Friday, February 25, 2011
Public service
Since I've been banging my head against the wall over this for the past week, I'd just like to put it out there on the internets for the good of the kids. Capcom Asia's version of Marvel VS Cacpom 3, in addition to costing $20 less than the US version, features reversible cover art. While the Japanese cover art isn't anywhere close to the quality of past VS titles, it does outclass the US art simply by its use of color. Comics = not serious business, therefore black should not be the primary color used for a video game based on comics. The game itself is fully international, much like the domestic version I suspect, and allows for customizing the voice effects for Capcom's side of the roster. The Marvel guys are sadly stuck with the current American animated media VO cast. They're not bad, and the new guys are perfectly fine, but the returning cast feel pretty awkward initially.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
The law of averages
I finished up The Last Story last night. I'm still trying to figure out what I think of it. Right of the bat, the game did not live up the the expectations, realistic or unrealistic, that were placed upon it. Similarly to Lost Odyssey. From the outside the game seemed like a grand epic, which turned into a mediocre adventure once the player actually got their hands on it. The same is true of the technical side. The promotional media was carefully manipulated to give the best possible outward appearance to what is actually a very basic, and sometimes awkward game. To put it bluntly, The Last Story is the very definition of “jank.”
The game starts off strong, with characters spouting off about dreams and stars and other such metaphysical nonsense. This is simply the device to get the plot rolling along, which does happen fairly quickly and with much fanfare. Midway through, however, it hits a wall, and comes apart, which wouldn't be much of an issue, if there was a good reason for it. It's as if the writers ran out of ideas, but wanted the story to keep heading in a certain direction, so they simply started down that path without any explanation. The chapter based presentation allows them some degree of leeway here, but as a gamer I don't feel the “it happened off camera” excuse holds water. If I'm asked to play a game, I better be the one responsible for driving the action, otherwise I can go watch plenty of movies instead. It's doubly disappointing coming from Hiranobu Sakaguchi, a creator I respect, who's responsible for one of my favorite character driven games ever, Final Fantasy VI, and to a lesser degree, Lost Odyssey, who decided to make this his personal project. It only serves to underscore the fact that he isn't a very good story teller. To be fair, the official line is that the original story draft was turned down, and had to be rewritten to comply with Nintendo's standards, and likely preserve the pretty white Wii packaging. (CERO C, and above rated games ship in black colored packaging, as opposed to the usual white. The Last Story is rated CERO B, roughly the equivalent of ESRB's “T.” By comparison, Lost Odyssey is rated “C.”) It does seem like there are remnants, literally, of what may have been great at one time. Half the game takes place in ancient ruins, uncovering forgotten secrets, which perhaps given more time and money could have been explored, again literally, and from a story perspective. A brief scene at the end where the main character plays through a flashback he's been experiencing regularly gives us a brief glimpse of what could have been. The Last Story is essentially the core of a game, with barely any of the usual superficial fluff that serves to flesh out the world and the characters that inhabit it, which in turn helps make for a more compelling gaming experience overall. If the player is expected to spend the next 30 hours in this world, it batter be damn well established, and interesting. I personally look for this every time I play a RPG, and can never understand players who complain about such “useless” elements. There is no such thing. From the foods that they eat, to the gods that they worship, any and all details help define a civilization. That said, I have never once skipped a cut scene in any game, let alone a RPG, but I found myself compelled to hit that Start button so the scene I was watching would end, and I could get back to killing lizards. (Note: Cut scenes can't actually be skipped in this game, since the next level is loaded as they're playing out, but they can be fast-forwarded.)
The actual game part of The Last Story is similarly bland. It is one of those unfortunate games that are trapped on the hardware they're given, and have to make due. (i.e. Shadow Of the Colossus) A great game developer can usually make the decisions necessary to preserve the designers' original vision and execute on it. Artoon, now part of parent company AQI, are not those developers. The frame rate drops into the teens often when the screen fills up with character models and spell effects. In a turn based game like Blue Dragon (the previous collaboration between Mistwalker and Artoon) this was not much of an issue, but in an action game like The Last Story, especially in situations that require some sort of precise timing, this can get disorienting, and frustrating when it leads to a missed opportunity or even death. Thankfully the developers decided to provide generous health reserves (with Life Points in addition to Hit Points) to the characters, as well as a simple healing mechanic (regenerative healing magic, and automatic revival of fallen comrades), in addition to checkpoints before each encounter. While the game system is unpolished, it thankfully does not punish the player for it, which was one of my original fears. The crutches offered the player actually serve more to swing the balance heavily towards their favor. The hardest part of almost any encounter is figuring out the gimmick which will then allow the player to inflict massive damage to the enemy. (Using an ice spell, for example, to flip an enemy crab onto its back.) This aspect is also so unbalanced, that the few times that the player is asked to rely on their brute strength, the game can become tedious and frustrating. For this eventuality, the devs have prepared instanced battle encounters that the player can enter continuously to gain experience points and levels, which do affect the character's performance significantly. There is a noticeable difference in battle performance between a level 10 character, and level 11 character. This is one aspect of past Mistwalker games I've appreciated, and am glad to see return. If anything, Sakaguchi knows how to make a good battle system. (Which incidentally explains what happened to the Final Fantasy series, but I digress.)
