Gaming Weekend: Grim Whimsy Edition
It was kind of a lark, the way I picked up Folklore for the PS3. I was adding some stuff onto Goozex for trade-in (my collection has grown so unwieldy I’m forcing myself to part with games I love but haven’t touched for months which is resulting in an influx of available points) and in my perusals of the listings my eye caught the game. I had been fairly interested in the game prior to its release but it was one of those offhanded “That might be cool” things since at the time I didn’t have the hardware to run it. Then it hit stores and the reviews started coming in, essentially a collective, stifled yawn.
When it caught my eye on Goozex it was more as a “oh that looked interesting, I guess there’s no harm dropping it on my list” and when I received it in the mail last week I got it on the same day as Call of Juarez, a 360 game I’d been eying since its release last summer. True enough, I popped in Juarez first but after a couple of levels I wanted to check out all the new stuff I had and I powered up the PS3 and fired up Folklore.
I mostly didn’t put it down for the rest of the weekend.
Folklore reminds me a lot of another semi-underrated game I liked, Kameo: Elements of Power. Both have a sort of Japanese style only as seen through a European lens and many of the concepts and game mechanics are similar. You have a whimsical world full of vibrant colors, imaginative character designs, monster/weapon collection, huge boss battles and some decent but mildly flawed action controls. But where Kameo had a disposable and largely unremarkable story, Folklore has a compelling mystery plot and an atmosphere that curiously slides from dark to lighthearted and back again. Themes of death and mourning are integral to the game and while most of the Folks (which serve both as foes and collectible weapons) are variations on fantasy standbys, their design is inspired more by the likes of Brian Froud and his darkly comic style.
The most significant problem with the game is its storytelling mechanisms, which reminds me a lot of games like Final Fantasy VII where there are moments of fully voice-acted CG but those often bleed into strange graphic novel-like silent cutscenes with no interactivity and word balloons for dialogue and then there are the conversation menus with mostly static character models where you click through lines of text and occasionally select a topic to discuss. The whole thing feels like its being presented in this awkward manner. My impression really comes down to it feeling cheap and unfinished or at the very least rushed. It’s not unbearable, but it probably contributes to the tepid reaction the game got and I wonder if this might not have been a better game with a better reception if they’d just rendered out all the story sequences.
Aside from the story and atmopshere, the game itself offers a rich tapestry of monster collection, if that’s the sort of thing you enjoy. You certainly have no dearth of options in this milieu, consisting of everything from the ubiquitous Pokemans to the obviously titled Monster Hunter, but Folklore does it as good as any. They do have a unique method of physical acquisition which requires that you assault the creatures until they enter a sort of submissive state at which point you can press R1 to latch onto their exposed Id (that’s the game’s word, not mine; they seem more like souls to me but calling them such wouldn’t jive with the game’s premises). To actually bring this Id into your possession you must use the Sixaxis function by jerking the controller upward, like yanking on the reigns of a bridle. When this doesn’t result in knocking your own teeth out it has a satisfyingly interactive feel to it. You can also expose several Ids at once and hold the R1 button longer to gather in a number at a time in exchange for an XP bonus, the act feels like nothing shy of wrangling, casting you in the unusual but not unwelcome role of “morbid fantasy cowboy.”
Which, I think, would also serve as an excellent moniker for Rock Band’s World Tour mode.
Other Games
- Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles – My other fixation this week was Rondo of Blood, which I finally pushed through for the first time. You can’t (I don’t think) get the “real” ending just beating Dracula once but there are plenty of other stages and secrets that need to be worked on the second time around. I also managed to unlock Maria, Symphony of the Night and at long last the original version of Rondo. Unfortunately when I tried to play the original I realized that either the included emulation is poor or the game was created clumsily. Either way some of the very minor adjustments they made for the PSP remake result in a game that may not always look remarkably better but certainly plays that way. Now all I have to do is play Stage 5′ a couple hundred more times until I can finally get through to the boss without having two health and no remaining lives.
- Jeanne d’Arc – After switching off between Folklore and Rondo nearly all weekend, I finally swapped discs in the PSP and made it through another stage in Jd’A. Interestingly it was the first time that some real strategic maneuvers came into play as I found you can pin some enemies to specific locations on high ground where the only access point is a ladder by parking a ranged unit at the foot of the ladder and firing up at them as long as you stay there. Since opposing units can’t move through yours, it doesn’t matter how much movement they have, they’re up there until the path is clear. I also started toying with finishing formations that allow for the best chance of having counter-attackers benefit from the “other-side” bonus when a character is successfully attacked. I haven’t gotten the ideal line-up set just yet, but I have a better way to wrap up a turn than before. In this particular stage I was vastly outnumbered (by plot design) and I thought I was going to lose but a well-timed Transformation—I can’t tell you how much having two available to Jeanne changes things—allowed me to cut through most of their forces in a single turn so while I still lost several units, I pulled off the upset victory anyway.
- Call of Juarez – It’s like The Darkness in the old West. A decent if not completely remarkable shooter that relies mostly on its setting to be intriguing. I like the quick draw mechanic on the preacher character but I hate the whip/platforming thing with the other playable guy: It’s like developers have learned nothing from the Xen section of Half-Life. If you can’t do first-person platforming right (Metroid Prime), don’t do it at all. The story is, after one chapter from each character, somewhat intriguing but they haven’t even said how the Juarez Gold (the desire for which is referenced in the game’s title) fits into the whole thing so I have to reserve some judgment for later.
- Rock Band – I had to try out the new store once I heard that “Still Alive” was going to be free and I’m pretty impressed. I kind of wish that the preview downloaded automatically, but I’m happy it works as well as it does. I also used some leftover credits to boost up my song library a little getting STP’s “Sex Type Thing,” Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” Radiohead’s “My Iron Lung” and a few others. I played through a bunch on guitar in a solo mode as well since I hardly ever get to play guitar when other people are around and found that they are all pretty fun (“More Than a Feeling” being the most fun to play by far of the lot). I did also finally play Oasis’ “Wonderwall” on guitar although I’ve had it for a while. I find that song to be more difficult than songs with wicked solos or super fast chord changes because it directly contrasts the way I play which is with zero upstrokes. The acoustic strumming thing just stumped me for practically the whole song.
- Catch Phrase – We had a very small dinner party Friday night with two couples we’re friends with and they chose Catch Phrase from the options I presented them. I think part of it was the seating arrangement which didn’t leave us with a lot of table room and Catch Phrase is easy to play sitting on couches. I don’t particularly care for the game itself, in fact; it’s too open for cheating/abuse because unlike Taboo it doesn’t have any built-in mechanism to stop people from stretching the bounds of what qualifies as an acceptable clue. And the game/competition itself is fairly lame so we quickly devolved the game into letting the person who guessed the answer be the next one to give clues. It worked in that it was an enjoyable way to spend time with friends but as a game it wasn’t my favorite activity. I suppose the audience wasn’t right for Arkham Horror in retrospect, but I really wanted to play that game this weekend.