. There is a huge disincentive to sit-down and play Resident Evil when one has less than two solid hours (at a minimum) to dedicate towards it, this really makes it vastly more difficult to enjoy the games. Allow me to furnish you with an anecdote: several days ago I was playing Resident Evil (GC) and had progressed a little over my twenty or so minutes of play when Lusipurr told me to hop on Skype. This left me with something of a conundrum; do I go to a save point and waste an ink ribbon on a paltry twenty minutes of playtime, or do I just turn off my console and loose my progress. In the end there was only one choice :(.

HUR HUR DEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRP! 8)

Like I said before however, the Resident Evil save system is a feature That I am slightly ambiguous about. I dislike it wholeheartedly, I always have and I always will, yet how does one rubbish it in a game which is based almost exclusively around the concept of resource management? On the one hand it doesn’t seem unreasonable to treat saving the same as every other resource in the game, on the other hand a lifetime of gaming has taught me that it is never good game design when a particular feature makes you want to play a game less.

Finally, the survival horror genre is apt to demonstrate another area of ambiguity within game design; namely the fairness of enemy and hazard placement. In the majority of game genres one would expect every impediment to gamer progression to be sportingly crafted, if the player is playing the game right then every hazard should be avoidable. Not so the survival horror genre, which requires the implicit threat of the unexpected in order to maintain a frightening atmosphere. When the player is unexpectedly assailed from behind (don’t be gross!) then they receive a shock, when the player wanders through some high grass only to find themselves caught in a bear trap they receive a shock, these occasions are absolutely integral to maintaining the experience, yet each time they feel a little cheap and unpleasant seeing as it wasn’t a deficiency in our technique which led to us taking damage.

To what extent then is it desirable to have the player blindsided by unfair gameplay elements? Too little and you have a game like the superb Resident Evil 4, which categorically failed at being scary. Too much and you are left with a game that you put down in contempt; I was rather enjoying many elements of Alan Wake, yet its occasional random battle mechanic felt cheap, nasty and amateurish. Then of course you have games like Doom 3 which attempted to utilize cheap-scare monster closets to such an extent that they became banal and farcical. When you find yourself starting to enter rooms backwards because of the tangible gameplay advantage it provides, then that is a clear sign that there are far too enemy spawns placed behind you. Ultimately a game which loads up on assailing players with blindsides may well be harrowing, yet it precludes the player ever getting the full measure of enjoyment from the game’s combat system, and all but ensures their low sense of efficacy as gamers when making their way through the game. As for me, I think my sweetspot is somewhere in the vicinity of Silent Hill 2 and 3. Unique events are good, but they are a distraction from core gameplay.

At this point I should like to solicit reckons, as per usual I don’t know quite where to come down on many of these game design elements. Can the challenge of negotiating inconveniently placed save points ever justify the heavy demands it makes on your time and patience? Should resource conservation games compel players to ration their saves also? How frequently is it advisable or desirable to to burden players with unexpected hazards in order to establish and maintain a game’s atmosphere?

NEVER FORGET!

Japan has a neux Sakaguchi.

The JRPG industry has not grown complacent so much as actively retreated into its cultural shell, voluntarily ceding the middle ground to WRPGs without so much as a word in protest. The trouble with Japan’s aging population is quite simply that JRPG developers have not matured their craft in line with the increasing age of their former players, but rather have increasingly courted the dwindling younger generation, taking on tween anime sensibilities which have resulted in narratives with all the philosophical depth of an episode of Pokemon (FFXIII). This Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic does not sit well with older Western RPG fans, so it is little wonder that JRPGs are haemorrhaging players to the likes of Bioware.

Zeschuck would be correct in assuming that the JRPG industry are increasingly looking to Western game design in order to bridge this disparity between gamer sensibilities, yet this is a highly dubious approach. Demon’s Souls has been met with much acclaim as a hardcore facsimile of Western RPG sensibilities, while Valkyria Chronicles adopts a TPS mechanic which will feel instantly familiar to Western gamers. Both games use Western mechanics to meaningfully evolve their genre, yet both are thoughtful enough efforts to stand on their own, effectively sidestepping the weakness of the industry.

Square Enix President Yoichi Wada.

