It’s difficult to imagine two game series being less alike than Koei’s Dynasty Warriors and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Both draw inspiration from the classic Chinese novel that the latter takes as its namesake, which details events in China between 168 and 280 AD. But on one hand, Dynasty Warriors is an over-the-top, hack-and-slash action game that has you wading through armies of literally hundreds, while Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a slow (perhaps the slowest) and thoughtful strategy game. Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires is an expansion, of sorts, to the original, combining the frenzied action of Dynasty Warriors with the strategic considerations of a Romance of the Three Kingdoms title. It’s a strange pairing, and despite the game’s many technical failings, makes for an addictively compelling experience. Truly, these two great tastes go great together.

New to the game is the titular Empires mode, which adds an additional layer of strategy to the standard Dynasty Warriors formula. You begin the game by selecting one of over forty playable characters. Should you dislike the entirety of this massive roster, you can instead opt to create custom characters from scratch, customizing their appearance, weapon, and fighting style. From here, you get to work reuniting China under your rule, choosing a starting location within the fractured nation. Like a Romance of the Three Kingdoms title, the strategy portion of the game is turn-based. Rather than directly act upon your empire, you instead pick from randomly selected proposals offered up by your generals at the beginning of every turn. These range from opening trade with neighboring provinces and forging alliances to hiring temporary combat units and recruiting wandering lieutenants. Every action costs gold, which you earn based on the size of your empire; you’re more than welcome to impose additional taxes on your citizens, but just be prepared for any consequences. While this strategy element isn’t particularly deep, and is an insignificant nothing compared to the tremendous (and often overwhelming) depth found in a Romance of the Three Kingdoms game, it’s a welcome addition just the same. In fact, without this additional layer of empire building, there wouldn’t be much to the game at all.

As the title suggests, Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires falls more on the Dynasty Warriors end of the spectrum. Once per turn you can choose to invade a neighboring province, taking three of your generals and three of your lieutenants, along with their armies, with you into combat. These levels are virtually identical to those found in Dynasty Warriors 4 and other Dynasty Warrior titles, as you once again repetitively button mash your way through entire armies of soldiers. Enemies and allies alike are completely brain-dead, with no real AI to speak of, as groups of soldiers spend most of the battle standing face-to-face with one another and only rarely swing their weapons. As such, it falls to you to single-handedly take out the opposing forces, but thankfully, their near-vegetable status makes this exceedingly easy. The only real challenge comes from opposing generals, but even they succumb to the same single-button combos eventually. Sadly, the game’s camera offers up more challenge than any of its enemies, and on the rare occasions when you do take a beating, it’s the camera’s insistency to narrowly focus on you rather than the action that’s to blame.

There isn’t much more to the combat than repeating the same four-move combo ad nauseum. Despite some light strategic elements, combat is still very repetitive and very shallow. Your goal as you plow through the zombie armies of Chinese soldiers is to capture bases and eventually capture your enemy’s stronghold or defeat their leader. Though you have no direct control over their actions, coordinating with your lieutenants and generals as they run about the battlefield makes this go much more smoothly, as they tend to gang up on enemy commanders with extreme prejudice. Still, you can just as easily ignore your allies’ cries for help and bypass both armies entirely to capture the final stronghold or quickly defeat the enemy leader by yourself. Sure, it’s a much riskier tactic, but it’ll also cut the time you spend in battle to a tiny fraction of what it would take otherwise.

After a battle ends, you have the option to hire any defeated commanders. Those you set loose, however, join the free market and are likely to get picked up by another industrious warlord. Following a successful invasion, the annexed territory is appended to your own. Control all of China and you win the game. Unfortunately, as you grow larger, you become more and more susceptible to attack as your borders extend to touch more opposing clans. Because you can only participate in a single battle in a turn, being forced to defend a territory from invasion prevents you from expanding your empire. It’s not uncommon to spend several turns in a row defending the same province from attack later in the game. The game is repetitive enough without having to fight the same armies on the same map three times in a row.

Graphically, Dynasty Warriors does little that impresses. While the textures are surprisingly crisp and detailed, character models themselves sport few polygons. Additionally, the draw distance is extremely short and, when coupled with the game’s limited scope of the action thanks to the too-tight camera, it’s not uncommon to watch enemies appear out of the ether just a few feet in front of you. The substandard visuals are to be expected, of course, given the vast number of characters moving around on screen at any given time. But despite the low visual fidelity, the game suffers from crippling slowdown during the heaviest combat and occasionally it gets so bad that the GUI itself flickers on and off the screen. The maps also tend to blend together, differing little in geometry or visual design. It quickly becomes difficult to tell one mountainous, jungled fortress from the next.

Empires also features Dynasty Warriors’ standard so-bad-its-good voice acting. A handful of distinctly American voice actors voice all of the game’s characters and blatantly mispronounce the Chinese names of characters and locations. The game’s ridiculous, over-the-top rock soundtrack heavy with electric guitar seems strangely out of place, but provides a uniquely old school, video gamey appeal. There’s something particularly entertaining about bashing a few hundred skulls while an electric guitar wails loudly in the background, even if it differs little from the gameplay the game was offering a few hours ago. Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires seems to revel in its ridiculousness, strangely matching Chinese history with 80s rock and distinctly non-Chinese voice actors.

Despite the sheer repetition of the combat, the poor graphics, and the questionable audio selections, however, Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires is still an addicting game. While the combat itself isn’t inherently interesting, the overarching strategy elements add just enough depth to keep the game from failing. Just as you’ve grown bored of mindlessly slaughtering another few hundred mentally disabled soldiers, you’re kicked back to the world map and the next turn begins. Before you know it, you’re selecting proposals and preparing for another invasion. You’re always just one more turn from saving your game and finding a more productive way to spend your time, but that last turn always seems to move further and further out of your reach. Though it may not be a great game, or even a good one, Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires is an addictive game that’ll leave you satisfied, if slightly numbed after hours of button mashing.

