What I'm Playing (Volume 125): Darkwing Duck

Darkwing Duck is a platformer for the NES, based on the Disney cartoon from the early 90s. It's one of several Capcom developed NES games based on Disney properties, most of which were actually pretty good. It's built on the Mega Man engine, and has a similar jumping and shooting mechanic as the game on which it's based.

Similar to the Mega Man games, you'll have a choice as to the level you'd like to tackle. Rather than having every level open to you at the start, however, the game is more similar to Mega Man 7 in that you can only select from a handful of stages at the start, and upon beating this handful, you can then unlock more selectable stages. The level design is good, but not great. There are plenty of creative spots here, and fewer "BS" moments than Mega Man, but also fewer cool level design ideas compared to its progenitor.

Gameplay is fine, but not quite as tight as a Mega Man game. The new wrinkle in this game is that Darkwing Duck can hang from objects in the background, enabling you to move up in a level in a vertical manner that you typically don't see in a Mega Man game. However, the exact hitbox for when the hang will trigger, and when it won't, can be imprecise and will definitely kill you on occasion.

Rather than unlockable weapons taken from robot masters, special weapons in this game can be picked up throughout the stage. Each special gas has a different effect, although none of them, save for the arrow, feel useful. The arrow behaves similarly to various Mega Man special weapons in that you can use it to stick in a wall, and jump up to areas that would be otherwise unreachable. Darkwing can only hold one special weapon at a time, so be sure to plan carefully for what you'll need! Unlike Mega Man, bosses in this game do not have weaknesses to any specific weapon, so use whatever you'd like! The bosses were fine, by the way. A few were pretty creative and interesting, particularly the mechanic that has to fix the machines you break, but others seemed cheap and frustrating, particularly the end boss.

I loved the length of the game. A skilled player can clear it in about a half an hour, and slogging through the stages with no experience probably took about 2 and a half hours. I played it on the Disney Afternoon Collection, so I had plenty of chances to work on individual segments of the game.

The graphics for this game are pretty good. They're not quite the same level of detail as one of the fourth through sixth Mega Man games, but are more similar to a quality found in Mega Man 2 or Mega Man 3. Nothing to complain about.

The music is composed by Yasuaki Fujita, of Mega Man 3 and Breath of Fire fame, and is very good. I wouldn't put it in the class of any of the Mega Man games, but there are plenty of good tracks here.

On the whole, this is a good NES game. It's not DuckTales, and it's probably not even at the level of The Little Mermaid and Chip n' Dale's Rescue Rangers, but it's a good effort from an excellent developer. I'll give it an 8.0/10.

I've already teased some of the stuff I'm working on, but here's another teaser, because I'm a maniac and am trying to play four home console games at once at the moment!

-TRO

Retro vs. Modern Games

When I tell people that I still play play retro games, I get some strange looks, similar to how I imagine people must look at you when you tell them that you don't vaccinate your children or ascribe to modern medical science. Why in the world would anyone want to spend time with games that have aged so badly? Why, when games have come so far as a medium in terms of storytelling and immersion, would you want to go backwards in time? I get these comments even from people who enjoyed retro games when they were modern, and for a while I struggled with answering them.

I definitely do spend quite a bit of time playing retro games, although I still do enjoy and play modern games. In the past three years, I have completed 144 video games I had not previously completed. Of those games, 16 were released in the 1980s, 48 were released in the 1990s, 36 were released in the 2000s, and 44 were released in the 2010s (I consider any game released before the Dreamcast and its internet connectivity to be "retro", by the way). And that number is decidedly skewed in favor of the newer games I play, as those are most likely to be first time plays. I've replayed several Mega Man, Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, and other retro games in that time, and those don't count in the numbers in the slightest.

