I’ve been wanting to do just a fun post to get our readers thinking for a while now, and I think this is a pretty good prompt for you all.  We’ve all thought about what would make the ideal group, party, or what have you, from fictional characters.  The most likely setting is a fantasy RPG world, but if you want to pick out somewhere else (school?), go right ahead.  The limits are any media derived from Japanese culture, this includes video games, anime, manga, drama series, and so forth.

Now, when you do this, I want you to try and be creative about it.  Sure, you can make a party of Cloud, Squall, Vincent, and Riku, but, everyone’s thought of it, and it’s not a terribly interesting group choice as is.  Of course, if you want to write a 10 page dissertation proving me wrong, more power to you.  Also, keep in mind that your characters need to be balanced.  They need to be able to work together not just on the field of battle, but also everywhere else as well.  It’s no good to have a bunch of expert warriors if no one knows how to cook!

Write as little or as much as you want.  Whether or not you’re game for this, I’ve picked out my own personal best party, and you can check it out after the break.

Yuri Lowell (Tales of Vesperia) – Yuri is a natural team leader. He has mid-high stats in all categories so he’s capable of playing whatever role on the front lines is necessary. His skills have good elemental coverage, though he does focus predominantly on wind. He has a also has a mix of rapid fire skills and slow sweepers, giving him excellent synergy with any party member. His tension abilities allow him to create exceptionally long chains with himself, keeping many enemies locked down while the other members complete their tasks, Finally, his Glory personal ability lets him shrug off attacks that would normally stumble others.

Outside of battle, Yuri is a natural group leader as well.  He has a strong personal sense of right and wrong, and acts on it accordingly.  He’s not afraid to make the difficult decisions, even when facing moral crisis.  Yuri is also not afraid to guide his party outside the confines of the law, should the need arise.
Ashton Anchors (Star Ocean II) – Ashton is the offtank and secondary melee dps. Ashton’s skills lean on his high attack power and mid-high defense, however, his magical aptitude is low. He also has horrible luck. His skills give good type coverage, however, most elemental skills have long windups; working in conjunction with Yuri solves this problem. Unlike Yuri, he has several ranged attacks when direct contact would be counterproductive. He also has his supreme skill Tri-Ace, which is a unique combination of nonelemental damage, determined by attack power, measured against enemy magic defense, and it hits the whole field.

Off in the field, Ashton has a surprisingly high aptitude for cooking, so the party’s never going to worry about starving.  The demons attached to his back have been around for a while and are quite knowledgeable, especially when it comes to monsters and other demons.  Their elemental affinities can also be used to clear brush or cross rivers, cutting down manual travel time significantly.
Viki (Suikoden V) – Viki is this squad’s go to girl for attack magic. Her Blinking Rune allows for transit to places that she’s been in the past, as well as instantaneous short range teleportation of enemies or allies. Being able to “blink” like that makes up a bit for her low health and vitality scores. It does suffer from minor reliability issues, though fortunately it’s always the exact opposite effect: failed self teleportation moves the nearest enemy and vice versa. She also has the ability to double cast other attack spells in her arsenal, complementing her sky high intelligence score.

Besides blinking through space, which allows rapid transit between known locations, her rune has also caused her to blink through time on occasion.  This gives her a more than rudimentary knowledge of both the past and future.  Viki also pretty clumsy, serving as a bit of comic relief for the others.
Dahna (Grandia III) – Grandia allows an incredible amount of character customization and role filling, and in this case, she’s going to be the healer and support. Her spell book will be stacked accordingly, along with one or two offensive spells just in case. Her basic physical attack is long ranged card throwing, which counters her naturally low mobility. She also has the ability to summon a mana spring beneath herself, to allow for nearly indefinite spell casting while active. Her other self-support skill gives her perfect physical evasion with auto-counter as long as her barrier lasts. Both together give her an amazing survivability few healers have.

Her knowledge area lies in lore and myths.  As we all know, anything in lore usually comes true at some point during the journey, so that knowledge is invaluable.  Dahna is also kind of a mother figure for the group, looking after them and keeping them out of too much trouble…

Well, have at it!