City 7: Toronto Conflict is a single player Half-Life 2 mod that’s been making the blog rounds lately. So, I figured I’d chip in, this being the Internet and all. Like Narbacular Drop (the inspiration for Portal), City 7 is the thesis project for a group of game design majors, this time from, of all places, George Town University in Toronto. The game is inserted cleverly into the narrative of Half-Life 2, sandwiched snuggly between the bookends of Dr. Kleiner’s teleporter mishap early in the game.

Gordon Freeman finds himself in Toronto, which has been reappropriated by the Combine as City 7. What follows is a decent enough, 2-3 hour romp through the city with plenty of action set pieces to keep you entertained; though I imagine those of you who have actually been to Toronto will be significantly more impressed than the rest of us. The mod’s pretty terribly balanced and aside from a spectacular finale, doesn’t do anything we haven’t already seen in Half-Life 2 or its following episodes. Still, single player Half-Life 2 mods that aren’t complete garbage are few and far between, and Toronto Conflict joins the short list of those that are actually playable. It’s no MINERVA: Metastasis, but not everyone can be Adam Foster.

Capcom’s Breath of Fire series has been around since the days of the SNES, but has always existed on the RPG periphery while the Final Fantasys and Dragon Quests of the world hog the spotlight. Though relegated to near-obscurity, each new game in the series has been noticeably better than the last, slowly iterating on its basic role-playing formula down through its sequels. With Breath of Fire IV, Capcom finally achieved what it originally set out to accomplish – they had created a solid, if unspectacular, RPG that could hold its own against the genre’s heavy hitters. Just as the series had finally come into its own, however, Capcom dropped the roman numeral for the next installment, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, and with good reason: With Dragon Quarter Capcom transformed the simple RPG franchise into something greater, losing the standard turn-based, random battle-saturated formula of previous Breath of Fire games and rebuilding the series from the ground up as a hardcore dungeon crawler. The end result is a brutally unforgiving, endlessly replayable RPG that does more than simply bring new ideas to a stale series – Dragon Quarter is a hugely innovative title that is like no RPG you’ve played before.

The more things change, of course, the more they stay the same. You once again find yourself in control of Ryu, a rather uninteresting kid with a wild head of blue hair. He is a Ranger, a member of an organization that hunts and destroys the monstrous genics, genetically engineered creatures that terrorize the subterranean population of the world, long since forced to abandon the planet’s surface. Ryu’s D-Ratio, a sort of military ranking that measures future potential, is only 1/8192; he is destined for a life of grunt work. Bosch, his partner, has a D-Ratio of 1/64. He could be a Regent someday, if only the captain would give them an assignment of note.

He gets his wish when they are assigned to protect a transport train carrying nondescript, but important cargo. When Lin, a soldier in the rebel front Trinity, attacks the train, Ryu and Bosch are separated and Ryu comes face-to-face with the train’s mysterious cargo: humanoid genic and series mainstay Nina, a pre-pubescent mute girl with a pair of blood red wings. Nina is dying, however, as she’s unable to survive in the polluted subterranean air. Luckily for her, a very old and very dead dragon has taken an interest in young Ryu, allowing the Ranger to act as a vessel for his tremendous power. Bosch, seeing his future Regentship slipping through his fingers, and more terrified of Ryu’s transformation than even Ryu is, realizes he must stop Ryu and destroy Nina, the Regents’ dirtiest secret. Ryu, Lin, and Nina, however, just want to reach pollutant-free sky above, if such a thing even exists at all.

You begin the game 1000 meters below the planet’s surface, and every transitional screen between areas reminds you just how far underground you are. Your objective is clearly defined early on – reach the planet’s surface, and with it, the sky – and as you progress through the game you see yourself inching (or perhaps metering) closer to the world above. The 1000 meters between underground civilization and the world aboveground forms a single, mostly uninterrupted dungeon comprised of dank industrial tunnels. Sometimes you progress downwards, but mostly you’re headed up. This, of course, stands in stark contrast to most dungeon crawlers, which start above the ground and send you spelunking down labyrinthine corridors. In fact, this simple reversal largely defines Dragon Quarter’s intent – this is a game that turns RPG conventions on their head.

Combat is perhaps the most traditional element of the game, but even it differs wildly from standard RPG offerings. Genics freely roam the game’s underground hallways; there are no random battles here. Attacking a genic, or being attacked by one, triggers combat with all nearby enemies, with initiative given to the attacker. Here, combat takes place in real-time sequences divided into turn-based segments. Each character has a limited supply of action points, which determine how far they can move or how many skills they can use in a given turn. The combat is fast, but allows for a great deal of strategy, as you can string together skills to form combos that deal additional damage, apply harmful status effects, or generate entirely new skills altogether. Squaring off against the game’s genics feels very similar to combat in a more tactical or strategic game, and every action and movement requires careful planning and consideration.

Dragon Quarter is unrelenting in its difficulty. Enemies hit hard and often, and sport plenty of hit points, but the game never really feels unfair. You have limited inventory space and need many healing and curative items in order to stay alive, regularly forcing you to make difficult decisions between useful items and potentially powerful, unidentified gear. You’ll often find yourself hanging to survival by a thread, avoiding enemies with the hope that you can find a safe zone to buy more items and unload your bounty of randomized loot. Because of the extreme difficulty, every challenge you overcome feels like you barely scraped by on luck alone, mainly because usually that’s exactly the case. You’re unable to cheat the system and grind or powerlevel your way to victory either, as genics never respawn, meaning your stuck with a finite experience pool to draw from.

Thankfully, Ryu has the power of a dragon on his side, but it doesn’t come free of charge. Early on, Ryu gains the ability to shapeshift into his dragon form, unlocking a host of powerful new abilities that will quickly make short work of even the toughest foes. Each of these powerful attacks, however, greatly increases your D-Counter, an in-game meter that begins at 0% but slowly raises to 100% simply by moving through the world, and increases with tremendous speed should you unleash Ryu’s dragon abilities. Reach 100% and it’s game over. While you can use Ryu’s powerful dragon abilities to overcome otherwise insurmountable obstacles, such as any of the game’s frequent boss gauntlets, you’ll quickly find yourself dangerously close to an unavoidable defeat. It’s okay to loose Ryu’s inner dragon occasionally, but rely too heavily on it, and you’re doomed to failure.