At the end of the day, sadly, The Last Story feels like a shoestring budget game, albeit with all the bells and whistles of a major title, that had the bare essentials it needed, to get the points the creators wanted, across. Perhaps it's more disappointing because it was a project developed by the father of Final Fantasy, and published by Nintendo, which couldn't capture any of the magic that those names usually entail. Taken by itself, The Last Story is a competent game, if a little on the light side in terms of content and presentation. After finishing it, and starting over on New Game +, I couldn't bring myself to rationalize a second play-through. I don't feel as if I missed anything significant, as far as I could tell. The game is split into 44 chapters, some being optional, and I had seen all 44. Some parts seemed brilliant and inspired, some were bland and derivative, and some down right frustrating. If all those experiences are averaged together, The Last Story ends up squarely in the middle of the road, a very average experience. If you must boil it down to an arbitrary numerical value, I give The Last Story three out of five big cats. The extra points are for getting stuck during the “ending.” Yowza.
Coming up: My review of ASH...
The game starts off strong, with characters spouting off about dreams and stars and other such metaphysical nonsense. This is simply the device to get the plot rolling along, which does happen fairly quickly and with much fanfare. Midway through, however, it hits a wall, and comes apart, which wouldn't be much of an issue, if there was a good reason for it. It's as if the writers ran out of ideas, but wanted the story to keep heading in a certain direction, so they simply started down that path without any explanation. The chapter based presentation allows them some degree of leeway here, but as a gamer I don't feel the “it happened off camera” excuse holds water. If I'm asked to play a game, I better be the one responsible for driving the action, otherwise I can go watch plenty of movies instead. It's doubly disappointing coming from Hiranobu Sakaguchi, a creator I respect, who's responsible for one of my favorite character driven games ever, Final Fantasy VI, and to a lesser degree, Lost Odyssey, who decided to make this his personal project. It only serves to underscore the fact that he isn't a very good story teller. To be fair, the official line is that the original story draft was turned down, and had to be rewritten to comply with Nintendo's standards, and likely preserve the pretty white Wii packaging. (CERO C, and above rated games ship in black colored packaging, as opposed to the usual white. The Last Story is rated CERO B, roughly the equivalent of ESRB's “T.” By comparison, Lost Odyssey is rated “C.”) It does seem like there are remnants, literally, of what may have been great at one time. Half the game takes place in ancient ruins, uncovering forgotten secrets, which perhaps given more time and money could have been explored, again literally, and from a story perspective. A brief scene at the end where the main character plays through a flashback he's been experiencing regularly gives us a brief glimpse of what could have been. The Last Story is essentially the core of a game, with barely any of the usual superficial fluff that serves to flesh out the world and the characters that inhabit it, which in turn helps make for a more compelling gaming experience overall. If the player is expected to spend the next 30 hours in this world, it batter be damn well established, and interesting. I personally look for this every time I play a RPG, and can never understand players who complain about such “useless” elements. There is no such thing. From the foods that they eat, to the gods that they worship, any and all details help define a civilization. That said, I have never once skipped a cut scene in any game, let alone a RPG, but I found myself compelled to hit that Start button so the scene I was watching would end, and I could get back to killing lizards. (Note: Cut scenes can't actually be skipped in this game, since the next level is loaded as they're playing out, but they can be fast-forwarded.)
The actual game part of The Last Story is similarly bland. It is one of those unfortunate games that are trapped on the hardware they're given, and have to make due. (i.e. Shadow Of the Colossus) A great game developer can usually make the decisions necessary to preserve the designers' original vision and execute on it. Artoon, now part of parent company AQI, are not those developers. The frame rate drops into the teens often when the screen fills up with character models and spell effects. In a turn based game like Blue Dragon (the previous collaboration between Mistwalker and Artoon) this was not much of an issue, but in an action game like The Last Story, especially in situations that require some sort of precise timing, this can get disorienting, and frustrating when it leads to a missed opportunity or even death. Thankfully the developers decided to provide generous health reserves (with Life Points in addition to Hit Points) to the characters, as well as a simple healing mechanic (regenerative healing magic, and automatic revival of fallen comrades), in addition to checkpoints before each encounter. While the game system is unpolished, it thankfully does not punish the player for it, which was one of my original fears. The crutches offered the player actually serve more to swing the balance heavily towards their favor. The hardest part of almost any encounter is figuring out the gimmick which will then allow the player to inflict massive damage to the enemy. (Using an ice spell, for example, to flip an enemy crab onto its back.) This aspect is also so unbalanced, that the few times that the player is asked to rely on their brute strength, the game can become tedious and frustrating. For this eventuality, the devs have prepared instanced battle encounters that the player can enter continuously to gain experience points and levels, which do affect the character's performance significantly. There is a noticeable difference in battle performance between a level 10 character, and level 11 character. This is one aspect of past Mistwalker games I've appreciated, and am glad to see return. If anything, Sakaguchi knows how to make a good battle system. (Which incidentally explains what happened to the Final Fantasy series, but I digress.)