It seems like the simplest answer as to why I love retro games so much is that they are a piece of nostalgia for me. I grew up with an NES, a Game Boy, a Super Nintendo, a Sega Genesis...and so on and so forth. And, in fact, many of my favorite games for those systems are ones that I owned and enjoyed as a kid. Nostalgia certainly plays a role in my enjoyment of retro games, but I don't feel comfortable in saying that it's the primary variable that explains my love for them. For one thing, I've completely fallen in love with plenty of retro games that I didn't grow up with, and never experienced. Games like the NES Mega Man games, DuckTales, Kirby's Adventure, Kirby's Dream Land 2, Super Metroid, Dr. Mario, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Dragon Warrior, Super-Punch-Out!!, and Wario Land 3 were all games I've reviewed glowingly on here despite having no prior experience with them. For another thing, there are plenty of retro games I remember enjoying as a child that are just objectively trash now. I've panned childhood favorites like Buster Bunny Busts Loose!! and been forced to turn off one of my favorite games from my childhood, Bases Loaded, in disgust. Additionally, there are plenty of games that I didn't love as a child that I now adore as an adult. A classic example is Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, which is one of my favorite NES games now, but was a mildly enjoyable distraction for me as a kid.

So nostalgia can't explain all of it, even though I'll be the first to admit in reviews when I think I'm being biased, because I definitely can be. So what is it about retro games that's so appealing to me? Games have certainly come a long way since I first picked up my NES controller to play Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt in 1993. I LOVE wireless controllers. I love patches and DLC, even as I complain about needing to download a patch for 45 minutes on release day of a new game. I love huge TVs and HD graphics. I love the option to play online with friends. I love the blowing open wide of the video game industry to countless independent developers. I enjoy immersive, cinematic gaming experiences (more on this later). There's so much to love when it comes to modern gaming that there must be something substantive to retro gaming, above and beyond pure nostalgia, to keep me coming back.

Note the identical shapes of the clouds and bushes

The more I think about it, the more I narrow my reasons down to three. The first issue is that sometimes hardware issues forced game developers to be far more creative about using limited assets, an issue that modern developers simply do not face. This isn't to say that modern developers never face a shortage of resources or assets to develop their games the way they would like, but it is to say that modern games are frequently plagued by having too much junk in them, rather than too little. In games like Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto and co. were so restricted on the amount of memory that they could use that they famously had to use the exact same sprite, colored differently, for bushes and clouds. These difficult choices about where to allocate resources forced classic developers to be extremely thoughtful about where to focus their limited time and resources in development, while not including things in a modern game just feels like laziness. Don't have online multiplayer in your game? Lazy. Don't have a single player campaign? Lazy. Don't have a particular mode or option another game has? Lazy. There's so little stopping you from making your game 1 GB bigger in the modern era, that you're limited only by your imagination and your time. I think that modern games frequently have so much stuff crammed into them that nothing is done particularly well or thoughtfully, but at least the developers can avoid being compared unfavorably to a similar game with more modes or options. Why, in heaven's name, did Mass Effect 3 need an online multiplayer option? Why do Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 need 12 minigames a piece, with none of them being any good? The feature bloat in these games takes away the time and attention developers could be giving towards more critical aspects of game design, and these little shortcoming definitely add up over time. Modern games that have had a more limited focus in terms of mechanics and design, such as Shovel Knight and Journey, have been some of my favorites, while AAA titles with all of their features just feel somehow lacking in sharpness.

The second reason I love retro games so much is because I genuinely do prefer the style of gameplay and storytelling present in retro games. CRTs, with their incredibly fast refresh rates, along with classic consoles and their wired controllers, enabled players to react and respond to threats far quicker than our more graphically impressive modern consoles. In addition, modern gaming's insistence on more photorealism in games makes it more difficult to achieve a twitchy gameplay experience that feels rewarding. I'll again pick on Red Dead Redemption 2, which must have the single worst hand to hand fighting experience known to mankind (this is certainly false, but I can't think of another worse one off the top of my head). Real people, of course, do not flick out their fist instantaneously to punch a foe like Little Mac. They have to reach back to gather momentum, and slam their fist into an enemy. If your focus is on realism, you'll have a split second delay between button press and impact that just never feels right. Modern games that get it right, like Marvel's Spider-Man, have some sort of supernatural reason to have that kind of lightning reaction, and so it works. But call me crazy that I miss some Punch-Out!! and Ninja Gaiden style combat from time to time! So much focus is placed on realism and immersion in modern games that sometimes I feel like you're actually being sucked out of the story, in a weird way. It was pretty easy to feel like you were the hero in games like Final Fantasy VII, Super Mario Bros., and Mega Man 3, despite their lack of graphical realism. But modern gaming breaks up gameplay so much between cutscenes and actually engagement that it can pull you out of the game by making you change hats from hero to spectator.

