Review #414: Shadow Hearts - From the New World

 It's a new Shadow Hearts and a brave new world.

 The Shadow Hearts franchise had proven itself to be a top-notch series of JRPGs for the Playstation brand, and what started as a spin-off turned into the final installment in the series: From the New World. It's... it's a mixture of familiar and new things, of which your mileage may vary depending on what you liked about the series.

 Eurasia was an interesting setting, but now we turned our eyes to North America and South America. You play as Johnny Garland, the game's protagonist... although he only becomes the protagonist on the game's final stretch. After a run-in with the occult, he joins Shania, a Harmonixer that strips down in order to fuse, something that Yuri didn't need to do, because Japan and her bodyguard, a gun-tooting native american named Natan. The cast only gets crazier from there, Mao, a female giant cat that knows drunken kung fu, works for Al Capone and trained Frank, our resident American trained in Brazilian ninjutsu, and then we've got Hilda, the game's resident Vampire who has a slim form, curvy form and a third peach pink bat forms depending on how many calories she sucks from her enemies, and lastly, Ricardo, a Mariachi that plays serenatas for the entire party in order to buff them.

 The game almost never takes itself too seriously, and even when it does, the game relishes in its ridiculousness. Which is a bit disappointing, I loved Shadow Hearts horror elements, and they are almost gone from the game, it seems only bosses show vestiges of its horror roots. The game also tried to make you feel sympathetic towards Lady and Killer, the latter being named simply 'Killer' because he is a Serial Killer... yeah, it didn't really work. It also went full Japan on the fanservice, of which I'm not a fan. The game is almost unrecognizable as a Shadow Hearts game, and the characters weren't very compelling, although the game's final hours are a bit interesting. It's a bit short too, I clocked little under 30 hours, and I did everything in the game except Mao's subquest and even spent some time grinding.

 If you've ever played a Shadow Hearts game you know the deal: Explore towns and dungeons, random encounters, turn-based battles, the Judgement Ring to perform attacks, spells or use items. The Judgement ring is a timing-based mechanics of sorts in which you must press the X button when a marker passes over a highlight area of the ring, if you wish to deal extra damage or even pull off your action entirely. Why change what isn't broken? It works well, it's fun and not even half as tedious as it sounds. It also brings back the customization aspects from Covenant, so each character can have different types of Judgement Rings, enlarge the highlighted areas or add secondary effects to your attacks.

 Spells work a bit differently, now you must find 'Stellar Charts', of which each character can equip one of them, this being charts with different slots in which you can put spells into. Slots have different levels and affinities, so you can't just put spells willy nilly, although you can tweak this slots, for a fee, at the store. It's alright I guess, I think I preferred the crest system, but I've not complaints with the charts. The Sanity system returns: Characters have three gauges, Health, Mana and Sanity, and every turn a point of sanity is lost. Lose all your sanity and your character goes berserk. To be honest, this is the Shadow Hearts in which Sanity mattered the least, I had Johnny, and only Johnny, go berserk once, and only once in the entire game.

 What changed, for the better, was combos. Now characters can store 'Stocks', up to two of them, by attacking or receiving damage. Stocks can be used to pull off combos, so characters no longer need waste a turn, and with it sanity, or stay close together. You just use a stock and boom, combo. Stocks can also be used to perform a double attack, or even a double attack combo. If you play your cards right you can even defeat bosses before they even get a change to do anything! The system is beautiful, but be careful: Enemies run under the stock system too! There're special forms of attacks(Heavy Attacks) that consume stock in order to take away stock from the enemies(Or from you, if an enemy does it!) and even a few spells that steal stocks. You must also think out your combos, since different attacks and spells will change the altitude of your enemy: Air spells won't work on a grounded enemy and ground spells or attacks will miss on a floating enemy. The combat system is easily the best it's ever been thanks to all the different, and fun, mechanics and depth.

 Sidequests are numerous and varied, and every character has his and her own handful to complete. And you should, at least for the characters you use, since it's the only way for them to earn new special moves and their ultimate equipment. That said, a ton of these have been made rather inconvenient. Take the Ring Spirit, the NPC that grants you modifications to add more attacks on the Judgement Ring, now you must bring every Ring Fragment that you find back to New York, whereas in Covenant you just had to find the Ring Spirit and be instantly rewarded. Or Natan's subquests, it's not enough to talk to the NPC once, then you must hunt the UMA, then you must return once again to the NPC for your reward, then you must progress through the story some more and go back to the NPC's location, rinse and repeat. There were a few too many 'Go to A then B then A then C' subquests too. I mean, some of Covenant's quests could be a bit tedious, like the one involving ghosts, but it seems that most From the New World's sidequests are as tedious as those few boring quests from Covenant.