Between the D-Counter, the limited inventory, and set enemy count, Dragon Quarter becomes a game of strict resource management. You are tasked with defeating the game’s many challenging enemies and reaching the sky above, but are held back by many constricting limitations. Simultaneously juggling your crowded inventory, killing enough genics to keep your characters from becoming underpowered but avoiding enough combat in order to have enough healing items to keep them alive, and carefully managing Ryu’s devastating dragon powers adds plenty of depth to the experience, even if it seems a bit overwhelming at times. With resources in such sort supply, your effective management of the available tools is crucial for success. If you don’t succeed, however, you’re still left with plenty of options.

Dragon Quarter’s most interesting – and controversial – element is its unnecessarily acronymed SOL mechanic, short for System OverLay. Should you fail, by running the D-Counter to 100%, being defeated in battle, or selecting the “Give Up” option when outclassed by the games challenges, you can restart the from the beginning, keeping your money, weapons, armor, skills, and some of your experience. In fact, chances are you’ll need to use this SOL Restart mechanic at least once in order to complete the game. Recrawling the same dungeon segments is far from boring, thankfully, as your holdovers from previous playthroughs greatly speed up the process. Playing through areas you’ve already visited also unlocks additional cutscenes that flesh out Dragon Quarter’s characters and plot, providing extra incentive to take full advantage of the SOL mechanic.

This SOL system also affects the way you save your game. Though you can save at any time, these temporary saves are erased the instant you load them. In order to create a proper, permanent save, you need to record your progress at a telecorder, which requires a save token. Unfortunately, save tokens are extremely rare, generally only offered as rewards after difficult boss battles, and often times, not even then. This adds yet another layer of resource management and difficulty to the game, forcing you to carefully consider each save, as it might just be your last. When you inevitably die, at the very least you’ll lose your progress and restart from your last save, and at worst you’ll be forced to SOL Restart from the beginning.

Dragon Quarter is therefore a game that doesn’t just encourage replayability, it demands it. The only way to see the entire story and realize your characters’ full potential is by utilizing the SOL Restart mechanic, getting a little further with each attempt than you did before. With this system in place, anybody, regardless of skill level, will be able to reach the ending of the game eventually, but even after the credits roll, Dragon Quarter still has much to offer. After you complete the game, you’re scored based on a variety of factors and issued a new D-Ratio, which in turn opens up new areas to explore, complete with new enemies and skills. Additionally, village building, a Breath of Fire series staple, once again returns in Dragon Quarter, this time allowing you to build and nurture a colony of sentient ants that carries over from game to game. There’s also an optional 50-floor dungeon that exists entirely outside of the normal game, complete with boss fights.

Dragon Quarter has earned a reputation for being confusing and obtuse, and often times it is, but if you can wrap your head around the game’s uniquely innovative mechanics, you’ll find there’s a lot to like. Make no mistake about it, Dragon Quater is a hardcore, demanding game, as this review heavy with explanations of game mechanics no doubt proves. Overcoming its subterranean tunnels is extremely taxing, but besting that next boss and tracking down that next weapon upgrade is wholly rewarding. While it may not be the traditional, formulaic RPG fans of the Breath of Fire series may have hoped for, and in fact expected, it’s an excellent game with a surprisingly effective story and is one of the most interesting RPGs on the Playstation 2. Capcom may have killed the Breath of Fire series so that Dragon Quarter could exist, but rest assured, it was a sacrifice worth making.

The Discovery Channel’s Rise of the Video Game turned out decent enough, though it lacked the intelligence and depth of PBS’ The Video Game Revolution. From the start, the show works with the assumption that video games are in fact Art with a capital A, and as art is a reflection of the time and society in which it is created, the show explores the cultural milieu that birthed each featured game. Space War as an extension of the space race and Tennis for Two as a rebellious use of wartime technology are interesting angles, but the show never really goes beyond simply analyzing each game as a representation of its era.

This first episode covered the two aforementioned games as well as the Magnavox Odyssey, Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, the Atari 2600, and Tetris. Like The Video Game Revolution, Rise of the Video Game is told through carefully edited interviews from industry legends like Ralph Baer and Nolan Bushnell, but also includes lesser known – and frankly, unnecessary – video game personalities like the guy who created JFK: Reloaded. Gee, I hope a later episode includes the dude behind Super Columbine Massacre. The episode ends after a strange transition (and a three year gap in chronology) trying to connect the Atari 2600 and the video game crash of 1983 with Tetris, which really doesn’t work at all. Tetris should have been saved for a discussion on handheld gaming, and the Game Boy – and Nintendo – weren’t mentioned at all in the episode.

Next week’s entry, however, looks to remedy this. The preview promises some Donkey Kong loving, but I wonder why they didn’t include it earlier in this week’s episode. It’s easy enough to talk about Donkey Kong without going into the details of Nintendo itself, and the game would’ve worked very well as a follow up to Pac-Man and a continued discussion on characters in games. Oh well, guess they’re going to use it as a launching point for covering Nintendo and its savage marketing tactics that pulled the console market back out of the gutter.

Still, the show was worthwhile for what it was, and I’ll certainly watch the remaining four episodes. Its focus is far narrower than PBS’ treatment of the same topic, despite having three more hours to cover the same ground. It would’ve been nice to have some more interesting industry veterans rather than the vice president of IGN and some random indie game makers, but even the lesser known figures offered interesting input. The show’s site allows users to rate the “classicness” of various games, including Second Life, Ragnorak Online, and Splinter Cell, and it’s only with the clenched anticipation of pain that I look forward to the series covering these games. At the very least, though, it servers as a nice way to kill an hour before Mythbusters.

But wait, there’s more.

The Inn Music Database is now more pathetic and less pathetically Web 2.0-y, though no new music as been added. I’ve also started tagging old posts, which will ultimately lead to little else than a “tag cloud,” to firmly prove once and for all that penises are, in fact, The DORK Club’s most covered topic.

