Nirvana In Mirrorshades

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

If you’ve enjoyed the Persona games – I’ve previously provided reviews of the first, third and fourth – then odds are that sooner or later you’re going to want to explore the wider Shin Megami Tensei series of demon summoning-themed JRPGs. What you discover is a mixed bag; most of the other branches of the series eschew the high school life simulation visual novel and dating sim influences of the Persona games (and only Persona 3 and Persona 4 actually focus on that), and whilst sometimes their surreal takes on fairly standard JRPG plotlines can be quite interesting, other times the games can get bogged down in repetitiveness and tedium. On top of that, there’s a sprawling morass of side-series which, like Persona, take the demon-summoning concept and put their own spin on it.

One of these is Digital Devil Saga – not to be confused with Digital Devil Story, the strapline for the original NES-era Megami Tensei games. Digital Devil Saga was a Playstation 2-exclusive duo of games which emerged after Lucifer’s Call – the sole game of the core Shin Megami Tensei series to get a PS2 release – and before Persona 3 came along to both redefine the gameplay of the Persona series and radically expand the bounds of what you could do in a Shin Megami Tensei game.

Consequently, what you might to expect to deal with here – both from the title being highly reminiscent of the original series and the fact that it preceded Persona 3 – is a more traditional Shin Megami Tensei game, and for the most part that’s what you get. So any of y’all who were hoping for another life simulation will probably be better off waiting for the recently-announced Persona 5.

Silent Hill’s Sequel Nightmare

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

In my restless dreams, I see that town: Silent Hill. Konami promised they’d take us there again some day, but they never did – at least, not in the company of Team Silent, the tour guides fans of the series had become accustomed to over the course of the first four games of the series. There’s been four new additions to the main series (where I define main series as “games which have seen release on home consoles rather than being mobile gaming or handheld exclusives”) since the demise of Team Silent in the muddled mess of The Room, and none of them have really won over the hearts and minds of fans. Is this a case of fandom being too hostile to the idea of new developers refreshing and putting a new spin on the series, or is this a genuine problem Konami are having with finding a safe pair of hands to bring the series forwards? Nothing for it but to ignore the warnings of others (because what sort of shitty horror protagonist would I be if I heeded warnings?) and head back to town.

The Short and Bloody Life of Team Silent

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

The early Silent Hill games are held up by some (including me) as the gold standard in survival horror, in particular because they have distinct and interesting aesthetics, great soundtracks and somewhat more original plots than your typical Resident Evil knock-off. As a result of this, a certain mystique has grown up around Team Silent, the original Japanese group of developers who made the first four game in the series. After Silent Hill 4: The Room various other developers – Climax Studios in the UK, Double Helix in the US and Vatra Games in the Czech Republic – have had their own stabs at making Silent Hill games, none of which have won over the fanbase to the extent that the original games did. Consequently, the accepted wisdom seems to be that nobody who isn’t Team Silent is really capable of making a good Silent Hill game.

That might be true. On the other hand, I’m not convinced that Team Silent were able to make a really excellent Silent Hill towards the end of their existence either. But to make that argument, I’ll have to kick off by talking about what they did right.

Teddie’s Got a TV Eye On Me

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

So, after kicking off the Persona series with the first game and thoroughly reinventing it with the third game and its mix of classic dungeon-crawling action and slice-of-life social simulation, the Shin Megami Tensei team were riding high. For their Playstation 2 swansong, Persona 4, they opted for a refinement of the formula which worked so well for Persona 3. This time, our nameless protagonist (Jerry Cornelius, in my playthrough) has parents who are not dead, but are going abroad for work for a year. So, they ship their mysterious, silent, grey-haired son off to the sleepy rural town of Inaba to spend the year in the care of his uncle Dojima, a detective in the local police force who has been bringing up his six-year-old daughter Nanako by himself ever since her mother died in a hit-and-run accident.

Even before the protagonist arrives in Inaba, however, there’s signs something is up; on the train down, he dreams of the Velvet Room, where Igor is once again waiting with a contract binding him to take on the consequences of his decisions for the coming year, along with his new assistant Margaret, sister of Elizabeth from Persona 3 who’s mysteriously vanished. (This time around, incidentally, the Velvet Room is a plush limousine travelling through fog-enshrouded darkness, which is much less obviously Lynchian than most of its previous appearances in the ga- oh wait.) Once he arrives, things only get stranger. Rumours proliferate of the Midnight Channel, a mysterious TV station which only appears when it’s raining and which is supposed to show the face of your true love. A television presenter who had been caught having an affair with a politician and had come to the town’s historic inn to get away from it all is found dead, dangling from, of all places, a TV aerial; some time later, Saki, a girl from the school the protagonist is attending in Inaba and who was featured on television after she discovered the presenter’s body, is found dead under similar circumstances.

