reappraising pokemon diamond/pearl

it’s only been a few months since i’d put aside pokemon pearl in disgust even though i was only at the halfway point, but i ended up getting sucked back into it and spending way too much time finishing the game recently instead of progressing through pokemon black which i’d also started. the main reason was because my nephew, who has soulsilver, really wanted to trade and battle, and i didn’t have any new critters to trade with him. so being the nice uncle i am i spent a lot more time with the game and wound up exploring features of the series that i usually don’t pay much attention to, including breeding, the safari zone, and online trades. i spent way too much time tending to my honey trees (but after days and days of regular checking twice a day with still no munchlax in sight i gave up on trying to catch one), and i actually saw all 150 of the pokemon in the regional pokedex, a first for me for the series but no doubt made easier by the game itself which requires that achievement before you can import pokemon from the GBA games. completing the regional pokedex became a mini-obsession and i definitely made good progress, although i got to a point where i had to level up too many pokemon that you can’t catch in the wild and my interest waned.

as for the other features i hadn’t previously explored in this game, i checked out the underground in order to find fossils, but as i suspected it seems otherwise completely pointless unless you’re really into building up your secret base (although the multiplayer might be worth trying). i caught all three of the legendary pokemon trio in this game, including the roaming one (also a first for me for the series). in a wi-fi trade i encountered pokerus, the pokemon virus, for the first time, although i still have yet to see my first shiny pokemon (although i saw one listed in a trade). i checked out the battle zone, the post-game pokemon stadium/colosseum-esque area, but didn’t find it to be too interesting, and although i enjoyed playing around with swarms, the poke radar, and the dual-slot mode, trying to complete the national pokedex just seems like an endeavor way beyond my level of interest.

although i came to appreciate pokemon pearl for all that it packs into one tiny cartridge, overall i still felt the same way as i had previously, which is that it, particularly the platinum version, feels like the summation of the series begun with the original pokemon red/blue but that it doesn’t add much that really feels fresh and new. pokemon black/white seems like an attempt to revitalize the series and actually strips away some features instead of adding them. my verdict is still out on that game, but so far i’ve definitely been enjoying it.

to end, as is my custom i’ll give a shout-out to my final crew. yet again it seems that steel pokemon can do no wrong, and bronzong was completely solid, even more so than the starter empoleon. roserade was pretty decent, although rapidash wasn’t a star player. even levelled up, blissey was fairly weak and useless, and it’s going to be a while before i feel motivated to use a normal-type pokemon again.

for links, check out my original post on pokemon diamond/pearl, but really all you need is the great bulbapedia.

readvancing upon the original advance wars

i finally finished the long game i’ve been playing, which was a replay of what has become a classic, the original GBA advance wars. i had first played the original almost three years ago, and although it was a little slow in coming i eventually grew to love the series almost as much as i love the fire emblem series. [most of this review is going to get into minutiae, but if you're interested in info on the original game mechanics check out this review at edge.]

when i had first played the game i had just finished playing all four (up to then) US-released fire emblem games and one of the japan-only titles, so i was a bit disappointed in AW‘s lack of plot and the focus on battle tactics over levelling up a set of characters. coming back to this after having played the rest of the AW series was a pleasurable rush of familiarity and appreciation for how perfect this game truly is. the characters are lovable and their CO powers distinguish them well; the battle mechanics are absolutely top notch; the graphics and music are excellent; and there’s an enormous number of maps with a fully satisfying level of variety among them. although i adore dual strike and in many ways consider it to be the pinnacle of the series (well, the US series at least, as i haven’t yet dipped into the japan-only titles), the original makes a strong case for not injecting the core game with steroids and in some ways overloading the game with a glut of extra features.

