This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Jeanne d'Arc
Now that I’ve finished Jeanne d’Arc (PSP, 2007), I can give my verdict!
This post is really an addendum to Monday’s discussion of Jeanne’s gameplay. There’s not much more I can say on that subject! It’s “lighter” – easier, less complex, less time-consuming and grindy – than the typical tactical RPG, but that’s an observation rather than a criticism. From a mechanical perspective, Jeanne is well-designed and largely well-executed (although it does seem a bit laggy compared to its peers), and that forms its main draw.
I do want to talk a bit about story, which is what so often elevates tactical RPGs from “good” to “great”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do that for Jeanne. The plot is a mishmash of competing and often incoherent plot elements, populated by characters who wander on- and off-stage with little rhyme or reason. What partly redeems it is that, after a slow start, some bits of that mishmash become much better than others. There are some clever twists on history, some very striking individual moments, and one subplot steals the show with its character development (both in the sense that the characters involved change over time, and in the sense that they make painful decisions that reveal their true selves). The net effect is that while the story as a whole is not good, enough of it was for me to stay interested.
At the end of the day, then, Jeanne is a good game rather than a great one. It doesn’t quite match the genre’s two pinnacles, Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre, which coupled great gameplay with powerful, meaningful stories. But its gameplay riffs effectively off the greats, and there are enough worthwhile ideas buried in the story to offer a nice bonus on top of that. A worthy “honourable mention” in genre history.
We hope you enjoyed this post! To quickly find this post, and our other reviews, click the “reviews” tab at the top of this page.
This week’s song is another great battle theme from Tactics Ogre, “Fight It Out!” I love the little discordant clash at the start of the song — it makes me envision everyone pulling steel before (at 0:15) the battle is joined. Enjoy!
This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Jeanne d'Arc
Combat in Jeanne d’Arc
I often praise the PSP as a mecca for turn-based tactical RPGs – Disgaea! Final Fantasy Tactics! Tactics Ogre! – and over the past few months, I’ve pencilled another name onto that list: Jeanne d’Arc, a 2007 title from Level 5 (very!) loosely inspired by the historical Saint Joan. It starts off rather generically, but now that I’m close to the end, I’m glad I gave it a second chance.
By way of introduction, Jeanne plays out like a cross between Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics. You command a squad of characters, each of whom belongs to a set class and has his or her own strengths and weaknesses. Notably, characters cannot permanently die! Between missions, you assign equipment and special skills (the two work a bit alike; a finite number of skills are available at any one time, and you acquire new skills via crafting and enemy drops). Some skills are class-specific, while others can be assigned at will. For example, Jeanne and her friend Liane both wield swords, so they have access to the same pool of class-specific skills. However, Liane trades off durability in exchange for stronger magic, suggesting players should assign melee boosters to Jeanne and magic spells to Liane. Combat plays out similarly to other tactical RPGs: park sturdier sorts at the front and mages/archers at the back, advance methodically, and heal as needed. So long as the party is adequately levelled, the game is reasonably easy, and since it’s also not very grindy, that’s not a hard condition to meet.
Jeanne’s appeal stems largely from how it gets the basics right.. The levels are creative, both in their layout (the maps are a nice mix of wide, narrow, flat, and steep) and in their objectives: most are simple sweeps, but some require you to make it to an escape point, or defend a key location. One, notably, is an imaginative riff on a certain infamous boss battle from FFT. The pacing is just right: combatants hit hard enough to keep the pace brisk, but (a single annoying escort mission aside) not so hard that the game turns into an exercise in luck-driven one-hit KOs. And while it’s easy in the sense that I’ve rarely seen the game over screen, that doesn’t mean it’s boring: I still reach for the grey matter in every battle.
This by itself would be enough to make me recommend Jeanne to genre fans in need of a fix, but on top of that, Jeanne adds several interesting little gameplay mechanics. While they aren’t hugely significant, they do keep the game feeling fresh. One is positioning: keeping characters next to each other gives them a defensive bonus, and the bigger the clump, the bigger the bonus. Striking an enemy will “power up” the tile on the victim’s other side (visible in the above screenshot – note the glowy yellow rings at the upper left and at the far right), but someone standing on the powered-up tile might be away from the group and hence vulnerable. (One tactic I like: run a hard-to-hit character, say the nimble thief Colet, around the back of the enemy line to power up a tile on the front. My slow-moving characters approach the front in a clump, and one stands on the powered-up tile; Colet, meanwhile, can happily look after himself.)
The game’s signature mechanic, however, is that Jeanne and several of her allies wear magic armlets that let them temporarily transform into super-soldiers – and if they kill an enemy while transformed, they get another turn. If they score another kill, they get another turn. And another. And another. The video below (starting at about 1:15) shows this in action:
This has a couple of implications. It changes the ideal tactics: while most games encourage players to focus fire so as to completely eliminate enemies and reduce incoming damage, in Jeanne it’s often preferable to bring a whole host of enemies down to low health (leaving them vulnerable to a single transformation rampage) instead. As with positioning, this isn’t a revolutionary feature in and of itself, but it is a nice point of differentiation relative to Jeanne’s peers.
More importantly, it helps give Jeanne a particular kind of fun. The joy of strategy games lies in reading the situation, crafting a plan, and finally seeing it come together (and generally, the deeper the game, the more profound the delight – anyone who’s played Dominions 3 will know what I mean). The drawback is that it can take a lot of time and effort for that plan to pay off! Puzzle games compress that into a single “aha!” moment and are quicker to play, but typically just have One True Solution. The transformation mechanic gives Jeanne a bit of the best of both worlds. Working out how to bring down a mass of enemies down to low health, then actually doing so, is quick and relatively simple – far simpler than orchestrating victory in Civilization or Dominions! But the basic skills – analysis of a fluid situation, thinking ahead, allocation of scarce resources – are the same. And the moment of triumph, when Jeanne carves her way through four or five enemies in one round, is real.
That, in fact, is almost a metaphor for the gameplay as a whole. By genre standards, Jeanne is relatively short (I’m at 38 hours and could probably finish before 40), simple, and easy. But that doesn’t make it mindless – either on the developers’ part, or on the player’s – or boring. Jeanne’s designers clearly put love and thought into their work, and it shows. This is one title genre fans should check out.
This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Sleeping Dogs
Taaaaaaxi!
Sometimes you can trace when you fall in love with a creative work to a single moment, of joy or wit or creativity. And so it was with Sleeping Dogs, video games’ answer to Hong Kong gangster flicks.
Our story begins with our hero, undercover cop Wei Shen, between missions — quite literally, as his next objective was some ways off. On foot, too far from his motorbike and too far from his destination, it looked like Wei was about to add a touch of verisimilitude — namely, vehicle theft — to his criminal disguise. Then I saw a taxi. Salvation! I sent Wei jogging over. The game popped up a message: “Hold Y to enter the taxi”. Y! Wei opened the door. Threw the driver out. And climbed behind the wheel himself.
Oops. What happened was, I had missed the “hold” part and tapped “Y” instead. So much for “not stealing a vehicle”, but oh well. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. When Sleeping Dogs gives you an ill-gotten taxi, you drive off (and luckily for me, there were no police officers nearby to object). But just because I had turned Wei into an unwitting car thief didn’t mean other cars on the road would disappear. In due course I ended up in the queue at a red light, patiently waiting my turn to go. So imagine my surprise when a passerby climbed into the taxi — only to open the door again and run for her life when Wei said, mildly, “Do I look like a cab driver to you?”
