Tag: JRPG

#WeeklyGameMusic: Blue Sky Town – Dol Dona (.hack//G.U.)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music. Today’s track is Blue Sky Town – Dol Dona, composed by Chikayo Fukuda. It’s a pleasant town music from Bandai Namco’s mega-long multi-media series, .hack, specifically, the .hack//G.U. trilogy.

Before there was Sword Art Online (SAO), there was .hack. That’s right, this game, manga, and anime series all takes place in the fictional MMO Action-RPG, The World. Dull naming aside, much like SAO, players start falling into a comatose state, both in-game and in real-life. Unlike SAO, the devs blame it to a computer virus, presumably spread by malicious players. The G.U. trilogy stars Haseo, who seeks for revenge after his close friend catches this comatose spell.

.hack//G.U. is a single-player action-JRPG series. Unlike, you know, real MMORPGs, .hack//G.U. is a story-driven game with no character customization, and A.I.-controlled party members. The party explores randomly-generated dungeons: battle initiates when a monster gets close to the party, constraining them into a tight circle. Perhaps the more unique side of the game is how narrative plays: there are email logs, marriage simulation, and other MMORPG-like communication methods to suck the player into its universe.

.hack//G.U. is available on PC via Steam, PS4, and PS2.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Give Me a Chance (The World Ends With You)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music. This time we’ll cover Give Me a Chance, composed by Takeharu Ishimoto and sung by Ayuko Tanaka and Mai Matsuda. It’s a composition from the cult-hit Square Enix game, The World Ends With You, an almost trading card game (TCG) JRPG and a banger soundtrack.

You can tell The World Ends With You is created by the same company famous for their Final Fantasy franchise when it stars an anti-social, brooding teen named Neku. This insufferable jerk eventually learns to get better when he’s suddenly pitted in a life-and-death game about fighting sound-based monsters and lazy grim reapers using a deck of shirt pins. To survive this terrifying game, this loser must make a sacrifice arbitrarily chosen by the game master (in this case, his memory, of course) and pair with a partner to fight together with. Did I mention this all makes sense in context?

Anyway, where The World Ends With You best shines is its real-time combat. Originally developed for the Nintendo DS, this game utilizes nearly every single feature in the portable console, including — get this — the closing-the-lid sleep function, as part of combat. Unfortunately for this blogger, his introduction to the game was on iOS, so he’ll describe how the combat works there instead: The World Ends With You TCG-like battle system operates by having each pin execute when a specific touch or swipe gesture is made. Multiple pins in a deck may share the same gesture; the pin placed on the top of the deck gets prioritized first, until it hits a cool-down state, in which the rest of the pins takes effect. Partners can also be summoned, using yet another gesture assigned to them: this helps build both a combo meter, and a super attack. It’s super fun, and I highly recommend checking it out!

The World Ends With You is available on Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Nintendo DS.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Men’s Hair Club (LISA: The Painful RPG)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music.

So, quick note: I’m going to be holding off on posting #WeeklyGameMusic, as I’m now hard at work on finishing Not a Clone. So today is a special treat: Men’s Hair Club by Widdly 2 Diddly is a bizarre chiptune composition that sounds awfully like dubstep. Sounds weird? Oh, man, you’ve seen nothing, yet! The game the composition is for, LISA: The Painful RPG, is an incredibly surreal, Earthbound-inspired adventure that has frequent mood changes, absurd scenarios, and a very, very disturbing set of unavoidable situations.

LISA: The Painful RPG stars Brad, a gruff, middle-aged man adept in martial arts, and with a broken past. One day, Brad wakes up from his pain-killing drug trip (aptly named “joy”) to suddenly find a crying baby girl. Claiming it’s his “second chance,” Brad brings the girl back home with his friends and raises her in secret. Did I also mention that Brad lives in a post-apocalyptic world where all women has died? Right when his adoptive daughter, Buddy, grows to her tweens, a breakout occurs, with Buddy kidnapped and one of his friend slaughtered. Angered, Brad immediately ventures out to find who kidnapped Buddy, while a confused tipster Terry follows along.

There’s a good reason why “Painful RPG” is in the title of LISA: The Painful RPG. The game starts off as a side-scrolling adventure, where Brad can jump up or down cliffs. Unlike most platformers, Brad can not initially jump across gaps; the ability is later unlocked with an item. Walking into other grown men or monstrous abominations will often initiate a turn-based RPG battle, where Brad can use his martial arts via WASD while Terry…does something. Unpleasant decision-making is this game’s main jam, though, as Brad is frequently forced into making some terrifying choices. Would you sacrifice an arm to keep a vital party member alive? Would you go through a Russian Roulette just to get a powerful ally? The world Brad lives in is vast, darkly funny, and absolutely brutal.