I spent the last week of my life blazing a trail through this game, partially at the request of friends and partially because I enjoy beating things down with a large key.  30 hours of gameplay on Proud mode later, I completed my mission.  Now it’s time to reflect on the whole experience.

First, we’ll consider the story portion of the game.  358/2 follows Roxas during his experiences as part of Organization XIII, from inception to the events that start Kingdom Hearts 2, as well as the “XIIII” member, Xion.  Additionally, and perhaps more importantly in some ways, Axel also plays a focus as his friendship with Roxas develops and his ideals slowly start to shift.  The story content evolves along with Roxas development.  He starts out as a “zombie” who says very little and doesn’t really think for himself, and the story is very brief and shallow to match.  By the end, he is a fully thinking individual, questioning his lot in life and the Organization, and the story content keeps pace with that.  It can be somewhat off-putting to some people to have almost no story for the first third of the game, but I think it’s an interesting way of story progression.

In the case of the other characters though, I was a little disappointed.  Saix does play a fair role in the game’s story, being the second in command, but he doesn’t develop at all and it feels like his placement is just cursory.  The rest of the Organization gets no development at all.  Sorry Luxord fans, you’ll just have to wait for another game.  The Disney cast also takes a major backseat; though you will run into them from time to time, you have very little direct interaction.  By comparison, Square-Enix’s cast is non-existent, except in one or two references.  The overarching theme is “What measure is a (non)human?” and is rather fitting for a game filled with Nobodies.  Unfortunately, it loses a bit of its impact because you know what must happen by the end of the game to prevent any major retcons from occurring.

On the gameplay side, this is your standard hack-n-slash Kingdom Hearts affair.  They do try to mix the formula up a bit with Objectives, which is admirable, but you know why you’re all here.  The difficulty seems a little schizophrenic at times, where you’ll go from rooms that you’re absolutely dominating to rooms where the designers hate your existence.  The lack of any repercussions for death is a double-edged sword here: it does make it much more bearable to clear these areas, but it cheapens the experience by promoting character suicide over strong tactics.  The leveling system is unique; it’s kind of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.  You’ve got a grid of squares with a series of abilities in a variety of shapes and sizes, and it’s your job to maximize the space available with the abilities you need.  Even raw character levels have to be placed on or removed from the grid, making this a great game for self-imposed challenges.

Normally you wouldn’t think much about replayability, but this game has a surprising amount.  Upon completing a level, you can unlock challenge variations by picking up the appropriate badge during normal play.  These challenges add restrictions to the level and grade you on different criteria, such as completion time.  It does keep track of high scores.  The game also includes a Mission mode activated in much the same manner.  In this mode, you can play as any member of the Organization, as well as a few extra characters.  Enemies have their health attributes increased and you can freely tweak other aspects of the level.  This mode also supports multiplayer, and should you have the overwhelming desire to kill one of your friends, you are free to do so.  Players can trade in emblem rewards from both modes for a few unique prizes.

On the audio and video fronts, the game also delivers.  Visually, this is one of the best and most intensive games that I’ve seen on the DS.  The models lose a lot of resolution from the weaker graphics processors, but they still look good and animate well.  That’s good, because there will be a lot of models on screen at any given time.  The same can be said about the environments you’re playing in, though I do think they stand up to the transition a little better.  You’ve seen the majority of these areas and enemies before, but there is some added content in there to keep the experience fresh.  Audibly, the game sounds great as well.  The majority of the music has been recycled from the other games in the series, which might disappoint some, but I personally couldn’t imagine places like Wonderland having different themes.  The small bit of vocal work sounds good as well.

The game does have faults, but they are largely cursory to the experience.  Bottom line, you Kingdom Hearts fans will probably eat this game right up, and you probably already have it.  For everyone else, this is a solid entry in the action-RPG genre, worthy of checking out.

Final Score: 8/10 Sea-salt Ice Creams.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been pushing through The Last Remnant, one of Square-Enix’s new IPs for 2009.  This is old hat for some of you, but there’s a surprising number of people that I’ve talked to who were interested, but never actually went to pick it up.  So, let’s take a look at it to see how it delivers.

