Pandora's Tower is finished, time for final thoughts (spoilers below)

Pandora's Tower came to North America thanks largely to Operation Rainfall. This fan initiative also helped to encourage Nintendo to bring The Last Story and Xenoblade Chronicles to North America. These last two games are dyed in the wool J-RPGs (with some variations).

But Pandora's Tower is the odd one out.

It's more of an RPG in the same way that Zelda games are sometimes considered RPGs.

You're given a big world (or a lot of dungeons) and get to explore, upgrade equipment, find new items, and mostly have bits of the story revealed as you do those first three things.

A stronger case can be made for Pandora's Tower being an RPG since it also involves an experience and levelling system, as well as character stats that determine the player's defence, attack, and stamina/health.

But Pandora's Tower also brings something else from the genre of the J-RPG into an action game framework.

The amount of HP of the game's final boss.

Seriously, with the boss' six weak spots each having their own screen-wide health bar, this battle can take a very long time. Since I didn't have any power-ups with me, it took me approximately 35 minutes to finish off the final Master, Zeron.

As such, it's definitely fair to say that the final battle is more a test of endurance than of skill. And that's fine, except that the quality of your ending isn't really based on your skill. 

It doesn't matter if you've finished the game without dying, or if you've somehow 100%-ed the game on your first play through. Instead, which of the game's endings you get depends on your affinity with Elena. Unless your relationship is ranked between eight and ten on a ten point scale, the ending is a let down in one way or another.

If your relationship is fairly strong (between six and eight on said scale) both Elena and Aeron hop off the top of the towers to rid the world of the bit of Zeron that lives inside of her. Also, the the Scar (a massive chasm over which the Towers are perched) is sealed.

If your relationship is middling on the game's scale, then only Elena jumps. Once again, in this ending, the Scar is sealed.

If your relationship is just okay, then Elena winds up trapped in the monster Zeron and Aeron uses her to bring a swift end to the world's ongoing war.

And, if your relationship is poor, then you wind up having to kill Elena.

Alternately, the game's best ending sees the curse lifted from Elena, the Scar healed, and the two living happily ever after in her village while the war comes to a close. But you only see that if you nurse your affinity with Elena to the full.

I suppose this affinity mechanic also links Pandora's Tower more strongly to J-RPGs, since there are a few that lock their best endings behind seemingly superficial sidequests.

All of this business of bosses and endings aside, I put 36.5 hours into this game. But it feels like I put in far more.

I think I'm left with this feeling because each play session engrossed me. Partially because Pandora's Tower is overtly darker than most of the games I play and because there's nothing to the game except the game.

There are no characters to interact with aside from Mavda and Elena. There are no oversized fields to roam in which things are cleverly hidden. There aren't even mini-games, unless you count inventory/equipment management and relationship tending.

So, what's my conclusion about Pandora's Tower, having finished it?

That it's an intense game. I always had a sense that every fight was for high stakes (because of the ever shortening curse gauge, and because monsters could often send you sprawling and sometimes surround you). The Masters offer some epic battles. The game's generally drab colour palette sets a remorseful, Gothic atmosphere. And the game's operatic score makes everything in it seem larger than life.

A final boss with six, full-length HP bars, as cumbersome a fight as it can be, is right at home here and to be expected.

Though making the entire game this intense would be too much, the Zelda development team working away on Zelda Wii U could definitely learn a thing or two from Pandora's Tower. (Just so long as it's not that the best ending should reflect the players' skill in only one of the game's mechanics/aspects.)

A post playthrough Super Mario RPG assessment

The 90s was the golden era of 16-bit console RPGs. You had your Final Fantasy titles, your Secret of Mana, your Lufia games, and, for those unafraid of emulators, Tales of Phantasia.

But, a little late to the scene, riding on the shoulders of giants, came Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars.

This was the game that got me interested in the RPG genre to begin with. From there I moved onto those Final Fantasy games and Lufia titles, and the masterpiece that is Tales of Phantasia.

But I first played this game (several times through) almost twenty years ago, now. As such, you'd be right to wonder whether the game holds up or not.

After spending a weekend working through it with friends, I can write confidently that it does. For the most part.

Graphically, the sprites based on 3D-models still look clean and neat (with the exception of monsters like Belome).

Aurally, the music and sound effects have all the charm they do in the other Mario games.

