While I had my Xbox controller out and the PC all ready to play games, I figured I may as well keep on chugging away at PC games that I've been meaning to play for ages. Eastward is a game my partner got me on Steam a good few months back, so it's been one I've been meaning to play for quite some time. I'd only ever heard good things about it, and though I wasn't *super* familiar with it, from what little I did know, it seemed right up my alley. It took me around 23 or so hours to beat the English version of the game while doing as many side quests and such as I can.
Eastward is the story of John, a miner living in the underground town of Potcrock Isle, who one day finds a little girl underground. Taking on the name Sam, this strange, white haired girl who he found in a strange yellow pod underground quickly becomes close to John, and they spend their days at the mines as John works out a meager living for the two of them. However, Sam's adventurous spirit combined with the turning hand of fate quickly make things difficult for the two of them, and they're forced to journey, as the title says, Eastward, for better or worse. Eastward was a game I absolutely bunched in with games like Undertale or Omori (two games, mind you, I haven't played) when it came out. It wears its inspirations on its sleeves, and the Mother/Earthbound series is very transparently one of them (to the point there's even a game-within-the-game called "Earth Born" that you can play). However, unlike many other Earthbound-inspired games, Eastward shares its genre with its other big inspiration, The Legend of Zelda, and with its other main inspirations very clearly being Japanese anime like Studio Ghibli films (as if the extremely obvious Hayao Miyazaki didn't make that clear enough), it certainly sets a quite high bar for itself both narratively and mechanically. Narratively, unquestionably so, I'd say it really lives up to the task it sets out for itself. Where something like the Mother series often uses a tale of growing up to communicate about the main themes of the respective title, Eastward uses being aged to do that. Honestly, I'd say the Studio Ghibli inspirations feel a lot stronger than the Mother/Earthbound inspirations in this regard, since the overall messaging and themes veer more towards contemplations on daily (especially family) life rather than the larger philosophical themes that Shigesato Itoi's works usually focus on. Eastward's main themes of responsibility and guardianship really impressed me. There's so much care and attention focused around the the different aspects of leadership and adult life (whether it's being the head of a settlement, a loving partner, or a parent to a child), it weaves a nuanced and heartfelt story masterfully. It's a story that's not afraid to get dark, but it's also a story that is never needlessly cruel or gratuitous, and that's something else I really appreciated it for. Eastward is easily one of the best written games I've ever played, and it's definitely one of my new favorite stories in media, hands down. While the narrative of Eastward may be more in the vein of a Studio Ghibli film, the gameplay is unquestionably more along the lines of The Legend of Zelda. It's a top-down 2D action/adventure game where you go through dungeons, solve puzzles, do sidequests, talk to townsfolk, all that good stuff. That said, given that this is a more linear game where backtracking to old areas is generally impossible, I suppose you could say it has more in common with games like Illusion of Gaia than Link to the Past. As a big fan of these types of action/adventure games, I found this to be a really fun one! The dungeon and boss design is really good, and the pacing of the story vs. action segments is also handled very well. There's a fair bit of side content to involve yourself with as well, and you very well might want to, because this is honestly a pretty tough game quite frequently. You can swap between John and Sam on the fly most of the time, and you can even split them up to operate them independently for puzzle solving. Sam has some attacks, but her main arsenal is a ranged stun move. John is your main pummeler and dispatcher of baddies, and his melee attack of a pan combined with the several guns you get over the course of the game will be how most bosses and such are fought. Rushing blindly forward into battle is often not the best course of action, however. John will step forward with each pan strike, which will usually stunlock most lone enemies, but it's not very helpful for fighting groups. Using Sam to stun enemies as well as dealing out your ammo (your guns all draw from the same pool) and bombs wisely is the key to surviving combats well, and the large enemy variety and well designed bosses make combat always something that's fun, even when it's hard. The game even has a very clearly Breath of the Wild-inspired cooking mechanic to top it all off, so you can always sure up your health bar with big healing items should you need to. On the whole, Eastward's mechanical design is just as well thought out as its narrative design, and that is to say: absolutely excellent. Aesthetically, Eastward is part of the modern trend of pixel-art indie games, but it's a *very* nice looking one of those. The music is fantastic and compliments each area and scene very nicely. The pixel art is also beautiful, and the enemy and especially NPC design is done so well that it brings each area to life in a way that feels different from the last. So many small touches and flourishes