It's hard to write anything about Tales of Monkey Island, Episode 4: The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood without throwing around big fat spoilers. Hell, the title in itself is a spoiler. In an effort to rid this blog of unsightly spoiler tags, I'll just say that Episode 4 didn't resonate quite as well in a design sense as Episode 3 did, but the depth and drama it adds to the series, and the Monkey Island canon as a whole, is really awesome and unexpected. The last episode is going to be a kicker.
 
I also picked up Torchlight. Torchlight is a guilty pleasure game for me, as it probably is for anyone else seriously enjoying it. It's a Diablo game with some cool little additional features, and that's really all that needs to be said. But I'll say more anyway. 
 
The inclusion of only three character classes feels a little lacking, especially when a couple of classes you'd expect to see are lumped in as skill tree choices under a single archetype. The skill trees themselves feel kind of bare, but they end up being pretty flexible. Skills are locked out by your character level alone, so it's pretty easy to pick up the better skills in a tree and become a real beast at higher levels. You can also cover up some weaknesses or even suppliment your strengths with the generic spell scrolls, which allow you to learn a few generic spells that any class can use, like summoning skeletons, healing spells, resistance buffs, and so on. To give you an example of how useful this is, I rolled an Alchemist to begin with, on Very Hard difficulty, and wanted to build an offensive caster in the traditional sense. The other two trees for Alchemist are a defensive/melee tree and a summoning tree. With the generic spells, I could buy summon skeletons and summon zombies in order to make a small but respectable summoner-esque wall of bodies between me and whoever I was firing spells at, without having to commit skill points into a second tree.
 
Finally, I've been playing more Warhammer Online. The latest patch has really put a lot more emphasis on getting to content that was previously very hard to get to a lot more painless to access than in months past. A lot of people who have stuck with the game had sort of hit a wall in progression, since the end game was pretty tough to get to even with a pretty well organized push by the entire realm. That's sort of been blown away now, and while the population of a server is still an issue, as a veteran player there is a lot more new things to do in WAR to keep me interested and playing.

So I'm an RPG fan. I like RPG's, but at the same time I'm pretty harshly critical about them. While it's a genre that I've liked since the early days of my gaming life, I've played so many that their common flaws take a back stage in my mind whenever I play one. This extends to MMORPG's as well. I've played more terrible free2play Korean MMO's and p2p timewasters than a sane person could bear, but they're also really good at identifying what is commonly good and bad (or more literally what I like and dislike) about the genre as a whole.
 
Aion was released recently, which from the beginning I was skeptical about. There was a lot of buzz around the game well before it was released, even before it was released in Korea, mainly because of how good the game looked and that you could fly. As details came up about the game, my skepticism was only heightened, and at the point where it was playable in Korea I pretty much had no reservations toward it at all. But my friends were all excited about it, and they needed a good healer (I generally play healer in every MMO I have ever played), so I made them a deal and preordered the game along with them. 
 
I had already played Aion before the English beta started, on the Chinese servers, so I leveled fairly quickly when the head-start began. I reached level 25 in two head-start days, which are relatively painless as far as level grind goes. I am currently sitting at about 45% through level 34, and only playing for a few hours every couple of days. The reasons for this are many, and I won't bother rattling off every single little thing I dislike about the game's mechanics and structure. There are a lot of them. At the same time, Aion isn't that bad of a game. It can entertain me, usually in short bursts. 
 
My relative apathy with Aion has sort of rekindled my love for another recently released MMORPG, Warhammer Online (yes, it's still running). That game also has a lot of flaws I can identify, but it's the little things that tip the scales. There are plenty of times while playing Aion that I just wished for some of the features of Warhammer (and even some nameless Korean f2p MMO's, some of which have some great innovative ideas among the general mess), no matter how little the feature or mechanic was, that made Aion feel sluggish and old and even asinine in comparison. 
 