The final reason why I love retro games is I simply adore the gradual improvement feedback loop present in classic games. When you get crushed by an obstacle over and over again, and clear it for the first time, it's an incredible feeling. Even better than that feeling is cruising past it with easy on later plays, establishing your own sense that you're improving. You replay so little of a modern game that it feels more like perseverance and less like improvement when you get over the hump in a modern game. Give it enough tries, and you'll do it, especially when it's only 45 seconds between autosave points. A game like The Last of Us could have done better to have longer stretches between autosaves that made you actually survive for a significant lack of time, rather than hammering your way past a tricky obstacle, but instead it will save every 3 or 4 minutes. Obviously, you can't beat most modern games in a single sitting like you could with DuckTales, but games like Super Mario World and Sonic 3 & Knuckles would establish that the feedback loop of improvement could absolutely occur alongside of save functions, and I really miss the feeling of progress and achievement in a retro game.

Anyway, I think there's actually a ton of merit in a classic approach to game design and function, which is why I'm grateful for modern examples of a retro approach, and also that our retro games can exist on our modern consoles with their wireless controllers and large screens. But I think I'll always have a special soft spot in my heart for retro games, which is why almost all of my all-time favorite games are retro. So don't feel like an anti-vaxxer for spending your time with Vectorman on a Friday night. You and he deserve each other.

-TRO

Top Ten Arcade Games

I haven't been writing on here as often as I'd like due to my work schedule, and it will be a bit before I'm ready to review any new games, so here goes with another top ten list to tide me and my faithful reader over until the next review!

Usually I'll give a quick caveat at the beginning, apologizing if your favorite game has been left off the list, and boy does that apply here. I was born after the hey day of the arcade, never went seriously to a physical arcade, and experienced arcade games largely through their console ports, with a few exceptions. As such, my arcade experience is highly colored due to the nature of my interests, but also the number of games that were ever ported to consoles. If it didn't get a console port, I've probably never played it, but I'm doing my best to address this shortfall as best I can by getting access to more arcade ports and by visiting a great little barcade in the city near my house. I've been once, and really enjoyed myself, so I think I'll be returning very soon.

Due to my woeful lack of education regarding arcades and the titanic number of titles from forty plus years of arcade gaming, I won't even bother to do a list of games I've never played or don't have enough experience with. This must be my most subjective list ever due to small sample size, so deal with it!

10. Donkey Kong

While I feel like Donkey Kong hasn't aged too well, I have to give it credit for creating one of my most beloved genres, and for 1981, this game is darn impressive across the board.

9. Arkanoid

My wife and I played this at the barcade a few weeks ago, and we honestly could have played it all night long. It takes the concept for breakout, cranks it up a level, and it's crazy fun, with a great spinner controller to tie it all together.

8/4. Marvel v. Capcom/Marvel v. Capcom 2

I'll take "reasons why my Dreamcast system rating isn't higher for 1000, Alex". All of my favorite Dreamcast games are arcade games, in my mind. Even though the Dreamcast ports for them are always technically flawless, the controller leaves a lot to be desired. I guess I'll just have to get a Dreamcast arcade stick *shudders at the cost*. Anyway, these two games are incredible, deep fighters, and totally hooked me in the arcades. Marvel v. Capcom was the very first game I purchased for my PS1, and though I've upgraded to the superior Dreamcast version in the years since, I'll always love both of these games. The second is just bigger and better in every way than the first, and is a real "whoa" moment in arcade history in terms of visuals and gameplay. That's why it gets the bump up to 4, and may deserve to be even higher.