to each NPC, especially Sam, had be grinning ear to ear more times than I can count in just how well they add character and voice to a game with no voice acting. To that point, the localization in this game is REALLY well done. I honestly never would've guessed this game wasn't written originally in English with just how well done the dialogue writing is, and this Shanghai-based indie studio could frankly teach a lot of AAA publishers a thing or two with just how much care and attention can really bring a game to life in a new language. I'll finish this review off with talking about the game-within-a-game, Earth Born. Rather than being some tacked on little mini-game, Earth Born is a properly fleshed out little game (as well as a not super subtle framing device for the rest of the game), and a really competently put together little rogue-lite RPG. *This* is where the Earthbound-inspired mechanical design is, and you, the knight, have 7 days to train up, get equipped, and assemble a party before the demon lord's ritual is complete. It's a pretty involved little game, and you could easily spend a ton of time learning its ins and outs and optimizing routes if you were so inclined. You can also get little in-game amiibo-type things in Eastward to use as extra items in Earth Born if things get too tough (and I know I needed them), but you thankfully never actually *have* to play Earth Born for any real period of time. I played it once and got lucky enough to get the normal ending in it (but good gods was it close), and that single full playthrough took me almost an hour! With how good Eastward already is, Earth Born is just icing on the cake and one more thing to get invested in if you're so inclined~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is the 3rd year in a row that I've ended up playing something very early in the year that becomes an all-time favorite game. Two years ago it was Dandy Dungeon, last year it was Disco Elysium, and this year it's Eastward. Eastward is a master craft of storytelling and an excellently put together action/adventure games that's absolutely deserving of standing tall amongst its inspirations. Not many dev teams could've put together something that works this well, but these folks have managed it, and I'm super excited for whatever it is they put out next. If a bit of difficulty doesn't turn you off to it, this is one you definitely don't wanna miss out on if you're at all into quality story telling in games or 2D Zelda-likes because it's one of the best non-rogue-like indie games out there right now, as far as I'm concerned.
0 Comments
Closing out the Quintet trilogy of action/adventure games on the Super Famicom that I started last year, I finished Terranigma just at the start of the new year~. Now, unlike Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia (two games I really loved), Terranigma is a game I knew almost nothing about but have heard great things about for years and years. As long as I can remember, this has been held up as one of the best games on the Super Famicom, as well as one of the best games that never made it to North America. Finally getting a good excuse to play this game in particular was one of the biggest reasons I started playing through the Quintet trilogy in the first place, really. Regardless of any other feelings I may've had on this game, it was very interesting to finally get a taste of the game that people have been praising for all these years. It took me about 17.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states.
Terranigma, or as it's known in Japanese, "Tenchi Souzou" (lit. Creation of Heaven), is the story of Ark. A young man living in the secluded forest village of Crystalholm, his whole life changes one day when he breaks down a forbidden door and finds Pandora's Box (and its resident scrimblo, Yomi) inside it. This sets off a chain of events that sees the elder of Crystalholm sending him on a grand adventure through the underworld. First, a mission to restore the continents of the overworld, and then a quest to guide the newly restored world to life again by saving its residents' souls. It's a story that, in its broader strokes, is very similar to the other two games in this trilogy, and in many ways it honestly feels like a strange midpoint between Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia. However, that comparison is good as much as it is bad. Actually, scratch that, it's actually much more bad than it is good ^^; Terranigma isn't written by the same person who did Illusion of Gaia (weirdly enough, Illusion of Gaia seems to be the only game that person has ever written, actually). It was written by the same writer as Soul Blazer along with a co-writer. Now however well their writing may've worked for a relatively smaller game like Soul Blazer, it really does not work nearly as well for a much larger game like Terranigma. The narrative pacing of this game is absolutely dreadful, with massive swaths of the middle of the game (I'd say from like the 20% mark to the 70% or 80% mark) having little to nothing to do with the overall themes or premise beyond "it's something else for Ark to do to restore the world or just progress through the map". That in and of itself isn't usually a bad thing, mind you, as not every game needs to be this grand epic that tells a meaningful story. Terranigma, however, IS trying to be this grand epic that tells a meaningful story, and just how many characters and thematic beats it tries to cram into its last leg comes off very poorly with just