That made me laugh. It was the perfectly logical thing to happen in that situation — the taxi was stopped, Wei wasn’t carrying anyone, and there was no way the would-be passenger could have known he was not a real taxi driver. And yet, it was so delightedly unexpected — how often do games obey real-world logic, instead of their own? That bit of clever thinking by the developers sealed the deal for me. I can’t wait to see what else they may have in store.
This week’s tracks are cousins: both are effectively variations on the main musical refrain of Princess Mononoke, one of my favourite movies (animated or otherwise). “Legend of Ashitaka” is the conventionally heroic version, strong but a bit wistful; “Journey to the West” is the more upbeat and adventurous of the two. The versions I’ve attached below are from the “A Night in Fantasia 2004” orchestral concert, which I was fortunate enough to attend. Enjoy!
We’re back into game soundtracks with this week’s song, the “Main Theme” to the PS3 tactical RPG Valkyria Chronicles. It was composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto, of Tactics Ogre/FFT/FFXII fame, and it lives up to that pedigree. Enjoy!
Compared to our Northern Hemisphere friends, Australia is relatively short on video game (and anime, and science fiction, and geek…) events — hence why I haven’t been able to talk about conventions on this blog. No longer! In a little over a month’s time, I’ll attend the EB Expo (Sydney Showground, 5 to 7 October) as a member of the press. I’ve copied and pasted the list of games to be exhibited below:
That selection is rather console/action-heavy, but that’s fine — I’ll still be interested in taking a look at the two prominent strategy games on the list, XCOM (just a few days before it unlocks…) and Company of Heroes 2. As someone who’s gotten a lotofvalue out of his PSP, I’ll also be very interested in an up-close look at the Vita — that’s one platform I intend to buy once it acquires a decent stable of RPGs (squad-based or otherwise). And there’s bound to be other titles of interest, so I’ll be sure to keep my eyes open!
To answer this question, I think it helps to split up what G&K offers into two categories. In one bucket, we can place the headline-grabbing features wholly new to V: new scenarios, espionage, and religion. Simply put, these are nice, but they’re not worth US$30 (let alone US$50, if you happen to suffer from regional pricing). In the other bucket, we can place the tweaks G&K makes to the core game: AI, diplomacy, units and technologies, and so on. These are the real draw.
Starting with espionage and religion, these two features are similar in that they both offer a handy set of bonuses, without reaching so far as to be game-defining. Espionage begins in the mid-game. When a civilisation begins a new technological era, starting with the Renaissance, it receives one spy who can be sent to a rival player’s city, sent to a city-state, or left at home for counterintelligence. Sent to another player’s city, a spy will provide line of sight and early warning about planned attacks, and every X turns, steal a technology (unless he/she is killed by a counterintelligence agent!). Sent to a city-state, the spy will gradually increase relations over time, and can be used to attempt a coup (a roll of the dice that will leave you with either a new city-state ally, or a dead spy). Simple, hands-off (none of the “fiddly agent” problem common to strategy games), elegant, but not decisive.
A la carte: religious bonuses in G&K
Religion, meanwhile, works off “faith points” which are primarily generated from buildings such as shrines/temples. The more faith points you accumulate, the more missionaries (spread your religion), inquisitors (quash other religions), and Great Prophets (do all the above, and also needed to found the religion!) you can deploy. Founding a religion allows you to pick and choose from a set of bonuses, some of which will apply only to you, some of which will apply to cities of any nationality that follow that particular faith. As only one civilisation per game can choose any given bonus, prioritising faith – and hence, that first Great Prophet – will allow the early bird to catch the worm. I think the importance of religion will depend on play style: I never found it that central, but I can see someone reaping dividends by taking a religion-centric civilisation (such as the Celts, who earn faith from forest tiles), then picking bonuses that allow, say, the purchase of pre-industrial units with faith.
Meanwhile, the two scenarios I tried (out of three* that shipped with the expansion) were a mixed bag. Steampunk scenario “Empires of the Smoky Skies”, despite its name, is a breath of fresh air. It’s quick to play: I finished in a single evening. Its mechanics are distinct; in particular, zippy research and construction, plus unique victory conditions, make it a builder’s paradise. And it has a sense of place, of steampunkish whimsy: it’s impossible not to grin when bartering anti-gravity ore with a goggled, top-hatted man named “Ignace Curnow”. In contrast, the “Fall of Rome” scenario was a disappointment. A purely military scenario with no diplomacy, no research, and no religion, it runs headlong into the “Civilization is not a wargame” problem that has dogged scenarios since Civ II.
We hope the skies are as friendly as they are smoky
Those are G&K’s most visible features. However, iceberg-like, its real significance is what lies below. Here are a few examples:
1) The computer player is cleverer (at least on land maps). Time after time, I’ve had to fight for my life – usually against early-game rushes, once against a late-game attempt to snatch up a diplomatic victory. In general, the AI hits the sweet spot where it can offer a thrilling game without actually making me lose. It did drop the ball in one game in which (a) the computer players all ignored the New World (this was a Terra map), and (b) the #1 player declared war on my horribly unprepared self… only to not lift a finger, not even posting a single soldier to our border! (The resulting war ended up one-sided, all right, but not the way I’d feared.) However, this match was very much the exception to a usually positive rule.
Heeeeeere they come! Babylonian forces (in teal) attempt an early-game rush.
2) Diplomacy, though still not up to the heights the series reached in Civ IV, has improved to the point where the computer feels rational now. That’s more than most strategy games can say! The computer will ask for a cease-fire when it’s weary and throw in the towel (but without the ridiculously abject capitulations of pre-G&K) when it’s beaten. Even more importantly, it generally will not go to war without a sensible reason, such as border tension, and it can be deterred by a suitable show of force – in one game, the computer massed troops on our border while I was busy fighting another war, only to back down once I rushed an army home! Not only is this good strategy on the computer’s part, it does a lot to aid my suspension of disbelief and hence, my enjoyment.
3) The tech tree, the available units, and their upgrades are better designed. Remember the abortive archer upgrade path, or the ease of beelining for mechanised infantry (which made tanks redundant)? Gone. Games ending before I got a chance to play with aircraft and other late-game units? Well, now that G&K has added Great War-era aircraft, I have story after story to tell about how airpower transformed my campaigns. The effect was almost as steampunkish, and certainly as cool, as anything in Empires of the Smoky Skies! It’s not perfect – the devastating Gatling guns unlock a little too early – but it’s much better than what we had before.
The Iroquois mass along my northern border while my main army fights Greece in the southwest.
I could list more incremental improvements.Refinements to one of Civ V’s best new features, city-state diplomacy. Notably faster performance on my computer. But the gist, I think, would be the same. The best reason to buy G&K isn’t to see spies, or prophets, or steampunk airships. The best reason to buy G&K is to see how it enables Civ V to realise its potential, and I think it’s telling that the more I played G&K, the more I liked it.
At the end of the day, my recommendation is straightforward. If you hated the base game, Gods and Kings will do nothing to change your mind. If you liked the base game, however, Gods and Kings is worth your cash. It offers subtle but real enhancements, and irons out several of the flaws that previously marred CivV. Its more visible additions – espionage, religion, scenarios – are merely icing on the cake. A good expansion.
* Despite its historical setting, the third scenario, “Into the Renaissance” starts players with just one city and a settler! This didn’t quite appeal to me, though I may revisit the scenario in the future.
