I am a big fan of Strategy RPGs, in fact my favorite game just so happens to be one. SRPGs just seem to have a way of offering me all the things that I want. I get a lot of joy out of creating a fighting force that is customized to my specifications. Creating a long term plan for what I want my team to look like and then gradually seeing that come to fruition is really fun to me. So when I heard about Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgement, a game that was suggested to me because ever character's stats and proficiencies are directly tied to your actions, I was instantly interested. Of course it's a $15 game from 3 years ago, but I just recently got around to playing through it. Having beaten the game, I thought it was worth taking a look at what it did right and... everything else.
So what does it get right? The first thing that comes to mind is that the battles are all pretty varied. There are a fair number of them for such a cheap game, and very few of them feature the simplistic "kill all enemies / the boss" objective. Even the missions that do have you simply murdering all the baddies almost always have something else to spice things up, often some object on the map that can be interacted with. This can mean a boulder you have to push down a hill, or a flaming brazier you can shove over to block off a path, or a variety of other things. Between those, and all of the treasures scattered across each map, every battle stays pretty fresh. Beyond that, the only other positive thing I can really say about the game is that it's stat system really is quite extensive, offering a ton of potential customization to each character. However... it's not so simple as that.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that Flames of Judgement is a game with a list of issues a mile long, a list that I couldn't possibly sum up in this post. But ultimately, most of the big issues end up relating back to the stat system in some way. Which is unfortunate, because I've always really liked the whole "your stats grow based on your actions" kind of systems. I think the issue Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgement faces however is that it just went way overboard. At a guess, I would say that each of your 6 characters have something like 45-50 stats. These include your core stats, your combat stats, your weapon proficiencies and your magic proficiencies. Many of them make perfect sense and are no surprise. Sure, you get better at using swords the more you use them, and melee attacks while your at it. Sure, your MP and magic stats go up the more you cast spells. The combat stats are just silly though. Why do we need a stat the indicates how much damage you do when you move more than 3 squares before attacking? Or when attacking from a higher elevation? More to the point, why do we need to care about these stats increasing?
As I said, the overwhelming depth of this system ends up causing several issues. For me though, I think what really killed it for me was the fact that, each character has so many stats it's hard to get a good impression of how strong they currently are, and how they are progressing. There is no one screen you can look at and see "oh, he has 12 strength, that's pretty good". In fact, each character has a strength, mentality and agility stat, but as far as I can tell they don't actually do anything but indicate the suggested route the player should guide that character along. These stats never change, and within a couple hours of starting the game the character with the second lowest strength was my best physical attacker. Now this may seem like a small issue, but I believe that in a game such as Vandal Hearts, progression is everything. If you can't get a good idea where your characters stand, then your system has failed. These systems work when you have a good idea where you want your character to go, how to get there, and how far along that path you currently are. Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgement fails to varying degrees in all three areas.
The other big issue to me was simply the game's usability and just the general feel of it. Just about every aspect of the game feels obtuse and lackluster in some way. Sure, I can understand if a $15 title uses still images for it's story scenes. But I don't understand why it takes as long to load some static images as other games take to load entire 3D cities. Why is it that the only time I can save is when in camp, but I have no ability to enter the camp menu myself? Do I really have to fight and win a battle just to save the game? Easily the worst offender in this regard is the game's inventory menu. It's understandable to some degree that it's hard to display so many stats, but it really wouldn't have been that hard to make a more usable menu system. To do just about anything requires you to scroll to a tab within a tab within a tab, then scroll all the way down a menu. Heck, I didn't even know how to equip items until 1/3 of the way into the game because the equipment screen requires you to scroll down to a second screen, but offers no indication that you can do so.
In the end of the day, Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgement is a game that exudes mediocrity from every pore. I could spend all day typing and still not list every minor issue I take with the game. You'll notice I didn't even mention the game's plot or it's characters, but I've detailed the most offensive issues here. Ultimately it's a game that is at it's best mildly interesting, and at it's worst an obtuse sack of annoying. Much of that is forgivable in a $15 title, but the most grievous issues plaguing the game are as a result of bad decisions and bad design, not because of a lack of budget. I'm glad that I did play the game, however. It's games like Flames of Judgement that we learn the most from - games with a few interesting ideas followed by a massive list of things not to do. With that said though, I wouldn't recommend it if you are looking to y'know, have fun with your video game.