Boring blogy/site maintenance updates to be replaced by equally boring game review updates just as soon as I finish Dragon Quarter.

Today was a busy day, kids. Or at least, it was as busy as a day can be when I only rarely get out of my chair. I implemented various changes and minor improvements across the sites, including fixing some long-standing display errors and correcting a few outstanding lapses in consistency. Plus, I even dealt with some years-old, depreciated HTML elements buried deep in the hidden regions of the site and converted all the pages to PHP files, taking advantage of all their new age wizardry. Ultimately, like most of the hours I waste on this site, the effects of my work are virtually invisible, but rest assured that I have, in fact, spent an entire day doing a great deal and accomplishing very little.

The real fruit of this labor is a rather unimpressive “video games,” page, which may or may not become something worthwhile at some point in the future. It really only exists for organizational purposes at this point, and differs very little from the preexisting Games, Games (Video), and Games (Also Video) categories. At least here I can be slightly more discerning with what’s displayed. And once I rewrite/heavily edit the Astro Boy, Baten Kaitos, Billy Hatcher, Defcon, and Gradius 5 reviews, I’ll actually be quite proud of everything linked to by that page. So, huzzah for that, I guess.

In an hour I’m going to watch Rise of the Video Game on the Discovery Channel, which promises to be the first part (of five) of something superbly awesome. After that, however, site maintenance continues as I attempt to upgrade our Wordpress backend. If you’re reading this anytime past four hours from now, assume I was successful.

Treasure’s catalog of 2D action titles include some of the best ever made: Gunstar Heroes, Guardian Heroes, and Alien Soldier. Astro Boy: Omega Factor stands toe-to-robotic-toe with any of Treasure’s previous heavy hitters, delivering a rich gameplay experience that’s equal parts brawler and horizontal shooter. More than just a simple action affair, the game is a celebration of Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka’s body of work, featuring an all-star cast of Tezuka-created characters and a surprisingly compelling narrative. Oh, and it’s a lot of fun too.

Astro Boy is one of the most pervasive Japanese characters ever created, born of the man lovingly referred to as the father of anime. For the uninitiated: After his son dies in a tragic accident, brilliant robotics expert Dr. Tenma builds Astro Boy to replace the son he lost, creating a robot that can do more than just follow orders; Astro has a soul. The charming robotic kid with 100,000 horsepower strength and an electronic heart is often trusting to a fault, accidentally placing himself in dangerous situations time and time again. Thrust into a world filled with conflict, Astro wants nothing more than to see everyone – robot, human, alien, or otherwise – coexist peacefully, even if he needs to bash a few skulls to make this dream a reality.

Rather than follow any of the innumerable adventures Astro has undertaken since his debut in 1951, Omega Factor instead fashions an entirely new storyline from the patchwork of Osamu Tezuka’s life’s work, featuring over fifty characters created by the prolific manga artist. Each character is faithfully represented in both on-screen sprite and simply animated character portrait, capturing Tezuka’s trademark bright, cartoony style. This massive cast of characters is more than just window dressing, however; besides factoring in the game’s incredibly complex plot that explores themes of racism and personal responsibility, the cast itself also forms an integral gameplay element. The titular Omega Factor refers to Astro’s robotic soul, which can be strengthened by establishing meaningful human connections. Bonding with others and earning their friendship – or failing that, at least their respect – allows you to upgrade Astro’s capabilities. Before the end, Astro will be an unstoppable powerhouse, but in the meantime, this allows you to customize Astro to best suit your personal playstyle. Upgrade his sensors or jets to improve mobility and more easily locate hidden characters or improve the power of his punches and increase his health total to stand a chance against that next boss. Each character is also cataloged in a ridiculously thorough in-game encyclopedia that includes character biographies and detailed data concerning the books and television series they appeared in.

Unlike other Treasure action titles, Omega Factor isn’t the sort of brutally difficult game that takes days to master before you’re beating the game in under an hour. This isn’t a game you beat in a single sitting; Omega Factor should last you between 6-8 hours, depending on difficulty level. Most of the game plays like a traditional side-scrolling brawler, complete with epic, Treasure trademark boss battles. Here, Astro punches, kicks, and posterior-mounted machine guns his way through waves of diverse enemies. The game makes good use of the Game Boy Advance’s sprite scaling, mixing things up and staving off repetition by varying the size of the enemies you face. While it doesn’t always make logical sense (six-inch tall mobsters, for example), it forces you to rethink your approach when battling monstrous versions of previously tiny enemies. And best of all, despite the sheer number of sprites on screen and the many layers of parallax, the game rarely suffers from any slowdown. Occasionally, the diminutive hero takes to the sky and blasts down baddies with his patented finger laser. In the sky and on the ground, combat is fast and chaotic, hinging on careful management of Astro’s EX powers.

In addition to his standard move set of punches, kicks, and finger laser blasts, Astro also comes armed with three powerful EX attacks. Besides dishing out heavy damage, each of these abilities also provides some sort of limited invulnerability. Enemies hit hard, regardless of their size, and managing the temporary invulnerability and the massive damage potential of these abilities is the key to continued success. The system in place here is simple, but allows for a tremendous amount of depth. Using standard attacks replenishes your EX power cache – limited to 99, 5, or 3 on easy, normal, and hard, respectively. Once charged, you can unleash a powerful laser beam from your arm cannon, destroying projectiles and enemies in its path with equal prejudice, but leaving Astro completely vulnerable from all angles but the front. His machine guns, on the other hand, deal a small amount of damage to all enemies on screen, but stun them temporarily and leave Astro completely invulnerable for the duration of the attack. Finally, the EX dash allows Astro to rocket across the screen, delivering a powerful punch to a single enemy and sending him catapulting along for the ride. Regardless of difficulty, you’re always a few punches and kicks away from another EX attack. These powers are carefully balanced both offensively and defensively, and in order to successfully survive the often-cluttered screen, you’ll need to make full use of their potential.