Unfortunately, the main story for this game is mediocre.  The world contains a number of Remnants, ancient artifacts that contain a variety of powers and have lead to wars throughout the ages.  Rush is the main protagonist, he does exactly what his name implies.  His sister was kidnapped by some incredible power, and now he’s trying to find her and save her.  In the process, he stumbles into a battlefield and is then taken in by the lord of a small nation, David Nassau.  They set off to wage politics and continue Rush’s quest, all the while learning that they’re part of a much larger plot set in motion by the Big Bad, the Conqueror, who does exactly what his name implies.  It’s a mildly interesting story that’s also fairly predictable, you’ll probably figure out the ending long before you get there.

The story probably suffers the most from a bad gameplay to story ratio.  Many have complained that Xenosaga’s was far too low, and amazingly Last Remnant has the exact opposite problem.  You’ll be fighting for ages before you get any story advancement.  Some auxiliary story is offered in the sidequests, which are mostly required anyway as without them you’ll never be leveled high enough.  There’s a decent conservation of detail, and some of the quests do tie into the main story.  In fact, you can meet all of the enemy’s generals before they ascend to their respective positions if you’re ambitious enough.  Character development is a mixed bag.  For the main plot, only Rush, his sister, David, and the Conqueror are fleshed out to any real extent.  However, many of the unique party members have their own backstory that you can read about over the course of several visits to their hometown.

I feel the combat, on the other hand, delivers.  It uses a different mechanic than you’re used to.  Individual members are organized into unions that act largely like a single member themselves.  The union has all their health and action points pooled together.  You can alter the stats of the individual characters through the use of formations, which are also critical in determining damage from the many multi-target attacks in the game.  Actions are decided at the beginning of each turn.  Every union chooses an opposing union to target, with a list of basic strategies like “Attack with mystic arts!” or “Hurry up and heal them!”  The available strategies are influenced by the skills the members know, and can be heavily influenced by the union leader.  Combat then ensues with the various unions meeting, flanking, and intercepting each other, with the latter two granting bonuses to the attacking union.  A morale bar shows which side is favored more in the battle, yielding damage and command bonuses to the side with the upper hand.  If you mindlessly press buttons in this game, expect to be taking a lot of dirt naps.

Now for the graphics and sound.  The game runs on the Unreal 3 engine, so it looks pretty.  The CG sequences are, of course, stock impressiveness from Square-Enix.  The larger battle spells and unique skills are also nice to look at.  Unfortunately, the 360 version was not optimized very well, resulting in framerate issues in combat and lots of popin throughout.  The music in towns and dungeons is pretty good, but there are very few battle themes in the game.  You’ll probably want to turn the music off for long combat sequences and start playing something yourself on the computer.  The voice work I think is of good quality.  Johnny Yong Bosch plays Rush, and you should know exactly what to expect there.  The other voice actors also do a decent job playing their characters.  I did like the battle chatter; your characters will vocalize the changing battle conditions and their current actions.  There’s also a larger pool of voice actors for the non-main unique characters, so you’re not going to be hearing a lot of voices used over and over again.

Finally, something important to consider is which version of the game to get.  The 360 version of the game feels like a beta version.  It’s got the graphic issues I mentioned, it’s got some bugs in the system, and it hasn’t been balanced very well.  There’s downloadable content, but some of it you’re going to have to pay for.  On the other hand, the PC version is much more refined.  Bugs have been fixed, the graphic engine runs much better, and combat has been retooled to be more balanced, and overall even more difficult.  The DLC from the 360 version has been worked into the game, being unlocked by completing guild tasks.  For the truly masochistic, there’s also a hard mode campaign on the PC that becomes available after you clear the game once.  If your computer can handle it, PC is definitely the way to go.

On the bottom line, The Last Remnant has a largely typical JRPG plot that’s been coupled with an much more expansive and fulfilling world, as well as a unique, fun, and challenging combat system.  Strategy fans should definitely give it a look, as well as those that are looking for a change of pace.

360 score: 7/10 Omnistrikes

PC score: 8/10 Gae Bolgs