a lot to love, so it seems churlish to have any complaints. this time through i did an S-rank run of the normal campaign mode, and chose my route in order to unlock the rest of the COs. it didn’t end up being too difficult, although i chose sami the whole way through and her missions are probably harder than andy’s or max’s. i also S-ranked the first war room maps and tried out the hard campaign mode, and here’s where things started to get dicey. a large part of the reason i like the fire emblem and advance wars series is that, unlike a game like chess, the emphasis isn’t on planning far ahead and instead a general strategy will suffice. but when trying to S-rank maps and in what i’ve experienced so far of the hard campaign this isn’t always the case, and although i enjoyed the “puzzle” aspect of some of the maps, at times it feels like there’s too much “try and die” gameplay. the game feels less cheap overall than other games with more-egregious cases of such gameplay, because as this article at edge puts it: “It’s not so much trial and error as trial and education, each mistake teaching you a little more about the impeccable clockwork that powers the game’s simple, stunning mechanics.” although oftentimes the lessons learned from a particular map do feel like they’d be applicable to others, the amount of memorization that can get to be involved and working out the timing of where your units can be on what day compared to the enemy’s can really make the game feel like a chore. also, although in the war room you can choose from all the available COs, because of the strict speed requirements if you’re trying to S-rank you more often than not have to rely on sami or max, which makes that section of the game feel more repetitive than it could have if it had had more varied objectives and conditions (as another example, sonja is completely useless in this mode since none of these maps feature fog of war). the fact that the war room maps also don’t include any pre-deployed units also make them feel too same-y.

despite my mild complaints, the game is clearly still a grade-A (or should i say “grade-S” ?) classic, and although i don’t think i’ll be tackling the hard mode any time soon i’m definitely looking forward to returning to this at some point in the future, as well as replaying the others in the US series. although since playing this i’ve had an overwhelming desire to play a fire emblem game again …

roll, tanks, roll! readvancing some advance wars links:
- this is still the best FAQ overall for the game’s campaign modes, although it misstates the requirements to unlock nell, which is that you have to beat the advance campaign
- advancewarsnet.com has some great info including a guide to the war room, guides to the campaign modes, the soundtrack, and sprite sheets and animated GIFs
- the similar-sounding site advancewars.net also has some great content, including CO sprites and a damage chart
- text of the entire script
- war room guide at gamefaqs
- this look back at the making of the original advance wars at edge from a year ago doesn’t have any great insights, but it’s one of the few interviews with the creators that i’ve seen

you never forget your first … replaying fire emblem 8

[note: this post is more ruminative than a typical review, seeing as how my love for FE burns bright and this post is about a replay of a game. consider yourself warned. ]

it’s been several years now since i first played fire emblem: the sacred stones for GBA. since then i’ve played all the other games in the series that have been released in the US (and am waiting impatiently for the US release of FE12 which was released in japan 5 months ago). but although i haven’t mentioned it since then, i’ve actually been playing it off and on over the past few years. one of the unique things about FE8 compared to the other games in the series is that after you beat the main quest, there are two areas, the tower of valni and the lagdou ruins, that you can torture yourself by trying to complete. i say torture, because both of them provide significant challenges simply due to the fact that you have to defeat multiple maps (8 for one and 10 for the other) without being able to save, i.e. if you lose a character due to one stupid mistake, due to the game’s central permanent death mechanic if you want to keep him/her you have to START THE ENTIRE DUNGEON OVER AGAIN. the lagdou ruins aren’t a walk in the park as it is, and i’ve spent way too much time trying to make my way through the ruins with absurdly underpowered characters.

and that brings me to my next point, which is that one of the things i love about the FE series is that you can always choose how difficult to make the game for yourself. in RPGs in general i suppose you can make the game harder by going out of your way to not use certain equipment or certain characters, but since you can always train your characters up through random battles there’s not really any sense of really being able to limit yourself. in the FE games, the majority of which don’t include random battles, you can place limitations upon yourself to such varying degrees that the same game constantly feels fresh, helped in no small part by the huge cast of characters you can choose from, each with his/her own distinct personality. of course the games are challenging enough in and of themselves, but advanced players can always find some new twist to make things more fun, such as limiting yourself to only magic users or unmounted units or characters who appear with the lowest base level or even something as arbitrary as characters with green hair. other games in the series have more challenges within the game, such as being graded on how quickly you finish each chapter, but FE8 has the advantage of being shorter than other games in the series, and thus perhaps a more likely candidate for challenges among fans. one of the things i find particularly worthwhile myself is using the characters who start off being the worst. since virtually all the characters become worthwhile once they reach the higher levels, it’s quite gratifying to carefully train up an egregiously ignored character and then have him/her blaze his/her way through the remainder of the game (see my 2nd playthrough (PT) of FE10 for a prime example ).

