Meh-sonance of Fate

(Even the protagonists look sort of bored with this game.)

I’m about 20 hours into Resonance of Fate, but I’m having a hard time sticking with it. By all rights, I should adore this game, since it avoids many of things that I profess to hate in RPGs:

(1) I hate lengthy, plodding, cutscenes with over-the-top dramatics, and RoF doesn’t have any of that. The storytelling is, in fact, refreshingly sparse. There are cutscenes, but they’re usually only a few minutes long—no more than evocative vignettes, sketching in the backstories of the characters. There are a few hints of what the actual storyline will be, but no overt foreshadowing. The writing and voice acting aren’t great, but they aren’t offensively bad either.

(2) I hate simple battle systems that reward mindless grinding over good strategy and tactics, and RoF isn’t like that. RoF’s battle system is actually… fun. There’s a good mix of character building strategy, in-battle placement tactics, and real-time dexterity. It’s tightly constructed, too, which I like—there are a minimal number of stats and upgrades, each of which has pretty clear implications on how battles will play out.

(3) I hate interminable, intricate side quests in RPG, especially when they’re focused on exchanging “key items” with NPCs (instead of, say, exploring the world or defeating enemies in battle). So I love that the side quests in RoF move along quickly. There is some random walking around towns and talking to people, but there aren’t very many “fetch quest” type missions (where you have to trade something to a guy to get a thing to trade to another guy ad nauseum).

So if Resonance of Fate does so many things right, why do I feel like quitting? I’m not sure. The only complaint that I can put into words is that the “dungeons” (really just battles chained together with no chance to save in between) are too long and too… “samey.” Sometimes you’ll fight the same bunch of monsters on the same terrain three or four times in a row, which just isn’t fun. It’s possible that the game, in general, moves too slow for my tastes.

At least, I hope that’s enough to to explain why I don’t really want to quit playing. Otherwise I may have to re-evaluate what I like in a JRPG. Maybe I really do like ham-fisted, cutscene-riddled JRPGs about adolescent spike-hairs who grind their way from town to town after town talking to random NPCs in order to find a brooch belonging to someone’s grandfather’s pig so he can trade it to a bearded guy for an airship…?! Yikes.

—Adam

Come On Now, People, Make A Stand

Navy Fleet is an iPhone game in the vein of Picross or Sudoku, a logic puzzle built around Battleship-like placement of a specific set of ships of varying sizes in a field of water. Using clues telling you how many spaces on each row contain ships and an occasional starting space or two already revealed, you must uncover the location of all of the ships. It’s a pretty simple concept and there are only 100 levels but I’ve been really enjoying it for the past few days.

I’d like to see the developer add on to the game with levels that change up the concept a bit, maybe with a larger board and a different assortment of ships. Still, these are keeping me busy for now (I’m about to unlock Admiral, the last set of puzzles) and I consider it $1.99 well spent on a simple, well-executed concept. I’m still waiting for a truly killer Picross game to come out on iPhone (I keep an eye on this pretty carefully, and have not been impressed by any so far), so this is a nice game along the same lines to play while I wait.

—Casey

It’s OK-ami, but not GREAT-ami

Do I really hate this wolf?

I started playing Okami a while ago and I don’t think I like it much. I can tell there’s a fun game in there, one I’m interested in playing, but there are just so many tiny problems.

(1) The camera control is terrible. You have two choices: move the camera with the d-pad, or enter drawing mode with B and use the nunchuk to move the camera. One requires you to choke up on the Wiimote; the other requires you to pause the game. Since neither is fluid, and the built-in camera is always kind of hinting into its own preferred position, I always feel claustrophobic: I can never quite see where I want to go.

The antecedent of “those” in the sentence above is presumably the letters in the game’s terrible typeface, rendered in poorly resampled pixels. They are indeed monsters.

(2) The text is awful. By which I mean: the auto-scroll speed is way too slow. It takes forever to get through one line of dialogue. The text also looks terrible: not just all the pixels are jagged, but because they chose an unreadable typeface. Is that Marker Felt?

(3) The controls suck. You’d think that drawing on the screen with the wiimote would be as natural as can be, but you’d be wrong! For some reason, the drawing feels cramped and inaccurate. My guess is that they’re translating the movement of the wiimote into a series of vectors and feeding that into the underlying PS2 code, which was designed to read input from a joystick, instead of taking the time to do the right thing (which would be to let the player draw whatever, and then analyze the drawing for shapes afterwards). (3b) Wiimote waggle for charging on the map and slashing in combat just feels wrong. I would rather have the waggle mapped to jump (since you do that much less frequently, at least in the first ~4 hours).

