‘It would be easy to construct a blueprint for the ideal hostess. Indeed, if the Japanese economy ever needs a boost, Sony might contemplate putting them into mass production.
The blueprint would provide for: a large pair of breasts, with which to comfort and delight her clients; one dextrous, well-manicured hand for pouring their drinks, lighting their cigarettes and popping forkfuls of food into their mouths; a concealed tape-recording of cheerful laughter, to sustain the illusion that the girls themselves are having a good time; and a single, enormous, very sensitive ear for the clients to talk into.’
When Final Fantasy’s creator Hironobu Sakaguchi left Square-Enix in 2002, following the colossal flop that was his flagship series’ only venture into Hollywood, nobody knew quite whether his new studio was headed for glory or disaster.
Had his simplistic 8-bit Dungeons and Dragons rip-off twenty years earlier been a happy accident? And how much input into Square’s output had the man actually had over the following decades? Surely the record-breaking successes of Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Trigger had been down to the worker bee creative force that buzzed around in his esteemed employment, rather than any masterminding from this remote executive producer. Could Sakaguchi really lead the JRPG into a new promised land from his new, semi-retired residence in Hawaii?
Blue Dragon, Mistwalker’s first release and an Xbox 360 exclusive, failed to offer an adequate answer to the questions. It was archaic to the point of zombification: an anachronistic product whose waxy 3D characters and sterile environments did little to disguise the worn mechanical cogs that clunked under the hood. It was precisely this conservatism that paid dividends in Japan, where the game became the best-selling Xbox 360 title of the time, but while the unadventurous gameplay may have warmed Japanese hearts towards the ailing gaijin machine upon which it played, Blue Dragon failed to ignite many passions, be they Japanese or Western.
As such, this DS spin-off is unexpected, especially considering the far greater success that Sakaguchi’s second release, Lost Odyssey, achieved. But, as the opening moments of Blue Dragon Plus make clear, the super-deformed appearance of hero Shu and his companions, and the colourful, cutesy Toriyama-styled ambiance is much more at home on Nintendo’s handheld than it ever was on a Microsoft machine. In part, this might be because Mistwalker has partnered with a different developer for this follow-up. Brownie Brown will be familiar to JRPG fans as one of the sets of hands behind the recent and excellent Mother 3 and its expertise combined with Mistwalker’s vision seems to have breathed vibrant life into the Blue Dragon universe.
In conclusion, if you’re thinking of covering Umbrella because it’s a good song then that’s fine, but if you’re doing it because you think it’s funny then you should be aware that the well’s pretty much run dry on that one.
Yellow dust on a bumble
bee’s wing,
Grey lights in a woman’s
asking eyes,
Red ruins in the changing
sunset embers:
I take you and pile high
the memories.
Death will break her claws
on some I keep.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
I read this poem earlier today and it sort of messed me up.
Despite the hipster soundtrack, the subculture-savvy dialogue, the pavement-level camera that distorts your view with fisheye cool and the ‘edgy’ protagonist who just got out of prison, Skate 2 is essentially a game about cold, hard physics.
This much is obvious within minutes, when you’re told to stop posing in your new Levi’s and gold aviators, get off your skateboard and, by hand, rearrange some ramps to solve a puzzle. The challenge is to ‘get some air’ over two dumpster bins, the game leaving you to figure out whether your arrangement of triangles will provide enough momentum and height to clear both objects lengthways, or whether you need to rethink the problem.
Underneath the style and bombast Skate 2 is a fiercely traditional videogame, one that takes an unflinching 8-bit approach to game design of which most contemporary games steer clear. For example, in one challenge you must grind two sets of stair rails in sequence, a filmed stunt that, if ‘nailed’, will form part of your amateur showreel. This ostensibly simple challenge requires you to approach the stairs from the perfect angle, flicking the right stick up to olly at the optimum moment, then balancing your body on the deck as you slide down, before kickflipping off to land in the perfect spot to approach the next rail. It’s a sequence of button inputs that must be perfected, as in the 2D platform games of yore: make a single mistake and you’ll fall off the board, smacking your face into the concrete to the wincing empathy of your cameraman.
At this point there are only two options available to you: try again or give up. There is no progression of abilities in Skate 2. Nearly every move is available to you from the start. You can’t toddle off to buy a better deck that will make the task slip down a little easier. You can’t go and level up your character’s jump stat, or save up for some more supportive sneakers. No, you just practice, building up the required muscle memory till you’ve increased your own out-of-game ability sufficiently to overcome the challenge. Skate 2, like the pastime it portrays, only grants long-term success to the skilled and dedicated. Everyone else can pretty much limp off back to Prince of Persia, Fable II and others that turn a blind eye to the fact you totally suck at videogames.
You can read the rest of this review on Eurogamer here
The first four paragraphs are like, blah, blah, blah, whatever and then there’s a violent twist of style and focus it becomes Huh? What? Wait. Woah!
I won’t spoil it by quoting and it’s definitely short enough that you can read the whole thing now.
