Josh

Last December, Shingo Mukaitoge and Konami delivered unto Wii owners the kid-friendly FPS title Elebits. The game was praised for its childish and colorful take on the genre as well as its unique assortment of “weapons” and gameplay mechanics. Keeping to form, Mukaitoge and Konami have dropped yet another kid-friendly title on us, Dewy’s Adventure. This colorful, squeaky, and exceedingly frustrating title certainly has all the right stuff to guarantee it clicks with the target demographic; however considering the ridiculous difficulty ramping, it’s doubtful any child would have the patience to develop an ardor for the game.

The story goes a little something like this: In an obscure fantasy world occurring within the pages of a storybook, a happy race of mushroom-puff people named the Eau lived peacefully until the foul black rain of the evil Don Hedron poisoned the land. In response, the Tree of Seven Colors, which provided all magical energy for the world, used the last of its power to produce a single drop of water, Dewy. The player is asked with controlling Dewy (and the world around him) to wipe out the dastardly menace of Don Hedron - using the sweetest and most non-violent methods possible, of course.

The instant you start up Dewy’s Adventure you’ll immediately notice how the game was geared for children from the get go; the characters all squeak, chirp and beep, the environments are extremely colorful and friendly (along with just about everything else), and the interface is easy to navigate, full of bubbly menus and bright color schemes. All of this cheerful sweetness is carried over into the gameplay as well; unfortunately narrowing the target demographic down even more, rather than leaving it open for a wide range of age groups to enjoy as Elebits was. However, several aspects of the game do remain similar to Elebits, most notable of which are the absolutely gorgeous illustrations used during cutscenes, the memorable and catchy musical score, and the painfully bad English voice acting. The English dub of Dewy’s Adventure is almost certainly performed by the same actors and actresses that did Elebits, and it’s every bit as wretch-inducing as the previous game.

Elebits won over most reviewers despite its childish design principles due to the unique way in which it handled the FPS genre and utilized the Wii’s excellent control scheme. Even adults could have fun with Elebits, not just the children it was obviously developed in mind for. Unfortunately, Dewy’s Adventure features no such unique appeal, and while Elebits might have taken a new twist to the FPS genre, Dewy’s Adventure utilizes a ¾ isometric point of view, and controls similarly to Marble Madness. Just incase you don’t remember, Marble Madness was damned tough, and the Wiimote, while generally one of the most precise control schemes on the market, embodies a complete lack of precision in Dewy’s Adventure.

The player controls Dewy by using the Wiimote in “classic” mode, horizontally. The controller is tilted back and forth and side to side to correspondingly tilt the world around Dewy, making him slide around on his ass to get from point to point. The 1 and 2 buttons work to perform jumps and attacks. Dewy’s Adventure uses the motion control of the Wiimote to generate environmental effects as well, as shaking the controller up and down will trigger a violent burst of wind, whereas shaking it side to side to create a powerful earthquake. These abilities are useful mostly for stunning enemies and activating switches, although they do occasionally come in handy while activating platforms and whatnot that require them.

While this is all well and good, the most unique aspect of the game lies in the ability to change the temperature of the environment at will. Pressing the directional pad up will cause the temperature to rise, turning Dewy into a cloud of mist or steam. This enables the player to perform a powerful lightning attack, striking many enemies at once. Conversely, pressing down on the directional pad drops the temperature significantly, and Dewy will become Ice. Aside from altering the slipperiness of the geometry, this will give Dewy several powerful physical attacks as well. In response to these dramatic shifts in temperature, the world around Dewy will appropriately freeze over or display signs of intense heat; ice will melt or solidify, plants will wilt or close up, water will rise or freeze over, etc. Changing the temperature brings with it a sort of timer that slowly equalizes the temperature back to what’s considered “normal”, giving an extra little bit of frustration towards solving puzzles that depend on the temperature being low or high.

While the controls of the game offer it’s most unique aspect, they also lead to the game being incredibly frustrating, due to their imprecise response to player movement. Tilt the controller a little to the side and nothing seems to happen. Tilt it too much and Dewy will go flying off the platforms that comprise the level geometry. Every time Dewy falls off a ledge, he loses a bit of health, and while this would be perfectly acceptable if there were enough health power-ups present in a level to stave off imminent death, there simply aren’t. Health-giving objects, and enemies that might drop health do not respawn, so once they’re gone, they’re gone. Now compound this with the fact that Dewy tends to drown in water. Let me repeat that: Dewy, a drop of water drowns in water. He doesn’t die outright of course, but he does take damage if he comes into contact with the very substance that is him. These facts, combined with a ridiculously unbalanced difficulty ramping system, make the game far too frustrating for any child to possibly enjoy.

