Cam's Eye View: 199th RPG Review Special Part 5: Grandia for the PS1 review

Welcome to a very special review for the 199^th and 200^th game. On June 29^th 2011, one of the founders of the wonderful developing company known as Game Arts passed away at the age of 45. This wonderful man is named Takeshi Miyaji. He is a man who was behind many classic games like Grandia and Lunar Silver Star Story. These are two of my favorite games of all time and in my top 10 favorite RPGs of all time. These last two reviews will be a tribute to not only Game Arts, but to Mr. Takeshi Miyaji and the hard working people behind these two games. Let’s start with the wonderful and much loved, Grandia for the PS1. The classic RPG was originally released on the Sega Saturn in Japan and was brought here to America for the Playstation 1, and is now downloadable on the Playstation Network store. It is a wonderfully lighthearted RPG that stands the test of time. This results in Grandia being one of the most memorable and one of the best RPGs of all time. Let us begin my 199^th review of Game Art’s classic, Grandia.

The story of the game starts off with a young boy named Justin who lives in a town called Parm. He lives there with his mom and his young friend Sue. He dreams of becoming an adventurer, and travel the world finding new places and people. He ultimately wants to follow in his father’s footsteps and find out what’s on the other side of a giant wall named the End of the World. After doing a few adventures outside of Parm, he sets off across the ocean to see what the world has to offer him. Along the journey, many companions join him. Childhood friend Sue, Feena, a famous adventurer of New Parm, Gadwin, a powerful knight from Dight, and many others that are very memorable, join him on his quest. The story as a whole focuses on Justin, Feena, and Sue, but the thing that makes the story great is how light-hearted it is. It’s more family friendly, like Castle in the Sky or Porco Rosso’s stories are. It gets dark near the end, but it’s an overall great story since it doesn’t fall back on stereotypes, like brooding young men with giant swords, or females with abused pasts, and of course melodramatic storylines. It’s a cheerful tale, even if some of the jokes and the voice acting are bad at times.

The gameplay is a typical Japanese style RPG, but with some fine-tuning. The whole world is viewed from an isometric-style camera, something I mentioned before in my Xenogears review, which was popular with games during that time like Final Fantasy Tactics and Wild Arms 2. Enemies are visible on the overworld and dungeon areas, and will run at you if they see you, or are close enough. The good thing about this, though, is that you also have a run button so you can escape the enemies if you don’t want to get into battles while getting to an area. This takes care of the issue of slow walking and random encounters that make for long hours of grinding. However, I’d recommend getting into a few fights so you can level up and not get wailed on by the boss and tougher enemies down the road. Battles are turn-based, but all actions are done on a timer on the bottom part of the screen where icons for each character and enemy are on the bar on the screen. If your icon reaches a certain part of the bar, you can then select your action, like attacking more than once, doing a single strong strike, using special attacks, using magic attacks, using an item, or defending yourself. You can move your character around the screen, which is a good idea, due to some of the stronger attacks having a large amount of range and area that can hurt multiple enemies or your party. The unique thing about the magic and combat system is that the more you use your magic and a certain weapon, they grow stronger. It’s like the magic system in Secret of Mana or Secret of Evermore. You can also learn special moves depending on what magic you have and what weapon you are using. Even though some characters are better as one kind of character than another, it still gives you a good amount of freedom as to how you want to build your party. The only drawback is that you learn magic by finding Mana eggs. There are not a lot of them and you can only use each egg once, so make sure you put the right spells on the right person. Outside of battle, if you see an enemy and he doesn’t notice you, you can get him from behind and get an advantage in the battle. If the enemies get you from behind however, they will get the advantage. It’s like the systems used in games like Blue Dragon and Earthbound.

The graphics are brightly colored and look nice. If you liked the graphical style of games, again like Xenogears, Wild Arms 2, and the Breath of Fire games on the PS1, then I think you would like them here. They might not age well in some areas, but I still think they have a charming way of making me look over some of the aged spots. The voice acting is hit-and-miss. Sometimes it’s good, but sometimes it’s so bad that it’s good. Though it does have that Xenogears problem where the voice acting isn’t used a lot, there is much more voice acting in Grandia than Xenogears. The music is amazing. It gives you that feeling of adventure over the horizon. It makes you feel like you should take every day to the limit and live it! This is, of course, thanks to the composer for this game, Noriyuki Iwadare. He is famous for doing the music for the entire Grandia series, the Lunar series (not including the DS game), Megaman X7, Growlanser, Radiata Story, Y’s 3, and he worked on two games in the Phoenix Wright franchise. It’s a great soundtrack with a lot of lighthearted themes. Even if some of the songs in the soundtrack can get annoying at times, due to a couple of them being short, the soundtrack for the most part is very calming atmospheric music, with simple beats and drums in some areas. I just love this soundtrack.

Even though I want to give this game a perfect 10, there are some minor faults. I wish there was a program inside the monsters that would make them back away from you if you were stronger than them, like in Earthbound or Dragon Quest 9. That would be so cool and would get a lot of the annoying battles out of the way due to the speed that the enemies come at you. I also wish there was an unlimited item-holding container instead of a limited amount of items on the character. There is a storage bin to store items in, but it is inconvenient because it is only in towns. Like I said earlier, the voice acting can be bad at times and although it’s not Game Arts’ fault, I wish they could have gotten people like Tara Strong or Steve Blum for some of the characters. It is also a tiny bit tedious to level up your weapon and magic skill, since you have to keep using those spells and weapons to power yourself up, but there are certain ways to easily level yourself up, so this is just a minor gripe.