We hope you enjoyed this post! To quickly find this post, and our other reviews, click the “reviews” tab at the top of this page.
What I played: One game on King as Austria (aborted). One game on Prince as Austria (won via the science victory). One game on Prince as Carthage (won, science). Two games on King as Korea (a pre-G&K civilisation) (won, science). One attempt at the Fall of Rome scenario (aborted). One attempt at the Empires of the Smoky Skies scenario on Emperor (lost). These were mostly on land-heavy maps: Continents, Terra, and Europe.
What I didn’t play: The “Into the Renaissance” scenario. The remaining difficulty settings and civilisations. Archipelago and similar maps.
Calling all readers, aspiring alien-hunters, and Guile-haired jumpsuit-wearers! With XCOM: Enemy Unknown‘s release just a month and a half away, Earth needs a few* brave** men and women. As in the original X-Com, players will be able to rename their soldiers at will, and for the XCOM game diary I’m planning, I’d love to name my troopers after you guys. Though I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and incoming plasma, it’ll be exciting while it lasts! Who’s with me?! Do you want to live forever?!
Ahem. If you’re interested, leave a comment below and I’ll add your name to the bottom of this post. Once the game is out, I’ll probably either create a new post with all the custom-named soldiers and their current status, or just expand on this post. So check back in a couple months’ time!
* at least
** or “foolhardy”
The roll call thus far
“Beefeater”
“Froggy”
“Josh” (wants to be first into battle)
“LeSquide”
“Kat”
“Talorc” (who wants a rocket launcher)
“Veloxi” (wants a sniper rifle)
“Hikaru Usada” (wants… to be last out of the dropship)
“Riztro” (great psi bait)
“Rebecca W”
“Wolfox”
“Farnsworth” (wants to hang back and lob the odd grenade)
This week’s song is the opening theme to John Adams, the very nice 2008 HBO miniseries. Below, I’ve linked both the full-length version and the shortened version that plays over the gorgeous credits sequence. Enjoy!
Hot on the heels of Paradox’s announcement of Europa Universalis IV, studio boss Johan Anderson has presented the first gameplay video! Courtesy of Gamespot:
That video’s highlight, for me, is the new trade system (which starts at 3:54). Placing trade routes on the map (linking the old EU “centres of trade”) appears to been inspired by Empire: Total War‘s excellent but horribly underappreciated system. However, it appears Paradox is adding its own flair. This Destructoid interview explains:
“So what we’ve done is added in a system of static trade routes, so the trade flows along from the world into Europe, and your job is to dip money out of them as they go by. The way you do this… firstly you have your trusty merchant that you can send to various points along the routes to convince them to suck more wealth down to you rather than have the locals cream off the profits.
The second part of your trade empire is territory. If you take the Portuguese empire you’ll see strings of bases along their trade routes, so if you do the same thing you’ll be able to suck more trade home to Portugal and make yourself wealthier.
The third part is the fleet which will help you control trade in areas. We’re going to make small ships trade ships and big ships combat ships. So the small ships, you can send them off to, say, the Arabian Sea where the trade will split between going around to Africa and going up to Eastern Europe, and if you increase your power there you can steer the trade to where you want to.”
Trade ceases to be a merchant placement mini-game, and looks set to become far more connected to conquest, colonization, exploration, and diplomacy. No longer do you have to conquer entire countries to get a gold mine in a specific province, you can use your fleet and strategic bases to control the flow of trade on your own terms. Previously the system was very automated “and the moment you start talking about automation, the feature has a problem.”
As the above video highlights at 6:18, trade routes will also shift over the course of the game (away from the Mediterranean and towards the Atlantic, once the routes around the Cape of Good Hope and to the Americas open up).
The net effect, hopefully, will be to strengthen one of EU3‘s weaker aspects: the naval game. Not only were individual naval battles not very satisfying (they tended to boil down to “who brought the most ships?”), but EU3 only modelled one of the uses of seapower (being able to land troops on the enemy coast), while neglecting the need to protect overseas trade routes. Based on what we know so far, it sounds as though EU4‘s naval game will be much more interesting, which should benefit maritime powers such as Portugal, the Netherlands, and England->Great Britain. I look forward to seeing how this works in the final game — and to seeing what else Paradox has in store for us.
This week’s song is another SNES-era RPG world map theme: “Time Circuits” (aka “Corridors of Time”), which plays in one of the most wondrous areas of Chrono Trigger. Enjoy!
#3 – 18 August 2012: Some details out from Gamescom, if you can read French! The highlights, according to Google Translate, include a co-op campaign and confirmation Sweden and Canada will be in the game.
#2 – 14 August 2012: . In response on a question I asked on the official forum about AirLand Battle‘s “dynamic campaign”, an Eugen team member stated:
Dynamic means fully dynamic -so much more than in W:EE
That sounds promising to me!
#1 – 12 August 2012: Eugen Systems and publisher Focus Home have announced Wargame: AirLand Battle, the upcoming (2013) sequel to European Escalation! I’ve quoted the full press release at the bottom of this post. The highlights are as follows:
1) The new game still takes place in the 1975-1985 time period, and the protagonists are still NATO and the Warsaw Pact; however, the action has shifted north to Scandinavia.
2) Fixed-wing aircraft will be in the game! This is a change from EE, where the only aircraft are helicopters.
3) There will be four new countries in the game. The developers have all but confirmed one of them will be Canada, with the other three being chosen from amongst Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.
4) The number of units has increased to 750 (more than double the 361 in EE!), of which 150 are planes.
5) Edited in due to my bad memory: AirLand Battle will have a “dynamic campaign”! This is the feature that has me most excited, as I felt the campaign was the weakest part of the original game.
6) You can view the first teaser trailer below:
I’ll update this post as news about ALB emerges, so stay tuned!
PARIS- Aug. 10, 2012 – Released in early 2012, Wargame: European Escalation by Eugen Systems became the new benchmark in real-time strategy games, praised by critics and players alike.
Today, its sequel, Wargame: AirLand Battle, has been unveiled for the first time in this teaser video. Planned for released in 2013, Wargame: AirLand Battle will bring the series to a brand new dimension. Today’s video gives a glimpse of the spectacular new features to come!
Wargame: AirLand Battle will be presented for the first time at Gamescom 2012 in Cologne next week at the Focus booth in the business area (Hall 4.2, Stand I-050a) and at Koch Media’s booth in the public area (Hall 7.1, stand B051 – B041)!
While the first Wargame made a splash with its powerful engine, Wargame: AirLand Battle will be the series’ leap forward by bringing a level of detail never before seen in a real-time strategy game. The new version of the IRISZOOM Engine™ will display spectacular graphics with a wide variety of units, scenery, and impressive topography reproduced from satellite maps, all of which are visible in today’s teaser.
Just like its predecessor, Wagame: AirLand Battle takes players through a series of conflicts commanding NATO and Warsaw Pact troops between 1975 & 1985 at a turning point of the Cold War. In this episode, war rages in Northern Europe, notably Scandinavia, whose architecture and magnificent landscapes are faithfully recreated in the game.
Wargame: AirLand Battle allows players to command all military resources of the Cold War era from tanks to planes. A total of 150 planes strengthen the playable arsenal of the game, from fighters to bombers to electronic warfare planes. Four new nations and their vehicles join the original eight from the first installment, making a total of over 750 vehicles and combat units rendered in realistic detail! Wargame: AirLand Battle also brings authenticity to the next level thanks to a new weapons system, better handling of fire effects, and a new Urban Combat Interface (UCI) allowing for battle inside cities.