okay, now on to the particulars. as i mentioned, i’ve made my way through both the tower and the ruins a couple of times each successfully (and many more times unsuccessfully for the latter), but i’ve also been playing the hard mode off and on. this is the first hard mode i’ve played in an FE game, and as FE8 is pretty much unanimously considered to be the easiest of the lot i didn’t mind easing myself into a greater challenge. it wasn’t overwhelmingly difficult, although there are a couple of chapters here and there that will make your blood pressure rise. it was nice to get to play through the second of the two main characters’ quests (which differ by 5 of the 21 chapters), and support conversations (short sequences of dialogue between characters you use together) are as much of a draw as ever.

ah, support convos! in my first PT, as with the other FE games, i stuck with pairings that the game makes obvious, which are pretty much all romantic pairings between a male and a female character. but the game has many more pairings that trigger support convos, and it’s fascinating to me to see what conversations the game’s writers have come up with for characters who would seem to have very little in common. sometimes this leads to unexpected romances or friendships, but oftentimes it also makes the world of the game feel more alive as the two may discuss the events that are happening or talk about one of the other characters. these insights into each character’s personality are painstaking to uncover and are spaced out over the course of a PT, and although one could easily just read them online it’s much more satisfying for a completist like myself to unlock them one at a time by actually playing the game. which isn’t too much of a chore, since the game continues to be as enjoyable as ever.

five FE games later it’s interesting to look back on the first one i’d played. the game itself can be much easier than any of the other games simply by virtue of the aforementioned random encounters you can use to train up your characters, but the small cast of characters and its post-game objectives make it unique and still an easy favorite. the color palette is bolder and more striking than the other two GBA FE games, and although it’s hard to assess objectively how i would rank this compared to the others, i’ll always have a soft spot for this, my first fire emblem experience. awwww.

oh, and in case anyone similarly FE crazy is reading this and wondering, my final team was: ephraim/l’arachel, lute/ross, gerik/tethys, colm/kyle, moulder/vannesa, and eirika/seth, with neimi/gilliam, joshua/artur, and cormag/natasha as backups. i don’t remember why, but i trained my group really unevenly. on average only about half of them reached around level 12 promoted while the rest were around level 1 promoted or hardly used at all and just hung around for the ride (and the support convos). ross was the MVP, but vanessa (who i hadn’t used last time) turned out to be the star player. ephraim, lute, kyle, and tethys were as reliable as ever, and cormag was shaping up to be pretty useful also. moulder was surprisingly useful. although he’s not nearly as strong offensively as the other magic users, his high defense and HP make him uniquely durable. gerik turned out to be kind of weak, which was surprising since he had dominated my first PT. and yet again i seem to have avoided all the latecomers to the team (mostly prepromotes) like the plague.

i started a 3rd PT and am sorely tempted to continue with it, but i really should move on to other games. for now at least!

some sacred links:
- as usual serenesforest.net is the go-to source of info for all things FE including official character art
- the serenesforest forums are quite active, and include such relevant topics of discussion as FE8 tier lists
- hard mode enemy stats
- entertaining video compilation of characters’ critical hit animations
- most of the links from my previous FE8 post are outdated now, but this promo chart is still extremely useful (although i have it pretty much memorized by now. ha.)

and the brawl goes on …

i’ve already written about brawl twice, once when the game first came out and once after i’d revisited the game and played with a focus on olimar. brawl in the family reminded me that this past tuesday marked the 2nd anniversary of brawl‘s release, and it was good timing b/c i’d been planning on writing a quick post about my latest concentrated burst of brawl.

this time around i focused on a different character, namely fox, and also attempted to improve my performance in boss battle mode (which of course just meant memorizing each boss’s moves). i still find the latter to be fairly pointless, especially with tabuu’s stupidly over-powered moves inc. a ridiculous OHKO (i’m really not looking forward to tackling that mode on the highest difficulties), but i found myself enjoying the rest of the game as much as ever. the nintendo fanboy in me just laps up all the visuals, cameos, and trivia, and with such a huge roster there’s virtually a limitless amount of gameplay left. one of these days i’ll sit down and finish all the various trophy requirements, but in the meantime i’m still just dipping into the game to finish a couple here and there. for regular matches i found myself gravitating back to my early favorites, such as zero suit samus and ike, and as before i could easily have spent many, many more hours on the game but instead restrained myself so that i could try to make a dent in the mountain of untouched games i have. so far the nintendo channel reports that i’ve spent 131.5 hours on the game; not a number that would rival many people’s, i’m sure, but i can’t think of many other games that are going to keep me coming back for more for so many more years to come.

