Secret of Mana

Well, I said I would review this one next and it's time! I have also beaten Uncharted 1 since my last post so that will probably be the review after this one. I played Secret of Mana co-op which I believe was a positive experience, it probably wouldn't have been as fun single player (though I would have gotten through it faster).

Secret of Mana

Overall:

Secret of Mana is an old action RPG for the SNES that I believe has gotten a re-release on the Wii virtual console (probably easier/cheaper to get it there then to find it for the SNES). I'm reviewing the SNES version, I don't know if there are any significant changes between the two. Anyway. You play as The Boy, he has no default name to my knowledge and neither do the Girl or the Sprite. You're going about your business in your village one day when you hear a voice and fall into this weird little pond of waist deep water that you can't climb out of for some reason. While trying to find the exit you come across a rusty sword and use it to fight off wild life. When you get back to the village you find out it's the famous Mana Sword and taking it is a huge taboo. They kick you out of the village but let you keep the sword. From there you kinda wonder around until you find the Girl and the Sprite and get wrapped up in a quest that involves the fate of the world. The Girl acts as a white mage and the Sprite as a black mage though both can still do melee damage decently (though not quite as well as the Boy). The game was made by Squaresoft in 1993.

Pros:

The game's strongest point and probably the one most people think of is that it's cooperative and you can get your friend over to take control of one of the other characters (+1.00). A big deal back then and still pretty sweet today this makes the game a lot more fun when you have someone else to help you. Not sure if you can multi-tap to get someone to control the 3rd character.

The game is an action RPG with an interesting melee mechanic where you have to wait for your stamina or whatever to recharge after each swing so you can't just swing constantly, you have to time your attacks (+0.25). You also soon get the ability to upgrade your weapons and can charge up for a stronger attack (+0.25). Again, do you wait and charge up to a high level for a powerful single attack or do you hit them as soon as your stamina is back (Hitting them before your stamina is back isn't really an option as you'll do like 1/10 the damage if that)?

The game does give you a good number of different weapons to use and they do work somewhat differently so you get a bit of variety. You need certain ones in certain areas like the whip to cross chasms or the sword or axe to cut down certain obstacles. They do it enough that you'll have to change weapons sometimes, but just shy of getting annoying about it (+0.25).

I do like the leveling system for the magic, the more you use it, the better it gets. This isn't completely positive such as when you end up being forced to use a magic you hadn't leveled enough but since leveling it isn't terribly hard this usually means you go kill some wild life with the magic till you get it up a level or two (+0.25).

+2.00

Cons:

The storyline is pretty nonsensical. I don't know if the Japanese version is like this too or they just sorta half-assed the translation (-0.50). I think it might be the latter as I often get the gist of what a character is trying to say, but it's still sorta rushed and vague. Jema appears out of nowhere to help you (with advice and never in combat) and all you get is some story about mana fading and having to go to water mana temple place. It's usually just enough to point you to the next destination without telling you really why you're going there.

Your ally's computer AI is a bit lacking. You can set it to various settings, but it doesn't seem like it has a huge difference. They still seem way too timid in approaching any enemy that you aren't engaging, but when you want to run past enemies they'll want to stop and fight the ones near you. Not a huge problem except in areas with winding passages (like most of the last dungeon) where they'll stop long enough that you go around a bend and then when they realize they need to move on they're stuck and can't figure out how to reach you (-0.25).

Late in the game there is a sudden and unexplained jump in the level and equipment they expect you to have (-0.25). When you have to go to the Pure Land everything there is suddenly able to kill you in 2 hits or so, the boss in one. Unless you know to go back to the previous area and look behind the pyramid to find the armor salesmen selling stuff that literally doubles your stats, you're pretty much screwed. If he wasn't hidden it wouldn't be so bad as you go there right after you beat it to talk to Jema.

Part ways through the game you get a means to fly and quickly visit all the previous areas. It's sorta odd as until this time you never saw the world map (except briefly when using the canons) and they really fumble here. You can't locate cities by name and since you've never seen them from a world map perspective you have no idea where they are or what they even look like. You can look at a 2D map but that doesn't even show towns on it, just geographical features. This does end up providing a lot of frustration when you spend 20 minutes trying to find the most recent town you were just in so that you can buy new stuff or advance the plot (-0.50).

