Notable Quotable #3

"The overseas market is key. It's not something we can turn our backs to. However, I think it's a bad idea to create products targeted for the West. ... Our only choice is to make titles that hardcore Japanese fans go for, then bring them out overseas as a purely made-in-Japan product. Disgaea is a success in the West, so I think it's best to go with a natural flow instead of trying to force ourselves in some unnatural direction."

-          Sohei Niikawa (CEO of Nippon Ichi) during an interview with Famitsu.

Infinite Space And Its Infinite Inaccessibility

Infinite Space is a great game that is extremely difficult to recommend unconditionally. It's an incredibly obtuse game, to the point that my one of my friends calls it a "high-functioning autistic." The confusing interface and poorly documented game mechanics are bound to turn off a lot of people, but it's impossible to discount it because it does so many things well.

Take the customization for instance. The main draw of Infinite Space is acquiring starships and steadily upgrading them using the "Tetris" system. As in Valkyria Chronicles, there's only so much space on a given starship, and the parts tend to look like Tetris blocks. So the challenge is squeezing in as many blocks as possible, all while keeping an eye on the price tag for installing each part. That can result in a bit of grinding early on as you try to scrounge the money for parts, but it's worth it when your tricked out destroyer rolls off the assembly line.

Half the fun though is micromanaging all the associated stats, and Infinite Space does an incredibly poor job of explaining what they all mean, even as it introduces head-scratching stats like "Livability" and "Med Tech." Given how much you can do in this game, these stats really aren't self-explanatory. Instead, you have to go into the Help menu to discover that Livability helps lower fatigue from long cruises, which is a cumbersome solution at best.

That's really just the tip of the iceberg though. There are all kinds of little interface issues, from the lack of a journal to keep track of missions (it's so easy to forget where to go in this game) to the inability to see how ship stats are affected as you attach different parts (you have to back out a menu to see how much a given stat has grown). And those issues don't begin to match the fact that Infinite Space basically throws you into the deep end of the pool from the outset.

Most people I know who played this game got stuck in Chapter 3, and with good reason. There are some pretty tough ship-to-ship battles in that section, and the melee battles will absolutely ruin those who forget to put someone in the security chief position. This sort of punishment would normally be fine, but once again, the info you need is buried in the Help menu. There's no indication whatsoever of what the security chief (or cook, or accountant, or ship surgeon) positions actually do without opening the in-game manual.

That goes double for the crew member abilities, which only kind of make sense after hours of play. At one point during Chapter 3, you have to engage several enemy fleets while only shooting down certain ships. Some of them lurk in the back row though, which means that your shots will always miss; so what's a captain to do? Apparently you have to drop the character you just recruited into the first officer position and activate his special ability.  When I first played, I had no idea those abilities were active rather than passive, much less that I was supposed to use it for that particular instance.

Like I said, poorly documented, at least for those who don't have the wherewithal to sit down and read the entire Help section. In other words, 90 percent of the people who will play this game. Nobody likes a tutorial.

There are other issues, like the combat, but the prior ones that I listed are the big ones. And yet, I can’t help but evangelize the heck out of this game. I find the customization utterly engrossing, I like having my own crew, and I feel completely engaged in the space adventure element. The flaws didn’t take me out of the experience by any means, but they did point to the need for RPGs to be as transparent as possible when it comes to stats.

Being a genre that puts so much emphasis on numbers and other mechanics, the stats should really be as self-explanatory as possible. I once spent quite a long time trying to figure out how "Special" was different from "Attack" in Poke’mon, but that's nothing compared to puzzling out what mechanics are affected by "Livability." Granted, it's all right there in the in-game manual, but a text box describing what each ship position and stat affects would have been preferable. As it is, it's pretty inaccessible, and it makes me sad to think that people might just give up and walk away because they don't "get it."

Is that their loss? Oh yeah, sure, particularly if they like starship or science fiction in any way. But it does suggest that the designers were so focused on the big picture of squeezing a space adventure onto the Nintendo DS that they neglected some of the mechanics, to the game's detriment. That said, I found Infinite Space to be quite engrossing the first time I played it.  Maybe you will too, just remember to read the help menu.

