Subjective Fact

I was looking at the stats for this thing and I noticed that my bullshit Nier review is way ahead on page-hits. Like way way ahead. Like screw the hilarious-ass posts on the state of modern RPGs. Never mind the informative piece about video game lawsuits. No one cares about the struggles of an atheist in a religious community. Underrated video games no one really played: that's where it's at. Also: I'm huge in Russia for some reason. Hi Russia!

Anyway, video game reviews are mostly bullshit. Sure, some parts are objective, such as 'are the controls responsive,' or 'how long are the load times,' or 'is it a bug-ridden, unplayable mess using paying customers as beta testers.' But most of it is subjective, such as the graphics, the soundtrack, or the combat engine.

For example; the Castlevania games, especially the ones for the NES, have the best soundtracks. I just stated that as a fact. It's not a fact. It's an opinion. But I behave as if it's a fact, and if anyone challenges my stance on it I'll start screaming about music theory and composition and spending 16 years playing music and my questionable credentials as a musical and regular genius and dammit, boy, I was listening to video game music before you were even a mistake in your father's eye!

My credentials.

All that doesn't make me right though. Just opinionated and loud. Most video game reviews fall into this category. Sure, they'll usually break them up into categories like "Graphics," "Sound," "Replayability," and so on, but that doesn't do much beyond give the appearance of some kind of set criteria for comparison.

Games with strong online multiplayer (first-person shooters,) tend to score high in the 'replayability' department. But what if someone doesn't have a reliable broadband connection? Or, like me, they feel like a creepy old man by being forced to play games with strange teenage boys? They're saddled with the repetitive, 8 hour long single player campaign. And quite often the multiplayer is just that + strangers. My neighbors play Halo: Reach like 80% of the time. I don't mean "of the time they play video games," I mean "of the time they have electricity." I hate that game. I've watched them play the same three goddamn levels with the same one character and his fucking two dozen identical, palette-swapped twins for hours on end. It looks, subjectively, like the boringest shit someone could do with a turned-on television.

Okay, none of that had anything to do with the games I wanted to talk about. I just wanted to point out that video game reviews are only an accurate judge of a game's merit for the person doing the review.

Chrono Trigger

Here's something I don't understand. Popular opinion states that JRPGs are a dying breed. People don't want turn based combat, fixed character development, plucky teenagers or anime bullshit in their video games. Yet the 2008 re-release of this criminally overrated game not only has a 92 on Metacritic, it also won 2008's DS Game of the Year. Nostalgia is a motherfucker.

I have no idea why this game is still so popular. Sure, it's a good game. It's not a great game. Turn-based combat, silent protagonists, plucky teenagers and sprawling plot-lines were hardly a new thing in 1995. Square wasn't doing anything new or different. It had several different overworld maps, yeah, but they all looked like shit. There weren't any random encounters, but by the end of the SNES's life cycle there was no real reason there should have been. All that really meant was instead of waiting for an invisible timer to go off you looked for an enemy to bump into.

One of the things I, personally, liked about the game (back when I last played it in 2002, after buying it off of a friend,) was the plethora of decent (for the time,) side quests. Mostly they involved pretty standard things like fighting optional bosses for overpowered gear, multiple endings and a new game+ option.

Like I said, it's a good game. But it was also one of, like, a billion equally good games that came out that generation on that platform. Earthbound was also good, and had enough tongue-in-cheek self-awareness to still be fun today. Secret of Mana/Evermore used many of the same conventions, but also had live-action combat (as well as confusing ass radial menus.) Robotrek, Lufia, Breath of Fire, Super Mario RPG, Arcana, Illusion of Gaia, E.V.O., Shadowrun. Why single out Chrono Trigger? Especially now; with fan translations and emulators we have access to gems we missed the first time around, like Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean, Terranigma, several Dragon Warrior games, and Bahamut Lagoon.

It feels like (subjective, remember?) people are remembering the spirit of the time more than the actual experience of playing Chrono Trigger. Seriously, modern reviews of Chrono Trigger are just moon-eyed love letters to a bright and innocent past. It's as if CT is winning the 'Most Generically Agreeable Game For 16-bit Consoles" award. Which is sweet, I guess, but kind of unfair to the dozens of other equally deserving games.

Koudelka

was a survival horror RPG released in the States in 2000. Don't worry if you haven't heard of it. I had almost convinced myself playing it had just been something I had made up while drunk then forgot I had made up. It wasn't until I recently worked through my backlog of current-gen RPGs and started raiding the past's dumpsters that I even remembered it wasn't a hallucination.

I'm going from memory and the Wikipedia page here, but I remember loving the shit out of this game. The combat was turn-based on a grid and had a pretty unique (for the time,) feature of breakable equipment. This wasn't a new thing, I personally first remember it cropping up in Final Fantasy Legend from 1989, but it was the first time I remember a RPG using it to heighten tension. And again, Survival Horror/RPG crossovers (with the exception of Parasite Eve,) weren't like a common thing at the time.

It also had decent voice acting at a time when most games either didn't use voice overs (Final Fantasy,) or shouldn't have used them (Resident Evil.) Graphically it was, well, PS1 Milk-Carton People, but it worked from an aesthetic standpoint. What I mean by that is that the game had a consistent visual style, which is about the best anyone can say about early faux-3D games from our perspective here in The World Of Tomorrow.

Koudelka, like many games and women I develop unhealthy obsessions with, received polarized reviews, with most reviews falling between 2 and 9. See? Reviews don't mean anything. I mean, if a game received a score of 2 out of 10, that would imply that the game was physically unplayable, like it would crash at the third boss or turn your Playstation into a spider dispenser or something. While a review of 10/10 would mean "This game is perfect and there is nothing anyone could ever do or suggest that would improve or detract from it. It also cures herpes." Whatever. Most of the praise was aimed at the dark atmosphere, combat system and audio, with most of the complaints being leveled at the dark atmosphere, combat system and audio.

It's a unique game, is how I would best sum it up. If you're reading this then you're obviously deep enough in the backwaters of video game history to expect more from a game than another Wolfenstein/Doom knockoff or another heap of bullshit+zombies+gimmick shovelware. I also realize that I'm writing this about 9 years too late for most people to actually play the damn thing, so instead please download Parasite Eve from PSN and pretend that it's somewhat different and set 100 years in the past and you'll get a pretty good idea of what you missed.