The side plot with the 2 stooges and the chick in charge of them was sorta random and never ended up going anywhere (-0.25). They just showed up to send a monster after you when the game designers felt you needed a break from the main bad guy. I don't think they worked for the main bad guy, their motivations never really came to light other then they were vaguely bad and pulled monsters out of their ass for you to fight.

-1.75

Overall Rating:7.25/10

Assassin's Creed 2

I recently beat Assassin's Creed 2 for the 360 and thus figured a review was in order. I also beat Secret of Mana (finally) so my next review should be for that. Yes, the SNES game, shut up.

Assassin's Creed 2

Overall:

Assassin's Creed 2 is the sequel to Assassin's Creed (who would have suspected that?). You follow Desmond Miles a regular guy living in the near future who is living out parts of his ancestor's lives via a machine called the Animus. This would be rather boring if his ancestors were bakers or tailors or whatever and we're fortunate enough that his ancestors happen to have been assassins who were involved in a secret ongoing war against the Knights Templar which are still around and into the whole world domination bit. In the first game you were captured by modern day Templars and put into the Animus so they could find where your ancestor had hidden a powerful ancient artifact. This time you escape and are helping the modern day assassins to discover where other pieces of Eden are as well as find out some historical information. You control a different ancestor this time, Ezio Auditore, in Renaissance Italy. Ezio is trying to unravel a conspiracy that involved his family (I'm being vague here to avoid plot spoilers) and in the process discovers his family has a proud assassin heritage that he must take up in order right wrongs.

Pros:

This game fixed a lot of the repetitiveness that was the biggest complaint against the first game (+0.75). You no longer have to gather intel on your target via the same handful of mini games, you find out who your targets are as part of the story and the mini games are gone.

They've added a lot of new options to combat as well (+0.50). You still have a knife, a sword, throwing knives, and your hidden blades but you get a second hidden blade for double assassinations, a gun for powerful ranged kills, poison for killing a person without them even knowing, smoke bombs to escape (overpowered like crazy, you get 20 seconds to kill everyone around you), and even throwing sand in your opponents eyes when unarmed. Like much of AC2 they kept the general mechanic from AC1 and refined it and gave you some more options.



As far as sneaking around goes you get a few new options. You can now blend in with more then just the traveling monks or their equivalent in a Muslim controlled city. Any crowd of people can allow you to blend in (assuming the guards aren't actively chasing you with line of sight) (+0.25). In addition you can hire prostitutes to distract guards that guard key areas (but not to have sex with), thieves to mess with the guards which causes them to chase after the thieves and effectively does the same thing as the whores, or mercenaries who you can tell to engage targets which makes a fight a lot easier since if you go up an enemy engaged to one of your mercenaries you can stab him in the back for an instant kill (+0.50).

You can also throw money to distract low level guards and citizens which will cause them to flock to the area (+0.25). I assume this would be good if you're trying to escape and wanted to slow down guards but I usually made a run for the rooftops and tried to lose them there.

They have a handful of extra little optional side missions you can try to accomplish for money such as races or assassination contracts from Lorenzo de Medici (+0.25). These bring in money that you'll be spending on inventory upgrades allowing you to carry more throwing knives/poison/etc. and on healing yourself at nearby doctors as well as on your Villa.

The Villa is a neat little project you get to work on throughout the game (+0.50). It serves as your home base but you can upgrade parts of it such as certain stores by paying money. Upgrading stores gives you a discount on them but the real advantage is that you start making money based on how much your Villa is worth which depends on how much you've upgraded it. Also every weapon or armor you buy adds to the Villa's worth as they are on display (where you go to change weapons/armor) as well as the collectible feathers you can find throughout the game. In fact most everything you buy that doesn't get used up like smoke bombs counts towards making your villa better. You see your town start looking better as you upgrade it too. Granted you'll end the game with more money then you know what to do with, but this isn't really a problem.

The assassin tombs are a cool little sidequest (+0.25). You have to do the first one, but after that in every major city you go to you can find one or two and upon finding the entrance you're tasked with a slightly more challenging puzzle/platforming section then usual and rewarded with some money and an assassin seal. If you get all six you unlock the best armor in the game that turns you a cool shade of black (much like Zero's armor).

I also liked the hidden chests that would be marked on your map if you bought a treasure map (+0.25). Good source of money but you still had to track them down. Reward for effort that made you work for it, but not to a ridiculous degree.

The puzzle involving the 20 glyphs founds throughout the world. "Subject 16" the guy before Desmond left clues to some secret hidden truth. You find these glyphs and have to solve a few ciphers or where's waldo type puzzles and you're given a half second clip of a video and usually some background information on the Templar's actions throughout history (+0.50).

