Hey folks and welcome to another fashionably late Comic Commish: my monthly expression of gratitude for my magnanimous Gold membership sponsor @omghisam. If you didn't catch last month's inaugural feature (or any Comic Commishes before then), I simply doodle a bunch of stickfolk that vaguely resemble video game peoples doing video game stuff.

The spin for this sponsorship year (October '13 to September '14) is that I revisit consecutive six month periods from the previous generation and talk about some of the games I enjoyed from that segment of the seventh generation's timeline. It's become a common practice, I hear, to occasionally "skip" a generation and come back to it once newer consoles are out and everything from the previous is cheap and cheerful. If you've been sleeping on the PS3/Wii/360 generation and need to catch up, here's a good place to start. Well, if you like JRPGs anyway, since that's mostly what I'm covering.

The period highlighted for November is the latter half of 2007. Some good stuff in here, far better than the shaky first half.

If You Were 18 When These Games Came Out, You'd Be 24 Now. That's... Not All That Impressive a Fact, Really.

So when I started this thing, I figured I'd concentrate on good games. But then Sam decided that I should really just focus on JRPGs, since they're the sort of thing that aren't really covered to any serious extent on Giant Bomb. On his own head be it.

Blue Dragon is the first Mistwalker RPG, created exclusively for the Xbox 360 due to a special agreement with Microsoft Studios. It has a bunch of Akira Toriyama characters (Sakaguchi clearly still had a few connections after leaving Square) running around a really quite attractive cartoon world fighting robots and a creepy old guy who cackles a lot and looks eerily like Mr Burns by way of Piccolo. As would be the case with all Mistwalker games to come, several of Blue Dragon's aspects are torn right out of old Final Fantasies and reconfigured to befit a modern RPG: specifically, the fan-favorite Job system has been modified to allow for more customization within each individual job while reducing the overall number of possible jobs to switch between, streamlining the system a bit without sacrificing too much of its complexity. Honestly, it's not like anyone used half of FFV's jobs, and Tactics's unit versatility kind of fell by the wayside once ninjas, calculators and T.G. "Hello, I'm here to break your game" Cid showed up, so I'm kind of with Mistwalker on this one.

The issue with Eternal Sonata is that it starts slow and wears you down from the outset by coupling its initially unimpressive but perfunctory combat with the all-too-earnest story about Frederic Francois Chopin's Magical Adventures Through Fantasyland and a cast of anime mannequins with cute music-related names. This is actually a test for patient players as the game will start to pick up as it introduces more characters and adds layers of complexity to its combat, slowly introducing chains, group combos, active blocking and its light/dark mechanics, eventually resulting in a game with a solid gameplay core beneath its treacly exterior. It's worth saying also that the game's graphics and its soundtrack (which includes a few Chopin pieces, naturally) are absolutely beautiful, even half a decade later. Once you're blatting out 32 hit combos with Salsa and laying out merciless Harmony Chain after Harmony Chain against the end-game bosses, you'll wonder why the game couldn't have been this satisfying to begin with.

My inability to draw a Mako Tank (let alone ride one) aside, there's nothing I could say about Mass Effect that hasn't already been said a dozen times over. The first game had an experimental style, in that it kind of threw about a dozen different movies' worth of sci-fi tropes at the player while somehow still creating a universe that felt entirely new. Shepard's first battle with the ominous Reapers, introduced through their harbinger Sovereign (but not their sovereign, Harbinger, who appears later), is one that is superbly drawn out and the way the game allows the player to dictate the order of the big set-pieces is a subtly clever way of putting agency in the player's hands while still persisting with a solidly linear story. Great moments, wonderful layered characters, a soundtrack and presentation that was clearly engineered by sci-fi buffs who knew a thing about a thing when it came to starships and romancing blue/green alien ladies and some really really slow elevators combine to create one of the most impressive and memorable western RPGs of the previous generation.

And this is where I write something about how Mass Effect 2 was better and then scurry away while giggling to myself.

The Other Ones!

(I'm not going to bother creating a "list" list and pray to Holy Hardcore Snider that the blogging code plays nice and actually allows me to embed it this time. I'll just create a bulletpoint list instead. Y'know, old school listing.)