The game unfolds mostly linearly, with an unexpected plot twist changing the structure of the game about halfway through. Eventually, you’ll find yourself replaying altered versions of the game’s first seven levels, bouncing between stages out of order to unlock secrets and prevent a full-scale robot-human war. This time traveling, nonlinear mechanic greatly lengthens the time you’ll spend with the game, and allows you to really explore the details of Astro’s world if you choose. Having every stage available to replay at any time, even after beating the game – which everyone will be able to do, if not on normal then certainly on the game’s easiest difficulty option – makes replaying your favorite boss battles easy and painless. Unfortunately, unlocking the game’s savagely challenging final level where all of the game’s myriad subplots come to a head is unnecessarily cryptic, requiring some clever guesswork or liberal consultation with your favorite walkthrough. Even after completing the game there’s plenty to keep you occupied, including a clever scoring system that encourages speed and survivability.

Astro Boy: Omega Factor is a welcome throwback to a genre that once ruled the market and now is little more than a footnote in gaming history. Still, even back then they never made them quite like this. With a lengthy adventure, an involving story, and nonstop, wall-to-wall action, the game is more than just a nostalgic trip back to the 2D action well. Omega Factor is a finely crafted game and one of the most charming titles on the Game Boy Advance. Fans of Astro Boy or just Tezuka’s work in general will be in fanservice heaven with Omega Factor, but be forewarned: if you’re not yet completely enamored with Tezuka’s boy robot with a big, electronic heart, you soon will be.

Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean is the first game from developer tri-Crescendo, and is co-developed by Monolith Soft, best known for the Xenosaga series. Like Monolith’s more popular PS2 franchise, Baten Kaitos is a story-heavy RPG that’s likely to have just as many diehard fans as detractors. While the game’s deep card combat system and intricate dungeons are both unique and welcome additions to the genre, its clichéd plot and trite dialogue will only remind veteran RPG fans of the better games Baten Kaitos goes to such great lengths to emulate. Still, for those willing to stomach the game’s stale narrative and derivative characters, Baten Kaitos offers up enough original gameplay ideas to redeem the experience.

Like most role-playing games since the genre’s inception, Baten Kaitos’ plot once again involves an evil emperor bent on acquiring X number of ancient relics in order to free an unspeakable evil and obtain ultimate power. As always, it’s up to an oddball cast of plucky, young adventures to stop him and save the world. The gang’s all here: from the brooding, self-centered male protagonist to the naïve love interest with stars in her eyes and hope in her heart. Set in a world where massive islands drift in a sea of clouds, nothing about the game’s storyline, characters, or universe is unique. The plot itself is perfectly competent, but it apes story elements from other RPGs so blatantly that it never adds up to anything more than a well-executed series of clichés. But while Baten Kaitos may fail as a piece of interactive fiction, it still succeeds as a game.

Much of the gameplay revolves around Magnus, magical cards able to trap the “magna essence” of real world objects (or magical forces). In combat, Baten Kaitos plays like an elaborate card game. Characters draw Magnus cards from their own unique decks and play them to execute corresponding actions. Selecting a sword card causes you to swing a sword; selecting a “fire burst” card sets enemies aflame. Additionally, each card has up to four spirit numbers – one per corner – that you can combine in traditional poker-style combinations like straights and pairs to greatly amplify your cards’ effects.

Despite its deep, strategic nature, combat is actually extremely frantic. There are no random battles; running into an enemy in the field will transport your party to a separate playing area. Here, you trade offensive and defense blows while under strict time limitations, forcing you to act rapidly while still thinking tactically. Individual turns play out very quickly, but battles themselves tend to drag on longer than in other RPGs. You’ll be so engaged stringing together combos, however, that you won’t mind, as even the most throwaway encounters provide a great deal of depth. Unfortunately, the game move so quickly, you’ll often accidentally sabotage your own combos, as the C-stick used to select cards’ spirit numbers is small and imprecise, leading to more than a few botched fatal blows. Baten Kaitos also features the sort of level system you’d expect from an RPG, but rather than instantly leveling after you meet experience requirements, you must first visit a nondescript church, only accessible through certain save points, to pray and reflect on your experiences.

Aside from their obvious influence on the game’s combat system, Magnus also affect gameplay outside of combat, playing a central role in the game’s plot and factoring into the dungeons. In addition to your combat decks, you also have access to several blank Magnus cards that can absorb the essence of nearly anything in the gameworld, from milk and apples to adventure novels and pickaxes, allowing you to transport materials or overcome obstacles. The game’s dungeons make heavy use of this mechanic. Clever Magnus-based puzzles aside, Baten Kaitos’ dungeons are the game’s real highlight, and before your adventure is through you’ll visit a topsy-turvy, upside down garden featuring a Tower of Druaga homage complete with 8-bit graphics, a maze of crystalline mirrors that fragment and distort the screen, and a massive tower whose floors contain some of the most diabolical block puzzles ever created.

Magnus also grow and change over time. Fruit and meat go bad with age while other Magnus cards transform and evolve into new forms entirely. You can also create your own Magnus in battle by playing a series of cards in a certain order. To get cooked rice, a powerful healing item, you’d play a power helmet (to use as a pot), uncooked rice, water burst, and then fire burst. The game’s crafting system is surprisingly deep, but also completely superficial; you can easily complete the game without ever touching it. Still, for those looking for even more depth from an already deep game, crafting adds yet another layer of interest. For everyone else, it amounts to little more than an inventory filled with spoiled food.

While the actual gameplay remains excellent throughout, Baten Kaitos isn’t so successful on a technical level. The game’s writing is pretty poor in and off itself, but the stilted, off-key voice acting transforms passable dialogue into a grating assault on the senses. To make matters worse, the voice samples themselves sound hollow and tinny, no doubt the end result of squeezing hours of voice work onto two tiny Gamecube discs. Thankfully, there’s an option to disable voices entirely. The fully orchestrated soundtrack, however, is varied and excellent, though tracks are noticeably recycled throughout the game.

