Dungeon Defenders: This is MY house

Must... defend...

I was going to celebrate the end of bad movie month by reviewing a bad movie, just for old times sake, but then decided that I’ve had quite enough of that, thank you very much.  I mean, when was the last time I reviewed an honest to god VIDEO GAME?  As someone who is a supposed gamer since the wee days, when controllers were more of joypads and the height of gaming was, in fact, River Raid on the Atari, I’ve been suspiciously silent on the new game front.  This, I think is because of monies.  Video games cost them.  Other things I need that are only obtainable with monies:  Food.

Anyway, that’s enough of a tangent.  Dungeon Defenders.  It only cost about ten bucks, I think, and I only picked it up because a friend on Steam said “download this now” and I said okay for some reason.  And yet, unlike all the other games I have downloaded and bought on a whim, Dungeon Defenders is fantastic.  I spend waking hours thinking of strategies and tricks to try.  Challenges cause me to shake my fist at Trendy Entertainment for their devious ways.

Blue Dragon: Because magic means having a weird ass shadow

THIS IS MAGIC

Blue Dragon is a unique game for me.  Namely, it’s one that I have actually beaten.  Oh, granted, it took me a while.  I teetered on the edge of no return of this JRPG for about a year and a half before I finally piloted my airship-fish into the atmosphere sucking hole at the end of the game in order to throw down with the last boss.  I’m glad I did.  While Blue Dragon is pretty much what you’d expect to find in JRPG fare, the ending was something bizarre enough to keep the game in my head nearly a year after I’ve beaten it.  I’ve played through portions of the game since then as well, mainly because I’m a sucker for games that have a job system in place.

That’s not to say Blue Dragon doesn’t have problems.  Most games do.  But the way Blue Dragon bypassed its own, personal issues was by being totally messed up and throwing in a liberal helping of cubes late game.  There’s probably going to be spoilers in here, for the record, though I’ll let you know when they’re coming.

Infinite Space: The Energizer Bunny of extraterrestrial games

If you’re a regular reader here at Faceplant then you know that I’m not particularly fond of jRPGs. In fact, I’m relatively new to the whole RPG genre. But Infinite Space for the regular old Nintendo DS intrigued me. I read about it on a news post by one Tycho Brahe early last year, and finally got around to renting it from GameFly about a month ago. As I understand it, it isn’t your typical jRPG. You’re not running through a fantasy land stabbing blobs or fighting Cthulhu. Nope. You are the 16-year-old commander of a space fleet.

Final Fantasy 4 DS: It keeps happening

"M'lord! We're in 3D for some reason!"

One of my favorite probably unintentional ironies in the video game world is the fact that Final Fantasy is still a thing.  I know the original Final Fantasy was named as such since Squaresoft never intended to survive past the game’s release, but that one, sole game resurrected the entire franchise and made the name Final Fantasy a household name.  I like the fact that the last fifteen bajillion final fantasy games released have been the “final” fantasy.  Not sure why.

Anyway, Final Fantasy 4 is a game that is close to my heart.  Originally released in America in 1991, back when the console war between Super Nintendo and Sega was so violent people actually got stabbed every now and then, Final Fantasy 4 was the second game in the franchise to mosey its way across the sea from Japan to us.  I’m not sure at this point if I read this statistic or am making it up entirely, but since then, Final Fantasy 4 has seen more remakes and re-releases than any other Final Fantasy game.  I’ve been playing the DS incarnation of this game for a while now, and with the announcement of another Final Fantasy 4 compilation game for the PSP hot on the heels of an episodic Nintendo Wii exclusive sequel, I figured this was as good of a time as any to go over the game to see why.

Radiant Historia: Do it again, whore

:(

Anyone who has been reading Faceplant! for a while is probably aware that I’m a sucker for RPG games.  I like the tedious micro management that accompanies battles and character upgrade menus, watching the best laid plans of the vapid and shallow characters in the game go completely to hell, and nothing quite beats that feeling you get when a game world completely sucks you in.  It’s kind of a hit or miss science, really, and every RPG I pick up gives me a certain sense of unease.   Waaaay back a while ago, I discussed which video game was THE BEST GAME EVER with Enosh and Elrood, and one of the things I said I look for is a game’s replay value.  To me, a truly great game is one that you keep coming back to after you’ve completed it, one that continues to suck you in regardless of how advanced of spiffy newer games have become.