• Jeanne d'Arc (Level-5, PSP, August '07) - This Level-5 strategy RPG lacks some of the vastness of their PS2 games, but is still a solid SRPG in the FFT mold with a few tricks up its sleeve. Its re-imagining of the 100 Years War as some kind of demon-inspired fantasy brouhaha with gothy androgynous anime Gilles de Rais and inexplicable leonine beastman La Hire helping out a rather intense version of Joan of Arc is also kind of charming, in its own way.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 (Atlus, PS2, August '07) - Persona 3 needs no introduction, though after the last Comic Commish I didn't feel like I should include any more PS2 RPGs because of that whole "PS2 is previous gen" technicality business. Still, Persona 3 was released during this period and is one of the best late-period PS2 games. After Persona 4, of course.
• BioShock (Irrational Games, Multi, August '07) - Right, BioShock. It was kind of a big deal at the time, and from all accounts still is with its most recent sequel in the considerations for Game of the Year. Well, by some at least. The original took System Shock 2's template of a horror-themed first-person RPG shooter and gutted all the spaceships and AIs business for a steampunk world inspired by Objectivism and a retro-futuristic city at the bottom of the ocean. There'll be no accusations, just unfriendly mutations under the seeeea.
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Retro Studios, Wii, August '07) - One of the best uses of a Nintendo IP in recent memory, the Metroid Prime trilogy closed out with this Wii sequel that managed to make Wii Remote controls not suck and expanded its scope to include several well-realized planets for Samus to visit. Whether you're cautiously making your way across a Bespin lookalike, dodging acid rain on the Space Pirate homeworld or poking your way through an especially eerie derelict space hulk, Metroid Prime 3 recovered from the fumble that was Metroid Prime 2 and pulled out what was perhaps the best of the three games.
• Two Worlds (Reality Pump, PC/360, August '07) - I just find Two Worlds endlessly amusing. What was clearly meant to be a pretender to Oblivion's throne, with its huge world filled with quests and dungeons, was ultimately a very buggy, laughably-voiced RPG with a story that made very little sense. I've heard Two Worlds Two is a lot better, but I almost don't want to play a competent version of this game. It wouldn't be anywhere near as fun.
• The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo, DS, October '07) - Phantom Hourglass is the first true sequel to Wind Waker, continuing where its progenitor left off with Link continuing his seafaring adventures in a world absent Ganon's shadow. Most of the Wind Waker charm survives intact, with a curious stylus-led control system and a Deppish new character in the duplicitous but goodhearted Linebeck.
• Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol! (Skip Ltd, DS, October '07) - The second Chibi-Robo game isn't anywhere near as fun or clever as the first, but it's still a Chibi-Robo game. That means careful power management, adventure game puzzles, slowly transforming a rundown environment into a haven with diligent effort and a charming presentation that looks at a world far too small to be of notice to us giant human types. It's a little hard to explain what Chibi-Robo is to those who haven't played it (action-adventure-RPG cleaning simulator?) but if you can't find the original GameCube game, this is almost a worthy substitute.
• Folklore (Game Republic, PS3, October '07) - Game Republic's games had a certain schizophrenic level of quality, but they did put out a few great games between Dragon Ball spin-offs and, ugh, Knights Contract. Brave Story: New Traveler, Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom and this game, Folklore, were all weird and wonderful in their own way. Majin and Folklore especially feel like lost Studio Ghibli movies, with Folklore featuring a menagerie of fairyfolk inspired by Celtic legends and a couple of humans who get caught up in a civil war between two factions of odd characters. It's a pretty decent action RPG that has you ripping the souls out of monsters and using them to fight other monsters, like some Shang Tsung horrorshow version of Pokemon.
• The Orange Box (Valve, Multiplatform, October '07) - The star of The Orange Box is Portal, a small game with some great ideas. That's not to disparage the lasting success of Team Fortress 2 or the creativity of the two Half-Life addenda episodes, but Portal was the reason you wanted to buy this thing for consoles. Valve's in a position now where they don't ever need to make another game again, let alone such a grand compilation: they could probably subsist on Steam royalties and Team Fortress 2/DOTA 2 hats until the end of time.
• Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure (Capcom, Wii, October '07) - Zack and Wiki didn't make much of a furore when it came out, mostly due to it being a Wii game, but it's one of the most brilliant deconstructions of an inventory-based adventure game that I've ever played. It has such a joyful spirit about its incremental puzzle lunacy as well, with lots of Capcom references and collectibles to find. Best of all, it re-introduces the idea of having a point-and-click style game where everything you need to solve a puzzle is on the same screen, negating the need to lug around a giant rucksack full of single-use junk everywhere you go.
• The Witcher (CD Projekt RED, PC, October '07) - The Witcher began CD Projekt RED's franchise of serious Baldur's Gate contenders, after BioWare moved away from the strict table-top rulesets for more accessible fare. The Witcher was there to pick up where they left off, though, and with two games and a third on its merry way we have one of the greatest in-depth western RPG franchises of the last decade. The cynical yet irresistible Geralt of Rivia is such a great character too, which definitely helps when you're forced to memorize a few complex combat systems in order to keep him alive.
• Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (Insomniac Games, PS3, October '07) - Ratchet and Clank's first PS3 foray is a huge graphical leap, if an otherwise standard business-as-usual iteration in one of Sony's most consistently excellent exclusive franchises. Honestly, it's getting hard for me to tell these games apart, but I'd be happy to recommend any one of them. Tools of Destruction, I believe, does a fair job of acclimatizing new players due to it being the first for a new console generation, so if you haven't yet leapt into the clever Saturday morning cartoon world of R & C, ToD might be a good place to start.
• Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo, Wii, November '07) - Well, Eurogamer just declared Super Mario Galaxy to be the Game of the Generation, and who am I to question their decision? It's not my personal pick, nor the Giant Bomb forum's, but it definitely deserves to be in the running for that accolade. It's just incredible.

Anyway, that ought to be enough to be getting on with if you're in the mood for some six year old video games. Man, that is a pretty creepy sentence to say out loud. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to tell a green Luigi man to stop dying constantly. New Super Luigi U is no joke, despite being a giant joke about how Luigi's kind of a goofball.