At the end of the day, sadly, The Last Story feels like a shoestring budget game, albeit with all the bells and whistles of a major title, that had the bare essentials it needed, to get the points the creators wanted, across. Perhaps it's more disappointing because it was a project developed by the father of Final Fantasy, and published by Nintendo, which couldn't capture any of the magic that those names usually entail. Taken by itself, The Last Story is a competent game, if a little on the light side in terms of content and presentation. After finishing it, and starting over on New Game +, I couldn't bring myself to rationalize a second play-through. I don't feel as if I missed anything significant, as far as I could tell. The game is split into 44 chapters, some being optional, and I had seen all 44. Some parts seemed brilliant and inspired, some were bland and derivative, and some down right frustrating. If all those experiences are averaged together, The Last Story ends up squarely in the middle of the road, a very average experience. If you must boil it down to an arbitrary numerical value, I give The Last Story three out of five big cats. The extra points are for getting stuck during the “ending.” Yowza.
Coming up: My review of ASH...
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Business as usual
The piece below about Taito's NESiCAxLive system got me thinking how all these small time companies can just throw all their games up there and not have to worry about hardware licensing or distribution deals. Then, something like Chaos Code might finally come to market. This would also kill off the recent trend of PC-in-a-box arcade "boards" that everyone has been announcing at trade shows lately. So much for that idea. The newly announced Koi Hime Musou 2D fighter will ship on AQI's new Neo Standard system. "Standard" is right, it's a low-end PC with a Core 2 Duo G6950 processor, 2GB's of DDR3 RAM, and a GeForce 220 video card. The only innovation, and single most expensive component, is the 16GB SSD (~$360). Why would any arcade op bother buying this? Will there ever be a new title released for this system? At this rate we're back to the dedicated board model, which was what systems like the Neo Geo MVS and CPS(-2) moved the industry away from. Shaking. My. Head.
Android is ready to play
One of the core ideals I've had when starting up this blog was to bring attention to the lesser known things in gaming. One such topic is cellphone gaming. Specifically _good_ cellphone gaming. And even more specifically good, Japanese, cellphone gaming. On top of that my platform of choice, Google's Android, has been the underdog in all things entertainment, despite its rapid growth, for years. There may finally be a light at the end of that tunnel, with Sony's recent announcement of the Sony Suite, which will bring original PSX as well as officially approved "Playstation certified" experiences to the platform. I've been in the Android scene long enough to know that that whole thing is still years away. Nothing happens fast in Android world. So, in the mean time, we need to make due with what we're given. Thankfully things have slowly picked up in this space, mostly due to iOS ports. The Academy-Of-Arts-And-Sciences-Game-Of-the-Year-2010-nominated Angry Birds leads the charge, Fruit Ninja is right behind, and Words With Friends even brought the oft-talked about, rarely implemented cross-platform multiplayer allowing Android and iOS gamers to do whatever it is that game allows them to do to each other. None of those games are for me, so I don't count them. Up my alley are things like Kairo Soft's Game Dev Story, another iOS transplant (which itself was an up-port from dumbphones), and what may be a foretelling of things to come, for good or ill, in HyperDevBox's and Idea Factory's Spectral Souls PSP-to-Android port. Those games are all fine and good, but none of them has been an original property, or very polished given their non-native nature. Which is why the biggest and most pleasant surprise to date has been YourGames' Retriod Shooting. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the first Android game worth a damn. At its core it's a Space Invaders clone, but mixes up the formula enough to be unique, by design (Space Invaders is pretty boring these days), and by necessity (perhaps the developer wasn't skilled enough to implement a control method as precise as Cave has managed in their iOS offerings).
The game is a simple vertical shooter, where increasingly complex waves of enemies rain down onto the planet earth, and it's the players job to fend them off by swiping a finger over the row of android dudes at the bottom of the screen that serve as defensive turrets. Successive hits earn combo points, which result in health restoration to the planet, or special attacks which clear the screen. The game may or may not be an endless score chase, since I haven't lived long enough to find the kill screen, but the time spent blowing up raining robot dudes has been one of the most genuinely fun gaming experiences on the platform so far. I'd put this one up against any of Cave's games any day. It features that same core fun that made arcade games popular in the 80's. It also has a nice 16-bit style to the graphics, which unfortunately only consist of a generic space background and colorful robot dudes. There is also a single music track, which is a catchy chiptune. For the price of a single play in a dedicated arcade machine, you really can't complain about getting this game on your phone for life. This is exactly the experience I've been waiting for out of Japan, and I'm glad it's finally here, even though it's a couple years late. The game did have compatibility issues at first, which prevented it from running on my high-end handset, but the steady stream of updates eventually resolved the issue. The latest even added an extra selectable character, opening up the door to future content updates. I'd consider this an exclusive, since I believe the little green android mascot character is a registered trademark of Google, and is only given to Android application developers for branding purposes. The iOS port would therefore need to replace all the character sprite graphics with colourful fruit or some such. Well worth your ¥100.