So I've been on a bit of a Fire Emblem kick for a while now. A couple of months ago I finally played through Path of Radiance, and following that I made my way through Awakening. More recently, I'm in the middle of re-playing plain old Fire Emblem, the GBA game from 2003. I've found it kind of interesting to look at how the series has evolved over the past 10 years. Of course the series didn't ever leave Japan until 2003, but since then it has picked up significantly more widespread appeal. I can't help but feel like several of the changes made to the series since then were made in the interest of appealing to the new fans rather than the old. So with that said, today I wanted to talk a bit about choosing characters, and why it was better back in the day.
Fire Emblem is a series that I have been a fan of for about a decade now, about as long as it has existed in North America. So you can imagine that I was pretty excited at the prospect of a new title on the 3DS, especially considering Radiant Dawn came out way back in 2007. Fire Emblem is just one of those series that speaks to me, it has interesting characters, tactical combat, immersive worlds, and yet remains a pretty simple product on the surface. Unfortunately I had to wait a couple months after it's North American release to pick up my copy of Awakening, but all is well. I have my copy now, and I'm just about done with it, so I thought I would share my thoughts on the latest installment in the Fire Emblem series.
The first thing that makes this title stand out from the rest of the series is simply the degree of freedom and customization one has over their characters. It's actually somewhat reminiscent of Sacred Stones in this, and also in that you can spend time fighting non-integral battles for experience. Awakening has three main systems for customization. Firstly, every character has a pool of classes that they can change to, and subsequently learn skills from. Each person typically has about 3-5 classes they can access, and it's interesting choosing which classes to spend time in, which skills to pick up. Each character also has 5 total skill slots, giving a pretty high degree of customization per character. Even beyond this though, is the ability to marry characters together. Doing so eventually gives you access to a new character in the form of their child, who inherits potential classes, base stats, stat growths and even a couple skills from their parents. It all combines for a pretty complex system that allows for a lot of long term planning.
While I'm a huge fan of the customization Awakening allows, the unfortunate fact of the matter is that the positives to this game more or less end there. That's not to say everything else about it is terrible, just not quite up to par with the rest of the series, in my opinion. Ironically, the very things that make the game so fun (to me anyways) also have a lot of not so great repercussions. It all comes down to pacing, really. Fire Emblem games typically ferry you immediately from one battle to the next with some storyline in between. In Awakening you can spend hours messing about, grinding baddies, playing DLC, fighting spot pass teams etc. While having all of this extra stuff to do can add a lot of meat to the game, it also completely removes all efforts at pacing. What's more, how you choose to build your army matters a lot less when you have as long as you need to make up for your mistakes and grind your weak characters. If you are like me, you end up so absurdly powerful that the story missions are a joke. Even the story suffers. Goofing off for hours between chapters removes all intensity from the plot. I really cared about what happened to the worlds of Elibe and Tellius, but the story behind Awakening feels really weak, I don't feel engaged in it.
Beyond the actual storyline behind whatever world Awakening takes place in, I feel like the characters themselves suffer a lot from this games open-endedness as well. For one thing, each character being able to re-class into so many different classes really hurts their individuality. In previous titles, a character's class defined who they were. When you can so easily switch a character's class, who they are starts mattering a whole lot less. They stop being a person and start being "Mercenary #3". It doesn't help that graphically, each character is only distinguishable by their head. In their base class they have a unique body, but as soon as they promote that goes away. Every Sage for example, friend or foe, has the same body, which just gets weird. It's especially odd when that body has physical characteristics that the character in question really shouldn't have, or varies drastically from that of their previous class. I personally consider this a much graver sin than any palette swap ever was..
Sadly, the character issues don't end with individuality, either. One other way that Awakening bucks the series' norms is in how it handles support conversations. Often times in the past, each character would only be able to support a handful of other characters. What's more, each character could often only get a limited number of supports. Neither is really the case in Awakening. Characters can support just about anyone else (from their own generation, anyways), and there is no limit to how many supports a character can have. This also ties into the marriage system, in that marriage occurs when two characters reach an S level support. At first this seems like an overwhelmingly good thing. It means support options aren't so restrictive, and each character has an incredible amount of dialogue with which to build their personality and relationships. What's more, Awakening doesn't resort to having pre-canned generic conversations like Radiant Dawn did. However the sad truth is that in the end of the day, the result isn't significantly better.
