Games

[Jedah]

English Title: Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

Japanese official site is up:

http://www.konami.jp/gs/game/dracula_ds3/

[icycalm]

There's two videos on the site now, one with cutscenes the other in-game, and a bunch of screens.

Everything looks stylish as hell. The illustrations, the cutscenes, the sprite and background work, animation... wonderful stuff. What a beautiful game! Even the site design is awesome.





Comes out October 23 -- one week before Thunderforce VI.

[icycalm]

Same as the second video on the official site, but enlarged a bit (that is to say upscaled), so you can better make out what's going on:

<embed src='http://v.egloos.com/v.sk/egloos/f0045321|626760/20080726170700000421211701' wmode='transparent' allowScriptAccess='always' allowFullscreen='true' width='480' height='400' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' flashvars='skinFile=egloosSkin.swf'>

Source: http://postback.geedorah.com/foros/viewtopic.php?id=703

[Jedah]

Some familiar enemy sprites, but still an autumn must buy for me. The only Konami games I still buy when updated. MGS are hardly games and Pro Evos lost their charm when they welcomed the FIFA crowd...

[mothmanspirit]

I want the parts of the soundtrack for this game played during some important moments in my life. It's that good.

The game itself: it's kind of bad, at the beginning, at least. I mean, this is the most interesting thing that's happened so far, notable because it manages to stand out as the most boring: a floating octopus thing attached to my head and took away all control I had over my character while he slowly sapped at my health. This lasted thirty fucking seconds!

The levels are also boring, being mostly flat rooms with some skeletons and bats.

[JoshF]

A friend with reliable opinion of this type of thing told me that it in fact gets worse as new abilities are learned that take away any challenge and thrill in maneuvering enemies.

[Jedah]

I have finished the game a couple of months ago. It's the weakest of the DS Castlevanias. The levels are too small and there is no imagination to some of them. There are levels that consist of a simple straight line! Give us a break Konami! There is an increase of challenge in the beginning compared to the previous 2 titles, but after some leveling up the game becomes a ride in the park (again). The new magic attacks offer little change compared to the weapons. It really is a bad excuse of a Castlevania game. I don't know why people prefer this to Portrait of Ruin...

[icycalm]

Sounds like this must be a very misjudged opinion of the game then:

Order of Ecclesia is the first Castlevania since Symphony of the Night that isn't trying way too hard to be Symphony of the Night. The biggest improvement is that it's not piss-easy, like all the other portable CVs. Mainly due to the much greater emphasis on the 10 weapon types and enemy weakness/resistance to each, which are now the most important aspect of combat. Since equipping the right weapons will make any section much easier, it also does away with most level-grinding.

http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?p=8725#8725

[Jedah]

Yes it forces you to change weapon types more often than previous installments but it still gets to easy once you get some interesting stuff and a few levels. The only difficult part of the game is an extra level called "Large Cavern" that is unlocked from a secret area inside Dracula's castle. It is like a much smaller version of the Arena area of GBA's Circle of the Moon. It has the most difficult foes of the game stucked in small rooms and the last room has a boss that can be beaten easily if you got the levels. That's it. It lacks so dramatically in the level and enemy design though, that it really feels like a rushed out product when you finish it. No attention to detail, no interesting extras/secrets/items etc. It's not a shitload of crap, but lacks the finishing touches.

Symphony of the Night: *****
Circle of the Moon: ****
Harmony of Dissonance: ***
Aria of Sorrow: *****
Dawn of Sorrow: ***
Portrait of Ruin: ****
Order of Ecclesia: ***

[Volteccer_Jack]

Re: levels being straight lines. I didn't care in the slightest because enemies actually posed a threat to me, as opposed to, say, Aria, where I can imagine falling sleep at some parts. But I'm the only one who thinks it's exponentially harder than all the other modern Castlevanias? Eh, I guess I'm a freak then. The only one I've played more than once is Symphony, anyway.

The only difficult part of the game is an extra level called "Large Cavern" that is unlocked from a secret area inside Dracula's castle. It is like a much smaller version of the Arena area of GBA's Circle of the Moon. It has the most difficult foes of the game stucked in small rooms and the last room has a boss that can be beaten easily if you got the levels.

That's arguably the easiest boss in the game if you have the third shield glyph to destroy his projectiles.