and the list of brawl links continues to grow as well … here are just a couple more:
- a great site that i hadn’t spent much time on before but that i’ve been reading more of is super-smash-bros.wikia.com. it has way more competition-level details about the game, inc. characters’ moves, strategies, and advanced techniques, along with all the accompanying jargon, than i’ll probably ever delve into, but it’s interesting to browse through it. (incidentally, recently brawl was announced as being newly included in major league gaming’s tournaments, which was nice to see.) the smash wiki’s behind-the-scenes looks at the game’s mechanics make for great reading, such as this entry on stale-move negation. also, while highly debatable, i always find tier lists to be interesting to read through. super-smash-bros.wikia.com has ones for all three entries in the series, which makes for interesting comparisons.
- i have little interest in actually taking snapshots myself, but i def. appreciate others’ efforts. brawlsnapshots.com is a fun site to browse through.

i-do-mo’ yu-gi-oh

about a year ago i played through a decent amount of yu-gi-oh! world championship 2007 (as recounted here). at that time i set the game aside because i got fed up with how long it took to build up a decent deck. to quickly recap, the game requires you to duel to earn duel points (DP) which you then use to buy packs of cards, but since you’re limited to only 1 rare, super rare, or “ultra” rare card per pack, many of which aren’t even that useful, it takes ages to develop a deck that contains a decent amount of the better cards.

this time around i passed a threshold and finally my deck had enough of these better cards, so much so that duels were significantly easier to win than before, even against the computer-controlled opponents at the higher level i had reached. but perhaps unsurprisingly, as my percentage of good cards increased and the difficulty of the duels decreased, the game’s interest started to wane for me. it became apparent to me that the game was significantly less deep than i had originally thought: duels seem to be less about strategy and building up decks that have a lot of cards supporting each other (e.g. “elemental hero” cards) and more about just having good individual cards. maybe at higher levels still or against human players the strategy becomes more important, but as it is once i got to this point i didn’t have much motivation to continue.

this time around i did end up exploring a bit more of the other modes. i had enough breadth of cards that i felt up to tackling the limited duels (e.g. limiting your deck to only dark monsters, or no trap cards in your deck), and those provided entertaining-enough diversions. still didn’t bother with the “theme” duels, though, (e.g. win after fusion summoning at least five times) as most of the themes just seemed pointless.

i also tried out the online matches, an area i hadn’t spent much time on before. i quickly ran into the problem that is so pervasive in online games in general, namely people who drop out as soon as it becomes clear they’re going to lose. this was extremely frustrating, especially since the game doesn’t include any sort of punishment for people who drop out. your ranking only increases based on winning online matches, and my partners were ill-matched anyway since i kept getting matched with newbies who dropped out and there wasn’t any way to increase my rank by playing more dedicated players (although the game does have an option to be matched with someone with a random rank, i still ended up being paired with newbies the few times i tried it).

one of the interesting features of the online mode is that you can get a list of the top-ranked players in the country and the world and download a copy of their decks, and then play against that deck on your own. this provided some interesting games, although i inadvertently discovered that you win duel points based on the rank of your opponent, even when playing him/her as a ghost. this turned out to be a big surprise because i played the ghost of the highest-ranking player in the world, and perhaps because of poor AI i beat him easily and suddenly found myself with thousands of DPs. this made buying packs of cards in the game trivially easy, but once i realized i could get pretty much whatever rare cards i wanted and thus fill my deck with the best cards, the game completely lost any sense of balance it had (which was already in short supply as it was). that ended up being the last straw for me, and for now i’ve put the game aside indefinitely. it’s too bad that the game didn’t have better pacing and more strategy, but i enjoyed the time i spent enough that i’d be willing to try out another game in the series. i don’t expect there to be any differences in the gameplay, but i’m somewhat interested in seeing if the pacing is any better. i doubt it will be, but i have a copy of the next game in the series, yu-gi-oh! world championship 2008, so i’ll try it out eventually. i’m leery of the fact that there are 2000+ unique cards in that game, compared to ~1640 in this game, since even in this game the majority of the cards felt fairly useless, but we’ll see.

you need yu-gi links!
i actually don’t have any links to add to my original list in my original post on the game here. but the two essential FAQs are still these two from gamefaqs: guide to all the cards with their text and the list of cards available in each series of packs.