Related: Since Google has finally made a decent Internet portal for browsing the Market, I went back to my original game rundown post and updated it with links to the games. Why did we have to wait two years for this functionality? And look, half of G-Mode's stuff is down. Some things never change.
The game is a simple vertical shooter, where increasingly complex waves of enemies rain down onto the planet earth, and it's the players job to fend them off by swiping a finger over the row of android dudes at the bottom of the screen that serve as defensive turrets. Successive hits earn combo points, which result in health restoration to the planet, or special attacks which clear the screen. The game may or may not be an endless score chase, since I haven't lived long enough to find the kill screen, but the time spent blowing up raining robot dudes has been one of the most genuinely fun gaming experiences on the platform so far. I'd put this one up against any of Cave's games any day. It features that same core fun that made arcade games popular in the 80's. It also has a nice 16-bit style to the graphics, which unfortunately only consist of a generic space background and colorful robot dudes. There is also a single music track, which is a catchy chiptune. For the price of a single play in a dedicated arcade machine, you really can't complain about getting this game on your phone for life. This is exactly the experience I've been waiting for out of Japan, and I'm glad it's finally here, even though it's a couple years late. The game did have compatibility issues at first, which prevented it from running on my high-end handset, but the steady stream of updates eventually resolved the issue. The latest even added an extra selectable character, opening up the door to future content updates. I'd consider this an exclusive, since I believe the little green android mascot character is a registered trademark of Google, and is only given to Android application developers for branding purposes. The iOS port would therefore need to replace all the character sprite graphics with colourful fruit or some such. Well worth your ¥100.
Related: Since Google has finally made a decent Internet portal for browsing the Market, I went back to my original game rundown post and updated it with links to the games. Why did we have to wait two years for this functionality? And look, half of G-Mode's stuff is down. Some things never change.
Cloud gaming
Ironclad was a decent enough shooting game for the Neo CD. There were also rumours of a MVS arcade release, but to my knowledge, no one actually has ever come forward and claimed to have owned or even seen one. The theory was given some cred when it went up on the Wii's Virtual Console service. This meant that even if it was just the CD version without the loading screens, the game did exist in a ROM-ready state, and could have been slapped onto chips if need be. All this, however, is years past it's expiration date, or is it? While doing some digging into Taito's NESiCAxLive service I noticed that SNK will make a handful of games available. A kind of Xbox Live for arcades, games are stored on servers, and downloaded to networked cabinets. The service launched with BlazBlue II, and will no doubt see most future titles available, like G.Rev's Strania The Stellar Machina. SNK decided to go in another direction, and are throwing old school games like Fatal Fury ONE, Samurai Shodown ONE, and Ironclad up there, in addition to the recent KOF 98 and 2002 remakes. So after years of speculation, a "lost" title will finally see the light of day in an arcade. This is a pretty damn ingenious idea, and a great solution for continued revenue from older titles that may not be financially feasible to physically distribute. I'm pretty sure it costs more to burn Fatal Fury onto ROMs than the game will likely earn. With proper support this NESiCAxLive system could become the commercial answer to MAME, arcade game preservation, while still bringing in income to the companies that made those games. The NESiCAxLive system and line-up will be present in Taito's AOU booth. The games featured will include:
- BLAZBLUE CONTINUUM SHIFT II
- AQUAPAZZA
- THE KING OF FIGHTERS’ 98 ULTIMATE MATCH FINAL EDITION for NESiCAxLive
- THE KING OF FIGHTERS 2002 UNLIMITED MATCH for NESiCAxLive
- Strania ~The Stellar Machina~
- Senko no Ronde DUO for NESiCAxLive
- Exception
- Dragon Dance
- SPACE INVADERS for NESiCAxLive
- Fatal Fury The King Of Fighters
- World Heroes
- Art Of Fighting
- Samurai Shodown
- Ironclad
- Puzzle Bobble
- THE KING OF FIGHTERS '94
- Metal Slug
- Raiden IV for NESiCAxLive
Saturday, February 5, 2011
The way of the game
I don't give a fuck about video game sales figures. I never liked playing armchair analyst, but I did keep track of the Xbox 360's weekly sales figures from launch, up until it reached 1 million units. At that point I considered the platform "established," and the industry was likewise committed to supporting it with niche and other interesting titles so there was no fear of a Dreamcast 2-like scenario playing out.
The recent reports of Mistwalker's latest game topping the weekly sales charts in Japan raised a few interesting points, not the least of which were fans lamenting its "poor performance." I was quite surprised as to why selling over 100,000 units was considered poor, so I decided to do a little digging. A great resource for relatively recent sales data is Garaph.info, which compiles Enterbrain (Famitsu) sales data from the past few years. According to the data found in the news reports, The Last Story was Mistwalker's best game debut, and surpassed their last project, the Microsoft Game Studios published Lost Odyssey's lifetime sales during only its first week. I think that's called a success.