how little time we've had to get used to these characters and what they believe in. Even Ark himself, present through the entirety of the game, comes off as a really weirdly written character because he just so infrequently actually gets lines to give his character any sort of meaningful depth over the course of the narrative. There's a kinda sweet love story in here somewhere, and I think there's even something about the nature of good & evil and the cyclical nature of history and the universe, but it gets so confused and hurried at the end that I honestly had a lot of trouble trying to figure out what this game was even going for. Part of that is due to the game's own clumsy writing, sure, but part of it is also that a LOT of this game just feels like a far more poorly done rendition of Illusion of Gaia's story. That game actually had a well paced narrative with characters slowly and thoroughly developed throughout it, and the lack of that narrative writing ability really hurts Terranigma's overall story (not to mention makes it look very poor by sheer comparison in the first place). Terranigma also has some pretty bad issues with casual racism (particularly towards African Americans and First Nations Peoples) as well. This is something Illusion of Gaia kinda struggles with, but it's WAY worse here. It's hardly the worst instance in the world, granted, and it's certainly not the biggest issue the writing has, but it was so distracting that I couldn't leave it unmentioned here. At the end of the day, though, Terranigma just isn't a very well told story. The bones of the narrative are largely just a poorer replay of Illusion of Gaia's story, sure, but that didn't need to be its death knell. It could've been a perfectly fine story just living here as a vacuum separate from its predecessor, but even divorced from its lack of originality (within its own series), the lack of care and attention in how the story itself is executed causes a lot more harm than any amount of copying Illusion of Gaia's homework ever could. On a gameplay level, we're kinda stuck between good and bad here as well (though more so leaning towards bad in a lot of ways that matter). In a vacuum, this is (seemingly) easily the best playing of the trilogy. The ways Ark can jump around, dash through enemies, use his run button (which we finally have) to zip from place to place, it all amounts to a game that feels very nice to play around in compared to the previous two games in the series, both of which felt like you were in some way locked to a grid. You also have a neat magic system where you find blue crystals (Magirocks in English), and they act as a sort of total mana. You buy magic rings at vendors (you have a money system now!), and how many Magirocks you have dictate how many total rings you can carry around. One ring is one use of that spell, and once it's spent, you get thost Magirocks back to "spend" again, not unlike spell slots in something like Dungeons & Dragons. We have lots of big, impressive bosses to fight, and there are tons of different weapons and armors to collect to give yourself different elemental damage & status effect resistances and strengths. However, despite just how far this laundry list of mechanical advancements may make it seem like we've come since Illusion of Gaia, these successes start to fall apart under closer scrutiny. A lot of areas are quite close quarters, so your nimble character doesn't feel like his speed in combat is particularly useful compared to how fast his enemies are. Boss design in particular is quite bad, frankly, and I cannot begin to count how many bosses (including the very first one) not only did MASSIVE amounts of damage compared to enemies in their area but also had quite unclear methods on how to even damage them in the first place. Dodging attacks, getting nuked down in seconds, and waiting very annoyingly long times between opportunities to be able to hit the boss at all are something that plague the fights in this game terribly, and that goes especially for the dreadful final boss. The bosses in this game aren't so much "not fun because they're so difficult" so much as they are "not fun because they're often just as boring as they are frustrating", and that's not something I can even begin to say for the other two games in this series (at least in their Japanese versions). None of this is helped, of course, by other bad choices or clumsy implementations of other mechanics. The jumping is a "neat" new mechanic, sure, but that doesn't really solve how the platforming in this game just overall kinda sucks. Walking on (or god forbid walking onto) ropes is an overly fiddly experience at the best of times, and most of the jumping that *is* here is either barely necessary or far more frustrating than it needs to be. The painstaking put together magic system is also just basically useless as well. Rings don't cost *that* much, but they cost more than enough that they'll add up very quick with how limited their uses are. They're generally also very ineffective compared to just pummeling things to death, and they're often not too useful for bosses either. On top of all that, unlike the previous two games, enemies respawn as soon as you leave and re-enter a room now, so using a big magic spell to forever-kill a difficult enemy isn't a consideration anymore either. Factor in as well that the level design and signposting are awful, so you're going to spend a LOT of time being lost and re-wandering around areas over and over. I reckon I spent about 4-ish hours in