Tag: Gamecube

#WeeklyGameMusic: Search a Seal ~Tethe Alla~ (Tales of Symphonia)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

Whoops, a little late on this #WeeklyGameMusic. We’ve got an old classic, Search a Seal ~Tethe Alla~, by Motoi Sakuraba and Shinji Tamura. This lavish variation of the dungeon-crawling music comes from the old-school JRPG, Tales of Symphonia: a seemingly innocent-looking Namco Tales Studio game that has a dark and twisted story discussing politics, religion, prejudice, and class struggle.

Welcome to Sylvarant, a fantasy world in decline. In a land where mana — the fundamental element in this universe — is rapidly depleting, humans are dealing with poverty, monsters, and Desians, a group of half-elves that enslaves humans into slave camps. But in a small village of Iselia, there’s hope: the chosen one, Collette, along with her guardians, Raine and Kratos, have just begun the journey of Regeneration. In said journey, the trio will break the five seals in the world to unlock the Tree of Mana, a renewable source of mana to bring prosper to Sylvarant and give humans a winning edge over Desians. Despite this setting, Tales of Symphonia actually follows an outsider, Lloyd, and his friend, Genis, who joins Collette’s party after the two banished from Iselia due to disrupting a neighboring Desian human ranch (and breach the two org’s peace treaty). The duo initially follows the party given they’re already familiar with its members (Lloyd is good friends with Collette, and Raine is Genis’ sister). But as the journey continues, they uncover terrifying secrets that forces them to question everything the party knew.

Tales of Symphonia is a JRPG that uses an (admittedly antiquated) real-time battle system called Linear Motion Battle System. Upon touching a generic monster in the overworld, up to four party members are teleported in battle mode. The playable characters moves towards or away from a monster, similar to 2D fighting games. Attacks are executed similar to Super Smash Bros., i.e. inputting a controller direction and button press at the same time. Naturally, each character specializes in a type of attack (e.g. ground-melee, anti-aerial, offensive magic, support magic, etc.) that enemies are weak to, so having a well-rounded party is important to success. Otherwise, the game’s exploration mode is relatively similar to most JRPG affair: in villages, talk to people; in overworld, just move from point A to point B; and in temples, use items to solve puzzles.

Tales of Symphonia was originally released for the Nintendo Gamecube. It’s been ported to PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and PC via Steam.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: A Song for Eternal Story (Phantasy Star Online)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

Following up with a SEGA music from last week, we’re moving right along to their lesser known IP, the Phantasy Star series. More specifically, the first online-connected entry in the long-running JRPG sci-fi franchise, Phantasy Star Online (PSO). Fans of this game from the Dreamcast and Gamecube era could probably immediately guess which track I’ll be introducing for this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic: the iconic title music, A Song for Eternal Story, by Hideaki Kobayashi and Fumie Kumatani.

Phantasy Star Online begins with a start of a new hope. With the home planet ravaged and inhospitable, your civilization journeys across space in an effort to discover a new planet to call home. When one of these colony-carrying spaceships, Pioneer 2, receives a message from Pioneer 1 of an excellent candidate they dub, “Ragol,” the former immediately beelines to the new destination. By the time they arrive, however, communication with Pioneer 1 — which up to this point has been regular with updates on their progress colonizing Ragol — suddenly ceases. Readings on the planet indicates a sudden large explosion occurred on the newly built city just before Pioneer 1 went silent. Suspicions high, the Pioneer 2 government asks for highly qualified soldiers, “Hunters,” to scout the planet and discover what dangers might lurk in this lush, unexplored land.

As a Diablo-inspired action-JRPG, Phantasy Star Online greatly diverges from past entries’ turn-based roots. A typical play session involves taking the following steps:

  1. Form a party of a maximum of four real players in Pioneer 2, which acts as the lobby.
  2. The leader of the party picks a quest from the quest counter. This prompts the game to procedurally generate a dungeon, themed under the environment the quest takes place in.
  3. All party members meet at the Ragol teleporter (after making preparations, of course) to start the dungeon-crawling adventure.

Combat in PSO is in real-time, where the player can customize their button inputs on what attack or spell to execute when pressed. The weapon the player equips dictates what action they can assign to their input pallet (weapons can be quick-swapped with a simple menu). Finally, the player’s class — chosen during the character creation screen — determines what weapons they can equip, thereby limiting what actions they can take. Given the game was originally designed with dial-up internet connection in mind, some technical limitations were enforced in the game that appear archaic to online games today. For example, players walk very slowly, and are unable to jump in PSO, making melee-heavy characters incapable of hitting flying enemies, and forcing them to rely on their gun-trotting or magic-wielding allies to handle the job.

Phantasy Star Online was originally released on Dreamcast, Gamecube, and PC. While official servers for the game has been put offline for quite a while now, the fan-supported PSO: Blue Burst Ultima Server is still online as of this writing. Of course, the other route is simply to check out the game’s free-to-play spiritual sequel, Phantasy Star Online 2, available on Xbox One and PC via Steam and Microsoft Store; which after 8 years since release, is still getting content updates as of this writing.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Little Jack (Skies of Arcadia)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

Power through this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic with a energy-boosting track from the SEGA Dreamcast classic, Skies of Arcadia, developed by Overworks! The wonderfully adventurous track, Little Jack, composed by Yutaka Minobe and Tatsuyuki Maeda, is one of the earliest tracks that plays in the game, especially when your party ventures off of your own floating home island, and into the skies on your own sky ship. A fantastic introduction to get you pumped in this retro, turn-based JRPG.