A Pocketful of Bloodshed

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

If God of War: Chains of Olympus had come out on the PS2, like the original game, it would have been a massive disappointment. The graphics are of a similar standard, and show as much visual imagination as the original game. The plot, likewise shows a similar capacity for completely mutilating Greek myth in a way which actually feels right even though it’s clearly wrong – as though these could be little details from Greek myth, even though they absolutely aren’t. The combat is more or less the same, the magic system is a bit easier to handle.

Except, at the same time, there isn’t really very much of an advancement over the original game. The combat is exactly the same, without much in the way of new tricks. Major battles and stunts are peppered with the same sort of quick-time events. It’s a prequel which doesn’t really shine that much of a light on Kratos’s past. The simplification of the magic system is achieved by stripping it down and making it less interesting. And it’s actually quite short.

There is one thing which makes virtues of all of these flaws, and which makes Chains of Olympus an excellent pick – it’s a PSP game.

The Beat of a Wing Makes All the Difference

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Project Zero II: The Crimson Butterfly – also known as Fatal Frame II: The Crimson Butterfly in North America and Zero II: The Crimson Butterfly in its native Japan – is, as the name suggests, the sequel to the original Project Zero, and to be honest, it’s sufficiently close to the original that if you didn’t enjoy the first one you won’t probably won’t enjoy this one either; the gameplay is much the same, the plot (and indeed some of the endings) are extremely close, and the atmosphere is much the same. But if you did like the first game in the series, The Crimson Butterfly introduces just enough interesting features to make it worthwhile.

The two main characters of the game are the Amakura twins – Mio, the character you control for most of the game, is mildly more outgoing and active and somewhat less psychically sensitive than her sister, Mayu, who due to a childhood accident walks with a pronounced limp and gets extremely anxious at the prospect of being separated from Mio. Out for a stroll in the woods in which they used to play when they were little, the two schoolgirls get lost after Mayu chases a bright red butterfly into the depths of the forest. As night falls they come across an abandoned village; they are unable to find a way out, and as they explore the village they discover its sinister history, involving dire sacrificial rites in the name of keeping closed a subterranean gateway to hell – rites in which twins took on the central role. And as their investigation progresses and the attacks from the ghostly residents intensify, Mayu comes more and more under the influence of the insane ghost of one of the last sacrificial victims, an entity which seems intent on using Mio and Mayu to re-enact the traditional ceremonies.

Lucifer’s Call Will Not Be Put On Hold

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Although I’ve played the first and third Persona games, until now I hadn’t played any games in their parent series, Shin Megami Tensei. That changed with Shin Megami Tensei III: Lucifer’s Call – called Nocturne outside of Europe, and the first Shin Megami Tensei game in either the main series or the various subseries to get a European release. Describing something as being like another thing “on acid” is a lazy habit, but Lucifer’s Call really is like Persona 3 on acid, even though it came before the other game. It lacks the daytime school narrative of the latter-day Persona games and therefore loses its moorings in everyday reality; the protagonist is transformed into something entirely unlike the teenage schoolboy he was and travels across a mutated, hallucinatory Tokyo on a quest not to discover the meaning of life, but to impose a meaning on life.

Our protagonist on this occasion – who never speaks, as is traditional in Shin Megami Tensei games – is a high school student with a passing interest in videogames and the occult. At the start of the game accompanies his classmates Chiaki Hayasaka and Isamu Nitta in order to visit their teacher, Yuko Takao, who’s asked them to come and see her in the local hospital. On the way to the hospital the protagonist encounters Jyoji Hijiri, a journalist working for an occult magazine who’s covering the riotous local activities of the Gaea organisation, a doomsday cult that apparently has connections to the hospital. At the hospital, the protagonist and his friends find that Yuko is missing and split up to find her. Our hero finds her, but she’s not sick – not physically, at least. She’s in the company of Hikawa, the menacing leader of the Gaea cult, who almost unleashes his occult powers against the protagonist but for her intervention.

Then she takes the protagonist to the roof of the hospital to look at the beautiful view of Tokyo it offers – and she calmly and patiently explains that she and Hikawa believe that the world has become corrupt and drained of all vitality, and must be destroyed and made anew in order to reinvigorate it. So they’ve done the logical thing and engineered the Conception – the end of the world.