total lost over several points before I just looked up a guide for it, and I recommend following a guide for this game in general, frankly. To top it all off, the game even has a DREADFUL stealth section full of guards who use have random patrol patterns in areas almost always clearly not actually designed for stealthing (as they're often reused from other castle areas in whole or in part), and it's no small miracle that I managed to get through that section as quick as I did without using save states. On the whole, I found Terranigma's gameplay thoroughly mediocre. It's hardly the worst on the system, sure, but it's a huge pile of bad-to-just-okay implemented systems that do a lot more harm than good compared to the more simple but polished experiences offered by its predecessors. Aesthetically, at least, this game is very very nice. It's a Super Famicom game from 1995, and damn does it look like it. From environments to NPCs to enemies to bosses, this game looks absolutely incredible, and for all the other bad things I can say about it, the graphics are outstanding. The music is also quite good, but it leans more towards atmospheric tracks than the previous two games. It's not a bad soundtrack, but it's my least favorite of the three, at the very least. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I wish I could only chalk up how hard this game is to recommend on sheer disappointment. I had heard a lot of great things about this game over the years, and with how much I enjoyed the previous two games, I was excited for a grand crescendo to a great trilogy. But with how bad stuff like the boss fights, signposting, and stealth section are, there are much larger caveats to recommending this game than simply "well it's not as well executed or written as the previous ones". Terranigma is a very pretty game, but it's just not a very good one. While it may not be an outright bad game, you'll honestly be better served playing one of the many other better games in this genre on this platform than trying to have a Just OK time trudging through this game's missteps. Continuing on with the Super Famicom's Quintet trilogy, this was the obvious next choice to play after Soul Blazer. Now this is a game I actually have played some of before, but I only got like a third of the way in and it was a LONG time ago. I'd also heard a lot of things over the years about how much worse the English version was vs. the original Japanese one (in a very standard mood for an Enix-published title), so I was very interested to see what the original version was like. It took me about 12 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states.
Illusion of Gaia is the story of Temu, a young boy who lives in a coastal town and spends all day hanging out with his buddies. He's always had strange, telekinetic powers, but he's a kid like any other, and as soon as he's able, he's vowed to go out and find his father who disappeared a year ago when he left town to search for the Tower of Babel. After the kingdom's princess flees to his town and hides in his house, he and her become fast friends, and before they know it, the king has imprisoned Temu and they've all started onto a grand adventure to save the world. In grand Enix fashion, I've heard many times over the years that this is a really poorly translated game in its English release. I've heard it described as outright nonsensical, even. The Japanese version, on the other hand, is actually a surprisingly really well written story. It's a really thoughtfully written tale about growing up, and I really loved how it tackled themes of discrimination (and while not perfect about it, it's a lot better than even a lot of games now get these sorts of things, frankly). Illusion of Gaia is a story very concerned about life, death, and just what you spend the one life you have doing. Life is never a completely pretty thing, and good people do bad things all the time for all sorts of reasons. What sort of life you lead and what you get from it, as well as what you do to others, is what paints this grand tapestry we call life. It's got some similar execution problems to Soul Blazer in how it doesn't always use music as well as it could to set certain scenes, but the story was nonetheless a really excellent one, and it's easily one of my new favorites on the console. It's just a shame it's nowhere remotely as good in the English release ^^; The gameplay is once again a sort of Zelda-like, but with generally stiffer feeling combat as well as a transformation gimmick. Temu can turn into the dark warrior Freedan at save points in dungeons (and even another transformation much later into the game), and the respective powers of the different transformations are used to solve puzzles in dungeons. The boss and puzzle design isn't quite up to par with something like Link to the Past or other 2D Zelda games, but it still makes for a quite fun action game even if the adventure parts are more centered around the story writing than the exploration in towns and dungeons. Speaking of which, there are significantly more towns in this game than in the last one, but they're largely for painting scenery and for telling the story. This is still a game with no money system, and you also don't level up with EXP like you did in Soul Blazer. Instead, clearing all of the monsters in a room gets you an upgrade to your max health, your attack power, or your defense power, so there's a hard limit to how great your stats can get in this game. There being no money also means that there's a hard