The problem lies in the fact that each character has precisely one defining characteristic, and the pure volume of writing that has to be done for each possible combination. Seeing how each character would interact with another is occasionally interesting, but after seeing several supports it invariably begins to tread old ground rather quickly. I get it, the mage is studious. The thief likes candy. The archer is a flirt. It would be nice if support conversations dug a little deeper like that, as has been the case in previous games. When it comes to romantic relationships things aren't any better, either. Because there are so many marriage options, the pairings are often quite unconvincing. I didn't see a single proposal that wasn't painfully contrived. Yet, each support feels like it's leading towards marriage. Even if a character is already wed, anyone else who gets an A support with that character will seem to be blatantly flirting. It's like characters in this universe don't know how to have a friendly relationship with the opposite sex without throwing a ring at them.
In the end of the day, Fire Emblem Awakening is a very odd game to assess. The level of planning and strategy it affords is significantly higher than previous installments. Yet, every other aspect of the game feels significantly more shallow. If there was ever a question that Fire Emblem should stay a linear game, I think Awakening proves the point. Being able to go off the beaten track totally ruins the game's pacing, both in terms of challenge as well as in removing intensity from the plot. Having characters that are so flexible and support conversations that are painfully generic lead to uninteresting characters that lack individuality. What's more, being able to level up at will removes any danger that your characters will ever die. Combined, I found I just didn't really feel like I cared all that much about my characters, or the world for that matter. Even the battles themselves feel less strategic and more like going through the paces.
Fire Emblem Awakening isn't a bad game, it just isn't good in the same ways that previous titles were. It's not a game about strategic battles, interesting characters and a tense war for power. Those things are there, they just take a back seat. Awakening is all about planning out your characters, watching them become beastly, and then spending $3 on DLC maps that take 20 mins to beat. A part of me wants to see what the game is like on the more absurd difficulty levels; maybe more challenge would solve a lot of the game's problems. A larger part of me feels like I've had my fill of this particular title. It's a quality title, I'm certainly not disappointed to have played it. It just didn't scratch the itches I expected from a Fire Emblem title.
So a few months back I wrote a post comparing Devil Survivor to Ni No Kuni. In said post I essentially sung the praises of Devil Survivor (and denounced Ni No Kuni), but the thing is, at the time I had only played about 8 hours of the game. Since then I have played about 20 hours more of the game, and being just about done, I wanted to to give a more complete impressions on the game. Needless to say, that is where this post comes in. I feel I should note that my opinion of each game (and which is superior) has not changed at all, but there is certainly a lot more to say about Devil Survivor now.
So before I go on, let's recap what I said in the aforementioned post. The long and short of it is that Devil Survivor has very deep gameplay. It has several mechanics all designed around the concept of building a cohesive team of demons with a large degree of customization. Said mechanics are also introduced at a pretty snappy pace, you get just enough time to figure out each mechanic, and it doesn't take forever to introduce them all. That customization isn't that easy to achieve though, as it typically requires demon fusion, and thus a lot of thought has to go into how best to achieve the desired results. The result is some pretty cool SRPG combat. 20 extra hours of play hasn't changed my opinion of this aspect of the game one bit. If anything, it gets even deeper as you go. Even without adding more mechanics, just the number of demons and abilities you get access to continually adds to the depth of the demon customization.
Aside from the gameplay, one big thing that I wanted to point out about Devil Survivor is it's story. While it's presentation is very simplistic and it starts off just like any other JRPG, Devil Survivor actually has a surprisingly striking narrative. Three teenagers randomly get the power to fight demons and save the world, but they are also trapped in an area of Japan with no power and no cellphone service, with thousands of other people (most of whom cannot fight said demons). As the days go by the people trapped in the "Yamanote Circle" become more desperate and dejected, the demons get more aggressive, and unbeknownst to most, some unknown disaster is looming on all of them. What's so impressive about all this though is just the way each person react to it all. Their responses feels very realistic, and seeing the way each person handles the situation creates some pretty powerful moments. There is something very profound about the way that, in the middle of this battle against demons, mankind is still their own biggest adversary. Amidst all this, the decisions that the player can choose also really makes one think about the moral stance they want to take on things. It's all a very interesting situation, and I didn't expect it in a game with such a by the book opening.