The solo campaign is composed of several new dynamic campaigns, during which players manage all aspects of battle by leading each squad of the Theater of Operation and making good use of reinforcements and strategic support. Wargame: AirLand Battle still allows customization of armies in solo and multiplayer modes thanks to the ‘Deck’ system, which is now being enhanced with an integrated ‘viewer’. Ultimately, each decision made will have an impact on the tactical outcome of battles and evolution of the global conflict! Prepare to re-enter the Cold War in 2013!
Criminal lords who control everything not controlled by the ultra-rich;
Police whose only principle of operation is maintenance of the status quo;
Hordes of poor people starving in the streets;
Absolutely no middle class whatsoever.
Nonetheless, the society manages to remain at a high technological level.
– The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés
At first glance, one might think that Deus Ex: Human Revolution, last year’s cyberpunk action-RPG from Square Enix, falls into the above trap. A walk around its first hub area (which I’ve just completed), the Detroit of 2027, appears to tick every box. The game’s first act takes place over a single evening, so the sky is black and forbidding. The streets are filthy. Graffiti is everywhere. The beat cops all wear riot gear. The outside world appears no better: newspapers refer to an ongoing “Australian civil war”. At times, the exaggerated dystopia shades into silliness: why are middle-class characters living in the same garbage-ridden slum as the local arms dealer?
The grrrritty future: Detroit in 2027, from Deus Ex: Human Revolution
But dig deeper, and you’ll find more to Human Revolution than Generic Science-Fiction Dystopia. This is a world defined, above all, by one social issue, one conflict – transhumanism, in the form of cybernetic augmentation. This raises several questions. First, there’s the usual debate about the morality of humans “playing God”, evident in conversations with other characters, in product blurbs from cybernetics manufacturer Sarif Industries and in radio broadcasts from anti-augmentation terrorists Purity First. It’s done well, it’s done plausibly – the pro/anti-augmentation slogans would fit right into today’s culture wars – but it’s also what we’d expect from a work that tackles the topic. In other words, well-executed but par for the course. If you are already familiar with this debate, from other works of science fiction, then Human Revolution won’t do much to sway your mind.
The game’s real strength isn’t what it has to say about transhumanism in general – it’s what it has to say about transhumanism in this particular world, with this particular technology and set of trade-offs. The advantages to cybernetic augmentation are obvious – you get to play with them. Want to jump like an Olympian’s dream, fling dumpsters and vending machines as if they were tissue-paper, see through walls, turn yourself temporarily invisible? These are merely some of the enhancements available to hero Adam Jensen, and making use of them is what Human Revolution’s gameplay is all about. More prosaically, cybernetics also fill the role of real-world prosthetics – allowing people who’ve been injured or maimed to live better lives. These positives are real.
The glittering future: the Sarif Industries lobby
But there is a heavy price. Cyborgs don’t lose their souls. They don’t become evil or insane or deranged. They don’t go on homicidal rampages. The game is not so crude as that. They do become dependent on an expensive drug, “neuropozyne”, to prevent tissue rejection and eventual agonising death. What happens when a cyborg runs out of neuropozyne, from the hints we’re given (and from this live-action trailer, in the form of a Purity First propaganda video) is not pretty – and there are “people” in Human Revolution, such as pimps looking for leverage over their girls, who’ll take advantage of that. This trade-off isn’t metaphysical, or moral, or airy-fairy and abstracted. This trade-off is grimly practical. Would you make it? Human Revolution’s appeal lies in its ability to make us ponder that question – and sympathise with those characters who didn’t get a choice.
Perhaps my single favourite visual in Human Revolution is a billboard advertising a new opera, “Il Metamorfoso” (see the bottom-left of the screenshot below). The game conveys so much meaning with that one simple little image. What is the “metamorphosis”? We don’t know, but given context and the curved, circuitry-like lines just visible in the ad, we can guess it’s augmentation. What is the opera’s take on it? The “Metamorfoso’s” demonic leer, and the way his hair flows into the sinister red background of the ad, speak volumes. Augmentation, the ad seems to tell us, is a deal with the devil. Revel in its power, but know it has consequences.
The commercial future: Detroit billboards in Human Revolution
It’s that kind of clever touch that draws me to Human Revolution. This is no exercise in mindless nihilism. It’s a game whose creators put real thought into its bleak future, into art and aesthetic and concept – and then, as good science fiction writers should do, extrapolated the resulting possibilities, vile or otherwise. It’s a game that respects my intelligence, and I look forward to playing more.
In my review of Tactics Ogre last year, I praised its music as a “labour of love”, and now it’s time to highlight it. I had a hard time choosing a track for this week, but I eventually settled on “Blasphemous Experiment”, the theme that plays whenever you fight a certain powerful necromancer. Enjoy!
This week, I have two songs for you: “Omoi Haruka”, the soft, gentle theme from the 2007 anime Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit, and its vocal version, “Nahji no Uta”. Excellent but criminally overlooked, Moribito brings its low-fantasy world to life with such verisimilitude, I could almost think it’s really historical fiction. Composer Kenji Kawai’s (Ghost in the Shell, Fate/stay night) music, particularly the folk song-esque “Nahji no Uta”, is a key part of that appeal. Enjoy!
Details
Track: “Omoi Haruka” & “Nahji no Uta”.
Source: Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit – OST #1.
Space combat has never looked so beautiful: Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
The 1990s were the decade of the real-time strategy game, and I played every major one: Herzog Zwei, Dune 2, Command & Conquer, Warcraft 1 and 2, Red Alert, Total Annihilation, Starcraft, Age of Empires 1 and 2. Then I burned out. Done with base-building, peon-sitting, unit-spamming, tactics-light games, I spent the 2000s in RTS-less bliss. Then came the original Sins of a Solar Empire, in 2008, as far removed from its 90s forebears as a game could be. Peon micromanagement was out. Scrapping over a finite number of planets with a finite number of available improvements (a la, I would later realise, Kohan or Rise of Legends), battling over strategic jump lanes, constructing vast capital ships and choosing scarce upgrades were in. I was hooked. Sins brought me back to the RTS fold. Now, four years later and two “mini-expansions” later, developer Ironclad and publisher Stardock have unveiled Sins’ latest incarnation: Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, a deluxe version incorporating every addition made to date, and some new ones to boot. Is it worth your while?
The key point about Rebellion is that, underneath those additions, this is the same Sins we know and love. Sins has always succeeded as an exercise in juggling resources: Do I use my main force to push on Deucalion, or do I hold it back to defend Calliope? Do I invest in a dreadnought that can eventually hit an entire fleet with one missile barrage, or do I bank on an early-game rush with a carrier? How do I split my cash between the fleet, fixed defences, economy, diplomacy, and research? Rebellion does nothing to mess that up. By itself, that makes it worthwhile for a series newcomer.