(4) I’m really, really getting sick of running around towns and asking people for something to do. Maybe this is just my JRPG fatigue talking.

—Adam

Tiny Tower

I’ve never played Farmville or any of that sort of Facebook game. Scott mentioned Tiny Tower, an iOS game that had just been released last week, and I quickly dismissed it as more of the same. You set up tasks that take time to complete and you either go away and come back later or you use currency to speed things up— currency that can be purchased with real world currency.

Then, last Wednesday, I quit my job. (Don’t worry, I have another one lined up.) The following day my wife left town, gone for six days. I sat in my apartment, alone, jobless. I downloaded Tiny Tower.

My first two floors

Tiny Tower is a little bit like Sim Tower. You build an increasingly-taller tower, populating its floors with businesses and apartments. People move in, businesses sell products, businesses run out of products. You decide who gets to stay in the apartments and where those people work (They all work in the tower. They never leave the tower. Until you evict them from the tower) and you decide what goods or services the businesses “stock”. Only one item can be restocked at a time, and the more expensive an item is, the longer it takes to restock. By employing your businesses with tenants who are particularly good at the given market that a business is in, you gain more efficiency and make more money.

These people will do in a pinch, I guess…

This is the first part where Tiny Tower gets weird. You have these people moving in, right? But sometimes, they’re not particularly great at anything. You’re not going to keep them around, are you? They’re deadweight. They’re bringing the rest of the tower down. If you just evict them, with the click of a single button on their profile sheet, you’ll create more room in the apartments and available jobs for more talented people. With more talented people, you’ll be able to generate money more quickly, and the tower will grow more quickly. It’s just good for the community. No hard feelings, right?

Poor bastards. Never had a chance.

You have a few currency-generating options that serve as busywork between product restocking times: shuttling people to different floors via the elevator and finding specific tenants for a variety of purposes.

When you shuttle people to different floors, you generally do just that: someone hops into the elevator and tell you a floor number and you control an elevator that takes them where they want to go. You generate a small amount of coins, presumably representing the assistance that you gave in helping them reach the business they wanted to get to (although I’m not sure how all the other customers are getting there— up an invisible set of stairs, maybe? And why do some people want to be taken to stores that are currently out of all products or construction sites?)

Every once in a while, you’re alerted that a different breed of person is waiting in the elevator lobby. These “VIPs” bestow special powers upon your ability to gain money or speed up time-consuming processes. Looking a little bit deeper, they break down into producers (construction workers and deliverypeople) and consumers (celebrities and “big spenders”). There’s an obvious imbalance in the value we place on these people, though— celebrities and big spenders are almost always valuable in some way; as long as you have at least one shop with stuff in it it’s worthwhile to send that person to the shop and collect the resulting cashflow.

For producers, though, you need to have a circumstance where they can actually help you— if a construction worker shows up, it can cut the time spent building a new floor in half for me right now, but if I’m not quite ready to build a new floor, I’ll just make them wait in the elevator on the ground floor. Producers are expected to patiently wait for me to need them and they’ll stay there as long as I want them to, waiting to be put to use. The lesson here is that consumers are always welcome; producers create new problems just to put their talents to use.

The other event that fills up your time, as mentioned earlier, is being asked to locate people in your building. This task itself is layered with all kinds of amazing messages— for one, the implication that this would be a hard task. I house and employ these (at the time of this writing) 45 people; of course I would know where they live and work and be able to find them quickly; right? Ha! Fat chance. Instead I run up and down the tower, looking for the most discerning feature of the photo given to me (thank god they show you a photo); hopefully this person is currently wearing a dumb hat. That’ll help.

The other concern with this “find the tenant” game, is, of course, the privacy issue. A lot of the missions are harmless. “A pizza delivery is here.” “A box of kittens is being dropped off.” “A long-lost relative is here to reconnect.” Hold on a second. How do I even know that this person is telling the truth? Couldn’t it be a bookie, a stalker, a serial killer? Why am I aiding these people? Then, of course, there’s the bombshell.

FIVE OH! FIVE OH IN THE YARD!

The worst part about this happening in my building? I helped the police find Leslie. And then, after it was done, they tipped me a “tower buck”. I felt dirty immediately. Why did I do that to poor Leslie? And yet… what if he was involved in something dirty? All those people who take the elevator up to the construction site and then just disappear? And the police didn’t even do anything about him! He’s working in my video store right now!

I’ll be right back; I’ve got a criminal to evict. Then maybe I’ll restock a few businesses…

—Casey