Enter the world of the good old days of the SNES, during which classics reigned, and cheap, low-budget games were few and far between the oceans of otherwise-great ones. Now, Squaresoft made a great development during those times, coming back after their hit Final Fantasy during the NES era, and now were publishing games left and right. The game I’m going to talk about today is Seiken Densetsu 3, or Secret of Mana 2, a classic game that certainly outclasses it’s predecessor.
If you thought Secret of Mana was good, you’re in for a shock. Instead of starting with a single lead character, you have a choice of six starting characters. You still have a team of three, but you can choose the three. Hell, even the storyline depends on who you choose as your lead character. I’d recommend getting the character that’s directly below/above the other character, so you’d receive a more complete plot. Of course, since Square was made up of a bunch of spiteful pricks back then, this game was never released in North America. Another reason to curse Square Enix yet again.
But don’t fear, thanks to a ROM hacker by the name of Neill Corlett, we’ve gotten access to this wonder. Really now, Square chose to develop Secret of Evermore over this beauty? Gee, I wonder where they made a mistake…Not that I’m encouraging piracy here.
The game is beautiful, and well put together, a nice class system where you can have a fairly variant team by the end of the game, a nice, cleanly-put together combat system, and an innovative storyline with a MASSIVE PLOT TWIST at the middle. There’s also the week system, and a night-and-day deal, which only adds to its complexity. Overall, this game has quite a bit of variety, and I’d recommend getting it, unless you’re not one for a good action RPG. Even if you disliked Secret of Mana, this is worth it. I hated that game, and this one made me a fairly huge Mana fan. That just says how good it is.
Of course, there is some humor involved here and there, and even a “I AM YOUR FATHER” moment in one of the storylines, though I’m not gonna tell you guys which character you gotta have. That’ll only spoil it. Oh, and rabites. That’s all I have to say. Rabites.
Sure, it’s your standard JRPG, with a few action RPG elements involved, but it’s still a worthy buy. Sure, you can’t go all evil and wipe out Forcena at the start of the game, but you can do a lot of other stuff. Did I mention Flammie? Besides, the game has a nice world to explore, and some of the cities are interesting. Overall, it’s a game that’s pretty flexible with your RPG playstyle, and you can choose to bomb out on melee characters, or go all-magic, and wipe the floor with some deadly spells. Either way, it’s great.
Oh yeah. I don’t think I mentioned that the dancing storekeepers are still there. And some mildly humorous commentary from characters, and the fact that there’s cannon travel. You know, the usual strange, unexplainable Japanese stuff you’d expect from Square. I mean, one of their villains in a game is a tree, and there’s a freaking squid that talks in another. Whaddya expect from them? Oh, right, good RPGs with strict plots and not much sidequesting.
The main problem I see with video games? There is no main problem, there's an entire bucket of "main problems", and even good series are full of them.
Let's take oh, Devil May Cry 4 for example. First step you remove your series' staple known-and loved character and make you play through half of the game as Cloud's retarded brother. Next you remove all difficulty and shovel in some padding puzzles for no good reason. That's not Devil May Cry, that's Dogz: Swordz Edition. Make the cutscenes 4 hours long each and say it's got 50+ hours of gameplay. You could argue that DMC has always been full of cutscenes when you should have been killing, but those weren't of sermons, those were of. It's the same formula to pad out some extra time, But how much of that time is spent watching Dante not ride up a building in his not motorcycle? But none of these problems matter, as DMC is full of gratuitous amounts of cleavage.
But Devil May Cry isn't the only guilty party.
I hardly need to mention media cash-ins like Bolt. But there's guaranteed to ne millions of people licking this shit out of the gutter. *IMAGE CENSORED* Nothing good comes of this, ever. Except Goldeneye, but that was made by Rare. Speaking of Rare:
Banjo and Kazooie, Nuts annd Bolts. This was a good game, but not a good Banjo and Kazooie game. I don't know what they were doing when they decided a total revolutionization of the game, but it didn't work. It was entertaining for a while, but we wanted Banjo and Kazooie, not Scrapheap Challenge: The Game.
There's also the constant shovelware output of Wii Music, Wii Fit, Wii Play, Wii Wank, Wiit Still Prints Money, But thats another story. Speaking of which, remember to come back next week when we talk about Shovelware. Thank you, please send any mail to my agent, I'll sort through it all.
I cringed at the sound of my British voice among those American voices. But the story itself wasn't too bad. I'm gonna start working on Part 2: Moderators soon, which should be interesting.
Also, how was there only 2 submissions for the Nerrcast and 2 submissions for the news?