For series veterans, the answer becomes more complicated. Rebellion’s new features fall into three main categories:
New units at either end of the size spectrum: titans, gigantic ships limited to one per player; and little corvettes. While the titans are Rebellion’s highest-profile addition, I’m not convinced they quite live up to the hype. Oh, they’re spectacular to watch, and they shake up the game dynamics the moment they come into play: it was horrifying and yet cool to see an AI titan take apart my level 5 Marza dreadnought (only one level away from Missile Barrage!) like the proverbial knife through butter. But what do they actually achieve? They’re a very pretty way to break stalemates – and that already existed, in the form of endgame superweapons such as the TEC novalith cannon. The titans (which unlock at research level 4) effectively pull forward that endgame stalemate-busting power into the midgame, which is satisfying but not as novel as some of Rebellion’s other changes.
The Advent Loyalist titan prepares to go into action.
New factions: Each of the game’s three races, the TEC, Advent and the Vasari, is now split into two sub-factions (Loyalists and Rebels) who share most of their units, but have unique titans, corvettes, and special bonuses. Two of the sub-factions deserve special mention. From early in the game, the TEC Rebels can break one of Sins’ key rules (players can only expand as quickly as they can fight their way past the neutral forces occupying most of the map): they can research a “truce amongst rogues”, which allows them to go unmolested by neutrals and space pirates – and thus, expand hilariously fast. This isn’t an instant win: new colonies in Sins start well in the red and require an initial investment to make them profitable, so the faster the Rebels grow, the more they have to invest. However, while “infinite colony spam” might leave the Rebels vulnerable at first (something I suspect would be a liability in player-vs-player multiplayer), it pays off hugely once those colonies pull into the black – giving the Rebels the most unique feel of any faction. Meanwhile, the Vasari Loyalists – hurrying to gather the resources needed to flee an ancient foe – get the ability to strip-mine planets down to a barren husk, as well as a titan that can salvage resources by chomping enemy space fleets. Not only does this emphasise the Vasari’s strengths at hit-and-run war, it also nicely fits the game’s lore.
New victory conditions: Whereas previous Sins instalments had two victory conditions (“kill ‘em all” and “accumulate X diplomacy points”), Rebellion adds “destroy the enemy flagship”, “level the enemy homeworld”, “research a special, fantastically expensive technology”, and “occupy a heavily-fortified neutral world”. If I had to name Rebellion’s most significant improvement, this might just be it: now I can finish large maps in a reasonable amount of time! Unfortunately, it’s also a gigantic missed opportunity: the AI doesn’t understand the two potentially most significant victory conditions. The flagship and homeworld victories are fine: the AI takes good care of those (if anything, it’s too cautious – the flagship is a big help on the front lines early on). The problem is with the science and occupation victory conditions. While the AI seems vaguely aware it can win via science (the game once notified me that a computer player was researching the victory technology, and while this was too little, too late since I was bombing its homeworld, it was still nice to see), it completely fails to grasp the concept of a victory countdown. When I am about to win, my opponents should try to stop me – that’s why the game broadcasts warnings about other players’ impending victory! Rebellion’s computer opponents, in contrast, do nothing. No last-minute rush, no desperate attack, just placid acceptance of their impending loss. Done properly, the science and occupation victories could have transformed Rebellion’s endgame, turning it from the traditional strategy slog into a desperate and tense and interesting race to survive until the countdown ran out. Instead, against the computer, they’re just “I win” buttons. This omission is all the more disappointing because it’s a problem the RTS genre solved almost 10 years ago: as far back as 2003, the computer player in Rise of Nations knew enough to go for my throat when I built enough Wonders of the World to trigger that game’s victory countdown*.
My Vasari Loyalist fleet closes in on the defenders of the special “occupation victory” planet.
At the end of the day, Rebellion is a good game: its Sins heritage sees to that. As the latest and greatest Sins instalment, I would unquestionably recommend it to a strategy fan new to the series. On the other hand, while Rebellion offers enough improvement to be worth a look for experienced fans, it falls just, painfully short of its potential. It was worth the time and money I put into it, but had the new victory conditions been better implemented, it could have offered more. A good game, but not the breath of fresh air for the series it could have been.
* To say nothing of the TBS genre, which decisively solved that problem with Shogun 2’s realm divide.
We hope you enjoyed this post! To quickly find this post, and our other reviews, click the “reviews” tab at the top of this page.
Resources
Sins of a Solar Empire wiki (most of the advice here seems pre-Rebellion, but still worth a look for new players)
The basis of my review
Length of time spent with the game: Around 19 hours (including time spent with the beta).
What I have played: One single-player game won, on Unfair difficulty, as each faction except the Vasari Rebels. One co-op game as the Vasari Rebels, approximately to the halfway point. One aborted single-player game on Cruel difficulty.
I never played Mass Effect 2, the source for this week’s song, “Suicide Mission”. Instead, I discovered the song on my newly bought copy of the “Greatest Video Game Music” CD, and took a shine to it at once. The version linked below is the one from the CD, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Enjoy!
This week’s song is the theme of Terra, the heroine of Final Fantasy VI, and also the game’s first overworld track. Melancholy, wistful, yet with a strain of hope, it is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard despite being composed for the SNES sound chip. Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhuEcFsYrco
Deservedly, it also features in pretty much every Final Fantasy remix collection there is: I’ve listened to piano, vocal, and multiple orchestral versions of the song. However, while the orchestral versions are grand and glorious and good (I’ve linked one below, from the “Distant Worlds II” collection), I can’t help but think that they miss the sweet sadness that made the original so special. The vocal version, “Wanderer of Time” (linked, bottom), comes a bit closer to the original. Still, they’re all well worth a listen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oCVhmzp0is
Details
Track: “Terra”.
Source: Final Fantasy VI original soundtrack.
Composer: Nobuo Uematsu. “Wanderer of Time” version sung by Risa Ohki.
The main map of Armageddon Empires. My hand of cards is visible at the bottom.
Two high-profile strategy games came out recently, Civilization V: Gods and Kings and Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, and I might as well spoil my forthcoming reviews by saying I like both of them. Each offers incremental but tangible improvements over its predecessor; each is a worthy addition to its franchise. However, for sheer enjoyment, they might just be trumped by a third title I discovered around the same time: Armageddon Empires, the 2007 board/collectible card game-inspired, turn-based strategy title from Vic Davis and his one-man studio Cryptic Comet.
By way of background, AE takes place on a future Earth devastated by a four-way war between humans, mutants, and two invading alien armies. Players explore a randomly generated map, gather resources, amass armies and heroes, research better equipment, and ultimately crush their opponents. In other words, AE is a 4X (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) game, the post-apocalypse’s answer to Civilization. However, whereas conventional 4X games allow players to build anything they have researched and can afford, AE represents available units and structures as cards – players are limited to building what they have in their hand at any one time. Certain card types can be created and added to a hand in mid-match, but the basic building blocks of gameplay – tanks, troops, fortresses, heroes – must be included in a deck before a match (hence the board game/CCG element)*.
That’s the waiter’s description – so what are the chef’s secrets?
My invincible endgame army.
The first thing that makes AE special is its twist on the genre formula: most strategy games are built around sprawl, but AE is built around scarcity. Most of the wasteland is just that, useless and barren, save for a few resource-gathering sites. Armies are finite, limited by deck size. New units are produced from one source (the player’s hand of cards – though they can then be deployed to any friendly base), so no juggling multiple cities, factories, or build queues. This has several implications. First, as Kieron Gillen pointed out, it’s consistent with the game’s post-apocalyptic theme: it stands to reason that in this world, there just is not that much to go around. Second, it does away with the usual bane of the strategy genre, the “I have to babysit all this?!” syndrome. Last of all, when players can form a stack of doom out of four units (see the screenshot above) and (at least on the default settings) there are no more than two or three main armies to manage, this doesn’t just affect the gameplay mechanics (“fewer, but more interesting decisions”) – it also makes every stack more distinct, and hence easier to identify, easier to grow attached to. (This is a topic to which I’ll return.)