7. Ikaruga

I don't want to scoop myself too much for a future What I'm Playing, but I've been messing around with Ikaruga a bit for the past month on the PS4, and find myself extremely impressed. It's got an awesome gameplay mechanic, wonderful visuals and sound, and has extremely sharp level design that integrates its mechanic to the maximum. It's also crushingly difficult, which means I'll be playing around with it for a while yet to come. Arcade shooters, and particularly vertical shooters, are the number one genre I want to experience more of in the years to come, and this game has been a delightful breath of creativity for me that makes me want more.

6. X-Men

This one gets a huge nostalgia bump for me, as it's the sole game on this list that I associate purely with the arcade. They used to have a four player cabinet of this at the local Chuck E. Cheese, back when Chuck actually had some arcade games, rather than just stupid carnival cons. I would burn every token into this game with a rotating cast of new friends, but I'd only play if I could be Nightcrawler, who is totally dope in this game. Over the years, I've felt like its quality had faded in comparison to the very similar Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons, which replaced X-Men a few years later. They had all three at the barcade, and after running the turtles and the X-Men for about 15 minutes a piece, I can safely say that X-Men is far superior. It's got much more fair boss battles, an excellent power up system that feels impactful, and is visually really great. Dontello and co. participate in a shameless quarter suck with unwinnable boss battles, and it's terrible. The SNES port of Turtles in Time is fantastic, but that one is junk. Next time I go to the barcade, I'll try out Simpsons and compare.

5. Tekken 3

My predominant experience with Tekken 3 is on the Playstation, but I've played it a few times in various arcades, and it's phenomenal everywhere. Everyone has their favorite 3D fighter, and while Dead or Alive and Soul Calibur have their merits, I'll take Tekken every time. This game represented a huge leap forward for the game in terms of roster diversity, and it's just awesome.

3. Pac-Man

It's probably the most important video game of all-time, and it's still extremely fun. Ms. Pac-Man is slightly better, but we'll give the edge to the OG here, and say that anything with these mechanics will be awesome forever.

2/1. Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike/Street Fighter II

Street Fighter III: Third Strike is unquestionably the better game of the two, but Street Fighter II has the most nostalgia of any arcade game on this list. I played it in arcades, convenience stores, SNES, Genesis...wherever I could get my hands on it. I learned to hadouken and how to shoryuken, and became a Ryu main for life. You can't go wrong with either, so crack open a roll of quarters, and get down to the arcade!

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 124): Sonic Mania

Sonic Mania is a classically styled 2D platformer released on all of the modern gaming platforms. It was my first Sonic game I've played in years (probably since one of the Sonic Advance games on the GBA), and I decided to play it based largely on the excellent reviews it received. It also helped that it was on PS Plus, making it so that I didn't need to buy it!

The game is created largely by Christian Whitehead, who had worked on other ports of Sonic games in the past. It definitely draws large amounts of inspiration from the classic Sonic games, but draws the most on Sonic 3 & Knuckles, to which it has the most similarities. As someone who rides pretty hard for the third Sonic game on the Genesis, this pleased me greatly.

There's not too much to say about the gameplay here. It's Sonic, and it feels exactly the same as you remember, with a few small tweaks here and there. For example, they add in an additional ability for Sonic to charge his spin dash while jumping. I never actually used it, but you can also turn off this ability should you dislike it. I didn't play as either Tails or Knuckles, but do intend to do a playthrough as both at some point.

The level design in this game is absolutely masterful. It totally nails the classic Sonic feel with winding levels with tons of branches and secrets, yet somehow maintaining clarity for the player on where to head next. You never felt lost, but you always felt like your path was up to you, and that feeling definitely lends the game to have a significantly higher replayability than other 2D platformers. Perhaps most importantly, as far as level design is concerned, the design team here took tremendous pains to eradicate the most frustrating aspects of classic Sonic games, the obstacles inherently placed to stop your speedier sections. There are still sections that feel like they're "on rails" where you're zipping through tunnels, loops, pipes, and other Sonic mainstays, but there's rarely a spiky enemy at the end of these runs waiting to take your rings without the slightest warning. This helps to reinforce the core element of Sonic's character (he's fast), while also realizing that humans can't possibly react as Sonic ought to. This creates a fun feedback loop for players, who can now enjoy the feeling of speed without the stress of a pitfall lying ahead. The slower, more traditional platforming sections, which were the strength of gameplay in the classic games, are every bit as fun as those.