Baten Kaitos also looks great, though the hand drawn, 2D backgrounds outshine the fully 3D character models. The painted backdrops are richly detailed and subtly animated, outdoing the mid-generation 3D models at every turn. The characters themselves are garishly overdesigned, bogged down by excessive nick-knacks and accessories. Characters are so heavily differentiated from one another that it’s hard to believe any of them are from the same planet, let alone culture. In fact, while all of the game’s varied locals are beautiful and visually interesting, they never feel as though they’re part of a cohesive world.

Aesthetically, it’s easy to see the game’s seams. With a plot, characters, and world directly ripped from other prominent RPG franchises, the universe of Baten Kaitos doesn’t offer anything we haven’t seen before. The storyline amounts to little more than a finely crafted string of clichés, while the banal dialogue and mostly gorgeous, if inconsistent visual design paints a fractured, disparate world. All of this nearly destroys the experience, but the underlying game mechanics and core gameplay are so good they manage to shine through the layers of tired conventions. As undeniably excellent as Baten Kaitos’ gameplay may be, though, the boring storyline and stock characters weigh down the game too much to easily recommend. There are better RPGs out there, even within the Gamecube’s limited library; Baten Kaitos’ developers ripped them off to make this game.

I’m playing through the unfortunately titled Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean for my next review/blog/post/update thing, and I’m shocked at just how blatantly the game apes other, better RPGs. It looks surprisingly similar to Chrono Cross on a purely technical level with its incredibly detailed, hand drawn backgrounds and fully polygonal characters, but the flamboyant character designs feel similar to Nobuteru YÅ«ki’s and the overall world looks very much like Chrono Cross’ archipelago of El Nido. Maybe it’s because Yasuyuki Honne, Baten Kaitos’ director, was also the art director on Chrono Cross. Or maybe it’s because a group of talented RPG fans got together, came up with some brilliant game mechanics, and then lifted visuals, characters, and story elements from other Japanese role-playing games to use in their own.

The game stars a slightly less annoying Squall from Final Fantasy VIII while Nina from the Breath of Fire series and Wakka from Final Fantasy X round out the supporting cast. Like Skies of Arcadia, Baten Kaitos takes place in a world of floating islands separated by an ocean of clouds. There’s even some Earthbound influences, with the player serving as an actual force within the gameworld. Role playing games have advanced less than any other genre in gaming; most of their once-unique elements – character customization, engrossing storylines, and player choice – have been appropriated by other genres. Rather than adapt and change with changing hardware, the genre has remained mostly stagnant, heaping slightly tweaked mechanics on top of the same tired conventions and clinging desperately to outdated systems generated by technological limitations that no longer exist. Exploring a genre’s clichés through a well executed genre piece can be fun and exciting, Skies of Arcadia is proof enough of that, but dragging your game through the same boring clichés for no other reason than you didn’t bother to try any harder is painful for anyone unfortunate enough to play through it.

Now, Baten Kaitos isn’t as bad as that mini-rant makes it out to be, but it’s symptomatic of a genre that’s far less relevant than it used to be. Before taking a break to write this, my Baten Kaitos party had just met a living tiki man with a penchant for song and fought off an interdimensional penis monster before arriving at a gingerbread village atop a giant, flying disco ball. So, clearly things are looking up. Whether the game breaks from the ‘evil empire seeking out X number of ancient relics to release an unspeakable evil’ storyline before the end remains to be seen, but as it stands now Baten Kaitos is a finely crafted game that acts as an amalgam of its own genre, doing literally everything we’ve seen before.

Originally formed by Konami employees tired of building big budget sequels and eager to work on smaller, more creative games, Treasure has become a fan favorite developer responsible for a library of challenging 2D action titles that combine brutal boss encounters with clever gameplay innovations. For the first time since their split in 1992, Treasure has returned to Konami’s side to create the next installment in the long-running Gradius series. Gradius V is more than just a Treasure title with Gradius’ name on the box, however. The game sticks closely to Gradius’ rich heritage and is a surprisingly conservative side-scrolling shooter from a developer known for its quirky, often gimmicky shooters. An extremely polished, if slightly derivative game, Gradius V proves that 2D action titles are just as viable now as they were a decade ago.

Rather than redefine the franchise, Treasure closely follows the rules established by previous Gradius titles, but never shies away from adding their own personality to the material. Once again, you take to the stars in the legendary Vic Viper, the only ship standing between the evil Bacterion armada and the peaceful planet of Gradius. Each of the game’s eight levels scroll horizontally from left to right and come packed with many of the enemies fans of the series have been blasting apart for years. However, Treasure often turns this convention on its head, quite literally, in fact, as stages twist and turn or often consist of many moving parts. Treasure likewise puts their own stamp on the game with their epic, multistage boss battles. These boss fights are as intricate as they are difficult, serving as Gradius V’s biggest highlights, but thankfully never completely dominate the game as they tend to in more traditional Treasure fare. Though Treasure brings its own unique flair to the game, they remain true to the Gradius series throughout and never sacrifice franchise staples in favor of more innovative mechanics.

Case in point: the tried-and-true power up system the series has used since its inception once again returns. Downing clearly identified red enemies yields pulsating power up capsules used to highlight successively more advanced upgrades along your power up meter on the bottom of the screen. You can purchase a highlighted power up at any time, instantly outfitting the Vic Viper with the selected upgrade and resetting the meter. Each of the four initially available weapon configurations differ little in terms of available upgrades – offering power ups that boost your speed, improve your weapons, or provide protective barriers – instead featuring unique Multiple formations and special abilities.

Multiples – sometimes called Options in previous Gradius games – are glowing orange orbs that trail behind your ship and are one of the six upgrades available for purchase. You can have up to four of these Multiples at any given time, each of which mimics the Vic Viper’s weaponry, up to quadrupling your firepower. The Multiples arrange themselves in different formations based on your initial weapon loadout. In types one and two, for example, the Multiples simply lag behind you ship, copying your movements on a half-second delay. Type three places two Multiples directly above and below your ship and type four has them orbiting the Vic Viper. Besides dealing out additional firepower, Multiples also have a special ability depending on your chosen configuration, such as the ability to freeze in place in type one or to change the direction of their orbit in type four. Each configuration and Multiple style is useful, but never useless, rewarding you for your chosen playstyle but never punishing you for it.