So where does that leave us? What we’ve got here is a game made for children but lacking any gameplay features that might draw in an older crowd of players. Add to this recipe a frustrating and imperfect control scheme with an unbalanced increase of difficulty over the first couple of levels, and our triptych from hell is complete. Oh, did I mention the title is laced with in-game advertising for one of Nestlé’s drinking water products? It really shows Konami’s commitment to the player to be willing to sacrifice what little of the 4th Wall that exists in this game to make an extra buck on the side.

While I praise Shingo Mukaitoge for trying, this time around it just didn’t come together that well. Elebits was successful in part because it played off one of the most popular genres of game design and twisted it into a unique format that people were genuinely interested in playing. Dewy’s Adventure does that too, but with whatever genre Super Monkey Ball or Marble Madness falls into, and while those games were certainly popular, they don’t have an incontrovertible hold on the industry that allowed Elebits to be as popular as it was. Please, try again Mukaitoge-san, I’ll be waiting for your next game.

Being a fan of the Real Time Strategy genre is tough. Over the last few years we have been presented, or perhaps I should say assaulted, with clone after clone of generic RTS titles. Oh sure, they’re not necessarily bad games, but they aren’t representative of anything new, either, only serving to provide something fresh in the form of a new franchise or storyline continuation from a previously released game. Developer Vanillaware has accomplished what I would have sworn was the impossible; created a new way to play RTS games. Vanillaware is probably known among most in the United States as the developer of Odin Sphere, a game which shares several things in common with their latest title, GrimGrimoire, which I will now tell you about!

Put simply, GrimGrimoire is a 2-D, side-scrolling, sprite-based RTS game. This is significant for two reasons: Firstly, in typical Vanillaware style, the game features absolutely gorgeous artwork, similar in both style and beauty to Odin Sphere. Characters are illustrated with luscious color schemes and flowing lines, and environment artwork is similarly well designed. The second reason of the game’s significance is that Vanillaware has managed to preserve the fundamental basic mechanics of PC RTS titles in a 2-D console game. This is nothing short of a monumental achievement in terms of cross-platform game design, and it warms my heart to see that there are a few developers and publishers in Japan both willing to try something new and publish it in the American market, where originality and innovation aren’t as valued.

As you start playing GrimGrimoire, you may be caught off guard by its rather blatant use of established material from the first book of the Harry Potter series, or at least, its obvious influence from such material. The player takes the role of Lillet Blan, a young student of magic just enrolling in a prestigious magic school, the Tower of the Silver Star. The School’s most powerful professor, Gammel Dore, is charged with defending the powerful Philosopher’s Stone from the forces of evil. While all of this may sound suspiciously similar, the similarities end there. As Lillet proceeds through her first four days of class (basically a tutorial), she’s awoken on the fifth to learn that everyone in the school has been massacred. Before she succumbs to the demonic forces attacking the tower, she is propelled back in time to the night of her arrival at the school, retaining all of the knowledge she attained over the last four days, including magical abilities. The story continues in this fashion, with Lillet being sent back in time every five days, uncovering more mysteries and truths than she’d initially dared hope. FUN FACT : Every character in the game is named after some form of hard alcohol!

The game is played on a single flat plane broken up by two dozen or so floors in descending and ascending altitudes, with the player usually starting somewhere around the middle. In this manner, Vanillaware was able to create an expansive playfield while maintaining the two-dimensional aspect of this novel approach to the genre. All of the fundamental gameplay mechanics of RTS games are present; resource nodes to collect mana (the game’s currency), harvester units that both collect mana and have limited build capabilities, fog-of-war to shroud the map, defensive turrets, etc. GrimGrimoire’s tech tree is divided up into four schools of magic in a rock-paper-scissors arrangement, each having inherent strengths and weaknesses to the corresponding magical school. These four schools, Glamour, Necromancy, Sorcery, and Alchemy, have three spell books, or grimoires, each, and learning the contents of them allow for the summoning of more powerful units. Glamour magic is capable of summoning nature-oriented creatures such as elves, fairies, and unicorns. Necromancy magic is capable of summoning astral units, like undead knights and ghosts, which cannot be harmed by physical attacks unless brought into the physical realm with special abilities. Sorcery magic is the stuff of hellfire, enabling the player to summon demons, imps, and powerful dragons into the fray. Finally, Alchemy magic, probably the most powerful of the four, allows the player to summon monstrous creatures with powerful ranged attacks, like homunculi, golems, and fearsome chimera.