The boss battles are the best in the series, with a wide range of clever and delightful bosses. My favorite is a chance to play a round of Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine as one of the battles. Its inclusion demonstrates the love and care for the classic Genesis library that has seeped in to every pore of this game.

The game is exactly the right length, and ends exactly when you're ready.

The graphics in this game are absolutely gorgeous. It looks and feels like a Genesis game, but has a slightly higher level of detail associated with its jump to a modern console environment. This is particularly notable in the backgrounds, which have never looked better.

The music is incredible! You'll get some of the finest songs from the classic Genesis games (you'll revisit remixed versions of classic stages throughout), along with some excellent new compositions for the original level designs.

There are a ton of great gameplay options for the truest Sonic fans, including co-op play, competitive play, time attack mode (with online leaderboards), and the ability to replay any stage from the beginning. My one complaint about these modes is that the screens for players on the competitive mode are pretty small and tough to see, and have the weird, stretched out look of a class game adapted to a modern console without an appropriate scaling tool. I think they could have done better here.

I really and truly feel like this is the best Sonic game ever made, even if it's not quite as original and innovative as either Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles. I have always been a person that appreciates the most polished game in a series the most, whether its the most innovative or not, and I think that that's true here as well. Sonic Mania Plus is definitely going on my wishlist, as I'd love to play some additional levels and reward the developers for a job very well done. There's a time and place to reinvent the wheel, but like with the Mega Man games before it, sometimes all you need is some superb level design and technical advancement to make a new game worth the trouble. This game nails that balance, and Sonic fans like myself had been waiting a long time for that to happen. I'll give it a 9.3/10.

Up next on What I'm Playing is...I have no idea. I'm working on a few games at the moment, and am unsure of which one I'll complete first. I've already teased the one I suspect will be next on a previous review, so I'll leave it to you to look through some old reviews to find out what I'm missing. You won't have to look too far back to find it. :)

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 123): Game & Watch Gallery 4

Game & Watch Gallery 4 is a collection of minigames based on the classic LCD handhelds from Nintendo's yesteryear. The cover boasts that there are 6 games in one, but that's a serious undersell. Each of the main games in the collection has both a modern and classic version. The classic versions are simply the emulated LCD games in their original version. The modern versions update the games with color and use Mario and Donkey Kong characters, rather than the various iterations of Mr. Game & Watch featured in the original games.

While you start off with six games (really twelve, when you count the modern and classic versions), by achieving more stars in the games you can unlock fourteen more, some with modern versions, and some without. Unlocking the new games requires unlocking stars in the games that have both classic and modern versions, and you can do so by getting better and better high scores. For a 1000 point score, you get the full 5 stars for each game, and each game has an A and B mode. These modes are sometimes just a harder version of the game, but sometimes are multiplayer versions which you can play with a link cable.

Some of these games are really fun, and some are not very fun. I had a great time with classic and modern games like Chef, Fire Attack, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Rain Shower, Mario's Cement Factory, Mario Bros., and Fire. Others, like Boxing, Donkey Kong 3, Manhole, and Octopus were not as much fun. In almost every case, I found myself enjoying the modern versions of the game more than the classic versions. This was particularly true of Chef, which is a straight up masterpiece in the modern version.

Grinding for the stars is the single biggest weakness of this game, and the ceilings for unlocking all of the games is ludicrously high. You can get a maximum of twenty stars for each game, and the difficulty level is highly variable depending on the game. Games like Octopus and Fire were really difficult for me to rack up more than 200 or so points on any given setting, and unless you can get nearly twenty stars on almost all of the levels (which requires 1000 points in each mode), you can kiss unlocking some of the games goodbye. What's more, some of the game modes can only be played via link cable, so unless you have a friend to play with, you can kiss a big chunk of the stars goodbye. This was one game where I would have liked there to be a cheat you could input to unlock all of the games, as some of these LCD handhelds are super expensive, and without paying a lot of money or putting in a ton of time on this cart, I probably won't be able to get an authentic feeling experience playing a Game & Watch like Zelda, which requires 160 stars (I quit between 80 and 90, and didn't really see a path to getting many more without a stupid amount of time or finding a friend to play with). The cheapest one I could find was 80 dollars, and I just wish that Nintendo had put their history behind a less stringent wall with this one.

