Assassin’s Creed

From the team that brought you Jade Raymond comes this epic third-person action/adventure game. Assassin’s Creed is a game with a lot of hype behind it, for a good reason. At first glance, it’s obviously a very visually impressive game that oozes of production value and artistic quality. It’s simply a delight to watch the main character, Altair, run around in the Middle-Eastern cities, cutting up templar knights.

But visuals aside, there’s of course some gameplay involved. The acrobatic / sword-dueling gameplay is not that far away from the team’s earlier Prince of Persia games, but to me Assassin’s Creed has a bit more appeal than the old prince’s adventures. This is not only due to its art direction and tone, but also because of the game’s storytelling and mission structure.

Most people who followed this game will remember that a certain “twist” overwhelmed the media buzz around this game. While I will not reveal the twist in itself (even though the game’s been out for quite a while at this point), I will say so much that it opens up for sequels that don’t necessarily take place in the setting of this first game. This is probably a deliberate choice of the studio/publisher for that exact reason, but it does serve other purposes as well. It gives Assassin’s Creed a unique attribute that really stands out.

Assassin’s Creed is an enjoyable game with very simple but fun game mechanics. Altair is a wonderful character to control, and his ninja-like agility and abilities would put most videogame ninjas to shame. The downside, however, is that the game is very repetitive. With a long list of main targets and a number of side missions at your disposal, it doesn’t take long until you start to grow tired of the routines you’ll have to go through to finish a “level”. But players who’re willing to push through the somewhat weak middle part of the game are sure to be rewarded by an excellent finish that only leaves you hungry for more.

Assassin’s Creed is far from a perfect game. It’s main downsides are by far the repetition and some quirky AI problems, but it still managed to keep me hooked the whole way with its engaging story and high fun factor. It’s going to be very interesting to see what waits in the next chapter.

Lost Odyssey

When Lost Odyssey was released, it felt like christmas morning. And, for the first time in quite some time, a game actually lived up to my expectations… well, at least some portions of the game did.

The graphics are at times quite great and at other times quite bad. Some textures applied to large surfaces look pixelated. However, the game makes up for this with great art direction.

On to the gameplay. The combat has the same turn-based gameplay that we’ve seen in other JRPGs, but Mistwalker decided to complicate things by introducing a letter and number value for each spell or skill. I still have no idea how it works, but it comes off as pretty intuitive. You want to cast a huge spell that’ll deal massive amounts of damage? Then chances are it’ll take two or three turns before the character actually casts it.

The Ring system, where you can create rings that grant you a bonus to a regular attack if you hold and release the right trigger at the right time, is pretty good. Creating the rings can be quite teadious though. Each ring has a number of levels, and each level is upgradable. I felt like I had 200 rings toward the end of the game.

The story is awesome. The protagonist, Kaim, an immortal that’s been around for a thousand years, is great. He’s got a real personality and he’s deeply troubled by the memories that emerge during his journey. The memories are presented as short stories with some ambience music and a few sound effects. The writing is top notch and I actually shed a tear during one of the better ones.

There are a lot of side-quests and it took me somewhere around 70 hours to finish the game. The story really takes you on a journey and, even though it has a few low points, ends with all kinds of epic moments.

I set a goal to do everything in the game, but I ended up doing ~90% of it. The only thing that still irks me is how the lip-syncing follows the English voices, even if you change it to Japanese voice-over. This makes all characters look semi-retarded when they’re speaking. Thankfully, the English voice acting is bareable.

Blue Dragon

The Blue Dragon experience started out well enough. In fact, I was enjoying myself more thant I had imagined I would. It was so incredibly beautiful and it jerked all the right JRPG strings.

The soundtrack is amazing, from start to finish. As are the graphics, and even though the art direction can be somewhat dull in some areas (like the Robot factories you visit, it’s all grey) it comes out looking really great. The monster design is spot on, and the cel-shading really does the trick.

Where the game is lacking, however, is in the story and dialogue department.

The dialogue - even with Japanese voices turned on (the English voices are truly horrible…) - feels out of place and down-right strange at several points during the game. So much so that I found myself giggling during several of the silly-cute cutscenes. Not because they were funny, mind you, but because the dialogue was so out-of-sync that the cutscene came out feeling like a strange joke.

The story starts out well enough. A group of kids live in a small, sheltered village that for some reason is plagued by something called a Land Shark. This time around, the group of kids are determined to capture and kill the evil thing. Naturally they fail miserably and become caught up in a plot where they ultimately have to save the world. We’ve seen it before and we’ve loved it before. It’s been done, and it’s a concept that usually works in Japanese RPGs. But not in this one. The story quickly turns into a big yawn and, quite frankly, the end pissed me off to such extent that I vowed never to play the game again.

It took me ~40 hours to play through the game and I got around 300 achievement points for it. I spent 5 or so hours trying to get some of the easier ones, but after that I simply gave up. The developer - Mistwalker - did something wrong with the achievements in this game.