Fist fight with the pope (+0.25). Enough said.

+4.25

Cons:

I miss the lengthy scenes when you assassinate a story character (-0.50). It still cuts to you talking to your target in limbo, but they say like one line and you tell them to rest in piece and it's over. I also sorta miss the lead up, they still have it a bit, but it feels less epic when you go to kill one of the conspirators, less of them put up a fight and just sorta run which is less satisfying (-0.50), and the ones that do fight aren't very tough to kill (-0.25). Granted an old man shouldn't be super hard to kill, but even some of the young physically fit ones just sorta go down without much fanfare.

Also they made the years fly by, like over the course of the game ten years go by (and then another ten near a time jump at the end) but if they didn't tell you the year at the beginning of each memory sequence (aka chapter) you'd assume the game happens in approximately 6 months to a year (-0.25). They do it so the events and deaths of the characters that exist in history match up to when they actually died and I don't know why it bothers me. I guess it just feels weird when Ezio knows where the next guy he needs to kill is and waits two years to do it (-0.25).

The feathers are the new flags from the first game. This time there are 100 spread throughout the game. They're just as much a pain in the ass to find as the flags were (-0.25). You apparently get a reward at 50 and all 100 but I ended up with maybe 36 or so and had zero interest in getting the rest. Not a huge complaint since it's entirely optional. I'm hesitant to dock points for a feature that is completely optional but here the problem was they missed the opportunity to do what they did with the hidden treasure chests and mark them on your map once you had bought a map (-0.25). I would have been much more willing to look for them if they marked them on your map or even just had a small circle showing which part of the map they were in.

-2.25

Overall Rating:9.0/10

Lame Game Tropes

I figured I was long overdue to write a little side entry on some aspect of gaming instead of just reviewing games. I'll probably come back to this again, but what I'm doing is basically "Stupid crap you see in games that I find annoying". This could range from a mission type, to a type of level theme, a kind of enemy, or anything else that I feel is too common in games. Now of course there are always exceptions to the rule but these are problems that are usually annoying the majority of the time they pop up. These again, are things that bug ME, so if you like some of these things I'm not saying that you have to hate them too.

1.) Escort Missions:

Along with timed missions this is one of the first thing gamers think of when it comes to mission types that suck. The idea behind it is simple, generally keep some character or characters alive that you don't control as you move from one point to another. The problem comes in due to bad AI in the escortee as they will often run into combat (Remember that battle in FFT where you have to protect that chick on top of Riovenes Castle?), get stuck on some object in the environment and leave themselves vulnerable, and generally suck at protecting themselves assuming they have any ability to do so whatsoever. Escort Missions are the worst.

2.) Timed Missions:

No list like this would be complete without timed missions. These often come in two types- the ones where you have so much time to complete them that the timer might as well not be there (End of Metal Gear Solid for example), and the ones where you will pull your hair out trying to do every part of the level just perfect so that this can be completed in time (Any of the rooftop races in Crackdown). A bad camera or shoddy controls can make these excruciating. Also bonus annoyance points if there is no way to start over if you screw up in the beginning and have to wait out the clock before you can try again.

3.) Underwater Levels:

Underwater missions or levels or anything really usually are pretty terrible or unusually difficult. This stems from the fact that generally a game won't be made with these types of game play in mind and someone comes up with the brilliant idea to tack one on. Kingdom Hearts had an awkward example of this in the first game. Most Zelda water temples are thought of as a pain in the ass. Underwater levels give the user a new dimension to move in that they're not used to while also slowing down movement, both can be annoying especially when they could have spent their time making a decent regular level. Also that sonic drowning noise will haunt me forever, and I never even really played much Sonic.

4.) Defend an area for X amount of time:

Similar in nature to escort missions you have to protect something for a certain amount of time. In this case it's usually a building, a computer terminal, etc. that is doing something important. Maybe a character is hacking a computer and you have to defend her and the computer (like in Goldeneye) or maybe reinforcements are coming to save YOU and you have to hold out until they get there. These aren't usually quite as bad as escort missions as you don't have to worry about some bullshit jumping out at you and in RTS games you could build units and defenses around it in some cases so that you're basically defending your base like usual. But otherwise they suffer from some of the same problems. Additionally in cases like this you have to face an infinite number of guys til time runs out, you can't kill them all.