AE’s second distinctive feature is that, like Distant Worlds and Conquest of Elysium 3, it gets exploration right. Every game map is bound to contain a few special locations (the number can be tweaked at startup), and these run the gamut. Named, especially juicy resource-gathering sites: the Camps (+3 manpower, whoo!), the Slave Pit and its overseers, the cannibal-infested Destroyed City. Abandoned strongholds: the White Base**, the Crashed Mothership, the Mecha Design Lab. Hidden goodies: a desiccated corpse still clutching a suitcase nuke. This works from a mechanical perspective: it encourages early-game exploration, rewards players for investing in recon units, and offers a trade-off: do I muster troops to take out a defended site, or do I use them to hit one of the other players? But crucially, it also adds to the theme. Scavenging is part and parcel of any post-apocalyptic world, and AE’s specific choice of locations adds further flavour. What do the slave pits and cannibal ruins tell us about the catastrophe that befell the world? What does the gaudy casino defended by gangsters tell us about how some survivors have managed to make their living? And just who was that poor devil with the suitcase nuke?
New inventions that my scientist can cook up.
The third element that makes AE special is the broadest and most intangible of the three, but also possibly the most important: this game is evocative. For me, every single-player video game is at least partly an exercise in imagination, in temporarily convincing me that I’m not just making pixels blink on a screen – I’m building a city, piloting a spaceship, saving the world. And this is where AE shines. Partly, this is thanks to the factors I discussed above. Exploration brings the game’s world alive, and the relative scarcity of pieces in play means that (a little like a squad-based game or tactical RPG) it’s easy to construct narratives about the Vengeance mech you always sent where the fighting was fiercest, or the plucky marines who seized the alien HQ with a surprise landing. Partly, this is due to the way so many game mechanics revolve around hero units, giving AE a human face. New inventions (see the above screenshot – better vehicle armour, man-portable laser cannon, tactical and strategic nukes…) don’t spring from a well of “science points” – they come from scientist heroes, who have to roll dice against their skills. That suitcase nuke won’t magically walk to another player’s base – a saboteur hero, such as the humans’ Valentine Kusanagi**, has to infiltrate the hex and make a successful roll. Partly, this is due to inspired card art. The Colossus mech is one of the scariest units in the game, and to see why, look at the screenshot below. That thing has to be the size of a skyscraper! Partly, it’s due to the way different game mechanics interact in clear and intuitive ways: my scouts found a nest of survivors in a destroyed city, which let me call in a tactician and some Imperial Marines, who secured a forward outpost, which I used as an airbase to launch a nuclear strike and win the game. Partly, it’s due to… I could go on, but the point is AE is so much more than the sum of its parts. I walk away from every match feeling like I enacted a heroic story, and that’s one of the best things I can say about a game.
The fruits of science. The Machine Empire’s Colossus is not something I want to face in battle… which is why I have its name written on a hydrogen bomb, bottom right.
One might wonder why, if AE is so good and has been around for five years, it isn’t also better known. To be sure, it’s not perfect. There’s no in-game tutorial, and while it’s a rare game whose controls I can’t figure out just by messing around, AE’s are sufficiently unintuitive to require reading the manual or a how-to-play guide (I recommend Bill Harris’). Its interface leaves something to be desired, even by indie strategy game standards, and so does its coding – I’ve had to abandon a couple of matches due to glitches. But I don’t think the problem is the rough edges – none of them seriously hurts the gameplay. I think the problem is precisely that AE has been around for five years. It was very much ahead of its time: despite its glowing critical reception, it was not only a TBS, but an indie TBS for the PC, in the days before iPads, hip indie bundles, and the recent renaissance of small/mid-market games.
And that really is a shame, because five years on, AE doesn’t just “hold up” – it shines as an example of what this genre can do. More than a very good game, more than a possibly great game, AE is a unique game, packed with lessons in design. This is one game I think every strategy aficionado, and certainly every strategy designer, should play.
* There are a couple of exceptions, but this holds true as a general rule.
** I also like the shout-outs that Vic Davis scattered throughout the game!
This week’s song is neither an opening nor a closing theme — it is, effectively, Okami‘s overworld theme. It’s the background music for the Shinshuu Fields, the “hub” area for the game’s first act, and much like the Morrowind theme from two weeks ago, its lilting, upbeat tones are the perfect thing to send you off on an adventure. Enjoy!
Details
Track: “Shinshu Plains 1” & “Shinshu Plains 2” (spliced together in this video and in the in-game music player)
Hi everyone — I’ve just added a new way to follow the site. For those of you on Facebook, you can keep an eye on the Matchsticks for my Eyes Facebook page (which reprints links to everything that goes up on the mothership), and feel free to drop a “like” or two!
In other site news, it’s been a couple of weeks since the last major update — I’ve been tardy, I know! However, I’ve spent some of that time with a couple of big new strategy releases, Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion and Civilization V: Gods and Kings, so I should be able to give my thoughts on one or both of them soon. Also, stay tuned for a piece on the lessons designers can learn from Armageddon Empires, a 2007 indie game that blends strategy game and CCG influences, and a write-up of the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, one of the best creative works (in any medium) I’ve encountered. Hope to see you round for those posts!
I’ve featured opening themes for the first two weeks of Musical Monday, but this week I have an ending theme to share with you — “You Were There”, the perfect song to close out the lovely Ico. Enjoy!
Track: “ICO -You Were There-”
Source: Ico: Melody in the Mist soundtrack.
Credits: Composed by Michiru Oshima and sung by Steven Geraghty.
From an opinion piece in last Monday (25 June’s) edition of the Australian Financial Review, page 43. The author, Mark Lawson, mockingly lists ways for politicians to waste their time:
Playing computer games. After a period with Civilization V (the game title uses the American spelling), I’ve switched back to Civilization IV as the game play is generally more exciting. But for long periods I’ve been into Medieval II, Victoria II, and Darkest Hour (a fan remake of the classic Hearts of Iron II game).
But if Julia Gillard wants real detail in her games, she could try the very complex Hearts of Iron III…
… For those who want a more active experience, the zombie shoot ’em up Left For Dead my son sometimes plays on the internet seems like fun. For those not into conquest or zombie stomps, my daughter recommends The Sims III.
Total War, Paradox, and Civ — I certainly can’t quarrel with Mr Lawson’s taste in historical strategy.
Update – 5 July 2012: It’s a mystery no longer: details of Conquest are now on Steam. It’s a territorial victory mode:
’CONQUEST’’ for Wargame: European Escalation brings brand new exciting content to extend the conflict.
Defy commanders worldwide in the brand new multiplayer mode: CONQUEST. To be victorious in this mode, in addition to the classic Command Points, you will have to control Victory Sectors (VS) located on the map, until the victory conditions are fully satisfied. In this mode there’s no Scoring System related to the destruction of your adversary’s units, only controlling territories will grant you victory. 7 maps have been adapted or created to fit this new mode, where you can either challenge players or AI.
Update – 4 July 2012: Patch notes are out! It’s a long list, but the highlights include a new gameplay mode (“Conquest”) and continued balance tweaks. I have to say, I’m very happy with Eugen’s post-release support for this game. Developers, this is how you treat your customers!