Unfortunately, things are not all rosy in Devil Survivor town however. The game suffers a lot in the area of difficulty. Of course there isn't anything wrong with a hard game, but the way in which Devil Survivor gets it's difficulty is somewhat problematic. Personally I really enjoy the battle system, I spend time fighting battles just because they are fun, and as a result am almost always sitting at about as high a level as you can be at any one point in time. Given that, I found fights which are just your team versus a bunch of demons to be pretty simple across the board. Problems arise in two different situations however. Firstly, there are several fights in which you have to protect NPCs. Second, boss fights. Granted, there is a difficulty option, but you can only choose your difficulty at the beginning of the game. I'm not about to start a new game because I'm stuck on a hard fight 25 hours in. It also doesn't help that there is no way to skip dialogue, so every time you fail a mission you are forced to sit through several minutes of dialogue before trying again (often including dialogue options, too). But let's get to the two aforementioned issues.
Now when i say there are fights in which you have to protect NPCs, I'm sure every game out there knows instantly where I'm coming from. Everyone has played at least one game in which you have to protect some flimsy, incompetent NPC, or suffer a game over. Devil Survivor is little different. Killing the enemies is no problem, but making them not kill the NPC is a different story. What's worse is that said NPCs invariably start a long way from your party. This means that the challenge in this mission basically becomes nothing but "hope the NPCs don't die before you can get to them". This results in some pretty frustrating losses, because when you fail it feels like you got unlucky and/or there was nothing you could do better. It doesn't help that the NPCs rarely go where you would like, but this does make some sense in the narrative at least. Your party summons demons, it makes sense that civilians would be confused and perhaps scared of you. It's also kind of neat narrative-wise that you spend so much time trying to save other people, but none of this makes their incompetence any more tolerable. The final nail in this particular coffin is just the frequency with which you encounter this kind of mission. At a guess I would say that somewhere in the vicinity of 20-25% of missions involve someone from their own stupidity.
Which leaves boss fights. Luckily there aren't anywhere near as many of these. It sounds kind of weird to say that boss fights are too hard, seeing as of all the fights in a game bosses should be hard. Where Devil Survivor goes wrong is just the fact that the bosses are so much harder than everything else you fight. One would expect that if you are completely and utterly wiping the floor with every other enemy you encounter, you should at least stand some chance against a boss. You would be wrong though. There isn't a single boss that didn't give me huge amounts of trouble, despite being ridiculously over leveled. The problem here is that, if you aren't capable of at least putting up a good fight against a boss that you have to beat to advance the story, then the game shouldn't allow you to get to that point. The fights leading up to that boss should be challenging enough to prepare you for it. If you are struggling against the rabble, you know something is wrong. If you breeze through the rabble, then the boss becomes an impassable wall which you smack head first into. It's called a difficulty curve for a reason. It's supposed to be a curve. Devil Survivor's bosses provide some of the biggest difficulty spikes I have ever experienced. On a slight side note though, I did like how in the case of one of the harder bosses, the game really drives home the fact that they use fire long before you ever face them. It gives you a ton of time to think ahead and prepare your team accordingly. I still got slaughtered when I fought him though.
Ultimately, Devil Survivor is still a very fun game. It gives me all the things I want in a game, and I'm very glad to have played it. It has convinced me more than ever that I really need to just dive into the Shin Megami Tensei universe. It's definitely a game with some serious issues though. There aren't a lot of them, but I feel that crushing difficulty is definitely going to get in the way of a lot of peoples' enjoyment of this title in the long run. It's not a game that even pretends to be trying to appeal to anyone but the JRPG fanatics though. Some people are looking for that kind of difficulty. Honestly, I feel like this game is niche enough as it is, so maybe it's ok that it's so hard. It's not a game I ever see myself playing against though.