Gradius V includes five difficulty settings ranging from very easy to very hard, but even on the lowest setting it’s still an exceptionally challenging game. The levels and boss fights tend to take lives in equal measure, requiring both rote memorization and fast reflexes to overcome. Dying in Gradius V comes with a hefty price, either placing your ship at a predetermined checkpoint or returning you to the heat of combat uninterrupted, depending on your settings. Either way, death strips the Vic Viper of all its powerups, but in the latter option your Multiples remain on the screen for you to collect, if you’re fast enough. Because it takes so long to bring your ship to full power, and because death takes such costly toll, the game rewards expert-level play and places an emphasis on survival over raw killing power. Still, staying alive is easier said than done, and it will take most players a good many hours before they can reach the final boss on the easiest difficulty setting. Thankfully, the Konami Code and a system that rewards playtime with additional credits means everyone will eventually reach the end of the game, even if they need to cheat a little to get there.

Gradius may be uncompromisingly difficult, but as clichéd as it is to say so, death in Gradius V is always your fault and never the result of poor design. The game doesn’t rely on cheap “surprise” obstacles or unfair enemy placement to create challenge. Gradius V’s difficulty instead stems from monstrous boss encounters and level design that requires pixel perfect precision to navigate successfully. Thankfully, the controls are accommodating, allowing for unprecedented maneuverability and some amazing collision detection. Even in a Multiple-less, completely powered-down state, you can still overcome any challenge the game might dish out thanks to the responsive controls. It might take you five times as long to down a boss, but you can still skirt along the edges of projectiles and line up shots with incredible accuracy. Despite being so difficult, Gradius V is never frustrating.

Though Gradius V still plays like a classic 2D shooter, it uses polygons instead of sprites. The game puts the power of the PS2 to good use, saturating the screen with 3D enemies and painting gorgeously detailed, if strangely parallax-free, backgrounds, only slowing down for trademark Treasure boss explosions that bring the framerate to its knees. Asteroid belts, space stations, and oozing biomasses are all visually exciting while still allowing you to differentiate between background and foreground elements easily. The Playstation 2 has a surprisingly robust library of 2.5D shooters, from R-Type Final to Treasure’s own Slipheed: The Lost Planet, but Gradius V is easily the best looking among them.

Sadly, the game’s audio doesn’t quite live up the visuals’ high standards. The soundtrack itself is excellent, consisting of fully orchestrated original tracks and remixes of classic Gradius music, all composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto of Final Fantasy Tactics and Radiant Silvergun fame. The epic, futuristic-sounding background music fits the tone of the game perfectly, and feels especially empowering as you score the final hit on a particularly difficult boss. The monotone announcer that calls out upgrades as you purchase them, however, quickly becomes tiresome. Like other voice samples in the game, including those in an annoyingly unskippable cinematic in the game’s second level, these recordings are compressed to the point of being unintelligible; were it not for the game’s subtitles it would be impossible to understand the dialogue. These voice samples actually sound as though they were ripped directly from Axelay – one of Treasure’s SNES shooters – rather than specifically recorded for a modern platform.

Aural complaints aside, however, Gradius V is another excellent entry in one of gaming’s most revered shooter series from one of the genre’s most respected developers. Longtime shooter detractors won’t find their minds suddenly changed by Gradius V, but fans of the Gradius series, Treasure’s games, or just shooters in general will find a lot to be excited about. Littered with plenty of nostalgic references to its predecessors, Gradius V is a game firmly rooted in its heritage with just enough new material to feel exciting and fresh. Whether you still visit the arcade every week or haven’t touched a side-scrolling shooter since the advent of polygons, Gradius V is a challenging and rewarding game and proof positive that 2D is a stylistic choice, not a technological limitation.

Diablo 2 still sits atop the action RPG throne, a full eight years after its initial release. Titan Quest and its expansion, Immortal Throne, join a long line of would-be usurpers that favor iteration over innovation, building on Blizzard’s solid foundation rather than forging their own mold. Titan Quest’s host of clever interface improvements, deep character customization, and unmatched itemization single it out as the frontrunner among Diablo derivatives. While some technical issues and unusual design decisions may dampen the game’s lasting appeal, Titan Quest is, well, a titan among mortals, deserving of a place at Diablo’s side and of all comparisons drawn between it and Blizzard’s benchmark franchise.

From the onset, Titan Quest unabashedly rips off its inspiration. Again you find yourself in control of a nameless hero on the trail of an ancient, powerful evil attempting to free a more ancient, more powerful evil. The Titans, rather upset at that whole Greek Gods banishing them from the world they once ruled thing, have freed themselves from their Olympian bonds and sworn vengeance against their former captors. Three lesser Titans, called Telkines, have unleashed an army of Greek monsters upon the world – minotaurs, gorgons, satyrs – and are now trying to free Typhon, a powerful Titan that wants nothing more than to see Zues’ head on a pike.

Caught up in the Gods’ affairs, and with the mortal world in danger, you’ll travel between ancient Greece, Egypt, and China in a quest to prevent these Telkine from loosing their Titan master. Like Diablo 2, the game is divided into large acts, three in this case, each of which takes place in a different section of the globe. Each locale is vibrantly brought to life through the game’s powerful 3D engine, which retains Diablo’s 3/4 overhead perspective. Character models and environments are surprisingly detailed, perhaps too much so, in fact, as even at its lowest settings the game’s lush visuals are demanding and the framerate frequently drops in larger, populated areas. Each location is clearly defined by historic and mythological landmarks; before the game is through you’ll visit an Athens in peril, fight mummies beneath the pyramids of Giza, and travel along the Great Wall of China.