 From the New World was a bit hard for me to fully digest. It's got the best combat system in the franchise, and making combos is a blast, but the story was so forgettable and as amusing and unique as the characters were, I still didn't feel engaged with them, I had a hard time being invested in their plights or shenanigans. Losing almost every horror element was also a tough pill to shallow, everything is so cheery and happy now, even more than Covenant. So many sidequests were annoying too, and as much time as they make you waste the game still ends up being rather short for a JRPG. Still, this is a quality JRPG, it simply falls short of the bar that Shadow Hearts 1 and Covenant set.
 8.0 out of 10

Now Playing: Ultimate Spider-man(GBA)

 Could it be?! Could it actually be... a good game!?

 Spider-man 2 on the PSP was next on the queue, but since I can't be bothered to wait any longer, let's jump right into the Ultimate Spider-man games. Well, so far the handheld Spider-man games have been unimpressive. Myterio's Menace was really good, but they dropped the ball afterwards. Ultimate Spider-man uses the same ugly 3-Dish graphics oh so many games of the era used, like Mysterio's Menace, yet as ugly as it is... it just might be the best handheld Spider-man yet.

 I just finished the first issue, or 'episode', and it was pretty good. Levels are kinda mazeish, but everything is very well defined so it's hard to get lost, and the addition of a compass is everything these games needed. The combat is decent even if enemies are a bit cheap, and I like having upgrades to find in every level. So far it's looking impressive.

Review #413: Spider-man 2(Playstation 2)

 A fistful o' web.

 Treyarch's Spider-man 1 was a very poor attempt at emulating the great Playstation 1 games. Poor controls, poor camera and a few really poorly thought out stages. With another movie comes another tie-in game and Treyarch once again helmed the project, but this time they created a thing of beauty, but every rose has its thorns.

 As is to be expected the game follows the story from the second movie: Scientist Otto Octavius is a tragic victim of an accident that binds a 4-tentacled machine to his spine and loses his wife, and now he is angry and will stop at nothing to finish his experiment. They also added a few new plot threads following the exploits of Spidey's rogues such as Quentin Blake and Rhino. Divided into 16 chapters, albeit on the open-world city of New York, the game is somewhat short... but there's a lot of busywork involved if you wanna make it all the way to the end. That said, I think I prefer this world to the movie's, since we get to interact with more character from the world of Spider-man while still being a somewhat faithful retelling of the movie's plot.

 The game works entirely different from previous Spider-man games, not only thanks to the new open world structure! Combat has been redesigned: Square punches, triangle shoots web and circle is used to evade whenever you see the 'Spider-sense' signals over Spidey's head. Truth be told, the game is pretty much a button masher, and by today's standards, the combat looks a bit sloppy... but it works fine for the game that it is. Pressing triangle midway through your punches will create combos, like hammering to the ground an enemy with web. You can use your web to pull your enemies in any direction, and with upgrades, you can web more than one enemy at a time. Not to mention that there's a fair amount of air combos and it's very easy to pop enemies into the air by using web or combos, both which can be done while you yourself are in the air! It's a lot of freedom, and while you're mostly mashing, it's fun and fits the character. L1 can be tapped to enter Spider-Sense mode, in which your attacks do more damage and it's easier to do land hit as enemies are slow down. That said, later in the game enemies will start dodging your webs and punches, so you will have to rely on dodging and punching, so every single encounter turned into waiting for the enemy to attack, dodge then use the spinning bird kick(Thank's Chun Li!) on them, since it's unblockable and cover a wide-area. It's the best way to deal with baddies, sadly, since a lot of the almost free-form combat quickly turns obsolete.