On the other side of the equation languishes Square Enix who imagine “MOAR OF TEH BLOOD” equates to a “Square Enix RPG for the world”, hold to the assumption that old man Nier must resemble Frankenstein’s monster in order to appeal to Western gamers, and that the failed sandbox of The Crystal Bearers is in some way representative of the fabled next frontier in Western popularity. This infantile Western tokenism is symptomatic of a developer that has become lazy in its thinking and is typical of Yoichi Wada’s focus group mentality. It is also symptomatic of one man’s effort to stamp out the creative licence of his game designers, going so far as to threaten layoffs for any division not targeting the mainstream in their projects, his director’s artistic discretion being ceded to focus groups resulting in Vann’s imposition on Yasumi Matsuno, and FFXII writer Miwa Shoda being told that RPG narrative is not important as gamers do not expect it, so only the minimum number of event scenes are required. Yoichi Wada is the Bobby Nodick of Japan. When Square Enix is not busy using Western appeal to butcher their games, they can also be found using it to explain away their copouts to an increasingly disenchanted domestic market. They can claim FPS influences all they like, but I have yet to experience a shooter as linear, sterile and uninteractive as FFXIII.

Greg Zeschuck is absolutely correct in sales of JRPGs having softened considerably, and that we shall see some western style changes in their formula, we have already seen this to an extent and there will be more for a certainty. The assertion which I believe requires greater scrutiny however is his implicit suggestion that this will be a positive step for the JRPG industry, that this is somehow their only way forward. Perhaps I am old fashioned in my thinking, but I view the refashioning of JRPG design after the image of WRPGs as a recipe for their remaining perpetually in the shadows of Western developers. Positive change must come from within the industry, if they look to without then they will fail. Destructoid’s Jim Sterling counters Zeschuck’s claim deftly in stating :

The last truly great console JRPG, in my mind, was Lost Odyssey, and it was great because it didn’t change a thing. Meanwhile, you have utter drek like Infinite Undiscovery, trying a brand new battle system and failing because the rest of the game was so crap. If anything, JRPG makers need to stop attempting to be “innovative” and concentrate simply on making a game that doesn’t completely suck.

We need more games designed by this man ...

Lost Odyssey did not attempt to borrow any radically forward thinking gimmicks to reinvent the wheel; it merely nailed the fundamentals of good game design in creating a challenging journey though interesting locations, which told a thoughtful story. In addition to this I would also mention Atlus and their Shin Megami Tensei series in totally debunking the assertion that traditional JRPGs can no longer be enjoyed by RPG enthusiasts. What is so different about the SMT series? I would suggest that the aspect which is key to their consistent quality is the developer’s own keen understanding of their identity. SMT games are unerring in their presentations of thoughtful, darkly philosophical narratives, and are unapologetic in their use of traditional JRPG mechanics.

This traditional focus, far from rendering their battle systems anachronisms, provide for consistently fresh and focused gameplay experiences, owing to the expert polish and balance applied by competent Atlus game designers. This is why you have Atlus being touted as the new Squaresoft even as Square Enix hops from gimmick to gimmick in search of a pre-existing game template that will allow for them to imitate their way to a profit in the West. In short Atlus know who and what they are, and they understand what appeals to their fan-base. They have the integrity to realise that attempting to make your games all things to all people will never ever produce a good game. Square Enix on the other hand is having something of an identity crises and their game design philosophy is in a constant state of flux, heavily beholden to Yoichi Wada’s focus group approach to design. I do not believe it premature to declare that the appeals of Square Enix to Western sensibilities have not been met with any measure of success, while some of the most widely acclaimed JRPGs of recent years have made use of traditional mechanics.

... And MOAR of the things that make JRPGs great!

I would suggest that traditional JRPG design is only as dead as the imaginations of Japanese developers and their shareholders. The genre is in a rapid state of decline, that is undeniable, yet this has more to do with the industry’s unforgivable lack of ambition in pegging their wares to the lowest common denominator. Ultimately this creative deficit cannot be addressed by cherry picking Western game mechanics. But what do you think Lusi-pals? Are JRPGs just as vital as they always were? Are they done for, and doomed to fade from the Western conscious? Or is the true state of the industry’s health somewhere in between? And should the industry look to ape successful Western RPGs?