Story-wise, the game is still compelling since several characters and elements of the Mario world are explored for the first and (alas) last time.

And, as far as the gameplay is concerned, Super Mario RPG offers a fine blend of JRPG standards (turn based combat and side-questing for secret areas and items) and Mario-inspired mini-games and platforming.

Though, the game's platforming is much more difficult than I remember. Mostly because the game's isometric viewpoint doesn't lend itself to easily judging distances and depths. Were it possible, warming up with some Sonic 3D Blast probably would've helped.

But Super Mario RPG really shines in its minigames' integration with the main game. Most of these games are played through at least once because of some relevance to the story. Placing them within the structure of the game as a whole keeps you from needing to do any serious backtracking to retry them. The minigames' accessibility also makes the game's world feel much tighter than those that are spread out over expansive world maps.

The cost for that tight world design is high, though. There's little exploration involved in Super Mario RPG. Just as when I played the game as a kid, in this recent playthrough there were a few instances where the crook of a wall or the texture of a rock suggested that something lay just beyond it, if only you had some of Link's bombs or Samus' roll ability.

However, beating an RPG crafted by the masters of the console RPG golden era, SquareSoft (known now as Square Enix) in a weekend (approximately 20 hours) is otherwise unthinkable. Were there an expansive overworld in Super Mario RPG, rather than a node system, much more time would be spent in travel. Not to mention, time spent fighting monsters during that travel.

But that's Super Mario RPG's greatest strength.

Even though when you know what you're doing it's a fairly short RPG, it's an RPG of small, manageable numbers.

At level 22, equipped with the Lazy Shell and the Quartz Charm, Mario doles out 500 damage per turn against the game's final boss. No more than fifteen turns of that damage alone ends him.

Your characters' HP isn't likely to climb much higher than 200.

The game pools together your party's MP into a number that maxes out at 99.

For whatever bizarre reason, you can only ever carry a maximum of 999 coins. If you do so, you'll never be left with less than 300 coins after upgrading all five of your party members weapons and armour.

These relatively low numbers make the game supremely manageable and conceivable. These qualities make the game a welcome reprieve from other more expansive RPGs (like Dragon Quest IX, or the downright intimidating Xenoblade Chronicles), while also offering a ready amount of challenge in its hidden content. Not to mention the infamous achievement of winning the Super Suit for executing 100 consecutive Super Jumps on a single enemy.

So, though the challenge may be set outside of the main game, and the experience as a whole is short in comparison to other RPGs, Super Mario RPG's rich blend of its name's two key elements locks it firmly in place as a great classic of the 16 bit era of RPGs.

The size of the world

Now that the game's opened up to some extent, Dragon Quest IX feels almost overwhelming. 

When I was given Xenoblade Chronicles as a gift and played a few hours into it, I was floored. There's just so much stuff in that game. There's an unbelievably huge world to travel, a whole network of relationships to tend to, and an item system that's simply extensive. At least, that's the impression I was left with after those first few hours of play. 

Dragon Quest IX now feels similar, but mostly in terms of the size of its world. I am definitely glad that the teleportation spell "Zoom" costs 0 MP. 

But Dragon Quest IX also has an alchemy system. So, as seems to be the case with Xenoblade Chronicles, and is the case with Pandora's Tower, inventory management is likely to make up a considerable chunk of the game. So far, alchemizing things simply gets you stronger items, and helps you to solve some quests. But I wouldn't put it past the game's developers to get you to combine items to move the plot forward at a point or two down the road.

Aside from that vague sense of fetch quest-foreboding, the game really feels vast. The cause of this sense of enormity is the way that the overworld is broken into several separate maps. This, along with the Starflight Express' basically being a warp point rather than a proper vehicle, works to make the world feel huge. It's not just something that can be contained in one map screen, or trudged across, oh no. 

It's likely that this overworld sprawl was necessary to keep within the DS' limitations. But, those limitations paradoxically give rise to a game world that feels much larger than it would were it just another of the continuous, rolling overworlds featured in most 16-bit era J-RPGs.

Returning to No More Heroes

With The Wind Waker finished and the Gamecube titles in the "Wrap-Up" portion of my Game List now exhausted, it's back to the Wii. Specifically, since the sprawling Xenoblade Chronicles will make a better finishing piece for the "Wrap Up" part of my Game List, I'm now playing No More Heroes.

