minna ni naisho dayo

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!

Rogue Galaxy (ローグギャラクシー)

It would seem my favorite developer this generation, Fukuoka-based Level-5 (creators of Dark Cloud, Dark Chronicle and Dragon Quest VIII), can do no wrong.

Their latest game -- Rogue Galaxy -- just announced this past week for PlayStation 2, may very well be the best-looking videogame I have EVER seen. I don't think I've ever been this excited for a new property before. Take a look at the 8-minute trailer on Level-5's page right now and prepare to be astounded. The visuals, the audio, the animation, the production values...it all screams quality, and the game actually looks like it'll be loads of fun to play, too. Best of all? They're promising ZERO load times.

I love this company. I feel like they were created just to make me happy.

Looking Ahead: August 2005

The beginning of July was so busy, I never had a chance to look at the month's games. But now that I'm back from a nice two-week vacation to the States, it's time to start thinking about future releases again.

June and July were pretty slow, mainly because of my new policy of trying to play one game at a time, rather than buying up anything and everything that looks even partially interesting to me. I got the awesome Ys: The Oath in Felghana for PC (which I'll write up when I eventually finish it) and Riviera: The Promised Land for GBA (which I'm playing right now), but that's pretty much it. August has a lot of games I'm very interested in, but only two that I'm 100% definitely buying the day they come out: Tales of Legendia for PS2 and Dracula: Cross of the Blue Moon (Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow) for DS.

That said, here's what I've got my eyes on:

Grandia III (Square Enix, PS2, August 4, Japan)

This one looks insanely beautiful, and I absolutely loved Grandia II (and to a lesser extent, Grandia Xtreme), so I'm very excited about it. But I think at this point, I'll probably wait for the US version since I've got plenty of other stuff to keep me busy in the meantime.

Pokemon XD: Yami no Kaze Dark Lugia (Nintendo, GC, August 4, Japan)

I'm definitely not buying this in Japanese, but I'm kinda curious about it. It's supposed to be the first "real" Pokemon RPG for a console, but I'm not sure if that means anything to me. I love the GBA games, but I never got into Pokemon Colosseum (of which this is obviously spun off from), and to be honest, for a GameCube game, it doesn't look very nice. I'll at least wait for it to hit in English before I think about giving it a try, but for now, I'm going to pass.

Taiko no Tatsujin Portable (Namco, PSP, August 4, Japan)

Hmm, bad timing for this one. I love Taiko no Tatsujin, and I was planning to buy this version ever since it was announced, but now that the awesome Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan is out for DS, if I'm going to buy any one music game in the next few weeks, it's going to have to be that one.

Jump Super Stars (Nintendo, DS, August 8, Japan)

This game is going to be absolutely huge in Japan, and I'm really interested in it from a cultural standpoint, but to be honest, I don't have much of a connection to many of the manga involved (maybe 10%, tops), so I'm not sure how exciting it'll be for me personally. It seems like something I'd want to try out on a friend's DS, but I don't think I'll need to buy my own copy. Not at full price, anyway.

Namco Museum Battle Collection (Namco, PSP, August 9, USA)

I had the Japanese version of this, but I eventually sold it when I found out how many games they were adding to the US version. I'll probably pick this up someday when I can find it used, as I do want it in my collection, but for now I'll probably hold off, since I already finished the four "Arrangement" games, and those were the meat of this compilation anyway.

Sonic Gems Collection (Sega, PS2/GC, August 11, Japan)

I've still never played Sonic CD, so I kind of want this. It'd be nice to have the three Streets of Rage games in one place, too. BUT...I want the Japanese version for the original SCD soundtrack and the SoR games (they were removed from the US version in order to get an "E" rating -- so lame!), which means I have to pay 4,800 yen (about $45) instead of $29 for the US version. Not cool! So, I think I'll wait until I can find it in the bargain bins of Akihabara before I pick it up.

Advance Wars: Dual Strike (Nintendo, DS, August 22, USA)

Bought and sold the Japanese version in a matter of days, and will pick up this US version instead soon. But not right away, as I've still yet to play through Advance Wars 2 on GBA, so there's really no rush for me to get into this one. Maybe later, when I can find it on the cheap.

Tales of Legendia (Namco, PS2, August 25, Japan)

Ahh, my most anticipated game this summer is finally here, and four months earlier than I was originally expecting! The Tales series is probably my favorite RPG series behind Dragon Quest, and Legendia is shaping up to be the best version yet. My company translated the English version and I personally worked on the entire US script, so I'm kind of deeply connected to this game, but I still can't wait to play through it in Japanese. The story and characters are great, the graphics are awesome, and the gameplay systems this time around look really hot -- especially battles. Just 25 more days!

Akumajyou Dracula: Sougetsu no Jyuujika (Konami, DS, August 25, Japan)

This one's known as Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow in the US, but it won't be out there until early October, so I'll be buying it and playing it in Japanese. The previous version (Aria of Sorrow) was great, and this one looks spectacular too. I'm pretty sure I'll be playing nothing else but this and Legendia for a while come August 25...

Also out for DS on August 25 are Survival Kids: Lost in Blue and LUNAR: Genesis, two games I'm moderately curious about but would never buy without more detailed info. If anyone picks either of these up, please let me know what you think.

Dynasty Warriors Advance (Nintendo, GBA, August 29, USA)

Was this any good? The screens looked nice, but I never read any impressions anywhere. I'm fairly interested at this point, unless anyone's got something particularly bad to say about it.

I think that's it for August. Bottom line: there's a lot of cool games coming out, but so far, only two that are guaranteed to be making their way into my home in the next 31 days.

More to come soon...