Well, I guess someone at Atlus games was reading the article.  Radiant Historia has tons of replay value.  Actually, it’s required.  In fact, if you don’t go back through and replay sections of the game over BEFORE you have completed the game, you can just forget about actually reaching the game’s true ending.

Demon’s Souls….yes, it’s supposed to be plural

A surprisingly accurate cover

Remember back in the day?  When games were on enormous cartridges you had to blow into to make work?  Developers were wily then, because they realized something.  “Hey!  Our game isn’t very long because it’s not the future yet!  How can we make this short game longer?  I know, let’s make it really god damn hard!”  I’m looking at you Super Ghouls and Ghosts.  (Side note:  That is the one game my dad became mildly obsessed with for no apparent reason.  I rented it, he saw me playing it, and in a total out of character for him move asked to try.  Two hours later he was swearing at poorly animated ghosts and being super upset that when he got hit his armor would fly off and he would just be a naked guy chucking spears.  He then NEVER PLAYED VIDEO GAMES AGAIN.  Total mystery!)  So dying ten thousand times just became common practice in gaming land.  Soon, as technology evolved and games could get a bit longer, the difficulty curve began to go down.  If you think of the current generation of consoles, what is the last game that REALLY made you want to throw the controller because of the difficulty?  I played Enslaved recently on hard, the first time through, and though I died some for sure, I never felt like the game was overly challenging.  An enormous challenge to just get through the game is rarely present anymore.  So that brings us to Demon’s Souls.  Developer From Software decided that us young whipper snappers were enjoying this whole “living” thing too much.  So they made the god damn hardest game on the face of the planet.  And it’s actually pretty good!

Fable 2 leaves you wanting more

This would probably be as good of a place as any to say this:  This is not a review of Fable 3.   This really makes sense since Fable 3 isn’t exactly out yet, and as a poor, penniless blogger, it’s not like Microsoft and Lionhead Studios are just handing me pre-releases of their up and coming games.  But, with there being a lot of hype surrounding the release of Fable 3, set for…  I dunno, sometime in the future, I think, this would be a good time to talk about the last entry into the Fable series.  I’ll post here the things the game does right and the things the game does wrong, and at the end of the long, slightly dingy hallway of the future we can compare notes and see if Fable 3 really is better than its ancestors.

Resonance of Fate: John Woo would be so proud

Resonance of Fate caught my eye a few months back because it still remains one of the few RPGs that exist on the Xbox 360, which is quickly becoming overrun by first and third person shooters.  Sure, we’ve got the Mass Effect series, Oblivion and Fallout 3, but a lot of the traditional RPG formula has been removed from these games and slapped into a new, shiny real-time game engine.  I can’t say I blame them, what with how poorly traditional RPGs are received in the American market these days, but I grew up with the old school RPGs and you know what?  I miss them.

This game, ominously titled Resonance of Fate for some reason, simultaneously caters to and defers from the old school formula and makes something rather unique, in a run of the mill sort of way.

Mass Effect 2: Import your bad decisions today!

Okay, lets face it.  People were anticipating the release of Mass Effect 2 like trolls sitting under a bridge waiting for billy goats to messily devour.  It was fabled to be like a god among video games, ready to be released by Bioware at any point to descend to our poor mortal realm to turn all the water in the world into wine for some reason.  And for good reason!  The first Mass Effect was one of the best RPGs to appear on the Xbox 360 thus far, answering burning questions, like if an epic scale role playing game can exist in the depths of space, if there is, indeed life in the galaxy, and if maybe, just maybe we can get our freak on with a weird snake-headed blue chick.

Anyway, there’s numerous, countless decisions you can make over the course of Mass Effect one and two, so it seemed fair that, like the game, this review will have multiple endings, with contributions from all of the Faceplant staff.

Final Fantasy XIII: like a fat man on rollerskates

Final Fantasy has become a household name, but it also has made essentially every review I’ve seen of the game completely unreliable.  When it comes to stories and game play mechanics, the Final Fantasy series has seen it all, with varying degrees of success.  But now, everyone expects the series to be exactly the way it was when they fell in love with it, and every time someone mentions the name Final Fantasy, it’s immediately followed by what the latest game should have been.

Imagine that you live in a delightful neighborhood on top of a hill, in a small Podunk town somewhere in the north-east, with charm just dripping off of every branch.  An orphanage for woeful children is at the bottom of the hill, which your whole town contributes to on a regular basis.  Your next door neighbor is a three hundred and fifty pound, reliable pork barrel of a man, who lets call, oh, I don’t know, Brett.