This isn't a blog made to shit all over Aion, though. It's to pose a question of anyone reading this:
 
Everyone has a genre of games they really love. I'm sure everyone has things that, over the years, they've grown to dislike about that genre. What are the little things that you wish the genre would stop doing, and by the same token, which little things do you wish the genre would just hurry up and standardise?
 
On a lighter note, Demon's Souls is awesome. That is all.

Tales of Monkey Island Ep3 was released recently, and I played through it in a single sitting this morning. It's another great episode in an already great series that's shaping up to be one of my favourite games of the year. Of course, I'm a big Monkey Island fanboy, but Telltale could have got so much wrong with the series that they hit pretty much on the head from day one. In previous blogs about the series, I've been pretty brass tacks and by numbers about how I feel about the individual episodes, but episode 3 is a bit of a special case. 
 
Lair of the Leviathan is the third installment of the series, and going into it I thought it would be hard for them to top the antics of the awesomely cinematic Guybrush v Morgan intro, Good Guy LeChuck and Winslow's map fetish, which themselves only barely trumped the introduction of the eccentric Marquis De Singe in the first episode. The third episode doesn't have quite the opening punch of the second, but what makes it stand out is it's ability to hold my attention for the entire episode and manage to surprise and amuse at every turn. 
 
Telltale games, having played through both seasons of Sam and Max, Strongbad, and now Tales, admittedly have their obvious weak points in the continuum of each individual episode. Sometimes the support characters just aren't that interesting, maybe you're doing something really generic that you feel like you did last episode, or whatever. In episode one, it was the crummy and forgettable support characters (apart from the villainous De Singe, of course), in the second it was a sort of draggy latter half. Lair of the Leviathan, though, kept me entertained for the duration. It was surprising to me, and I started to think about the reason for it.
 
The opening of Lair of the Leviathan isn't as epic as the second episode, but the way that the introduction puzzle is paced and played out is a good example of how Telltale are getting better and better at making parts of the series less gamey and more cinematic. The clues and such are presented in exposition which isn't immediately apparent as part of a puzzle, then throws you relentlessly into the puzzle with a surprise that actually made me laugh out loud, which is rare for me. 
 
When you read the title, Lair of the Leviathan, and know the cliffhanger ending of the second episode, you wouldn't be knocked for thinking that the episode takes place entirely inside of the giant manatee (whose design reminds me a bit of the sort of Linda the Lungfish of Psychonaughts style of mutated aquatic life), but the game continues for about as long after you escape from the innards of the beast. The puzzles and scenes after the fact don't feel tacked on and really help to make the game feel less predictable and offer as much really cool twists and events as the first half of the episode. 
 
This episode also fixes one of the major gripes I had with the previous two episodes, in that some of the support characters are completely forgettable and just there to serve as anchors for a particular puzzle. While the support characters in Lair of the Leviathan are, indeed, anchors for puzzles, they're also given more of a meaningful context and have an agenda beyond being someone to steal something from/give something to/provide a random bit of information. It gives the narrative more depth and puts some of the puzzles into the context of what is happening. Some of the funniest lines are uttered by support characters, although admittedly some of the dialogue between them works well simply because of the return of a beloved Monkey Island fan favourite (I won't spoil who it is!). He also features in the end credits, which is one of the best credit sequences in a game I can remember watching.
 
After thinking about all these things, I've come to the conclusion that Telltale obviously have: The story in an adventure game, and how it is presented and told, is more important than the part where you solve the puzzles. The way they are getting better at presenting the story and trying to intergrate the puzzles into the actual flow of the narrative rather than having them there for the sake of you doing something between each exposition is really awesome, and i really hope they only get better as the series comes to an end. Die-hard adventure game fans would disagree with me, but the way Telltale put a well told, well presented and amusing story over the need for bogging it down with mind-bending puzzles is the best thing to happen to the genre. 

