August 15, 2005
Riviera: The Broken Land
Argh. After spending 18 hours, seven minutes and 22 seconds of my life on the GBA version of Riviera: The Promised Land, from Atlus, I am now officially giving up. I got as far as area 5-7, which, as far as I can tell, is something like 70% or so through the game.
I feel kind of bad bailing out like this, but I'm just not having fun. Riviera had a lot of promise, but the gameplay is fundamentally broken and unbalanced, making for an experience that gets increasingly more tedious the further you go. When you feel yourself wanting to power off instead of trudging through another boring, mindless battle, you know it's time to hang it up.
The way the game system works, you basically need to stop what you're doing every time you find a new item, as items contain individual skills that need to be mastered by your characters in order to increase their stats. You find an item, you participate in "Practice" fights until everyone in your party has mastered said item, and then you continue. (The reason you do this in "Practice" fights is because your items are expendable in normal fights, but last forever in practice. It doesn't make any sense, but then, if it did, the game system might not be as broken as it is.) You can wait until later to power up your guys if you want, or you can choose not to power them up at all (bad idea), but you then run the risk of missing out on certain skills and stat upgrades because your inventory can only hold 15 items at a time and you constantly have to throw out old stuff in order to make room for new stuff. Put short, it's a pain in the ass.
This pain might have been relieved a bit if battles didn't take so long. You can turn off enemy cut scene animations during battle (when they use an EX skill, which is often), but you can't turn off your own, and you can't cut out normal animations at all, which take forever. So basically you just sit there, watching every animation unfold, wondering when you're finally going to be able to get back to the game. Over and over and over.
Annnyway, I don't mean to sound so negative. I was actually enjoying myself for a while, but ultimately I just got tired of playing. If you're one of those gamers who's got tons of free time on your hands, you might be able to enjoy it more than I did. For a more detailed overview of the game, go check out 1UP.com's review and see if it interests you any.
As for me, I've got to decide what to tackle next. Next week marks two major releases for me here in Japan (Tales of Legendia for PS2 and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow for DS), so I think I might just take a break from playing games for a week until those two arrive. It's not like I have much time to play anyway, but for those two, I'll actually go out of my way to make time. I can't wait!
Posted by john tv at August 15, 2005 12:42 PM