It should be noted before we proceed that the Garaph database is about a month out of date, with the latest entry being the last week of calendar year 2010. The sales of The Last Story would not therefore be included in the DB, and where tracked initially by Media Create, a seperate firm from the one used as the basis for these figures. The differences between the two have historically been statisitically insignificant, and even if they varied widely, the comparison would still be good enough for this blog post. I'm not advising Goldman Sachs to invest here, I'm just shooting down fanboy rants. I will also round the figures up to the nearest thousands increment, but the links I provide have all the gory details down to the single last box copy sold.
Since I consider Lost Odyssey very highly, I decided to dig a little further, and called up the data on the best selling Xbox 360 games. Here, I was surprised to see that LO was in fact the 12th best selling, out of 15 titles that moved over 100,000 units. That doesn't seem very good at all, considering that Mistwalker's orignal game, Blue Dragon was 4th, and sold a little over 200,000 units in its lifetime. Lost Odyssey was actually the worst selling RPG on the platform, and shockingly enough was surpassed by titles like Infinite Undiscovery, and The Last Remnant. The best performing RPG title on that list was also a surprise, Star Ocean 4 The Last Hope, which also sold over 200,000 units. The fact that all those games had the Square Enix logo on the box could explain this. Overall, on the 360, no title has ever came close to 300,000, with the best selling game being Grand Theft Auto IV, with approximately 210,000 units sold.
That said, The Last Story is a Wii title, so we should be looking at that platform instead. Here, the situation is much different, since Nintendo's own titles dominate sales and mind share. I kept the cut off point of at least 100,000 units sold the same, and the database returned a list of 64 titles that qualify. The top 11 best selling titles are all Nintendo published, and sold at least 1 million units, with the top seller, New Super Mario Bros. selling 4.1 million alone. The library is also more varied, so there are numerous tiles that would barely qualify as a "role playing game." I personally don't consider the likes of The Legend Of Zelda or Monster Hunter to be in the same genre, but I'll mention them here with the caveat. Monster Hunter 3 was the best selling third party title, with a hair over 1 million units. This should be considered the realistic ceiling that any other third party would shoot for in order to quantify mainstream "success" on the platform. But my personal lofty target would be Dragon Quest Swords, which is also barely an RPG, which sold roughly 400,000. The best selling "true" Wii RPG would therefore be Teles Of Symphonia Dawn Of the New World with approximately 200,000 units. The only other true entries in the genre on the platform are Tales of Graces, with 170,000, and Nintendo's own recently published Xenoblade with the "disappointing" (according to internet commentators) sales of 140,000. Personally, I'd consider Xenoblade the only true competition, since the Tales' and Dragon Quest series are already well established, and carry a brand recognition a new title can't possibly have. As a side note, the latest entry in the hardcore favorite Fire Emblem franchise also sold approximately 170,000 units in this current market. It also should be noted, that a personal favorite entry, Arc Rise Fantasia, isn't even found in the database. Whether that's due to an oversight on the part of the maintainer, or poor performance I can't say.
This brings us to the elephant in the room, and one of the loudest laments heard from its user base, the viability of the Playstation 3 market for RPG's. Using the same metrics, the database returns 66 titles that sold over 100,000 units. At the top, to no one's surprise, is Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIII, with just under 2 million units. What one should take note of instead is that this is the 13th (main) entry in the series. The first original property, which has since become a series, is White Knight Chronicles. The original title sold just under 340,000. This would be what I would unquestionably label as a "success," taking the entirety of the current Japanese console role playing game market into account. Right on its heels is the PS3 port of Tales Of Vesperia, topping its 360 sales by a healthy margin of 3:2. Bandai Namco's other HD port, Tales Of Graces F is teetering at 300,000, with a surprising ratio of 2:1 over its original Wii source. This could be considered the strongest argument against a Wii exclusive RPG. The White Knight Chronicles sequel follows with almost 250,000. The next game of note on the list is the PS3 port of Xbox 360's best selling title, GTA4, with sales just shy of 200,000, placing it firmly behind its 360 twin. Then comes another personal favorite, the SEGA published Resonance Of Fate, which charted here with sales in the 180,000 range, but failed to do so on the 360, with a ratio of 6:1. Considering this was a simultaneous release, where the previous Tales' games were year-old ports, this could be taken as the best indicator of console preference among RPG gamers. Fan favorite Demon's Souls follows with almost 160,000 units, and the other side of the port debate, Star Ocean 4 The Last Hope International is right behind it. The spread here isn't huge, but the 360 original still tops the un-enhanced PS3 version. Valkyria Chronicles is the next game on the list, if I'm including marginal titles, with 140,000. And Ar Tonelico III rounds out the list with 108,000 units.