Recently, there has been a sort of huge resurgence of what people consider oldschool genres in video games. Stuff that was way popular back in the early days that at some point dropped off the map and almost faded into obscurity. Adventure games, fighting games, 2D adventures, even the rise of 'casual' puzzle game timewasters, kids today are reliving the memories of an older gamer like myself, albeit less pixelated and with less granulated and robotic voice acting (well, sometimes...). 
 
But some genres don't have the luxury of fading away to be reborn. Ones that cling to the very thread of being modern mainstream to this day and yet have not changed all that much over the years. I am, of course, speaking of the humble JRPG.
 
I recently played through most of Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, the two Mistwalker exclusives for the xbox360, enough to feel the need to write a blog about them anyway. By definition, these games are, heart and soul, oldschool JRPG's. Most of what bothers me about them, and their public reception, was the manner in which they came about. They were both 'dream team' games used to push the 360 into the Japanese market. As such, a huge expectation was thrown on them in the western world that they would be somehow ascendant above all other JRPG's and would find the magical missing piece that would shatter the world of JRPG's forever.
 
Of course, it wasn't to be. What Mistwalker made were two perfectly competant oldschool JRPG's, in a traditional sense. Because of this, (and some technical difficulties in Blue Dragon particularly) the two games weren't exactly seen in a favourable light in the western world, yet garnered pretty amazing review scores in Japan (say what you will about Famitsu's integrity). 
 
The games themselves, by reading reviews and playing them myself, aren't terrible games at all. Blue Dragon, is about as close to playing a Saturday morning anime that you can get. The feel of Akira Toriyama's character design interlaced with a non-complex yet well-told story akin to a fairytale or kids show makes it interesting without resorting to overtly complex ridiculousness that finds it's way into alot of JRPG's. The characters in Lost Odyssey are believable and tragic, and the dream sequences can really make you feel and relate to them. 
 
The graphics in both games are, stylisticly, absolutely stunning. Blue Dragon in particular suffers terribly from framerate issues, and Kluke's face just looks fucking weird, but otherwise they are visual tour-de-forces. The cutscenes are very well done in both games, and as I said earlier, Blue Dragon is like watching a genuine anime from start to finish in that regard. 
 
So what makes the games suffer bad review scores then?
 
Sadly, it is the simple notion that they are oldschool JRPGs. The mechanics, although suffering from traditional pitfalls like level scaling problems, are sound and not overly complex, and the differences, like all JRPGs, are incremental, leading to a sort of 'stuck in the past' feel that they were designed to invoke in the first place. But this isn't a blog about how badly done-by JRPGs in review scores. It's about games made in a traditional oldschool way being accepted and not accepted due to trends. The differences between the Telltale adventure games and classic ones are incremental, and Shadow Complex isn't exactly reimagining the 2D exploration genre. I'm not saying those examples are bad games by any stretch of the imagination, it's just neither example really go above and beyond the existing mechanics and are still great examples in their respective genres.
 
Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey are the same. They are games in a specific genre catered for a specific audience in a deliberately oldschool fashion, and while they have their problems and aren't for everyone, they are still good examples of the genre and are worth checking out for fans of the style. JRPG's are gonna stay JRPGs, they aren't going to magical reform into some super-genre with some massive sweeping messiah-brought change. JRPGs can't 'come back,' because they never left in the first place. So why is it that people expect them to?

I went out today with a pile of monies in my wallet, and came home with a shiny new PS3 Slim. I got it at JBHiFi, they were having a deal where you got a free game and HDMI cable with it for a few bucks less than the RRP, so I can't really complain. I also picked up two of the most interesting exclusives to me: Valkyria Chronicles and InFamous. The free game was Assassins Creed, btw, which will probably see about as much attention as the pack-ins for my previous console purchase, Lego Indy and Kung-Fu Panda. 
 
My PSN account will be the same as my XBL one (iwilldoit9times), so hit me up on either. Make me feel at home. And by home, I don't mean Playstation Home. Ugh...