LISA: The Painful RPGis available on Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Snowy Valak Mountain / Night (Xenoblade Chronicles)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music.

A bit late, but this week’s (last week’s?) music plays on Valak Mountain during night in the cult classic Xenoblade Chronicles. ACE+’s composition is simple, calming, almost silent tune that fittingly brings awe to a snowy mountain lit by glowing crystals. It’s one of the many beautiful pieces cleverly placed in the game that can be described as Nintendo’s answer to Skyrim.

In a very unique premise, Xenoblade Chronicles‘s world is actually two massive giants that stands still after a long battle eons ago. In the present, the denizens of one giant, the Hums and Bionis respectively, is defending against the Mechons from the other giant, Mechonis. While the majority of the Hums cuddle at the back of the leg of Bionis for safety, the bookworm Shulk discovers how to utilize the magical sword, Monado. Not only are Mechons weak against the Monado, it also doesn’t physically harm Hums, and even provides the user the power to see the future. Feeling powerful, Shulk and his best friend, Reyn, attempts to defend their colony from a surprise Mechon attack. Naturally, by JRPG logic, this causes their next-door neighbor/girlfriend(?) to die, leaving the two in grief. Thus, the duo to go on a long journey in a revenge mission against the Mechons.

Exploration is the highlight of this real-time action JRPG where taking on over 700 side quests, fighting area-specific enemies, or even just walking up to a check point gives you experience points. In battle mode, standing close to an enemy causes your character to automatically attack them in regular intervals. More important are the magic system: every playable character can use their magic as much as they want, as they don’t have an MP gauge, but every magic suffers from a cooldown where they are rendered unusable. This allows for a surprising amount of magic combos your party can dish out. For example, Reyn uses a lot of defensive and attention-seeking magic that causes the enemies to focus on him, while Shulk has a lot of position-based magic that are more effective on the sides or backs of enemies. Certain status effects, such as stuns, require a certain sequence of moves to be executed as well, requiring one to carefully configure their party for optimal use.

Xenoblade Chronicles was originally developed for the Wii. There is a port available for the 3DS, and a Switch remake is in the works.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Unreasonable Behaviour (Off)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music.

This week, we listen to yet another sad music, although it’s a rather different kind of sad compared to Gone Home. I’m also going to be unconventional, and select a dark track, Unreasonable Behaviour by Alias Conrad Coldwood for this week’s cult hit freeware game, OFF. Compared to the more popular Peper Steak — an offbeat swing music that plays during the normal battle sequences — Unreasonable Behaviour brooding tone better fits with the actual mood and narrative of OFF: dark, twisted, and a terrifying deconstruction of JRPG tropes.

Developed by yet another one-man team, OFF is a very French take of JRPG (FRPG?). You, the “puppeteer,” are suddenly dropped into an unusual world where you take control of the Batter. A quick walk leads Batter to a Cheshire cat named Judge, who politely introduces both the Batter and the player to a world composed not of earth, plants, wind, and water, but rather, metal, meat, gas, and plastic. What is there to do in such a bizarro world? Simple: do what the main character says, and purify the world from evil, first starting with the ghosts, and eventually to the violent guardians of this universe.

Much like the older Final Fantasy games, OFF uses random encounter and an archaic turn-based battle system where the party attacks after their cooldown time is over. This does mean that while selecting an attack, enemies can attack your party as well. That said the battle system isn’t exactly known to appeal the fans. Rather, it is the fourth-wall breaking story that progressively gets more complex and violent that turned this game into a cult hit. Much like Spec Ops: The Line, the player’s action is constantly in question as he or she blindly follows the Batter’s direction…and watch in horror as the world steadily loses its unique colors.

OFF is a free PC game that was originally written in French. A translated version is freely available at Starmen.net.

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Weekly Game Music: The Flaming Tree (Tsugunai: Atonement)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

New week, new music.  This week, we return to a calmer tune, with a hint of wonder.  Yasunori Mitsuda composition, The Flaming Tree, has a mysterious feel to it.  Quite fitting for a spiritual game like Tsugunai: Atonement.

Tsugunai: Atonement tells a story of a daredevil mercenary named Reise. When he attempts to retrieve the Treasure Orb as one of his missions, however, the gods angrily handicaps him by splitting his soul away from his body.  Now only a ghost, Reise must atone for his sins by possessing other people and helping them aid their life.

Tsugunai: Atonement is a turn-based RPG.  Unlike a generic JRPG, however, the “party” is only one character Reise happened to possess at that time.  In this sense, the town acts as a character hub for Reise, where each possessee have their own special abilities.  Once possessed, Reise may visit a nearby dungeon to fight through monsters and defeat the main evil.

Tsugunai: Atonement was released on the Playstation 2 in 2001.

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