[Tain]

But I'm the only one who thinks it's exponentially harder than all the other modern Castlevanias?

Not at all. I actually needed to learn even the early crab boss's patterns rather than simply relying on whoring out potions. It's been a long time since I've had to do that in a modern Castlevania.

[Recap]

Symphony of the Night: *****
Circle of the Moon: ****
Harmony of Dissonance: ***
Aria of Sorrow: *****
Dawn of Sorrow: ***
Portrait of Ruin: ****
Order of Ecclesia: ***

Is "Symphony of the Night" really a 5/5 game to you or you're just comparing those for reference?

[icycalm]

@ Volteccer and Tain: well, he said that "There is an increase of challenge in the beginning compared to the previous two titles"

but

"but after some leveling up the game becomes a ride in the park (again)."

[icycalm]

On another note: this site needs a Symphony of the Night review. It is very important to explain to people exactly what the addition of grinding does to a game.

[JoshF]

What bothered me most about SOTN was that I always either seemed to be a game-breaking behemoth (where the game becomes boring because you can destroy the most powerful enemies with little threat and you might as well not even bother dodging attacks) or a total weakling (where the game becomes boring because it takes too long to kill enemies or because your halting your progression in the game in order to grind.) You can get in the sweet spot occasionally but it should be up to the developers to find that not the player. Richter and Maria modes had set HP, I think.

[Jedah]

Is "Symphony of the Night" really a 5/5 game to you or you're just comparing those for reference?

I love it and it's an excellent video game to me, with or without the comparison. It was all this stuff you could find and do even after you thought you are finished with it. And of course its gorgeous visuals. "RPG"* elements left me untouched because I hate "RPGs".

The best of this certain style of games is still of course Super Metroid.

* Not in the sense of real Role playing (which is nearly non existent in video games, at least not those they claim to have it) but in the sense of leveling up and upgrading your weapons and equipment.

[icycalm]

And of course its gorgeous visuals. "RPG"* elements left me untouched because I hate "RPGs".

I will rewrite this to avoid your abuse of the term RPG:

And of course its gorgeous visuals. The leveling elements left me untouched because I hate leveling.

or

And of course its gorgeous visuals. The stat-upgrading element left me untouched because I hate stat-upgrading.

[icycalm]

You can get in the sweet spot occasionally but it should be up to the developers to find that not the player.

This is what grinding does. It is the easiest way for a developer to avoid having to balance the game. Simply add grinding and the game is immediately "balanced" for EVERYone: from the most hardcore player in the universe to his retarded little baby brother.

And this is simply unacceptable. Games that include ANY form of grinding whatsoever, even a single hidden spot, should get 0 stars immediately, regardless of how awesome everything else may be: atmosphere, graphics, sound, level design, whatever -- nothing can compensate for robbing the challenge from a game and turning it into an exercise in logistics.

And all kinds of games can suffer from this: both action and strategy. Grinding is a bona fide videogame design plague with not a single redeeming feature whatsoever, and should be entirely eliminated. Given, however, how challenge-averse most human beings are, and how limited their capacities for understanding and appreciation, this of course will never happen.

[icycalm]

Note that, given a choice between a game with terrible, uneven balance and grinding, and a game with no grinding but a range of selectable and well-balanced difficulty levels, only a moron would choose the grinding. It is always preferable to drop down the difficulty level of a game than to resort to grinding. But of course having a range of difficulty levels takes even more balancing work, whereas just throwing in grinding and letting the players deal with it is a much easier option. Never mind that in that case pacing = fucked, and half the game if not more becomes skull-numbingly boring: the unwashed mashes lack the faculties to tell the difference, so why should anyone care?

In closing, and as Cave's Tsuneki Ikeda has said, when it comes to action games: Arcade Is God. Let the console kids spend half their lives grinding if they want to -- we know where the action's at.

[icycalm]

All the above is PROVED by the fact that there are NO games with grinding that are at the same time balanced. Because if they were, THERE WOULD BE NO NEED TO GRIND!

And what would happen if a game WAS indeed balanced, but also offered the player the choice to grind, if he happened to be somewhat below the skill level for which the game was balanced?

I'll tell you what: the weaker players would grind, grind, grind, not only until their characters became strong enough to allow them to tackle the game at their own skill level -- but they would grind until the very end (because once you get used to grinding, it is virtually impossible to give it up half-way through the game and begin to tackle it through skill).