For those unfamiliar with the title, it's similar to recent Grand Theft Auto games, but much more focussed. Rather than doing a myriad of missions for various mobs, the protagonist of No More Heroes, Travis Touchdown, is merely pursuing his goal of being the greatest assassin. So you spend the game going around doing various jobs to earn enough money to pay the admission fees for Ranking Fights. In these fights, Travis faces off against one of the 10 assassins that he's trying to top, and assumes their rank once they've been defeated.

I'd just barely started to play it before getting swept up with other things, so all I had to relearn upon picking it up again were the controls. They're pretty straight forward. The nunchuck controls Travis' movements, the "A" button interacts with things, and "B" cancels things. The others do specific menu-and HUD-related tasks.

The game doesn't use precise motion controls for Travis' beam sword, a la Skyward Sword, but once you've engaged with an enemy a direction will flash on the screen, prompting you to finish off the enemy or your current combo. It's an all right system, and the game's free-roaming city-sized world offers welcome exploration potential. Though it's a very empty feeling place since the only conscious person on it is Travis. Everyone else wandering and driving around is just a shell, moving about and yielding to Travis no matter what.

Scenes from the Historia

Now it's just a matter of time. But, along the way there are still some really cool sidequests - especially since some of them fork off into completion and one of Radiant Historia's many bad endings. The most recent of these showed Marco's rage erupting after Stocke sent an old friend of his to her doom. The bundled mercenary kills everyone in your party, save for Stocke, but, since Eruca's dead, the desertification of the world continues unabated.

Awesome "Game Over" (or as the game prefers "Fin") scenes aside, there are some problems with its cutscenes.

In the scenes with Marco's old friend, for example, we're expected to assume that they're close based on their short burst of dialogue. Because Marco's usually played as a comic relief character, getting us to care about him and this character that's interacted with for less than a minute isn't easy to do. The game gets us to recognize their relationship, but it doesn't give it quite enough impact. I'd go so far to say that it's a handheld version of something a console game like Xenoblade Chronicles would probably make utterly expansive.

Just before the scene with Marco and his friend, we're treated to another. This one features Raynie explaining why Cygnus is important to her. As a character that we've seen develop from nearly the start of the game, it's a much more effective scene - even if it's an aspect of her character developed within the last 1/2 hour or so of gameplay.

Moving Forward down a Broad Hallway

It took some time to rev up to it, but finally - finally - Radiant Historia seems to be properly underway.

Stocke, Sonja and Rosch have escaped from Alistel and are holed up in the Satyros village of Celestia. This kind of shift in place really makes me wish that this game had an open overworld. Though, setting up the proper fences to keep players around where they need to be would be tough. And coming up with enough material to furnish interactions for any timeline or any point thereon would be exhausting.

So the game's system of timeline and a Super Mario World-style overworld gives a manageable kind of freedom. At least from the development side of things. Radiant Historia's a fun game, sure, but it's not something you can expect absolute freedom from. It makes me glad I'm not playing Xenoblade Chronicles in tandem with it - Radiant Historia's practically an interactive choose-your-own-adventure novel compared to that game.

Opening a whole new set of Chronicles

After finally getting all the necessary parts, I've got the Wii rigged up to an old tube TV I've had since my undergrad days. Needless to say, the picture quality is a little rough on the newest and sharpest of games, but they're still entirely playable. Strangely enough, adjusting the screen option on the Wii system menu to wide screen gives the most readable text - definitely of great importance for a game like Xenoblade Chronicles.

When I first started this title months ago, I felt overwhelmed. The world is huge, the exploration seems unlimited (letting players jump adds to this appearance), and the reign on the player seems incredibly free. For the most part, this freedom comes from the game's third person perspective, something I've never seen in an RPG before, having my roots in SNES era (J-)RPGs and their modern equivalents. Though, come to think of it, Quest 64 had a similar perspective.

Anyway, because there's so little railroading (no guards at gates, or companions calling you back from invisible bounds) it's a bit difficult to figure out what to do next. However, just as with the ability to save anywhere solves the issue of never having a save point when you need one, the game's got the problem of direction figured out. At the top of the screen (clearly visible even with my rig) is an arrow and a counter. The arrow points the way, and the counter shows how many steps are between you and your destination.

So, though the visual going may be rough at times, I'll never get lost in this game. This bonus should make the game's tens of hours fly by, however periodically I pop this one in.