Sound, controls, and graphics are all basically what you expect. They're all either LCD or low-grade 16 bit quality. Nothing to see here, nothing really to report on.

I really enjoyed my time with Game & Watch Gallery 4, and was pleasantly surprised by some of the creative game designs that Nintendo was doing nearly 40 years ago, in some cases! Some of the games on here are clunkers, but if you enjoy simple little games with a lot of heart and soul, you should check it out. I'd have probably paid the 7.99 for which I acquired this cartridge just for modern Chef, which I'd highly recommend to everyone. I'll give this game a 7.6/10 as a fun little time waster and history lesson, but nothing that will change your life.

Up next on reTROview, I'll be reviewing a game I'd been looking forward to since its launch, but had been unable to play because I'm poor. Check back in tomorrow (hopefully) for another reTROview!

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 122): Xenoblade Chronicles

Wow. What a summer! I have not posted on here for a full month due to the fact that I've been out of town for a few weeks, and insanely busy the rest of the time! I honestly haven't even been able to spend that much time playing games, let alone reviewing them, but I do have a few in the can that I'll be reviewing here in the next few days, assuming I don't catch any new assignments at work.

Xenoblade Chronicles is a JRPG, originally created for the Nintendo Wii, home of such memorable JRPGs as Xenoblade Chronicles. For the purposes of this review, I played the game on on the 3DS (I scored a killer deal on a cart on Offerup a year back or so). It is part of the Xeno series, which was a little confusing to me until I started to think about it compared to games like Final Fantasy, which are all a part of the same series, but don't always exist in the same world. I adore Xenogears, the game which founded this series, but had very little experience with the rest of the Xenoverse, save for a confusing weekend spent renting Xenosaga Episode 1: Der Wille zur Macht, an early contender for silliest JRPG title of all time (The frontrunner is Tactics Ogre 64: Person of Lordly Caliber. No, actually, it's Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue. Yes, these are all real video games published by real video game companies and translated into English for a broad American release.). This is an unusually relevant review (for me), given the news that this game is currently being remastered for the Switch.

Anyway, Xenoblade Chronicles is a game made by Monolith Soft, a company founded in part by Tetsuya Takahashi, a man who was involved with several of my favorite video games of all time, including Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, and Xenogears. This, capped off by Final Fantasy VII, is the best run for Squaresoft, and he had his fingers in a lot of my favorite stuff, so I was quite dismayed by Project X Zone, another Monolith Soft game, and found it to be a steaming pile of trash. I can't find Takahashi's name on anything having to do with Project X Zone, though, so maybe my original delay to tackle this game was ill-informed. I also discovered that Monolith Soft had participated heavily in one of my favorite games of all-time, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and that was enough to get me to pick this bad boy up in a fever, falling headlong into yet another JRPG and burning another 60-80 hours of my life in the process.

The story is clever at times, but not close to comparing to that of Xenogears. The story is set in a huge world that is actually a fossilized giant, located next to another giant. The tale is that the two giants battled to a standstill generations back, and that life has sprung up across these two enormous Gundam-like beings. Your story begins as life-forms from the other giant swarm onto your hero's world and attack your home at Colony 9. The story also revolves around a legendary energy sword called the Monado, that only you are capable of wielding to its fullest extent. I enjoyed the story, but it's not the greatest I've ever seen.