Gameplay of the game itself runs pretty much like other RTS games do; find resource nodes, build some harvesters, earn some cash, construct build some units, and kick ass. The more mana you collect and enemies you kill, the more upgrades you’ll have available to strengthen your characters during that level. Most units that the player can summon are on foot and must take the stairs connecting each floor to traverse to the next, however flying units are exempt from this requirement, as are the chimera and dragons, which are so large (each fills about a quarter of the screen) they can simply walk from floor to floor as if it was flat ground. It’s the rock-paper-scissors design that adds difficulty to the game’s many levels, meaning that even the most powerful units have their weak points, and it’s important to combine units of all four schools of magic to supplement any weaknesses the CPU might try to exploit. Each of the game’s levels provides a different challenge the farther in you go. Unfortunately, it’s the level design which leads to the game’s first disappointing aspect; a general lack of level diversity. Every single level of the game, every one, features the same cut-away medieval backdrop and art. The only difference between each stage is how the stairs are arranged and how barriers and gaps are placed across each section of floor. Considering the effort Vanillaware went to produce the artwork, elegant control scheme and thoughtful creature concepts, why they felt a lackluster job on level design was required is up to anyone’s guess. The least they could have done is provided different level backdrops, but even that is left out. While it’s not a crippling problem, and the game plays fine and still looks gorgeous using the singular medieval backdrop, it still speaks of either a lack of effort or a forced publishing of the title.

The game features a robust assortment of English-speaking voice actors to provide a full dialogue track during the story sequences. However, in classic Vanillaware style, they have thoughtfully included the complete, brilliant Japanese voice track in the game, which earns them points bordering on the brobdingnagian scale. The player can switch between the dialogue tracks at any point during the course of the game, which is fortunate for those of us that are unable to appreciate the inner-ear damaging “talent” of most American voice actors. Similarly with Odin Sphere, GrimGrimoire features a musical composition that starts out well but slowly whittles away at your patience as you hear the same track look over and over again for just about every level in the game. Unit specific audio design is generally robust and different for each branch of magic, with the most powerful units sounding appropriately monstrous, and demonic units sounding evil and damning. However, units like Elves, Imps, and Fairies, which possess high squeaky voices, will probably give you a headache after a few minutes as they continually repeat the same high-pitched acknowledgment and confirmation sound bytes over the course of an hour long stage.

On a straight play-through, the game will probably take you about twenty to twenty five hours to complete. Of course, once you beat a certain mission you can always return to that stage, and there are usually about five bonus missions in every chapter, as well. Considering the length of time some of the bonus missions take to complete, it could theoretically take a player several hours to complete just the tutorial section. In other words, there’s a lot to do! The game is rated E for everyone, but it’s seriously doubtful if anyone in their teens or below would have the patience to play through this entire game. GrimGrimoire is quite possibly the most innovative take on the real time strategy genre in years. Not only that, but it’s a fun and sufficiently different experience that simply exudes style and creativity, that hopefully everyone, including non RTS fans, can enjoy. GrimGrimoire is in stores now.

The latest foray into the space-based genre of RTS games takes its form in Sins of a Solar Empire, the first and rather highly anticipated title from Ironclad Games. On the surface, Sins appears to be no more than a Homeworld or Hegemonia clone, but a closer inspection of the title unveils a simplified yet altogether brilliantly constructed 4X game. For those not familiar with the term 4X stands for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate, describing games along the lines of the Civilization and Master of Orion franchises, which incorporate the four mechanics into solid gameplay. Sins incorporates these traits in a streamlined way, finding a graceful balance between the complexity of Master of Orion and the oversimplification of Hegemonia.

The story of Sins is simply a prologue for the game, providing a relatively tiny amount of back-story for each of the three factions that players are able to partake in. I use the word prologue here pretty much because that’s essentially all it is, as Sins features no single player campaign. At all. While this might be off-putting to some (and was to me initially), the gameplay of Sins isn’t one in which a single player story would be easy (or even efficient) to tell. The flow of the game is such that any serious attempt at storytelling would be limited to the speed at which the player could effectively expand through each level, and considering how a simple skirmish game against a single CPU opponent can easily take six hours or more, the potential for telling a story isn’t great. As it is, the player is provided with the option of playing as one of three races against the computer or other human players. The TEC (Trade Emergency Coaltion) is an interstellar alliance of human colony worlds. Their ships tend to be heavily armored and focus greatly on ballistic weaponry, and look very similar to the warships of the human Imperium from Warhammer 40,000. The Advent are a crusading human army of exiled religious zealots, returning to TEC space to wage war on their oppressors. Their technology is extremely advanced, producing cheap ships with weak armor that flaunt powerful laser and plasma weapons. Finally, the Vasari are an alien race of conquering nomads, whom have been fleeing a pursuing, unknown force of devastating power for decades. Vasari ships tend to be more expensive but are also heavily armored and fire phase missile technology which has a chance of ignoring enemy shields altogether.

