Nintendo

Puzzle and Dragon and Mario

Even though Puzzle and Dragon Z 3DS bundle isn’t out for a week, a demo recently hit the store and drew my attention. I have never had a strong affinity towards Bejeweled and its kin, but I have fond memories of playing Puzzle Quest in the late hours of the night. Trading in traditional turn-based combat for Match-3 gameplay makes of the perfect portable RPG, one that can be consumed it bite-sized offerings but still offer the feeling of progressing and growing a character. When I first heard of the mobile game Puzzle and Dragon years ago, the Pokemon team-building aspect combined with the unique twist on the formula sounded intriguing, but being a title relegated to smart phones my access to them was practically nonexistent. Cut to Nintendo announcing a complete package version of the game for the 3DS, one that lacks the usual real-money usage that would have likely turned me away from the game to begin with. Sounds perfect, right?

The 3DS demo only covers two game modes of the Mario version, which is the much smaller and more straightforward of the two. The basic game is a grid filled with multiple colors of gems, each representing a different element. Matching three or more of these gems causes them to disappear, triggering their in-game effect — mainly causing damage or healing yourself — and causing new random gems to fall from the top of the board. getting multiple matches in this way multiplies their effectiveness. The twist on the formula here is that instead of moving one gem one space at a time, each turn consists of dragging a gem along the board as much as you can in two seconds. Every time the gem goes into a new space, it trades positions with the gem there.

The demo doesn’t really allow for team-building, but from what I can gather a team is comprised of six members, you, four captured monsters, and a teammate, each with an ability that charges up over multiple turns and can be used to alter the board, such as turning certain types of gems into other types of kinds of gems or changing the amount of time you have to move gems on the board. The type of damage each element didn’t seem to matter, the game seemed to care more about the length of the combo. Enemies are given a number next to their character model that shows how many turns until they attack. At least in the demo, the player was quite fragile and couldn’t survive more than a few attacks. The “dungeons” were fairly straightforward, essentially fighting battle after battle until you get to the boss at the end. I could see the more limited Mario half of the bundle become quite repetitive.

At first, I had quite a bit of fun, analyzing each screen and formulating paths to maximize the number of matches. The game barely feels like playing a Match-3, instead it feels like using the same design space to make something far more unique. The problem is that it lacks any sense of progression or depth. None of the team-building aspects are there and most of the enemies are just Mario characters, which just consist of mushrooms and turtles with different combinations of spikes and wings. Admittedly, this is a demo and for a much more abridged version of the game, but it did kind of turn me off of the idea of shelling out money to buy the whole thing. Puzzle and Dragon Z is obviously meant to be the much more expansive and enriching experience, but the short bit of the Super Mario Bros. I played dropped this from a must-buy to a wait-and-see.

Final Fantasy Theatrhythm: Curtain Call

I’m not a very involved music guy. Whatever gets regurgitated on the radio ad nauseam consists of most of my musical palette. So most of the time I am drawn to the music of the media I consume on a far greater rate, namely video game and film music. There is something soothing about the reserved, atmospheric quality of many video game scores and something exhilarating about the more uptempo that serves as the background for intense, action-heavy scenes. Video game music rides a fine line of having to be instantly recognizable and infinitely repeatable, all while mixing into an interactive setting where the amount of time music is heard is ultimately up to the player. Whereas a musician or film director controls how much of a song is heard, the longer a player stays in a town, the longer they hear that town’s theme.

And few other series have as proud of a tradition as Final Fantasy. The long-running, quality-oscillating series has no doubt been at the center of video game music even through it’s worst of times. Even during the series’ worst games (II, VIII, XIII), Final Fantasy needs is omnipresent score to keep the feeling of the series alive. Square Enix knows this and felt the need to celebrate it by making Final Fantasy Theatrhythm, a game with a title on par with the nonsense usually attached to SE releases. Theatrhythm was a fine attempt a rhythm-based game using FF music, though it lacked any sort of interesting structure outside of the songs and the number of songs felt limited, especially given some of the omissions.

Curtain Call, last year’s sequel, is more or less the same game but with a hell of a lot more, a general improvement overall. Many of the glaring issues are still there, but there is now more of the good stuff to counter it.

For the uninitiated, Theatrhythm‘s gameplay is divided into three different types: Field Stages, Battle Stages, and Event Stages. Gameplay occurs entirely on the bottom screen while the top screen is dedicated to the note track. Notes will come sliding in from the left side of the screen and as they reach the right side an appropriate tap of the stylus will hit the note. Every successful note will score points, more less depending upon the accuracy, and hitting consecutive is essential to hitting high scores. In Field Stages, a single note track appears as the character walks forward. Characters walk further the longer you keep a streak going and landing critical hits will speed them up. Battle Stages resemble the battle screen of the older titles, where your four party members line up against a monster. Each party member has a track of its own and successful hits on the music track make them attack the enemy. Finally, Event Music has a track of music playing over an FMV of the relevant game from which the music came from.

The party you pick does matter in the slightest. Playable characters range from at least one choice per game to 3 or more for the more popular ones. Each of them have different stats and learn different abilities. Strength and Magic stats are relevant to Battle Stages while Agility and Endurance affect Field Stages. Abilities tend to be passive benefits, like slowly healing HP for every successful hit or triggering damage after a certain number of critical hits. Items can be used for a one time benefit during a fight, such as temporarily increasing a stat or adding other modifiers in different ways.

The main form of the game is the Quest Medley mode, where players travel across an overworld playing songs to progress, fighting bosses, and collecting items. This mode helps give an overarching structure when compared to the first game, which offered very little beyond just playing the songs from a list. Each map has different paths to success and provides a variety of songs to play, which helps the people like me who would prefer to play a random song over and over again rather than get bored of the ones I like. For all this though, the mode still tends to get repetitive, if more slowly.

The repetitive nature of the game is the least of its worries. Rhythm games aren’t exactly known for their variety outside of the songs available and this game was only ever going to appeal to Final Fantasy fans anyways. This is why strong base mechanics are important to rhythm games. What does harm the game to an extent are these very same mechanics and how limited they are by the 3DS.

I don’t think its unreasonable to say that many of the best rhythm games have a unique input method for the games themselves: Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Dance Dance Revolution, DJ Hero, etc. Now I don’t feel its necessary to have this, I’ve gotten my mileage out of Audiosurf and am looking forward to this summer’s Amplitude. But video game controllers do not often work the best for these types of games when compared to something designed with it specifically in mind. Here is where Curtain Call runs into problems. With one note track, the variety in the note charts is wholly underwhelming after a while. Even in Battle Stages, where there are 4 tracks, there is no method to switching between them, they are functionally one single track and the game even tells you to treat them as such. Imagine a Guitar Hero game with only one button and a strum bar and you will have a better idea of how the game feels. There is some variation by requiring different directional sweeps of the stylus to land notes, but the is the only thing done to change up the difference between tap notes and hold notes.

It mostly comes down to how willing you are to put up with mediocre mechanics to listen to compressed versions of Final Fantasy music you love. Don’t get me wrong, I have fun rocking it “Clash at the Big Bridge” and “One-Winged Angel” as much as the next fanboy and the inclusion of more spinoff titles and even further reaching DLC tracks is a plus. But even though the game does ramp up its difficulty on the highest level, anyone looking for an in-depth or captivating experience would best be served elsewhere. It’s fans of the music only for this one.

The art style is also terrible, but mostly ignorable.