Demo Driver 8: The Night of the Rabbit (#181)
You said it was night, but this looks pretty much like day to me.
I’ve never felt wholly comfortable mocking point-and-click adventure games. I’m fine sharing my thoughts on the genre as a whole, but the thing is that most of them come across as almost unbearably earnest. They sustain themselves almost wholly on presentation by writing and art. Critiquing the gameplay is an easy shot, and while it’s a worthwhile topic of discussion, it doesn’t change the fact that the game in question is essentially coming to you hat in hand while asking you to be a mildly interactive participant in what comes down to a storytelling session.
At the same time, this is a genre that has some pretty significant problems as a result, so I don’t feel that it’s fair to just leave off mentions of the nature of point-and-click adventure games. They’re not quite as much a non-game experience as the dreaded “Walk Around and Stare” genre, but you’re still stuck clicking about and hoping to have an impact. So you can imagine that I’ve got some conflicted feelings about The Night of the Rabbit right out of the gate.
Telling Stories: We don’t like your kind here
Some games just don’t want roleplayers around, it seems.
Guild Wars made a point of not letting players stop running no matter what; Warhammer Online made the same mistake. Several console-based games make things like walking and chatting more difficult than they need to be, discouraging people from roleplaying even further, and some games like Defiance barely give you a spare moment to stop and chat about local politics anyway. It makes things a lot more awkward, because it’s one thing negotiating around other players who don’t like roleplaying. How do you deal with it when the game itself doesn’t want you around?
Like always, there are no hard and fast answers, but there are approaches you can use. Very few games are made with the intent to stymie roleplayers, but several make the mistake quite naturally. So let’s look at what you can do when the game’s built in such a way that you certainly don’t feel welcome
Should Bravely Default be a Final Fantasy game?
In most fantasy RPGs, having amnesia is like one better than having an iPod.
When is a duck not a duck? When is a Final Fantasy title not a Final Fantasy title? What does the former even mean these days?
There used to be a really clear distinction. Games were called Final Fantasy when they were part of a huge long series of games, each of which consisted of the same two words followed by a number. You can argue the point a little, sure – Mystic Quest exists, the first Seiken Densetsu game was marketed as a Final Fantasy gaiden – but by and large this was the abnormality. But now we’re deep into sequels and prequels and spinoffs that are, just the same, branded as part of Final Fantasy. The reason Final Fantasy Dimensions is called that instead of, well, Final Fantasy (previous installment +1) is pretty much arbitrary.
But it gets really weird with Bravely Default. Here’s a game that’s developed by a studio that has worked on Final Fantasy before. It’s a spiritual sequel to Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light, which itself is a spiritual sequel to Final Fantasy III‘s remake, which could almost be considered a sequel of sorts to Final Fantasy III due to the extensive nature of the remake. It obviously adheres pretty damn closely to the standard Final Fantasy tropes. I’ve seen people go so far as to say that in a just world, it would be a Final Fantasy title.
Should it be? That takes some talking. Read More…
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy I, part 2
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Remakes of the first Final Fantasy have an odd dichotomy going. In the early parts, it’s easier to be curmudgeonly about the more “faithful” remakes while wishing for a game that isn’t brutally crushing you at every turn solely by fiat. As the game goes on, though, the more modernized versions start inspiring more ranting about how things were back in your day.
But that’s a little further along in today’s entry. As you probably remember, we left things off right around the time when the game finally remembers what the stated goal was at the beginning of the game. You know, when you’ve finally finished derping around enough that you could go deal with the Earth Fiend. Which is annoying, but in a way I almost wish the game had continued along that vein, sending you on elaborate, sprawling sidequests just to make a little forward motion. It really creates the sense of two distinct games, where you spend a whole lot of time getting to fight the Fiends at all and then you just sort of kill them in quick succession.
There are only a few places where you can break from the game’s very linear sequence, and taking care of the Earth Fiend first is not one of those places. It’s more obnoxious than all that, really – you have to descend, kill a vampire, open a passage, talk to an NPC who literally does nothing else, then go back down and actually kill Lich. It’s kind of pointless, and it feels like padding the length of the game without even giving you an extra dungeon to go through by forcing you throw the same dungeon twice.
Hard Project: Transformers
This might be as good as it gets. That isn’t entirely buoying.
One of the thing that fascinates me endlessly when it comes to video games is that there are certain IPs forever being tossed about and adapted into bad-to-mediocre games… despite the fact that the IP in question seems suited to games. Sometimes the games languish in development hell over and over, sometimes they get released and never find any sort of critical affection on account of being crap, sometimes they get adapted by several companies in several forms which are all bad.
So let’s talk about these sorts of project, starting with one near and dear to my heart: Transformers. I’d be lying if I said that this was an IP that’s never been made into a game, and it’s in fact been made into several. They’ve more or less all been fairly terrible; the games with the best reception are the ones that more or less just dropped everything else and turned the game into a more conventional console shooter with optional (and largely useless) transformations. War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron received generally acceptable reviews, but the other games have been panned, and Transformers Universe has gone from being an MMO to cashing in on the MOBA flavor of the month. So what makes Transformers so hard to bring in as a game?
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 