And the stronger players would simply not be capable of ignoring grinding altogether. The first or second time they got stuck somewhere, they'd immediately start grinding, thus robbing the game of any difficult encounters it might have had.

It would take an EXTREMELY self-disciplined human being to ignore grinding altogether and tackle the game straight on, and in the end he would STILL not enjoy himself as much as if there was no grinding whatsoever, and he was spared the ordeal of having to act like a fucking drug or smoking addict or an alcoholic on withdrawal symptoms or some shit. It's like giving you a "WIN" button for an entire game and daring you to use it. This shit is not fun -- playing the game like that would be torture.

So even if the game was extremely well-balanced (and this has never happened to my knowledge), it would STILL be much worsened by the grinding, and all the effort that went into its balancing would be lost ON EVERYONE WHO PLAYED IT.

Case closed.

[icycalm]

I love it and it's an excellent video game to me, with or without the comparison. It was all this stuff you could find and do even after you thought you are finished with it. And of course its gorgeous visuals.

This reminds me of the dude in the DMC4 thread, when he was talking about DMC3. With crap games, when you ask people who love them for their reasons, you always get stuff about "the aftergame", "the visuals", "the story", or, in a word, "the atmosphere". From all of that you can immediately deduce the game's true quality (i.e. its lack of quality). When the first things that come to people's minds are "aftergame" (lol), "visuals", "story", etc., you know the game has some SERIOUS fucking issues.

So what is the problem here? It is basically the bastardization process. It is people not being able to understand if they love a game AS A GAME, or if they love a game AS A MOVIE, AS A COMIC BOOK, AS A DREAM, AS A BED-TIME STORY, AS A HALLUCINATION, etc. etc. People who can't distinguish between all of these entirely different experiences should never be allowed to review games -- 80% of the shitty reviews in the world are shitty for exactly this reason. People simply lack the self-knowledge, the necessary level of introspection, of reflection, of rumination, of inquiry and examination, to figure out what the hell is happening IN THEIR OWN HEADS. But if you can't figure that out, of what use can your review be to anyone? Where will the analysis come from, if all you can say is that you love "the visuals", or if you cannot see how ridiculous it is to praise a game for "all the little stuff you can do after you are finished with it" instead of all the GREAT stuff you can do BEFORE you are finished with it?

"It made me feel warm inside" is not a valid point from which to launch a critique. One must be able to analyze, one must be able to compare, one must be able to establish criteria and apply them appropriately in each case. Of course all great games make us feel warm inside, but the question here is WHY? Why did this game make you feel warm inside, and not some other one? What does the other game lack that this one has? And did you feel warm inside primarily because of some text you read, of some piece of music you heard, of a splash of colors that suddenly flashed across your field of view -- or did you feel warm inside because of a prolonged and complex interaction that took place between you and that collection of 1s and 0s that sat spinning inside your console's CD drive?

[icycalm]

And let it be known that I have played all three GBA Castlevanias, and had a great time with them. But how to explain to people that this does not contradict all the above I've written?

See, the games were fun and worthwhile not because of the stupid grinding and backtracking but DESPITE it. This means that if you removed them, you would have some of the best videogames ever.

This is what differentiates the critic from the common fan. The common fan will settle with pretty much anything, because he has no standards. The critic, however, is always judging with an eye to the top, because that, after all, is what his job is all about.

[Recap]

Case closed.

Indeed. Put it up on the front page just in case and I'll have one more editorial gone from my to-do list.

A line about the "RPG" term I wanted to say to you since your fantastic article on the subject -- I don't think you'll find anybody disagreeing it's some sort of a misnomer. It's just that we all accepted it as a polysemic word. On the one hand it designates the original game, on the other it designates the turn-based, grinding-focused video-game genre too. It's a word the Japanese made for themselves by a borrowing process (awfully, if you want) and we Westerners need to use in order to refer to this certain Japanese thing. It's not different to the term "adventure game" [laughs], in the end.

[raphael]

I think I have never seen the verb "to grind" applied to videogames before. Could you please clarify the meaning?

I didn't play any Castlevania, so I wasn't helped by the example.

[mees]

Doing the same crap over and over mindlessly in order to amass experience points/gold/whatever.