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Tag: level-5

  • Attack of the Friday Monsters! (Millennium Kitchen/Aquria, 2013)

    Attack of the Friday Monsters! (Millennium Kitchen/Aquria, 2013)

    Developed/Published by: Millennium Kitchen, Aquria / Level-5
    Released: July 18th, 2013
    Completed: 3rd October, 2014
    Completion: Finished the main story and all of the “episodes” other than that one which requires you to play the mini-game over and over and over and ov
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    There are a couple of things recently in my life that have caused my face to seize up into a rictus of sheer joy. The kind of frozen, gawping wonder that you’d assume, had you caught me in the middle of it, that I’d just taken some brain candy and locked myself in the memory of going down “The Big One” in Blackpool at some innocent age, a long, long time ago.

    Well, I’ve never been on “The Big One” so it wouldn’t be that. One of these two things was seeing Tilda Swinton in Snowpiercer, playing the ungodly spawn of Margaret Thatcher and Jarvis Cocker. I’m not totally sure why that tickled me so much, but it did. The other was Attack of the Friday Monsters!’s intro, which you can see here.

    Oh my god, right? It’s so sweet. It’s sweet like having a man with fists made out of lugduname punching all your teeth out and then grinding them into dust to save you the indignity of watching them rot out your head because it is so sweet. The incredible on-the-nose nature of the lyrics; “I am a child,” “My dad is a dry cleaner.”

    So much simplicity, but also, so much depth.

    And on that level, Attack of the Friday Monsters! is an interesting one. You see, as a game, if we’re going to “review” it that way, Attack of the Friday Monsters! is deficient. It’s very, very basic. The game tells you to go a place, you go there, things happen. There isn’t really any puzzle-solving to be had. There’s a collectible card game that you’d think was really important, but you actually only play it about three times in the main story mode, and the game itself is a very simple rock-paper-scissors-a-like that might have some tactics to it but (frankly) they’re so subtle as to be basically pointless.

    There’s really nothing to it at all. And yet Attack of the Friday Monsters! is deeper than many games by virtue of its setting and story. Set in a small Japanese town in a not-directly-defined period of time, it follows Sohta, who has just moved there with his family (his dad’s a dry cleaner, as pointed out in the song) and is set the task of delivering some freshly cleaned clothes on Friday, the day of the week huge monsters have a fight on the outskirts of said town (so he’s got to be home before that happens.)

    It sounds “wacky” and “Japanese” to have a game where giant monsters fight near a small town and everybody just accepts it, but as is (obviously) the case there’s so much more to it than that. Directed by Kaz Ayabe, known for the (never released outside of Japan) Boku no Natsuyasumi series, Attack of the Friday Monsters! is similarly a reflection on Japanese childhood and a thoughtful take on the rhythms of Japanese life and culture that surround it. It’s much, much closer to, say, a film by Hirokazu Koreeda than it is another video game, which makes Ayabe absolutely unique as a game developer. You see, Attack of the Friday Monsters! isn’t really about the “play” as such. It’s about being a wee kid in a new town, about being told what to do by your parents, about being side-tracked, about meeting new kids, about not really feeing in control of anything about your life (because you’re a wee kid), about having to be introduced the games that the kids in your new town play, about how those games seem weird and silly, about the lies your parents tell, about the lies parents hold…

    It’s about the golden age of tokusatsu in the sixties, when televisions became more usual in Japanese homes as the country left recovery from World War II and began to boom; in fact it’s about being a child at that period, and not having the experience of war first hand to see Godzilla as a metaphor the horror of nuclear warfare, but as a hero to cheer on when he battles Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. It’s about that difference, that gap right there at a moment in history where Japanese adults saw something, Japanese children saw something, and that what the children believed became true, because after all, they believed it so forcefully, so unquestionably, and the adults had been helping them believe it. Because why not make believe, after so much struggle?

    Attack of the Friday Monsters! is about so much more than rock-paper-scissors. It’s definitely about more than semantic quibbles of how good a “game” it is or not. It’s trying to say something bigger, and I think it’s easy to get lost and forget that’s entirely possible when we grind things down to their mechanics.

    Will I ever play it again? Hmm. I’d love to play it again, maybe on a big screen, but on 3DS probably not.