 But where the game really shines is how they overhauled the Web-head's means of transportation. R2 will shoot web towards the nearest building(No buildings means no web, and short buildings mean short lines of web!) and allow Spidey to swing, and won't let go until you jump, press Jump or press circle near a building to stick onto it. You can even tap R2 quickly again to stick to two different buildings and use the web as a Spider-man slingshot! While Spider-man no longer sticks to surfaces automatically, the circle button allows for more comfortable swinging and can even be used in conjunction with the dash button to run alongside a building's wall! Traversing New York is a blast, and it only gets better as you get the hang of dashing, using charged jumps after a swing, learning to stick to a wall after running on it and buying swinging speed upgrades. There're a few kinks, like Spidey's dashes being somewhat uncontrollable, a camera that sometimes requires manual correction and how stick onto ceilings now shifts the camera with Spider-man, instead of allowing you to look down below as you moved around, but they are mostly nitpicks as movement works, mostly, like a well-oiled machine, and you can learn to get over its shortcomings.

 So, as far as gameplay goes, it sounds like a bonafide title, don't it? I mean, mini-missions like saving cops, rescuing balloons for helpless children, stopping joyrides and what not will give you something to do at any time you play the game, there're plenty of upgrades to buy, races around the city to challenge and even hidden tokens to find! Well, turns out that in order to make any progress in the story you have to forcefully partake in these activities and grind points. It gets very repetitive very fast. I will grant it that, even as repetitive as these random activities got, I still played four hours straight on my playthrough... but by the end of the game it gets downright ridiculous, requiring 50000 points to access the second to last level and another 50000 to access the final level. At least those are the bonus chapters. It's recommended that you save off finding tokens, challenging races and the Mary Jane missions for these final two chapters, as those are the activities that give the most points. Regardless, they turned such a fine, fun game into a chore. Padding at its finest, it seems that they were scared that the base game wouldn't have been enough... and how mistaken they were. It's sad, because I was having fun repeating these identical side-activities in order to buy every new upgrade, but once they force you to do it, it starts getting annoying.

 Spider-man 2 on home consoles is a classic, it redesigned Spider-man games for years to come, it turned into the gold standard upon which other Spider-man games would be judged and turned open-world roaming into a feature that would be sorely missed if not used. That said, I can't forgive how repetitive tasks get when you are forced to grind in order to progress. How repetitive the once fun combat gets when enemies start dodging everything you throw at them and must rely on the same repetitive strategies to defeat them. Regardless, it was a bold move for the franchise that paved the way for a brave new world of Spider-man games.
 7.5 out of 10

Now Playing: Spider-man 2(Playstation 2)

 I tip my hat off to you, Treyarch.

 I remembered Spider-man 2 pretty fondly, although not as fondly as Ultimate Spider-man, and it's pretty good, but...

 But first things first, well friggin' done, Treyarch. Spider-man 1 was a mess that was trying to follow in PS1's Spider-man's footprints, but they did away with that and made an entirely different game... and it was a stellar success. All the things Spider-man could do with his web worked well on the cartoony PS1 games, but it makes sense to remove them since this is going after the more realistic movies. The combat's the best it has ever been, while there's only one attack button, the web button can be used for some pretty spiffy combos.

 But the star of the show is easily the web-swinging. It's so much fun to zip around New York, and I'm pretty sure it's gonna get even better once I unlock the rest of the speed boosts.

 What I'm not sold on, and something I didn't remember, is having to farm Hero Points to progress. These might, MIGHT become a chore, but let's see...

 PS: I'm almost done with Shadow Hearts 3. Almost.

Month Overview: June 2017

Tally:
Shadow Hearts - Covenant 9.0
Suikoden II 9.0
Gungrave 6.5
Tony Hawk's Underground 7.5
Midway Arcade Treasures 3 7.5
Jersey Devil 6.0
Hidden Invasion 2.0
Spider-man(PS1) 7.5
Spider-man 2 - Enter Electro 7.5
Spider-man - Mysterio's Menace 7.0
Spider-man(PS2) 3.0
Spider-man(GBA) 4.5
Spider-man 2(GBA) 4.5
Spider-man 2(DS) 4.0


 Spider-manathon began this Month! And we're off to a rather mediocre start. The PS1 games were pretty good, but as soon as we jumped ship to the PS2, it sunk, it sunk deeeeeep. The first gameboy advance was pretty good for what it was, it's funny because it's pseudo 3-D sprites are downright hideous, but it is a good game! And then came both movie games, which look league and bounds better... but made levels even more mazelike, added time constraints and turned the gameplay into a scavenger hunt rather than a traditional side-scroller, much to the games' detriment. Spider-man 2 on the DS is particularly bad about it, but it felt even more tedious that time around, tacked-on touchscreen controls didn't help its case. The good news is that now we've got Spider-man 2 and Ultimate Spider-man, both on the PS2, which I remember being particularly good, Ultimate being the last Spider-man game I had played, and my favorite.