I love the penultimate line: “I don’t think she’d played with guns as a girl, and I didn’t press charges,” as if the first fact was the main reason Beryl stayed her litigation.
Anyhow, it’s a masterclass in succinct understatement.
I can testify to how playing with toy guns (virtual ones, at least) might improve your combat skills. A few years ago, after playing months and months of the first Ghost Recon on the first Xbox, I attended a friend’s Stag Party at which we went clay pigeon shooting.
Despite it being my first time and having never fired a shotgun at a moving target before, I hit thirty out of thirty clays, both those flying through the air and those bouncing along the ground. Now, we were beginners so I’m sure it wasn’t the tricksiest of challenges but somehow, all that time spent tracking targets along horizon lines with my virtual SA-80, judging distance and movement to land a perfect headhsot did translate into a real world ’skill’.
Of course, that skill was essentially just being able to read and interpret physics with some degree of accuracy, but still, it was one of those unexpected moments that causes you to pause for thought.
Stephen Poole’s recent Edge column on the brilliant DS game Air Traffic Chaos touches on the same subject and is well worth a read if you have another spare moment.
Before you even launch Flower you’ve read everything you’re going to be told in words about how to play it:
“Tilt Controller to Soar. Press Any Button to Blow. Relax, Enjoy.”
It might not be quite so concise as Pong’s “Avoid Missing Ball for High Score”, but Flower’s instructions are still unusually succinct and, like those displayed on the side of Nolan Bushnell’s arcade cabinet, they are given outside of the game experience, in the PlayStatation 3 XMB.
Once you land inside the game, you learn only by doing. For that reason, at first glance Flower appears like the most beautiful tech demo in the world: no more, no less. You soar over Elysian fields, wheeling down through Zelda green tall grass and then back up again into a Sega blue sky. The camera fish-eyes to take in a perfect pastoral world in glorious widescreen, one without evidence of man or, even, animal.
It’s the experience of a dream, a game in which you play not as a space marine or a plumber or a busty archaeologist, but as a gust of wind. Your disembodiment is profound because this is a game played almost without touch. Rather, you tilt the controller to direct yourself around the scene, the only clue to your presence the petals that are swept up into the air with your passing. The control of movement is sublime, the best yet felt on PlayStation 3, and, free of a character to move and all the messy physics that a body imposes, the result is the purest of interactions between gamer and gamer.
But once you’ve grown accustomed to the bright, hyper-real idyllic environment, and once you’ve satisfied your appetite for flying around unfettered, loop-de-looping unseen beneath the clouds without so much as a reticule in sight, a single question dominates: um, so what now?
Then you start to notice the results of your actions: the particle effects and whooshes that fire everytime you fly close to a flower and sweep up its petals. And then you notice the arrangement of those flowers on the ground, their placement not random enough for nature, as purposeful and ordered as crop circles. And then, when you trigger all of the flowers in that formation you see the bursts of energy and change that tear across the ground, sprouting new life and colour below. Ah. So there is a game in here after all.
It is, in fact, a game of vibrant cause and effect: you start small, scooping up a single petal into your breeze before scooping up more and more into your conga line of confetti till it flutters back tens of metres. In one level each group of flowers you open triggers a new gust of wind, one that powers a wind turbine high above. Trigger all of the interactive spots in a field and you might tear off down a gulley, snaking through rock formations while desperately trying to steer over new petals and pollen to add to your train. Each petal you collect triggers a sound sample, notes fluttering over the sparse piano to create a intertwining soundtrack, a freeform marriage of sound and interaction just as mesmerising as that first heard in Rez.
The three stages we’ve played so far, despite their lack of a HUD or scores or gauges or explicitly-defined goals, all of those things we’ve come to expect of the medium, do have a game-like structure. There are inputs you must make, actions that you must trigger and a path of interactions that must be followed to progress and so, underneath the sparse top layer there is still a traditional, if slight, game arrangement underneath. Viewed unfairly this sparseness will be seen as a lack of content and ideas as much as a stripping away of the medium’s tropes: style over style over substance. And viewed too generously, it will result in the kind of exultant prose and breathless recommendation from critics that will put too much burden on its delicate shoulders, ensuring a backlash hits before the game’s even out.
It is also a game with aspirations to Art, something that will no doubt count against it for much of the gaming audience. Despite the textless, subdued presentation, the message of the game rings loud clear and also a little unsubtle. The game opens in a dreary urban scene, a wilted flower standing on grey, miserable window ledge looking out across wet streets, traffic lights smearing colour in rain droplets in the middle distance. Centre the camera on the flower, and you’ll be transported to a level, the implication that you’re playing inside the flower’s dream of its former life in the countryside. Complete the stage and, when you return to the sepia shop window, the flower has now straightened its stem, the further implication being that it has taken strength from this memory.
You’ll already know whether that’s the kind of meta-narrative that makes you weak at the knees or weak at the stomach: Flower’s divisiveness is assured. Many will accuse the game of pretentiousness, which is a word that’s now irritatingly synonymous with anything that’s ambitious, unusual and different. Let’s agree never to use that word when talking discussing this game. Flower is not pretentious: it is ambitious, unusual and different.