The titles that can be realistically compared to The Last Story on the PS3 are White Knight, Resonance Of Fate, and Demon's Souls, which average to about 220,000 units sold between them, which is not far off from Blue Dragon's own 360 sales or the best selling Wii RPG. Taking all this information into account, a realistic forecast for The Last Story as a new role playing game in the current Japanese market would be ~200,000 units. Considering it's already half way there, and that the average sell-through^1 post release for the top selling original RPG's is ~100,000, I can't see how The Last Story can be considered a failure. All this information is subjective, of course, since the cost of producing each game title varies. It would not surprise me if Final Fantasy XIII did not pay for its own development while something like Xenoblade did, making one a failure and the other a success from a financial standpoint. And at the end of the day, that's the only point that matters to a game developer.
Appendix A:
1 - (LTD total - 1st week sales)/3 averaged for the best selling original titles for each console; Blue Dragon, White Knight Chronicles, Xenoblade.
Appendix B:
The Last Story is in fact Mistwalker's second title published by Nintnedo, the first being the DS strategy RPG ASH: Archaic Sealed Heat. While we're on the topic, that one sold about 150,000 units, and was also decried by internet people as a "failure." I'm not about to do this whole thing over again for portables, so we'll just have to assume the punters were wrong.
From the jump (added on February 19th, 2010):
Not to beat a (stupid) dead horse any further, but an important point seems to have been omitted by almost anyone chiming in on this topic (myself included). Enterbrain, and likely Media Create, sales data doesn't include any online retailer transactions. The Gamasutra compiled, Amazon specific, best seller lists from the weeks that The Last Story has been on sale show that it was ranked among the top 5 multi platform sellers for two weeks following release, and currently sits at #5 on the latest Wii specific chart. No figures are provided, but whatever that number is, it can only serve to increase the total. I think the lesson here is that we as the public are given very limited information, and can't possibly make any accurate predictions based off of that.
The recent reports of Mistwalker's latest game topping the weekly sales charts in Japan raised a few interesting points, not the least of which were fans lamenting its "poor performance." I was quite surprised as to why selling over 100,000 units was considered poor, so I decided to do a little digging. A great resource for relatively recent sales data is Garaph.info, which compiles Enterbrain (Famitsu) sales data from the past few years. According to the data found in the news reports, The Last Story was Mistwalker's best game debut, and surpassed their last project, the Microsoft Game Studios published Lost Odyssey's lifetime sales during only its first week. I think that's called a success.
It should be noted before we proceed that the Garaph database is about a month out of date, with the latest entry being the last week of calendar year 2010. The sales of The Last Story would not therefore be included in the DB, and where tracked initially by Media Create, a seperate firm from the one used as the basis for these figures. The differences between the two have historically been statisitically insignificant, and even if they varied widely, the comparison would still be good enough for this blog post. I'm not advising Goldman Sachs to invest here, I'm just shooting down fanboy rants. I will also round the figures up to the nearest thousands increment, but the links I provide have all the gory details down to the single last box copy sold.
Since I consider Lost Odyssey very highly, I decided to dig a little further, and called up the data on the best selling Xbox 360 games. Here, I was surprised to see that LO was in fact the 12th best selling, out of 15 titles that moved over 100,000 units. That doesn't seem very good at all, considering that Mistwalker's orignal game, Blue Dragon was 4th, and sold a little over 200,000 units in its lifetime. Lost Odyssey was actually the worst selling RPG on the platform, and shockingly enough was surpassed by titles like Infinite Undiscovery, and The Last Remnant. The best performing RPG title on that list was also a surprise, Star Ocean 4 The Last Hope, which also sold over 200,000 units. The fact that all those games had the Square Enix logo on the box could explain this. Overall, on the 360, no title has ever came close to 300,000, with the best selling game being Grand Theft Auto IV, with approximately 210,000 units sold.
That said, The Last Story is a Wii title, so we should be looking at that platform instead. Here, the situation is much different, since Nintendo's own titles dominate sales and mind share. I kept the cut off point of at least 100,000 units sold the same, and the database returned a list of 64 titles that qualify. The top 11 best selling titles are all Nintendo published, and sold at least 1 million units, with the top seller, New Super Mario Bros. selling 4.1 million alone. The library is also more varied, so there are numerous tiles that would barely qualify as a "role playing game." I personally don't consider the likes of The Legend Of Zelda or Monster Hunter to be in the same genre, but I'll mention them here with the caveat. Monster Hunter 3 was the best selling third party title, with a hair over 1 million units. This should be considered the realistic ceiling that any other third party would shoot for in order to quantify mainstream "success" on the platform. But my personal lofty target would be Dragon Quest Swords, which is also barely an RPG, which sold roughly 400,000. The best selling "true" Wii RPG would therefore be Teles Of Symphonia Dawn Of the New World with approximately 200,000 units. The only other true entries in the genre on the platform are Tales of Graces, with 170,000, and Nintendo's own recently published Xenoblade with the "disappointing" (according to internet commentators) sales of 140,000. Personally, I'd consider Xenoblade the only true competition, since the Tales' and Dragon Quest series are already well established, and carry a brand recognition a new title can't possibly have. As a side note, the latest entry in the hardcore favorite Fire Emblem franchise also sold approximately 170,000 units in this current market. It also should be noted, that a personal favorite entry, Arc Rise Fantasia, isn't even found in the database. Whether that's due to an oversight on the part of the maintainer, or poor performance I can't say.