Game of June 2017:

 A game deserving of every bit of praise it gets, Suikoden 2 features a rather deep storyline, with interesting characters and twists. So much so that Suikoden V, which borrows from almost every game in the franchise, borrowed the most from Suikoden II and, in my opinion, pulled it off even better. That said, Suikoden II did it first, and what a treat it was.

Runner-up:

 Shadow Hearts Covenant is easily one of the PS2's finest JRPGs ever made. The story is interesting, characters are endearing and the combat is a blast. I feel about this game kinda like how I feel about No More Heroes. No More Heroes/Shadow Hearts had made up in personality and style what No More Heroes 2/Shadow Hearts Covenant polished up in the gameplay department. So while the gameplay is much better, it's also missing a bit of the personality that made the first entry so fantastic. So long horror elements, you'll be missed.

Review #412: Spider-man 2(DS)

 Yet another subpar entry in the ever growing library of handheld Spider-man games....

 We've danced this dance before, Spider-man 2 on the DS is everything that has come before on the Gameboy Advance but under a new coat of paint. A pretty coat of paint, but it's the same ol', same ol'.

 Once again, this is a very loose retelling of the second game based on the second movie, it even uses still of the game instead of the movie itself. Which means that the game isn't very faithful at all, and you'll see a few faces that didn't make it into the movie. The game should take you about an hour and a half to finish, more if you want to torture yourself and unlock everything.

 The worst part about previous games was the fact that they were 2-D scavenger hunts on mazelike level while under time constraints, well, hope you like'em because this game is exactly the same. I mean, only a few levels have a 'real' time limit, but if you want to get an A rank you will need to be fast. And believe you me, there's no chance in hell you'll get an A on your first time through, and probably, not even on your second run. And you'll want an A rank if you want to unlock special moves, but frankly, 7 of them are useless, the only one worth using is the impact web, and you start the game with it. Alternatively, you can put a Mysterio's Menace cartridge on the GBA slot of the Nintendo DS and gain access to all eight moves, that's what I did.

 Spidey can punch and kick with the A and Y buttons, X slings web towards whichever direction you are holding, which will propel you towards whichever object it hit, if it hit any. L is used to engage in 'Spider-Sense', when an enemy is about to hit you markers will pop up on Spidey's head, pressing L at that moment will slow down time, which is pretty neat and useful. This being an early Nintendo DS game means that there're forced touch-screen minigames. Every single boss has an attack which will have you pop that stylus out of its socket in order to hit objects, and then clumsily put it back before the boss sucker punches you. Fun.

 Every single issue this game has comes together in the last level. It's long, filled to the brim with bottomless pits and obstacles and enemies which will throw you helplessly into the pits. You have to web-swing through gaps in the floor, but be careful not to get hit by a flying enemy that there was no way you knew was coming. Oh, and you have to find 12 computers to deactivate. And if you die you have to start from scratch. And each computer involves a touchscreen mini-game. Which you must repeat if you die. Because it's very easy to die in this level. But there're no checkpoints. And you have to find everything in the friggin' maze again. Because the game sucks.

 Yeah... Spider-man's debut on the DS is pretty sad. It's sad, because controlling Spider-man is pretty smooth, and if the game design was any fun, it could've been a really good game. It also looks very pretty, so it's a shame to see it flop so hard.
 4.0 out of 10

Now Playing: Spider-man 2(DS)

 What's with Spider-man and mazes?

 Why? Why can't I have a single portable Spider-man game that isn't designed around finding needles in haystacks? It isn't much fun having to go round and round and round again searching for the single thug that's outta my sight. Worse, if I want to unlock the special moves I have to finish the stage as quickly as possible. Poor game design is poor.

 At least the game is rather pretty, swinging around is fun and the combat is serviceable. But I've had my feel of half-assed scavenger hunts on mazes while under time constraints. It's not fun, it wasn't fun then and it won't be fun ever. Ever.

 At least it's better than both movie Spider-man games on the GBA.