Throughout it all, of course, you’ll be confronting the Titans’ armies. Combat is fast and unrelenting; you’ll continually battle small groups of interesting enemy types that interact and play off one another’s strengths and weaknesses to form generally engaging encounters. The game’s robust physics system sends defeated enemies satisfyingly ragdolling off cliffs and tumbling over level geometry. It’s not all about flinging fallen corpses, however, as Titan Quests’ enemies excel at killing your character if you’re not careful. Thankfully, the game frequently saves your progress with Portals and Rebirth Fountains, ensuring you’re never too far from your corpse and serving as stand-ins for Diablo 2’s Waypoints. Guzzling potions is the only way to ensure you’ll be alive long enough to sell any valuable items you come across in your travels and earn the riches you so obviously deserve.

Titan Quest features the sort of tiered, prefix/suffix-modified item system you’d expect from an action RPG. The game’s itemization is really its greatest strength, surpassing even Diablo 2’s. Enemies will only drop items they’re carrying, meaning wild boars won’t yield suits of armor and a single skeleton won’t drop five polearms. Additionally, every item that hits the ground is potentially useful for someone, even if it’s just vendor-fodder for you. Every item and item modifier is powerful enough to find a home in some wanting character’s inventory. There is no garbage loot here; truly, this is loot porn at its most beautiful. On top of the standalone weapons, armor, and accessories, Titan Quest’s baddies also drop relics and charms you can combine to form powerful items used to augment the strength of other items. Plus, the game features an auto-sorting feature that automatically rearranges items in your inventory, allowing you to keep your full focus on more pressing matters – like slaughtering an army of harpies.

Besides individualizing your character through your item loadout, the game’s skill system grants a wealth of customization options. As you play the game, you can choose from up to two of nine different masteries, one at level two and one at level eight. Masteries function similarly to Diablo 2’s skill trees, with skills positioned in one of six tiers. Each time your character gains a level, he or she also gains three skill points. These points are used to purchase new skills, as long as you have purchased all subsequently required skills, or to improve upon skills you’ve already acquired. In order to unlock each new tier, however, you must invest in a general mastery pool that doesn’t benefit the skills you’ve learned in any way, but instead boosts your character’s attributes. This system allows you to spend your points in a rush for the top tier skills without too much of a penalty, as your character still becomes stronger with each level even if his or her skills don’t actually improve. You can progress through the masteries at your own pace, slowly maxing out lower tier abilities before accessing newer skills or heavily investing in the mastery itself in order to obtain top tier skills as quickly as possible. The game encourages and rewards specialization. Additionally, you can visit a mystic at any time to untrain spent skill points, for a price, ensuring mistakes made early in the game don’t have ramifications later on.

Titan Quest also features a multiplayer mode, but it’s archaic even by Diablo 2’s eight-year-old standards. Characters are all stored client-side, meaning there’s nothing stopping enterprising players from hacking their character files to make themselves impossibly powerful. This effectively ruins any legitimate character interaction or item trading from the onset. To make matters worse, games only support up to seven players and suffer from massive lag spikes whenever a player joins or leaves. Helpful tools like the ability to kick or ban players from your games or to force all players to join the same party automatically are welcome, but the multiplayer component is so lazily implemented you won’t spend much time online anyway. Aside from playing with your friends, playing online is rendered moot by rampant cheating and the game’s overall poor replayability.

There are many reasons to replay Titan Quest, even if multiplayer fun isn’t one of them. The mastery system allows for a wide range of possible character types and the itemization is so excellent, from the types of items dropped to the rate at which amazing items appear, that it’s hard to resist the siren call of character building. Unfortunately, two large problems cut Titan Quest’s time in your DVD-rom drive short and keep the title from becoming anything more than a very good single player, single playthrough game.

First, and most shockingly, Titan Quest’s levels aren’t randomly generated. They’re certainly very well designed, offering multiple paths to a single destination and rewarding exploration, but they’re also set in stone. While this has no ramifications on your first playthrough, in the long run, this lack of randomness makes a very repetitive experience. Quest objectives are always in the same locations and areas’ entry and exit points never change. Replaying the game to test out new character builds or to farm loot, staples of the genre, becomes very boring very quickly. There’s little incentive to play through the exact same level layout a second time on a harder difficulty setting, let alone with a new character.

To make matters worse, Titan Quest is unusually long. With Immortal Throne, the game clocks in at 25-30 hours per difficulty level. With Epic and Legendary difficulties waiting beyond the first, you’ll be playing each of your characters for 100 hours before hitting the level cap and exhausting the game’s content. Action RPGs are generally shorter games that encourage replaying their content, and Titan Quests’ decision to fly in the face of convention by building a lengthy, unrandomized world unfortunately cripples the game’s longevity. The game is a great deal of fun, and does a lot of things right, but you’ll be hard pressed to find the motivation to replay the game, online or off.

Still, as a single player action RPG Titan Quest is an excellent offering, even if you only play through it once. Immortal Throne, its expansion, adds a fourth act set in Hades to the game in addition to a ninth mastery that focuses on buffing and crowd control. Most importantly, it adds a new vendor called a caravan, which provides additional storage space as well as a universal storage area that any of your characters can access. This greatly alleviates any of the inventory pains of vanilla Titan Quest and alone makes the original unplayable when compared against the expansion. Immortal Throne also introduces a robust crafting system, allowing you to combine the relics and charms used to augment items into powerful artifacts. At this point, there’s no reason to play Titan Quest without Immortal Throne, and anyone doing so will be sorely missing out on some of the game’s best features.

Sadly, THQ hasn’t released a single patch for Titan Quest since Immortal Throne’s release in March 2007. Many balancing issues as well as superficial graphic and quest bugs remain. Though honestly, the balance issues aren’t much of a problem given the game’s poor multiplayer component. It may lean heavily on Diablo 2’s shoulders, but in many ways, Titan Quest surpasses its inspiration. In the eight years since Diablo 2’s release, it has faced many imitators but Titan Quest is its first true competitor. Its gorgeous graphics, subtle physics, and brilliant itemization balance out graphical problems and the absence of random levels. While it may not be your next life-consuming addiction, Titan Quest is still an excellent entry in the genre and a welcome appetizer in the wait for Diablo 3.