Caltrops - Xenosaga

Forum Overview :: Xenosaga

by Damocles 04/05/2003, 1:49am PST

FABIO wrote:

Damocles wrote:

Wouldn't know; never played it. Kinda like Legend of the Dragoon, I was warned off.

GIA used to be my complete source for game reviews. Whatever they thought of a game, I'd just have to take the exact opposite to get an accurate picture every time. Some of the stuff they gave 5 out of 5's for were ridiculous, I think I hated every single game they gave that to. EVERY single Square fantasy RPG got 5/5. FF8? Chrono Cross? Vagrant Story? To me a perfect score says "MUST BUY", at least if you're a fan of the genre. You can argue that you liked any of those games, but must buys they were not. I think the only review of theirs I ever agreed with was Parasite Eve 2, god that was mediocre.

I still love their amazingly inaccurate review of Star Ocean 2, calling it a phenominal looking game with no gameplay to back it up, when the exact opposite was true. I saw better 2D models on the SNES. Combat nothing more than smashing the X button? Attack magic was worthless? Did that person even play the game?

It served its purpose. The GIA was based on a simple idea: they cared more about the "superstructure" built onto the game, rather than the underlying game itself. The plot, graphics, sound, voice acting, and whatnot were privileged in order to counter the "gameplay-only" reviews from other places, where the prevailing idea is usually that anything on a console that tries to tell a story or employ what decades of television and film creators have learned is OMGFRUSTRATEDDIRECTOR. Stuff like the FF games got high ratings for this because they were BLOODY GOOD AT IT, even if you didn't like the underlying gameplay. (For many of them, I did: It's funny that both games you mentioned for the perfect scores are ones that I consider great, ambitious, yet flawed titles.)

Plus, they were RPG and niche game freaks, which makes sense, considering that RPGs were the genre that (at the time) was pushing this boundary. And they used a system similar to film, not games; nobody with any brains would use a five-point system in any other way, and most reviewers will tell you that flawed games can theoretically get perfect scores on much more demanding scales. (Witness Gran Turismo 2 in EGM).

Vagrant Story, for example, was an interesting story well told, with well-designed and well-crafted graphics, astounding sound, interesting presentation, and an almost nethack-like focus on exploration. It also had poor documentation of its extraordinarily complex weapon creation system that serves as the underlying strategic element to the game, and was more unforgiving than your typical 8-bit game. Unfortunately, it also had a combo system that people could easily exploit; there were penalties, but they weren't clearly enough explained within the game.

(That was a big problem with Square at the time... you simply should NOT force a player to "learn by playing' when it comes to tricky systems that the character, were he actually doing it, would know like the back of his hand. Strategy needs to be taught, and documentation can be as important for games as it is for applications if the game doesn't aim at simplicity. Which they don't all need to: Miyamoto's style is only one of many, and some of the best PC games ever made had manuals thicker than that guy trolling the Rygar board)

Would I give it 100%? Nope. Would I give it five stars out of five, like they did? Sure, with a warning to download and study a weapon creation faq so you know what the game's really about. (Hint: It's not about stacking boxes or wailing away with combos.) It's all about perspective. After all, the only really objective way to judge is TtC, and nobody uses that.

Yet.

As for Star Ocean 2... never played it. I heard it had the worst dub this side of 80's anime, though.