This brings us to the elephant in the room, and one of the loudest laments heard from its user base, the viability of the Playstation 3 market for RPG's. Using the same metrics, the database returns 66 titles that sold over 100,000 units. At the top, to no one's surprise, is Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIII, with just under 2 million units. What one should take note of instead is that this is the 13th (main) entry in the series. The first original property, which has since become a series, is White Knight Chronicles. The original title sold just under 340,000. This would be what I would unquestionably label as a "success," taking the entirety of the current Japanese console role playing game market into account. Right on its heels is the PS3 port of Tales Of Vesperia, topping its 360 sales by a healthy margin of 3:2. Bandai Namco's other HD port, Tales Of Graces F is teetering at 300,000, with a surprising ratio of 2:1 over its original Wii source. This could be considered the strongest argument against a Wii exclusive RPG. The White Knight Chronicles sequel follows with almost 250,000. The next game of note on the list is the PS3 port of Xbox 360's best selling title, GTA4, with sales just shy of 200,000, placing it firmly behind its 360 twin. Then comes another personal favorite, the SEGA published Resonance Of Fate, which charted here with sales in the 180,000 range, but failed to do so on the 360, with a ratio of 6:1. Considering this was a simultaneous release, where the previous Tales' games were year-old ports, this could be taken as the best indicator of console preference among RPG gamers. Fan favorite Demon's Souls follows with almost 160,000 units, and the other side of the port debate, Star Ocean 4 The Last Hope International is right behind it. The spread here isn't huge, but the 360 original still tops the un-enhanced PS3 version. Valkyria Chronicles is the next game on the list, if I'm including marginal titles, with 140,000. And Ar Tonelico III rounds out the list with 108,000 units.
The titles that can be realistically compared to The Last Story on the PS3 are White Knight, Resonance Of Fate, and Demon's Souls, which average to about 220,000 units sold between them, which is not far off from Blue Dragon's own 360 sales or the best selling Wii RPG. Taking all this information into account, a realistic forecast for The Last Story as a new role playing game in the current Japanese market would be ~200,000 units. Considering it's already half way there, and that the average sell-through^1 post release for the top selling original RPG's is ~100,000, I can't see how The Last Story can be considered a failure. All this information is subjective, of course, since the cost of producing each game title varies. It would not surprise me if Final Fantasy XIII did not pay for its own development while something like Xenoblade did, making one a failure and the other a success from a financial standpoint. And at the end of the day, that's the only point that matters to a game developer.
Appendix A:
1 - (LTD total - 1st week sales)/3 averaged for the best selling original titles for each console; Blue Dragon, White Knight Chronicles, Xenoblade.
Appendix B:
The Last Story is in fact Mistwalker's second title published by Nintnedo, the first being the DS strategy RPG ASH: Archaic Sealed Heat. While we're on the topic, that one sold about 150,000 units, and was also decried by internet people as a "failure." I'm not about to do this whole thing over again for portables, so we'll just have to assume the punters were wrong.
From the jump (added on February 19th, 2010):
Not to beat a (stupid) dead horse any further, but an important point seems to have been omitted by almost anyone chiming in on this topic (myself included). Enterbrain, and likely Media Create, sales data doesn't include any online retailer transactions. The Gamasutra compiled, Amazon specific, best seller lists from the weeks that The Last Story has been on sale show that it was ranked among the top 5 multi platform sellers for two weeks following release, and currently sits at #5 on the latest Wii specific chart. No figures are provided, but whatever that number is, it can only serve to increase the total. I think the lesson here is that we as the public are given very limited information, and can't possibly make any accurate predictions based off of that.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
The last express
You know the drill. I wasn't planning on posting this, but it was significant enough to force me to. The game itself may not be that great, but what's riding on it is. This is probably the last game I'll buy. Unless the entire industry turns, and rights itself overnight, I'll be taking an extended break from all the nonsense. Incidentally, the director of this game feels the same. Unfortunately, he should be the one to steer the entire industry in a new course. If he bails, we're all doomed.What we have here is Hiranobu Sakaguchi's The Last Story. Similarly to his last big project, Lost Odyssey, he is the chief game designer, his old friend Nobuo Uematsu is handling the music, and Kimihiko Fujisaka (Drakengard, Sands Of Destruction) is the contracted character artist. It's the same formula that brought us the original Final Fantasy (that one featuring Yoshitaka Amano), and I'm glad to see it still being used. On paper this game looks quite capable of delivering on the lofty expectations placed on it, the biggest unknown, unfortunately, is the actual game itself. We'll get to that in bit, first let's ogle the pretty packaging.
