Adventure Archives - Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: Servants of the Mountain (Final Fantasy X HD Remaster)

Posted on October 26, 2020 by Taro Omiya

In a bit of a twist, we visit this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic to a rearrangement of a mainline Final Fantasy game that wasn’t originally composed by Nobuo Uematsu. Servants of the Mountain, originally composed by Masashi Hamauzu, is perhaps an underrated gem that doesn’t get called out very often. This remix also gets a helping hand from Junya Nakano to give Final Fantasy X HD Remaster the fresh coat of pain it needs for modern hardware.

Final Fantasy X story is…rather confusing. It begins with the sports star, Tidus, heading out to a thrilling match of Blitzball, only to be swept up by a gigantic monster named Sin (…subtle). From there, he gets thrown with a group of aquatic scavengers to pick out some machine parts, then gets swept up again to the calm Besaid island. Thoroughly disoriented, he gets laughed at by the locals when he claims he’s from Zanarkland, as according to them, that civilization has perished a long time ago and only exists in folklore. In the midst of all this craziness, he’s invited by Yuna, the local’s summoner, to join her pilgrimage. He agrees, given he really doesn’t have much better to do, and Besaid was giving him a depression pretty quickly, anyway.

Interestingly, Final Fantasy X uses a turn-based combat that doesn’t utilize time like past entries. Instead, the player decides what moves to make to all party members during one turn: in doing so, an indicator regularly updates who will make which attack first. Naturally, all moves, both by players and enemies, are executed accordingly. This allows the player to easily swap out their party members in the middle of any turn, given each character specializes in exploiting a specific enemy weakness. Otherwise, exploration is the usual Final Fantasy fare: find keys, open doors, activate switches, trade items, etc.

Final Fantasy X was originally released on the Playstation 2. It’s HD Remaster was bundled together with its sequel, and is available on Windows via Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 3 and 4.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Little Jack (Skies of Arcadia)

Posted on October 12, 2020 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: Tarrey Town (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild)

Posted on September 28, 2020 by Taro Omiya

Relax with this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic, and let your worries wash away. Even when exploring a post-apocalyptic universe, Nintendo still provides some unexpected optimism with tracks like Tarry Town, composed by quite a large team of composers and sound designers, including Hajime Wakai, Manaka Kataoka, Yasuaki Iwata, and Soshi Abe. As the game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild demonstrates, it’s still possible to rebuild anew from the rubble of the past.

Much like past entries, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild begins with our hero Link being awakened from sleep. But this time, instead of a nice comfy bed, he gets up…from what appears like a high-tech cryogenic chamber. To add to the confusion, it turns out he’s amnesiac. Upon stumbling into an old man, the stranger helps Link catch up with some shocking details: he, the chosen hero, has failed to fulfill the prophecy. With the hero deftly defeated by Ganon and his army, the Hyrule kingdom has succumbed to his destruction. Fortunately, Zelda managed to temporarily seal the great evil, putting both into a century-long slumber. With only these scant details available to him, Link must travel across the vast, now-unfamiliar lands, and devise a plan to defeat Ganon before the seal loses its strength.

Taking notes from other open-world games, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an Action JRPG that involves making use of whatever Link can find around him. This often means that Link steals food, weapons, arrows, and armor from other people, both living and long deceased (though it appears the living town folks don’t mind). In his large pockets include the Sheikah Slate, a handy tablet that can create useful tools out of thin air, including bombs, pillars of ice, and magnets. It furthermore doubles as a map, where useful mini-map markers can be manually placed. The game often starts like a survivalist experience, but it won’t take long for most players to master the elements of the game, and take on some of the most powerful monsters it throws at you.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is available on the Nintendo Switch and Wii U. No other ports exists as of this writing, but a sequel is in works.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Credits (Metroid Prime)

Posted on April 7, 2020 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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