The strength of videogames, their glorious, wonderful, compelling strength, is in providing humans access to impossible experiences. Flower presents an impossible experience: something that could never be felt outside of a videogame. It’s wonderfully abstract and yet wholly tactile at the same time. The strength of the game is in its wholesale embrace of its fragility: the confidence to be an art game without apology, the courage to be textless, the strength in focusing on a subject matter with such feminine overtones and association on a platform that has neither. This is interesting. This is unusual. Only a bonehead would deny its existence is a good thing for videogames. But whether the result makes for a good videogame is another question. And whether that question even matters here, is yet another.
While the news first broke in Japan a few weeks ago, I only just heard that Bubble Bobble/ Rainbow Islands creator Fukio Mitsuji, a.k.a. MTJ, died last month.
One of Taito’s defining creative minds, MTJ’s work also characterised the mid-era Japanese arcade industry.
EA Mythic’s Paul Barnett still uses Bubble Bobble as an example of a strong idea, distinct in his mind from a merely good idea, thanks to its ridiculous but memorable premise: two midget dinosaurs who destroy bullies by enshrouding them in bubbles and bursting them.
Here is the blurb from the back of the original Bubble Bobble arcade flyer, distributed to arcade owners in 1986. It’s a wonderful piece of alliterative nonsense, gloriously of its time.
“Meet Bub and BOB our bantam-weight brontasures who are bent on battling big bullies by blowing and bursting bubbles. Before battling these brazen bullies beware that bubble blowing is better than blasting bullies with bazookas, or better than bouncing bombs from biplanes, and even beats boxing these brainless barbariasn. So now that we briefly belayed the Bub and Bob biographies, begin by browsing the play instructions below and becoming the best BUBBLE BOBBLE bubble blower on the block.”
The sequel to Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands, was the first game I played on the ZX Spectrum, its unlikely combination of bright, primary colours with the intense dread that comes from running away from rising water sticks vividly in my mind to this day.
Atlus continues to be one of Japan’s most interesting developers.
By choosing to work primarily on the PlayStation 2 and handheld platforms, familiar hardware with tighter boundaries than than the current crop of consoles, the company succeeds in keeping its overheads lower than many of its contemporary rivals.
Because the developer chooses to sidestep the graphical realism race, leaving Square-Enix and its ilk to work the giant CGI mills, Atlus’ ideas have to be strong, and the execution of those ideas all the more ingenious for it. As a result, what their output lacks in 3D splendour it more than makes up for in bold innovation and vision, as their impressive discography testifies.
One of the strongest games released at the close of 2008 in the US was Persona 4, Atlus’ high school detective RPG. Building upon the solid foundation laid out by the excellent third game it is a triumph of design and execution, packing its ideas tightly while never feeling overbearing for it.
Set in the rural town of Inaba, the overarching focus of the story is a spate of disappearances and murders in the community, which you and your close knit set of friends investigate (in parallel to you uncle and guardian, who is a bona fide local detective).
Aside from the Phoenix Wright-style clue gathering, you and your friends also discover the ability to literally climb into television sets, which act as gateways to an esoteric dimension, a playful idea from Atlus about the on-screen worlds we gamers visit.
Inside these TV worlds you encounter kidnapped members of Inaba’s community, one per visit, who have been trapped there by dungeons and bosses manifested from the darker sides of their personalities.
The boss character for each dungeon is usually a dark vision of its hostage, one that whispers cruel attacks on its prisoner’s self-esteem.
It’s a little high concept but is nevertheless executed in such a down-to-earth way to appear reasonable and even compelling. Indeed, this is a wonderful example of how a game can examine difficult issues such as self-esteem, insecurity and bullying in a smart, non-preachy manner.
If nothing else, questing through issues of self-esteem and insecurity is a welcome change from battling goblins for crystals. And, while the conceit could so easily have appeared twee, your investment in the characters and the deft skill of the scriptwriters inspires a genuine desire to fight for their psychological freedom; you feel compassion for their brokenness, a rare emotion to videogames.
Persona 4 will be released across Europe in March by publisher Square-Enix. It might not provide a road map for the future of Japanese RPGs but as a vision for how the genre can continue to grow, expand and concentrate itself, it has few contemporary rivals.
When Final Fantasy’s creator Hironobu Sakaguchi left Square-Enix in 2002, following the colossal flop that was his flagship series’ only venture into Hollywood, nobody knew quite whether his new studio was headed for glory or disaster. 
1. Mechanical Bride
Despite the hipster soundtrack, the subculture-savvy dialogue, the pavement-level camera that distorts your view with fisheye cool and the ‘edgy’ protagonist who just got out of prison, Skate 2 is essentially a game about cold, hard physics. 
This short (and true) story from 
Before you even launch Flower you’ve read everything you’re going to be told in words about how to play it:
While the news first broke in Japan a few weeks ago, I only just heard that Bubble Bobble/ Rainbow Islands creator Fukio Mitsuji, a.k.a. MTJ,
Atlus continues to be one of Japan’s most interesting developers. 