ach new game of Sins sees the players (up to 10 of them on included large maps) start with a single controlled planet, from which the player must quickly expand from to increase available resources. After establishing themselves in their home system by building extraction structures to collect crystal and metal from orbiting asteroids, the player will soon need to send out small contingents of frigates and colony ships in a Sci-Fi “land-grab” to quickly establish themselves on neighboring planets and asteroids. There are four types of colonizable planets: desert, terran (Earth-like), ice, and volcanic. Each presents their own challenges to tame, and may not even by colonizable at all without specific research. There are also colonizable asteroid settlements, which cannot support a large population but are useful as outposts. Each asteroid and planet is situated as a node in a vast network of connected “space-lanes” which a player’s units must travel along to traverse the map.

The game is driven by the necessity to collect massive amounts of the three resources the economy of Sins is based upon: Crystal, Metal, and Credits. Crystal and Metal can be extracted from small asteroids found throughout the map. Credits can be attained two ways: By having a large established population on colony worlds and asteroids, which taxes their populations, and by building trade stations, which are orbiting ports which send and receive interplanetary (and interstellar) trading craft throughout the map. As a result, most of the game’s important structures and units (specifically capital ships) require a large amount of all three resources before the player can build them. This is definitely a good thing, as the capital ships are powerful in the extreme when compared to standard frigates, and the last thing this game needs is a cap-rush in the beginning of the match. Also of note is the game’s incredible number of technologies and abilities that are available to research. Each race has 6 individual research trees that are eventually fully explored, covering weapons and ship technologies, social and planetary development, defense technology and more.

Diplomacy also plays a part in Sins, as even your most hated opponent can become your friends relatively quickly. CPU players will often issue human players various missions, the completion of which will raise the player’s standing with the CPU, allowing for cease fires, trading alliances, shared vision, and more. These missions can range from destroying the ships or structures of another opponent to simple extortion by demanding a donation of a certain amount of resources. What the relationships with the CPU ultimately culminate in, however, is a protection racket. If you want to remain the CPU’s friend, you better damn well do as they ask or risk falling into disfavor, thus becoming their enemy once again.

If diplomacy fails, there’s always a less scrupulous option: pirates! Every map of the game has at least one Pirate base, which is home to a massive fleet of terrible ships. Pirates are a third party, controlled by neither a player nor the CPU opponents, and they can be set upon your enemies like dogs of war, given the right price. Every ten minutes or so a pirate raid commences, and a bidding war begins, with players dropping cash on their opponents, enticing the pirate forces to raid a random asteroid or planet of the player who’s had the most cash placed on their bounty. Additionally, the more money placed on a bounty, the larger the pirate attack will be, and even if you lose the bid, the money you spend on a bounty is not refundable. While an interesting mechanic, unfortunately it comes down to each player having to babysit the bidding process every time, which detracts from the game’s flow and keeps the players from focusing on more important things that require their attention.

If the game has one major flaw, it would be the sheer amount of time it takes to play most games. There is no such thing as a “quick” match of Sins, as even the smaller maps against a single CPU opponent can take hours. Larger games involving multiple players are simply impossible to resolve in a single sitting, requiring the saving and loading of the game whenever all the same people can come together for another 10 hour stretch. Many people had serious issues with Supreme Commander due to the amount of time a match takes, and those same people should stay well away from Sins of a Solar Empire. It takes, above all else, patience.

So, basically what we have here is one of the best 4X RTS games released in years. It has a robust economy, several very interesting mechanics to keep it interesting, beautiful graphics and an aptly epic musical score. The gameplay is fun if you have the patience for drawn out conflict, and the combat truly enters the epic stage later in the game, when there are hundreds of ships engaged in battle. The lack of a single player campaign and the many hours it takes to get anything meaningful out of it hold it back a bit, but if you’re looking for a new RTS experience, look no further than Sins of a Solar Empire.