Combat is flat out excellent. The game uses an MMO-style of combat, quite similar to that of World of Warcraft. You can pin many abilities to a tool bar, and use commands to trigger them, all while your character will autoattack according to his/her stats. What makes the combat fun is that each character has his/her own playstyle, and that combat revolves around skillfully positioning yourself at the proper point of weakness demanded by your character's abilities. So, a given ability will say that it will do double damage by being executed behind an enemy, but you will benefit even more by first moving to their side, and executing another attack to lower their defense before dropping the bomb. Status buffs feel impactful and noticeable, and, more unusually for a JRPG, debuffs are essential and comprehensible in battle. The core mechanic of battle is that you must first "break" your opponents' defense, then "topple" them to make them incapable of defending themselves, and finally "dazing" them to extend the duration of their topple. What's more each opponent has their own vulnerabilities that makes each battle feel like you need to adapt your strategy to fit the opponent, making combat far more fresh and interesting than your typical JRPG. One small complaint I have with combat is that it could be difficult to tell sometimes where exactly you were positioned in relation to some of the non-humanoid enemies, which made it hard to know exactly which effects would occur on each effect. This was irritating, but on the whole I enjoyed the combat a lot.

*MINOR SPOILER ALERT*

Another great aspect of combat was the concept of time travel. Early on in the game, you figure out that Shulk has little visions of the future that he can use to anticipate enemy movements and thwart bad outcomes. This is a big theme throughout the game, but unlock other games, this theme is actually useful in combat! You'll get visions of your friends being knocked out or hit with crushing status ailments in combat, and have a timer to topple your foe to prevent this, kill them, shield/heal your friends, or draw their aggro to you to save them. This is a really fun mechanic and plot device, and is far more thoughtful than your typical JRPG approach to time travel, Chrono Trigger excepted.

*SPOILER ENDED*

The visuals for the game were insanely impressive for a 3DS game, and particularly impressive with regards to the environment. The closest comparison I can give is of Final Fantasy XII, which has a very similar look at feel to it. I think the character models have not aged terribly well, but the surroundings were still quite stunning to look at. They had some difficulty adapting the game to a handheld, particularly with environmental effects. Looking at Youtube videos of the game on the Wii, the weather, which plays a big role in the game, was significantly more difficult to see, and not just because of the small screen size. There was also substantial slowdown during some combat, especially in big battles towards the end of the game.

The game's quest mechanics were mostly user friendly, especially compared to the typical MMO approach, which I detest. Having to haul back your 7 beetle wings or report on the junk you investigated on the ground is realistic, but no fun, and Xenoblade Chronicles largely skips the reporting stage of questing, unless the report would forward an interesting character narrative. The frustrating thing about questing was finding the quests in the first place. Characters spawn at all hours of the day, walk around the map, and are really difficult to find, even with a handy guide given to you telling their active times. It doesn't even give you rough locations, and seeing as a lot of your time will be spent doing sidequests to try to level up your reputations in these areas to access more quests and level up, this is a big pain. What's more, your increasing reputation will unlock new quests, but you may never know they are available unless you happen to be in the same area as a character you've already spoken to, but may not have trusted you enough yet to give you the quest. The fan wiki is essential to enjoying this game, so don't feel guilty about using it. Without it, I wouldn't have had as much fun as I did.

The game's music is very good, but it's crippled by its single most annoying trait-combat screaming. There will be an absolute cacophony of screaming from all of your characters at every second throughout your battles, including enlightening cries of "THIS IS THE MONADO'S POWER!" and "GREAT JOB, RIKI!". These get so annoying, and you'll spend so much time in combat, that I quickly grew bored of the music.

The voice acting has some pretty saccharine British accents, and is generally fine. For a game as early and as complicated as this one, with so much text, I'll say it's actually pretty good.

The game's length is far, far, too long. Combat always stayed fresh, but I admittedly grew bored at about 60 hours, and still had 20 hours more game play to go.

All things considered, I'd definitely recommend this game. It has the feeling of Final Fantasy, but a different combat approach that really sparkles. There are some rough edges that need to be worn off, much like the early Final Fantasy games, but this game has a ton of charm and promise, and a lot of great ideas that are executed well. It's a Wii gem, and the 3DS version does it a lot of credit. I'll give it a 9.0/10.

Up next on What I'm Playing is a little game I picked up for cheap during a recent BOGO sale at my nearby video game shop. Here's a teaser...

-TRO