limit to how many healing items you can get, and I've heard many a tale of how important it is to save your healing herbs in the English version to be able to deal with the harder bosses (which are MUCH harder in that version than in this one). The Japanese version, at least, had quite a nice difficulty curve to it, and while it's a bit harder than Soul Blazer and has no option to grind for power (though you can grind for extra lives, for whatever that's worth), this version should be eminently completable, especially for people familiar with the genre. The presentation here is once again very good. The graphics are very pretty, and each location looks very distinct. NPCs and monsters are also very expressive and cool looking respectively, and the UI on top of the screen that shows monster and boss health is super appreciated for a game like this. While the UI design may've moved on from just copying Actraiser, the quality of the music is thankfully still just as strong as ever, and Illusion of Gaia has a soundtrack very befitting of its legacy. Verdict: Highly Recommended. At least for the Japanese version, this is a game I can't recommend enough. It's a real shame that the English version is so much poorer, because it's honestly one of the strongest games on the system when it's actually written the way it's supposed to be. The action may not be the strongest on the system, but the story more than makes up for that (despite the imperfections and casual racism ^^; ), and this is absolutely a game worth checking out for action/adventure and 2D Zelda fans. Known as "Soul Blader" here in Japan, I've been meaning to get to this game and its two sequels for quite some time now, and a simple sort of Zelda-like was just what I was in the mood for after all of that N64 playing earlier in the month. I honestly had virtually no idea what this game was even like, but its reputation was good enough that I was willing to take the chance regardless. It took me a bit under 8 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states or using a guide.
Soul Blazer tells the story of a heavenly guardian come down to the world to set things right. The great demon lord Deathtoll was summoned by humanity, so the souls of just about every living thing have been sealed away by his dark minions. It's your mission to head down there and set things right again. While the story's presentation is quite of its time (that being quite simple and without much use of scene-setting music), it's actually a surprisingly well written story dealing with how there can always be hope in the world despite how eager humanity can be to march towards its own demise for personal enrichment. It's not exactly the best story on the Super Famicom or anything, but it was one I enjoyed nonetheless, and it's nice to see a more well considered story in a Zelda-like like this. While I do call this game a Zelda-like, it's honestly much more like Ys 1&2 and Gauntlet had a baby that was then raised by Actraiser XD (which makes some degree of sense, given that this was made by the guys who made both Ys 1&2 and Actraiser). It's a top down action game much like Gauntlet or Dungeon Explorers, and you go through dungeons killing all the monsters in an area. Upon killing all of the monsters out of a certain spawner, the spawner will explode all on its own, and walking over it will destroy it and free the soul of the being trapped in it. Upon returning to the town of that particular area (of which the game has seven), you can talk to these beings (be they people, animal, or plant) and receive information, goodies, or just a simple thank you. This game has no money, so your goodies you find generally fall into being either new equipment (armor, swords, or spells), or just the power gems that you collect to power your spells. It's a pretty simple gameplay loop overall, but it's one that works really well regardless. It'll probably be a bit of an easy game for some (though the English version is a little bit harder), but I found its challenge to be juuuust right for me as a veteran of the genre. Even if you are having a hard time, you gain experience points from killing monsters, and there are always monsters that aren't connected to spawners that simply respawn when you enter and leave the screen, so simple EXP grinding to power up more is always an option if you're having trouble~. The presentation of the game is really stand-out excellent. As mentioned earlier, we're taking a LOT of stuff from Actraiser, as almost all of the sound effects and even significant bits of the UI seem to just be copied directly over from Actraiser. Heck, even the way enemies get stunned slightly after hitting them is right out of Actraiser XD. Thankfully, not only is the Actraiser stuff very good and functional, so reusing it here is hardly a problem, but we also got a banging soundtrack too! This game's soundtrack was awesome, and there was barely a new area I got to where I didn't say out loud "oh hell yeah, this song rocks!". The graphics are also very pretty, though they're certainly of the time for a '92 SFC game. Verdict: Highly Recommended. With a nice little story and really fun and balanced gameplay, this is a super easy recommendation. If you like 2D Zelda-type stuff at all, then this will likely be a game you quite enjoy, and you don't even need to be super good at these sorts of games to beat it. An awesome action/adventure game to spend a weekend with, if there ever was one~. |
Categories
All
AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
|