Original post: Back in April, Eugen Systems patched a new game mode into Wargame: European Escalation, and now the game’s Facebook page has this to say:
Second free DLC coming in July !
Get ready to confront your opponents in new multiplayer mode!
There are no additional details for now, but I’ll keep you posted as more emerge.
Good news — my computer is back from the service centre, and even more importantly, my backup restored just fine! It’s business as usual again, so stay tuned, over coming weeks, for write-ups of Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion and Civilization V: Gods and Kings. I’ll see you ’round!
From Soren Johnson’s Designer Notes (itself a reprint of an article in Game Developer magazine):
Ever since OnLive’s dramatic public unveiling at GDC 2009, the games industry has been watching and wondering about cloud gaming, at times skeptically, at times hopefully. The technology holds the potential to revolutionize the business, perhaps forever destroying the triangle that connects consumers with hardware manufacturers and software retailers…
… Most importantly for consumers, cloud gaming should change the economics of pricing. By removing the traditional retail middlemen, not to mention secondary drags on the system like rental and used-game sales, a developer could easily make as much money selling a game for $30 via the cloud as they could selling it for $60 via a traditional retailer. The industry could finally approach a mainstream price point, with games priced comparably to movies, books, and music – instead of the $60 price point (for a $300 console) which is absurdly out of reach of the average consumer.
Indeed, the economics could change for developers too. If entirely new business models emerge, with consumers paying for a game daily, weekly, or monthly – or perhaps with a single subscription to all available games (a la Netflix) – the design incentives change. Cloud gaming could reward developers for depth of gameplay over ornate, scripted sequences; infinitely replayable dynamic games like Left4Dead or StarCraft might suddenly be more profitable than hand-crafted semi-movies like Call of Duty or Uncharted…
.. However, cloud gaming’s potential is much, much greater than changing the economics of the industry; in fact, it could revolutionized the very way games are made…
… Perhaps the group which has the most to gain from this new model would be small, independent developers, for whom the idea of building an indie MMO seems laughable given their tiny resources. One can’t help wonder what Mojang could do with a cloud-based version of Minecraft, seamlessly updated, playable from any device or browser, that connects every world end-to-end. So far, the big question for cloud gaming is when will it be feasible, but ultimately, the more important question is what will it enable.
Definitely worth a look (and while you’re there, check out some of the older posts — in particular, the two about theme vs mechanics are some of my favourite pieces of games writing.)
It’s Musical Monday again, folks! This week’s song, composed by Jeremy Soule, goes by several names — “Call of Magic”, “Nerevar Rising”, “Morrowind Title” or just “the Morrowind theme”. Of all these titles, I like “Call of Magic” the best: it’s a hopeful song, filled with the spirit of adventure. Just the thing to see you off on your journey:
This is a good time to be a fan – as Iam – of games that mix squad-level strategy and RPG mechanics. Last year saw the PSP release of the excellent Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, a labour of love that blended fine-crafted gameplay, a mature story, and gorgeous production values. This year won’t lack in quantity: it’s already seen a Jagged Alliance remake for PC and the recent PSP launch of Gungnir. Two more titles are due out in a few months (Firaxis’ XCOM: Enemy Unknown for PC, and Atlus’ Growlanser: Wayfarer of Timefor PSP) and we may well see a third soon, Goldhawk’s Xenonauts (PC).
The above names suggest this is a pretty broad genre, and in fact, I don’t think there is a single squad-level strategy/RPG genre so much as there are several distinct subgenres, spread across PCs and home and portable consoles. As such, this is also a good time to review each subgenre – which games it contains, what makes it distinctive, how it compares to the others, and how it’s faring.
Type 1: the “squad-based strategy game with RPG elements”
Typified by the Jagged Alliance series and the first three X-Com games, this subgenre is largely PC-based (notwithstanding the odd console port) and driven by Western developers. These games share two overarching attributes. First, they emphasise the “strategy” part of “strategy/RPG”, and second, they’re closer to the “realistic” than to the “cinematic” end of the spectrum (at least compared to the other categories!). These manifest in a few ways:
There isn’t much in the way of character customisation or special abilities. Different troopers have different statistics – marksmanship, strength, etc – and, in Jagged Alliance 2, different passive bonuses (e.g. night operations or automatic weapons). However, soldiers lack RPG-style active abilities, and they usually don’t have classes – they certainly don’t in X-Com and JA. What does distinguish soldiers is their equipment (which, in the absence of classes, can usually be freely assigned). You won’t mistake a rifleman, a machine gunner, and an anti-tank specialist!
The same applies to the enemies you fight. In JA2, a black-shirted commando will be both better armed and a better shot than a yellow-shirted militiaman, but actual boss enemies and special abilities (with the exception of a handful in X-Com – psionics and Chrysalids) are rare.
In the absence of “gamey” levels of health, life is cheap. X-Com, where the most heavily armoured veteran could die to a single unlucky shot, took this to extremes – but even in JA2, a single turn’s volley fire could be lethal. Conversely, the lack of character customisation means that losing one trooper is not the end of the world – especially not in X-Com, with its never-ending pool of recruits! (I seem to recall JA2 was a bit harsher on this front – not only were there finite mercenaries available, but losing too many would make it hard to recruit more. As such, X-Com was best played without reloading, but I doubt JA2 would be so amenable.)
In the defining games of the genre, there is no scripted campaign – in X-Com and Jagged Alliance, you choose where and when to take the field. This fits with the conceit of these games – you’re the overall commander, in charge of far more than just battle tactics.
Combat typically requires you to kill/capture every enemy present. However, the battlefields are large, what you can see is limited to your soldiers’ line of sight, and the enemy could be anywhere. As such, battles tend to unfold as a sweep of the map.
This subgenre has never regained its 1990s glory days (hence PC gamers lamenting the “death” of squad-based strategy/RPGs), notwithstanding the odd 2000s release such as Silent Storm. However, signs of life remain. As a largely faithful remake of X-Com, Xenonauts falls squarely in this category, and if it lives up to its promising alpha build, that would deliver a welcome breath of air.
Fire Emblem (various Nintendo platforms) and Valkyria Chronicles (PS3 for the original game, PSP for the sequels) form a second subgenre, console-based and driven by Japanese developers. (I suspect Jeanne d’Arc for PSP would also fall into this category, but I haven’t played enough to be sure.) What sets these aside from Type 1 games is that they’re a little more stylised, a little more “game-y”, a little more RPG-like. Specifically:
As with Type 1 games, there still isn’t much in the way of character customisation or special abilities. However, in RPG fashion, realism now plays second fiddle to game logic. FE/VC characters are much more distinct than X-Com troopers, and their abilities and weapons are delineated by class. A “shock trooper” in Valkyria Chronicles will always use a submachine gun rather than a rifle, an engineer will never be able to use a grenade launcher, and so on. Fire Emblem even cheerfully throws in a rock/paper/scissors dynamic between axe-, sword-, and spear-wielding classes.
Meanwhile, much like trash mobs in an RPG, individual enemies in Type 2 games tend to be clearly weaker than the player’s squad members. However, watch out for bosses!
In Fire Emblem, characters can still die easily in the hands of a careless player. However, as with Type 1 games, the lack of character customisation means that the loss of one character is not the show-stopper it might otherwise be. (Valkyria Chronicles is a little more forgiving – it gives you a three-turn grace period to call in a medic.)