PSA: Hironobu Sakaguchi’s The Last Story was just announced for a European release on February 24^th, 2012.  Words cannot describe my excitement!

Revisiting the Metal Gears… in HD

Out of all the HD collections I’ve played so far, none in my mind stick out as much as Metal Gear Solid when it comes to the aging process of games.  Playing it actually feels like traveling progressively forward in time.

In my opinion, the years haven’t been kind to Metal Gear Solid 2.  Visually, all three games in the collection look excellent (especially Metal Gear Solid 3) but mechanically MGS2 reminds me of how painful Metal Gear’s transition was into the game it is today.

It’s almost as if Bluepoint and the other developers all along have handpicked PS2 games that still play and look somewhat like the games we’re playing today.  For instance, Shadow of the Colossus was a perfect candidate because the original version was just too much for the PS2 to handle.

 

On the contrary, I felt really rusty getting back into MGS2 – at 10 years old it is one of the oldest games to receive an HD remaster.  Somewhere around the Olga fight I remembered that I needed to treat the earlier MGS games like a top-down action game, and suddenly it started to make sense again.

To be honest I never liked MGS2’s gameplay a whole lot – I only really appreciated it for the meta storyline.  At least the original Metal Gear Solid was consistent in how it basically played the same as its 8-bit predecessor Metal Gear 2 (also on this collection and highly recommended).  MGS2’s shiny new graphics forced Kojima to employ cinematic camera angles to show them off which really messes with me in the context of a stealth game.

I understand the game shows you exactly what you need to see (and adding new controls and a new camera would break it) but getting myself back into the proper mindset of MGS2 might just prove too hard.  It’s not even about going back in time for me though when it concerns Metal Gear.  The problem is that MGS2 reminds me of that phase when Japanese designers were still trying to figure out how to make a good third person action game on a console.  The closest things to a textbook  (Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War) were four and five years away respectively, so I can’t really hold it against them.  MGS2 is just representative of a painful middle period in the history of Japanese console action games.

Maybe big MGS2 fans will still be able to play it fine.  I can still deal with the older Resident Evil games because I played them for years, but I haven’t been playing Metal Gear for as long as most fans.

I think I’ll be able to get back into MGS3 if only because of the Subsistence camera – which was when the franchise started to feel like an actual three-dimensional game.  The abundance of cut scenes kind of kicked me in the face too, but man MGS3 has never looked so clean.  There are actually details in the art assets that I couldn’t notice on the PS2.  The fact that it’s running at 60 frames per second for the first time isn’t hurting either.  I really don’t know which game received the better HD treatment, this or Ico.

If there’s one reason people should buy this collection though, it’s Peace Walker.  Only having come out in the last few years, the only thing that really held PW’s gameplay back was Konami’s choice of platform.  Here, it feels like a regular, modern game in absolutely every aspect save the PSP graphics, and it’s definitely a game that Metal Gear fans shouldn’t miss.

I personally think that PW is easily the most content-rich Metal Gear game ever.  After transferring my save file over, looking at my stats reminded me that even after 55 hours I still have a ways to go before I’ve seen everything this game has to offer.  Playing it with two analog sticks now, it feels like a revelation, playing a Metal Gear game where the controls actually make sense.  I hope this attracts other people to the game.

The one thing that probably keeps astounding me through all the games in this collection is that I forgot how much charm Kojima put into his games.

Starting up MGS2 and hearing Otacon give Snake a full tutorial and gameplay hints mixed right in there with the mission briefing felt so much more cohesive than having to read those things on a loading screen.  Taking care to put all that stuff in-universe surprisingly helps Metal Gear’s suspension of disbelief instead of hurting it.  You know it’s a video game, but it becomes a very engrossing one.  The games in this collection probably have five times as much personality as most of what I’ve been playing this year.

I guess one great reason to do these HD collections is as a reminder.  On one end this one feels like a reminder of how different and dated Metal Gear was not too long ago.  On the other hand it also reminds us of what a lot of games have lost in the years since.