A little while ago I wrote an extensive post detailing all of the things that Ni No Kuni does wrong. The short version is that, it's a good game but is it has terrible compantion AI, terrible pacing, tries to do too many things with it's combat and is very repetitive. The reason I mention this is because of the other game I've been playing recently: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor Overlocked. While it's a much simpler game with no exploration, no puzzles, simple graphics, almost no animation, etc, I feel like it succeeds in all of the places that Ni No Kuni fails. So I thought I would take some time today to explain my thinking on the matter.
To begin with, let's look at how Devil Survivor works, and why it's similar to Ni No Kuni. Basically, Devil Survivor is what you would get if you mixed a monster collecting game like Pokemon, and a strategy RPG like Fire Emblem. In battle you have up to 4 characters, each of whom leads it's own unit consisting of themselves and two demon companions. The player moves around the grid-based map and engages opponents in battle. Upon entering said battle, the game transitions to a turn-based combat system wherein each member of the two engaging units can use one attack. Beyond this, there is an "extra turn" system, wherein each combatant can earn an extra turn (or cancel the opponent's extra turn) if in this combat phase they hit an opponent with an element they are weak to, score a critical hit, or are just really fast. The way that this is similar to Ni No Kuni is simply in the monster collection aspect of things. While you don't tame demon's, just about every opponent you face in battle can be obtained for your own use. Furthermore, there is a big focus on building a cohesive team by choosing the best demons to place on your team.
Before I get too deep into how the monster systems compare though, I want to talk a bit about the rate at which new mechanics are introduced. As I stated in the other article, Ni No Kuni goes at a slugs pace. Several hours pass between each new mechanic. More to the point though, it feels like the game goes out of it's way to show you why you need this ability before it finally bestows it upon you. The result is basically just frustration all around. Before you get whatever ability, you feel frustrated. It's obvious something is missing and you are being forced to do things the hard way. When you finally do get this new ability, it's a sigh of relief or a "Now why couldn't they have given me this 3 hours ago?". In Contrast, Devil Survivor has a much choppier approach to doling out the goods. Devil Survivor's new mechanics are also all based around the mechanic of improving your demon party through customization. Between the speed and the fact that each mechanic builds upon the last, acquiring some new ability feels way more fulfilling than in Ni No Kuni. The feeling is more along the lines of "Wait, I can do what now? Wow, that's cool, I can't wait to give it a whirl!".
Now then, on to the matter at hand. When it comes to the whole matter of building a team of monsters, there is one main thing that I look for. I want to be able to look at the available allies, easily discern the basic strengths, abilities and weaknesses of each, and with that knowledge compose a team that has the highest possible effectiveness in the most possible situations. I'm a sucker for customization and planning long term. Ni No Kuni has none of this. Customization is minimal, and each monster has way too many factors to consider, making it next to impossible to put together a team that really complements each other as best as possible. You could certainly put together a good team, but it often involves ignoring a monsters elements or astrological sign. On the other hand, Devil Survivor strikes a wonderful balance with it's mechanics, despite having just as many or possibly even more. I suppose you could say it has depth where Ni No Kuni his complexity. It's mechanics complement each other rather than get in each other's way. It's pretty easy to put together a team that wrecks fire monsters, but is really weak against electricity. You could also then solve that by changing out monsters (which you can do in between encounters, even) or even fusing demons together in such a way as to remove weaknesses. Want a healer in this team, but your spellslinger knows no heals? Well, it's not too hard to teach them one, no matter who they are.
These are just some examples of how Devil Survivor does things better. I could go through a ton of specific examples, but I think you get the point. Devil Survivor is all about putting together a team that works well together. Exploiting your enemy's weakness is quite literally a core mechanic. The games goes to great lengths to accommodate your ability to do this by customizing your crew through interesting methods. Ni No Kuni is bogged down by trying to do too many things which get in each others way. In the end of the day a lot of people just end up going with whatever they think is the coolest. Which has merit in it's own I suppose. The fact that you can beat the game using pretty much whatever monsters you want will appeal to some. It's certainly not deep, compelling gameplay though. That about sums the comparison up, actually. Ni No Kuni is all flash but little substance, whereas Devil Survivor is all substance and no flash.