Gameplay consists entirely of a scripted campaign with set battles – no strategic metagame here.
Battles still revolve around sweeping a large map, but this plays out slightly differently. Your objectives are different – most levels require you to capture a specified piece of turf, rather than just clearing out the enemy. However, since enemies typically don’t “wake up” until you move close enough, this encourages you (especially in Fire Emblem) to play slowly and carefully, so as not to trigger an overwhelming enemy response. The result, in Fire Emblem, was precise, meticulous gameplay as I checked enemy characters’ movement ranges, lined up the party in safe areas, and then quickly moved in for the kill. (Valkyria Chronicles was a little different in that its scoring system worked by speed, so it was often “optimal” to run past enemy soldiers and beeline for the objective, but I tended to only play this way when I knew a map very well.)
This genre is doing a bit better than Type 1. Valkyria Chronicles never saw a PS3 sequel (2 and 3 came out for PSP, and 3 never made it to the West), but Fire Emblem: Awakening has been announced for 3DS. With luck, we’ll see more of these games in the future.
Type 3: the “role-playing game with tactical elements”
A third subgenre, also primarily console/Japanese, includes Final Fantasy Tactics (PSX/PSP), Tactics Ogre (originally SNES/PSX, but I’m mainly thinking of the PSP remake), Front Mission (various), and Disgaea (various). The dividing line between this and Type 2 can be a little blurry, but in general, the key feature of these games is that they emphasise the “RPG” part of “tactical RPG”.
By this, I mean Type 3 games share traditional RPGs’ emphasis on character development. Out of battle, there’s plenty of time spent on allocating skill points, navigating often-baroque class trees (this class guide for FFT says it all), and building a super-team. In battle, where a Type 1 or Type 2 character would be limited to moving, attacking, and maybe unlocking doors, Type 3 characters constantly fire off special attacks and unique abilities. This also extends to enemies – regular enemies, not just bosses, frequently have their own nasty abilities.
Conversely, while some of these games do allow for permanent death (FFT, Tactics Ogre), building up characters takes so much time and effort that I think players would have to be crazy not to reload in the event of their characters dying. (Other games, such as Disgaea, sidestep this problem by not having perma-death in the first place.)
As with RPGs and Type 2 games, there is a scripted campaign with a set storyline and battles to play through.
The “tactical” part is still present: battles are played out on strategy-style grid maps and positioning remains a consideration (for example, Tactics Ogre, which encouraged you to use terrain and heavily armoured knights’ special abilities to wall off squishy mages and archers). However, the maps are typically smaller than in Types 1-2, and enemies are typically more aggressive about coming out to meet you. As such, there’s no more “sweeping the battlefield” dynamic.
Out of the three subgenres, this one is probably doing the best. While the broader JRPG genre largely disappeared during the HD console era, this subgenre never went away. The PSP in particular is a mecca (FFT, Tactics Ogre, ports of Disgaea 1 and 2…), and new/ported Disgaea games continue to appear (e.g. Disgaea 4 came out for PS3 last year, and Disgaea 3 has made it to Vita). I look forward to seeing, and playing, many more in the future.
Within these categories, different games have added their own unique twists. For example, the genius of Valkyria Chronicles lay in its control scheme. You didn’t move soldiers by clicking squares on a grid – you took direct control of the selected soldier, using the PS3’s analogue stick to run him or her behind sandbags, into trenches, out of cover and into the open. The camera wasn’t locked isometric – it followed each soldier from a third-person perspective. You didn’t choose targets by selecting them from a list or highlighting their square – you hit a button to bring up a pair of crosshairs, then swung the crosshairs over a selected foe, and finally “pulled” the trigger. Now, VC was still a strategy game, not a shooter – once you lined up a shot, whether it hit was determined by the soldier’s class, equipment and special abilities, not by player skill. Yet, by bringing the immediacy and excitement of an action game, the control scheme contributed tremendously to the overall experience.
For another example, consider Disgaea, which relies heavily on terrain and movement. Many battles contain “geo panels” that give a special modifier to anyone standing on them – for example, automatic healing (or automatic damage!) every turn, a bonus to attack, an all-around bonus to enemies, and so on. These special effects are generated by geo symbols, pyramid-shaped objects that also appear on the map. And not only are the geo symbols destructible, but party members can pick other characters (friends and foes) and geo symbols up, then throw them around the map. Many levels rely on this! For example, if 90% of a map is coated in red panels, and two geo symbols placed on the red panels give enemies on red a 6x bonus, trying to play as if the game were FFT would be suicide. The solution: line up a daisy chain of, say, six characters. Have #5 lift #6, have #4 lift #5 (who is still carrying #6), and so on. Eventually, #1 throws #2, who throws #3… all the way to the point where #6 can reach and destroy a “3x enemy boost” geo symbol in one turn, before the computer gets to use those nasty bonuses. Does this make story levels puzzle-like? Probably. But it is an interesting mechanic in its own right, and it does distinguish the game from the rest of the genre.
This takes us back to XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which stands out because of the way it blends multiple games and subgenres. The way it breaks down soldiers into classes, with their own equipment loadouts and special abilities, is straight out of Type 3 games. So is the ability to unlock additional, more advanced classes later on. But its frequent use of an action game-style camera reminds me of nothing so much as the intent behind Valkyria Chronicles’ control scheme (or perhaps the Gallop brothers’ cancelled Dreamland Chronicles, which was to have used similar controls), and the frequency of character death is a (key) holdover from the original X-Com. As such, I don’t think it’s possible to draw apples-and-apples comparisons between Firaxis’ XCOM and the originals, or between XCOM and Xenonauts – but this doesn’t bother me in the least. While Firaxis is diverging significantly from the originals’ design, it also seems to be cross-pollinating several excellent strains of squad-level gameplay. We’ll see in a few months’ time how well this works out, but for now I am eager to see what Firaxis can do.
And if I had to conclude on one thought, that would be it: eagerness. Whether these games fall into one big genre or three related ones, at their best they combine the strengths of strategy games and RPGs. They offer the satisfaction of out-thinking and out-manoeuvring an opponent; intricate plots – and a focus on named, persistent characters. Just as great characters make great fiction, the stories that arise through gameplay become all the richer when they star characters whom we have nurtured, whom we can identify and remember. I remember the almost-dead warrior in FFT who ended one of the toughest boss fights in the game with one last desperate jump. I could almost feel the desperation in Valkyria Chronicles when three soldiers tried to hold off an enemy tank, and when I got control of my own tank and sent it to their relief, I certainly felt the power. And I remember the fallen heroes of X-Com and Fire Emblem, including veterans who had been with me since the start of the game and who finally gave their lives near the end. I remember these and more.
At the end of the day, it’s no coincidence so many of my favourites fall into the categories described above – PC and console, Western and Japanese. I look forward to seeing more of all these in the future, and I hope that if you’re a pure PC or pure console gamer, if you’re familiar with some but not all of the above games, I’ll have piqued your interest in the rest
Beautiful and artistic, Ico,Shadow of the Colossus and Okami are three of my favourite games of all time. The first two were ported to the PS3 last year, and now it’s Okami‘s turn: Capcom has announced OkamiHD, with optional Move support, will come out later this year. Trailer below:
As one Youtube commenter points out, I don’t recall the PS2 version of the game being anywhere near that blurry, but I’ll welcome anything that could bring such a great game to a wider audience (or even just ensure its availability for an HD platform).