Which then happens.

Persona Walk With Me

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Once upon a time, in a magical land called Japan, there was a series of horror-SF novels by Aya Nishitani called Digital Devil Story, the central conceit of which revolved around the use of computer software to summon demons.

A little later, someone made a console RPG adaptation of the first Digital Devil Story novel, Megami Tensei (or Reincarnation of the Goddess), combining dungeon crawling with a strong plot. This RPG would, like its peers Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior, inspire a whole slew of sequels and spin-offs, many of which take place in entirely different universes (although there are suggestions that at least some of the games take place in a common multiverse).

And so Megami Tensei begat Shin Megami Tensei on the SNES, and lo, Shin Megami Tensei did begat Persona on the PlayStation, an alternate version of the series with its own take on the whole “demon” angle. In the Persona series, the demons are not summoned from some exterior source, but from within the protagonists themselves, and are expressions of their own inner selves (although the same cast of demons from the main Megami Tensei series fill in as the various Personas, the common demonic pantheon being a feature of the wider Megami Tensei series). Personas and Persona-users are mankind’s bulwark against the Shadows, occult enemies whose nature is intimately tied in with the Personas themselves.

Then Persona 3 – or to give it its full title, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 – came out on PS2, and things began to get really weird.

Photos of Ghosts

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

A survival horror game with three different names, depending on what region you are in, Project Zero, as its known to us Europeans (our friends across the Atlantic call it Fatal Frame, whilst the Japanese just call it Zero) is in many respects a very standard survival horror game, which can trace its roots back via Silent Hill and the original Resident Evil to Alone In the Dark. The gameplay is much the same as those previous games: you wander around a haunted mansion finding clues and solving puzzles, and occasionally have to get involved in difficult and dangerous combat against the horrific denizens of the manor.

The major innovation of Fatal Frame is its embrace of J-Horror tropes and themes. Whereas Alone In the Dark was based on Lovecraftian horror, Resident Evil took its lead from George Romero (in particular, the opening sequences of Dawn of the Dead, with SWAT teams fighting zombies), and Silent Hill acknowledges the influence of a host of Western authors, Fatal Frame takes its lead from the recent renaissance in Japanese horror (which us Westerners finally picked up on with the international success of Ring), taking its themes and motifs from classic Japanese folklore and ghost stories and presenting them with a modern aesthetic.

God of Frustration

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Don’t get me wrong, folks: God of War, at its best, is a really good game. It’s a classical-themed action game, like Prince of Persia (complete with climbing sequences) with fat heaps of violence. Ladies and gentlemen, this game is the definition of metal. You will seize zombies and tear them in half, showering the floor with their innards. You will twist off Medusa’s head. You will jam your sword into the Minotaur’s mouth and laugh as it vomits blood. You will cut down panicing Athenian citizens in order to get health boosts. Folks, if you want over-the-top violence and brutality God of War is the game for you. When it’s at its best, it is raw, unrestrained catharsis in videogame form – everything 300 should have been but wasn’t.

That’s when it’s at its best, though.

The brilliant thing about the likes of ICO, Shadow of the Colossus and Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time is that by and large the designers knew the difference between challenging and frustrating. Some of the parts in those games were tricky, but once you worked out what you needed to be doing you’d only need two or three tries before you got past them.

Not so in God of War. Occasionally, God of War will throw a boss fight, puzzle or trap at you which leaves you shouting at the screen. Helpfully, if you die enough times in a row the game will offer to lower the difficulty level for you, but this only applies to combat, and some of the most frustrating parts of the game aren’t fight scenes.

Classics geeks might whine at some of the elements of the game, but I actually like God of War‘s deviations from classical myth: while I’m pretty sure Zeus never sent Cronos to wander chained through the desert for eternity with the gargantuan Temple of Pandora chained to his back, it does sound like the sort of thing which would happen in classical myth – as if we’re party to an alternate telling of the stories from a different, lost city-state, perhaps. The main frustration with God of War is the occasional frustrating sequence that sours the game experience, sequences which become more frequent as the game progresses. To be honest, I’d like to see more games give me the option of just skipping a section of the game if I can’t get past it. Sure, it’s mildly cheating, but if I’m paying good money to play a game I’d like to be able to experience all of it, as opposed to being stonewalled by my lack of amphetamine-heightened thumb-twitching skills.