This is one of my favorite games of all time and one of my top 10 favorite RPGs. I wish it wasn’t such an overlooked, but pretty popular classic Japanese style RPG. It will cost you a bit to get a hard copy of this game, but you can easily get this game off the PSN store for 10 dollars, which is an easy steal for such a long and memorable RPG. This has been part one of the Game Arts tribute and the 199^th review from me. Get ready for the long awaited 200^th review and the final part of the Game Arts tribute.

This game gets a 9 out of 10

Cam's Eye View: Prince of Persia Retrospective part 2: Prince of Persia 2008 for the PS3 and Xbox360 review

Hey, guys. Welcome back to Prince of Persia Retrospective part 2! Now, if you guys read the first part, then you know what I am going to review next. If you haven’t read the first part of this retrospective, then here is a short version. Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time was an okay game in my opinion. I thought the combat was tedious and platforming overly difficult, but it was worth a rent to see what the big deal was back in 2003. However, it is time to move on and play a different game. I decided to skip the two sequels and move on to the Prince’s first HD appearance in the 2008 Prince of Persia! I remember when people saw the new art style, everyone was overreacting and freaking out wondering what had happened. It turns out that, in my humble opinion, it’s a better game than the 2003 game, though it does have its faults, and I will get to them later in this review. So, let’s get into part 2 and review Prince of Persia.

            The main story of this game stars our hero, the Prince, as he wanders through a desert looking for a camel that has a king’s worth in gold on it. While he looks for the camel that probably is dead from the weight and the heat of the sun, he meets a princess running from some guards. After some more running, they run into the princess’s father inside the Temple of Light where the father then releases a powerful dark god. It is up to the prince and the princess to restore the sacred areas of the land and take down the dark god. So, yeah, it’s basically “ I’m a guy who is normal but is thrown into an impossible mission that I probably won’t survive”, but it works for who the Prince is.

The gameplay featured in Prince of Persia is mixed with intense swordplay along with some very creative Prince of Persia platforming. The main platforming comes in the form of wall-crawling, ring-grabbing, walking on ceilings, jumping on poles, and running faster all over buildings in the specific area. In each section of the world, one of four bosses resonates in each area, and you must defeat them to restore the area, kind of like Okami in a way. After you purify each area, you have to collect light seeds to gain access to special powers, like launching yourself from one pad to another, to getting the ability to run up walls and ceilings without needing to use rings or vines to grasp on to. The sword combat in my opinion is much MUCH better. This time you can pull off more offensive combos with the help of the princess who can stun enemies to where you can use your acrobatic sword skills to take down enemies. The final main gimmick I have to tell you all about is the infinite continues you can get if you mess up. Each time you miscalculate a jump or do something bad, you can always get a helping hand as the princess will pull you back up and put you a few feet away from the area you died in. It is a much more direct approach to combat, and the execution of the game, instead of making it all acrobatic like the last game.

The graphics are purely beautiful. Granted, some areas look a little repetitive as you walk through them, but the moments when you restore sacred areas just look amazing. The animation of the Prince also looks really good in some areas, like when he climbs upon the ceiling, he looks realistic, but in real life, you would be dead if you did that. The voice acting is, again, hit and miss, but the company definitely upgraded by kicking the last person who did the Prince’s voice out the window and bringing in Nolan North, who you guys all know as Nathan Drake from Uncharted. He does A LOT better on this role than the last guy. Everyone else is pretty hit and miss, but it’s good overall. The music is also nice since the same composer of the last Prince of Persia game I reviewed is back doing this game’s musical score that sounds really good.

However, it does have some major faults, which could either make you buy or rent the game. While the platforming is fun, you could easily get lost and go the wrong way, and it takes a while to get back to the area you started at. That is another thing that bugs me; it takes forever to get to point B from point A. While finding light seeds is required to progress through the game, it gets boring REALLY fast. It just gets repetitious since, later in the game, you will need to find every single little light seed to get the new powers. It’s the same kind of collecting issue as in the Ratchet and Clank series and the early Spyro games. It also doesn’t help that platforming takes over fighting 90% of the game, meaning that battles will not be consistent throughout the game. I also kind of wish puzzle-solving aspects were kept out of the game since some of the puzzles are just overly tedious in some areas of the game. I also find the dialogue to fit somewhat, but most of the time, the lines are cheesy

Overall though, what are my thoughts on this game? While some areas don’t age as well from three years ago, it is definitely a better game than the Sands of Time. I say, rent it if you haven’t played it yet, or buy it if you like this franchise. I just wish they continued with this art style instead of going back to the old style like with the most recent games in the franchise. That’s right, I said games with an ‘s’ at the end! Stay tuned for more reviews and a special two-part finale to the Prince of Persia Retrospective!

This game gets a solid 8 out of 10



Game Review: Hell's Kitchen

Game Review: Hell's Kitchen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-lvuRzYeOk

A brand new review for the weekend. Hope you guys enjoy it. Thanks for watching!

Rayman Origins - E3 2010 Debut Trailer

Looking sweet. Now I need to play the first Rayman game.

Assassins Creed Brotherhood - Trailer E3 2010 HD

Never liked the franchise myself, but I do know a few fellow gamers are looking foward to this new Assassins Creed game