I’ve previously covered Skies of Arcadia in an older post (before the 2020 blog post series refresh), but to help everyone catch up: in this game world, you control the sky pirates, Vyse and Aika, to explore all the floating, airborne islands across the vast skies. That’s right, there’s no planetary ground in this fantastical universe! The plot kicks off with the duo rescuing Fina from the scrupulous Valuan army. Upon returning to their Robin Hood-like home base, Fina reveals that her mission is to collect the Moon Crystals, powerful magical crystals that comes from the six moons, before they fall into the wrong hands. Immediately sensing adventure, the three teenagers team up to recover these crystals.

While Skies of Arcadia shares a lot in common with any retro turn-based JRPG — maze-like exploration, HP bar for health, MP for magic — one of it’s more unique features in its normal battle system is the Skill stat. Unlike all the other meters, Skill is shared between all party members in the field, and is the primary resource consumed for dishing out the most powerful attacks. Recovering skill can be done by sacrificing a character’s turn with Focus, and/or simply letting the party’s turn end. A large majority of the player’s decision-making will focus on how to best allocate Skill points during battle to balance hitting hard, and defending.

Skies of Arcadia was originally released for the Dreamcast. It was later ported to the Gamecube as Skies of Arcadia: Legends.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Song for Dot (SSX Tricky)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

Another retro game to look forward to this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic. In a bit of a twist, here’s SSX Tricky‘s mix to the 90’s track, Song for a Dot by Space Raiders, which itself samples from There Goes My Heart Again by Fats Domino. Phew, that’s a lot to go through! Although the original music piece is pretty decent, this writer has a soft spot for the improvements EA Sports BIG made to better fit it’s hyper-fast, trick-driven winter sports game.

SSX Tricky is a (very 90’s) snowboarding game, where comically exaggerated international characters pits against each other to perform ridiculous tricks. And by, “ridiculous,” we mean, “physically impossible.” Performing a helicopter spin? Check. Doing the worm on the snowboard? Yup, check! Using the snowboard as a diving board? You betcha! To further push the arcade nature of the gameplay, performing tricks fills a boost meter than can be used to accelerate the character’s decent down the mountain even faster, for bigger air.

That said, a special mention goes to the game’s dynamic music mix. The soundtrack is programmed to change on nearly every action the player performs. The aggressive contrast between the tension of jumping high into the air and performing tricks — accentuated by the sudden ducking of the background music, leaving only the drum beats — to the release when landing said tricks — which brings in a bombastic fanfare and the return of an even louder melody — is an experience rarely replicated as well in any other game franchises. The whole thing is just an absolute joy to listen to.

SSX Tricky was released on PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox, and Game Boy Advance.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Credits (Metroid Prime)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music. Today’s track is an oldie, but timeless creepy-crawly…sci-fi tune, the Metroid Prime credits theme, composed by Kenji Yamamoto and Kouichi Kyuma. That’s right, we’re highlighting Retro Studios’ first release, the fantastic sci-fi first-person action-adventure game, Metroid Prime, published by Nintendo.

Where to begin with such a legendary game such as Metroid Prime? The mission starts with infamous bounty hunter, Samus Aran, investigating a seemingly decimated space laboratory that reveals that the evil Space Pirates has, once again, been experimenting with the deadly alien parasites, Metroids. True to the series roots, while Samus successfully destroys the laboratory to prevent further spread of specimens coming out of it, she loses all her upgraded space-suits with it, and needs to regain them from a neighboring planet that she once called home (or more like training ground, but that’s another story for another time). Unbeknownst to her, though, the Space Pirates had some tricks up in their space-sleeves…

Metroid Prime is renowned for successfully genre-shifting the retro-platformer to a first-person shooter, and still garner praise and support from fans of the older series. Despite some similarities, graphic-wise, to modern shooters, Metroid Prime doesn’t feel like a competitive shooter. Instead, the game has a strong emphasis on exploration and puzzle solving, with action occasionally sprinkled to even the game’s pacing. More often than not, the map is going to be your best tool: figuring out where to go next, and more importantly, how to get there defines the game’s core experience. Furthermore, to de-emphasize the action, Metroid Prime utilizes a lock-on mechanic akin to The Legend of Zelda series, making combat focus more on dodging attacks, rather than aiming. Finally, who can forget the scan-visor? It’s a lore-revealing tool that allows Samus to gather information on aliens, plants, data logs, power-ups, and more! This useful, but optional feature allows the player to organically piece together the scattered logs and events by themselves, revealing what has happened to the planet prior to Samus’ arrival.

Metroid Prime was originally released on Nintendo Gamecube. A remake of the entire Gamecube series, Metroid Prime: Trilogy, was also released on the Nintendo Wii, complete with motion-controlled aiming.

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Weekly Game Music: Opening Theme (Super Smash Bros. Melee)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music.  This week, we drop all the subtle music for one that’s obviously epic.  That’s right, it’s the Opening Theme from Super Smash Bros. Melee.  And not just any sort of music, but an actual live performance of Hirokazu Ando’s greatest composition.  Enjoy!

For the uninitiated, Super Smash Bros. Melee is the second game in the outrageously popular Nintendo series, Super Smash Bros.  Popular, because it’s a fighting game starring Nintendo’s most popular mascots.  Hard not to like it, really.  In Melee‘s irrelevant story, each mascot are initially plastic figures made “real” when played on a table-top game.  An elegant way to explain why characters from different universes can exist in the same game.

Super Smash Bros. Melee is an unusual 2D fighting game in that fighters do not die from depleted health, but rather, from being knocked out of the level.  The more damage the player accumulates, the easier it is for him/her to be smacked out of the level.  As a consequence of its objective, Melee has a very strong platforming aspect, too.

Super Smash Bros. Melee  was released on the Gamecube in 2001.

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