    Final Thought: That Ayabe can manage so much with an experience that clocks somewhere in the region of a couple of hours makes it a legitimate tragedy that Boku no Natsuyasumi has never been released for audiences beyond Japan. It would be a serious issue if Koreeda’s work had never been seen outside of his home country, for example. That art is accessible is important, and it’s something that the games industry still struggles with.

    This essay is featured in Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24.

  • Crimson Shroud (Level-5, 2012)

    Crimson Shroud (Level-5, 2012)

    Developed/Published by: Level-5, Nex Entertainment / Level-5
    Released: December 13th, 2012
    Completed: 9th January, 2014
    Completion: Completed New Game and New Game+, getting the good ending.
    Trophies / Achievements: N/A

    Crimson Shroud, eh? Where to begin? Well, I started this blog largely to work out my usually conflicting feelings on the games that I finish (and, honestly, to work out my definitely conflicting feelings on the fact that I feel I simply must finish the games I start) so Crimson Shroud is definitely a “key text.” Because If I’m honest, all I want to—can do—when writing it up is give it a kicking for its many, many deficiencies, but by virtue of it very clearly being an auteur work and something I played largely while half-watching TV, I sorta remember it… fondly?

    So. Crimson Shroud is a game from Yasumi Matsuno (he of Vagrant Story fame) that’s supposed to make you feel like you’re playing through a table-top RPG campaign. This doesn’t really work. Yes, the visuals of the table-top figurines sort of work (though they’re oddly ugly; low-fi in a clumsy fashion) but the fact that your main interaction with the game is through very traditional Final Fantasy-esque battles—just with some dice mechanics plastered on—kind of messes it up. And then there’s the writing, which implies (like Japanese RPGs tends to) that you are the main character. It’s awkward, as the visual novel-esque way the story is represented makes it feel as if you are being told a story about characters rather than living as them—though this might be a factor of the English translation.

    Probably worse for the whole table-top RPG feeling is just how strictly the game sticks to other JRPG conventions. The game may have a limited number of locations and maybe less than twenty individual battles total, but forces you to grind one battle (two, in New Game+) endless times to hopefully get a drop required to progress. The game strongly implies that your characters would rather AVOID these battles (it even gives you a pre-battle opportunity to flee) so it’s no surprise that most people get stuck/give up in chapter two, unless they look up a FAQ (which might be intentional, who knows.)

    I’ll be honest and say that I gave up four times before that, in my lack of comfortable progress through the tutorial. It introduces a few concepts to you before it explains them or their complementary mechanics ; I kept restarting it in the hope that it would click (it eventually does: during the second chapter grind, which gives you some space to feel out the characters and battle system. This is far from ideal.)

    I think, however, that the worst of Crimson Shroud is in its UI. Throwing dice is fine—gimmicky, and it mostly just serves to slow battles down—but the part that matters most in a game without traditional levelling, the crafting and selection of gear, is tragic. I still don’t grasp how the game displays which item is better (there’s a mess of stats) and one of the most important aspects of the gear—the spells that are attached—aren’t fully shown unless you scroll down and select them individually. Any gear reorganisation takes forever and is an unpleasant headache of memorisation.

    Crimson Shroud is, by all accounts, not very good. But something about it is alluring. Matsuno has created a world with far more setting than you would expect for an eight dollar RPG, with a complex backstory that made me want to play through the New Game+ for the good ending (which is a bit of a cheat to double the game length, and one which I regret because the good ending doesn’t really explain anything.) What’s sad, of course, is that it isn’t like this world-building would be remarkable in anything except a game—I certainly wouldn’t read Crimson Shroud if it was a novel. More honestly, the game gets its hooks in by offering a very classic reward mechanic—grind, sort loot, get powerful, grind—wrapped up in a style and setting that’s just interesting enough that if you do most of the grinding with the telly on in the background you’re pretty sure you had a nice time.

    Will I ever play it again? The Japanese version has a New Game++ with parodic dialogue, which was mercifully cut from the English translation. So unless I learn Japanese as well as I’d love to (I won’t) no.

    Final Thought: I was sure I remember someone—Adam Saltsman?—describing Crimson Shroud’s story as a search for a pair of mystical panties, but I really have no idea what he was on about. One of us has misunderstood the story totally.

    This essay is featured in Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24.