I never wanted to do this "unboxing" thing, since I'd never be the first to do it, nor have the facilities to do it properly (a well lit room, and a video camera). Over time I've felt that a lot of important information was lost by never showing off the innards of these game boxes. Not the least of which is the disc art, which is often times the best piece of art in the entire package. So let's do this thing. The thumbnail up top is the game box as it appears on store shelves. It's actually a standard Wii DVD case encased in a cardboard sleeve, which only shows off a girl's profile. The actual box art is quite a bit more colorful, but Sakaguchi likes him his minimalistic box covers, so a compromise was made. The first thing one does when picking up a game box off the shelf, is flip it over and check out the screens and info on the back. With The Last Story we get a neat surprise here, as it seems the cover image extends to the other side. Opposite the heroine, Kanan, on the reverse side we have a profile of main character, Elza, sporting not one, not two, but three individual ear piercings. Dude is hard core. The position of Elza's head mirrors Kanan's so exactly, that it's actually possible to reverse the box sleeve, slide it over the back cover, and create an "Elza Edition" of the main box art, if one so desires. Unfortunately a game can't be released without all that customary copyright information and technical details like supported controllers, and CERO rating stamps. This usually sullies the pretty artwork the artist worked so hard to create. Nintendo decided to reward fans by printing the full cover image without any of those trappings on the reverse of the insert. I didn't get the limited edition art booklet and mini CD which was some sort of half assed pre-order item, so this is as close as I'll get to an art book. Still, better than most run-of-the-mill releases. The disc and instruction manual are in full color, befitting a significant release from Nintendo. There was a little bit of confusion initially surrounding this release, as one of the first promotional pieces of art showed the main characters, and a bad ass white tiger. The tiger has since been downplayed in the official art, and nothing was ever mentioned about it on the official promotional materials detailing the world and characters. While the art on the disc omits the all-important tiger, I can say with authority the tiger is all up in this game, and is even more bad ass than a huge white tiger can possibly be.
I'm still fairly early in the game, still before the main mission that gets the story rolling gets handed down. The action, however, starts almost immediately when the player hits the (proverbial) start button and a lengthy tutorial dungeon ensues. Here the player is almost immediately given control of Elza, and thrown into a battle with an almost full battle party. The point is to proceed from battle scene to battle scene picking up and mastering new techniques along the way. After finishing it, and coming face to face with the awesomeness that is the tiger, the party heads back to the main city where the game is based. the next few hours are spent touring it while meeting the remaining principal characters and learning more techniques to progress through the game. The rushing slash attack, for example, is unlocked during a forced trip to the local coliseum.
The city is very large, and full of people, but none of them seem to be very convincing as townsfolk. They simply meander about bumping into each other while going through their random animations and spouting gibberish. The game tries to shoot for a Shumnue-like feeling of immersion and being surrounded by other people's lives, but falls a little short and lands somewhere closer to The Last Remnant. The imprecise and stiff character animations and movements are very reminiscent of that game. The graphics are also a technical mixed bag. Some textures looks excellent, like building walls and floors, while some, like characters clothing and hair look low res and artificially stretched. This is especially noticeable, and jarring during the cinematic presentation of cut scenes. If you're going to put a camera "there," at least make sure "there" looks as good as possible. The action camera does a decent job showing off the action during battles and exploration, but it too can trip over the age old "getting stuck in a corner and clipping through everything" hurdle. The frame rate is fairly solid, while not 60, not always 30 either. "Playable" is the adjective I'd use. Character controls are reasonably responsive, but animations feel very stiff. While using the automated control method the developers thought up as the default, almost all actions feel as if there is a second of lag between the press of the button, and the animation on screen. I remember mentioning somewhere that Japanese developers who try to innovate on standard RPG mechanics usually wind up with terrible action games instead of innovative RPG's and The Last Story feels like the exact boundary between the two. Not unplayably clunky, but not intuitive enough. If this was a Devil May Cry-like game it would (and should) get raked across the coals for these technical shortcomings, but since this game is an RPG first, and everything else second, I'll look past these issues and reserve judgement once I get further into it. The usual jumping off point in this situation would be the part where the game punishes the player for trying to fumble with the imprecise interface under stress, such as unbalanced boss encounter. (There was something worryingly close to this during the tutorial dungeon, but I was simply doing it wrong, and the battle was incredibly easy once the gimmick was uncovered.) I hope that at the very least if Sakaguchi hasn't learned how to make a workable action game over the decades, he at least learned enough as a director to avoid that scenario.
So far, the music too has not knocked any of my socks off. If anything, I've noticed that it isn't very "Uematsu-like." In most of his works it was still possible to draw connections to his previous efforts, going from Blue Dragon back to Final Fantasy X or even VI for example. So far, I haven't heard anything that reminds me of an older game. I can't say if this is a positive or negative, as I don't remember hearing anything that stuck in my head the same way certain themes from past games tend to do. Maybe this is a sign of Uematsu evolving his craft, or maybe it's a sign he phoned this one in. As with the game proper, I'm reserving final judgement until I experience more.
Interlude:
This didn't seem that important, but I didn't want to leave the issue hanging. The very next night after posting the above article, I went back to the game and almost immediately I was reminded of Final Fantasy VII music. So there you have it, Last Story harkens back to FFVII. I personally hate the FFVII music (and everything else about that game), but the similarities are only in arrangement, not actual composition. One can think of this as FFVII music done right then.
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