Today I was struck by a notion. A particularly powerful notion, rather uncommonly potent for something of this sort: why aren’t there any two-hour games?

I know, I know. The answer seems obvious enough. Nobody likes short games, right? Especially now, with the whole global economy in such a rut. If we’re to shell out $50 or $60 USD for a new title, we want to garner more than five or six hour enjoyment, right?

Of course we do. We all want to get our money’s worth, and the only truly quantifiable means we have to measure that is with the number of hours we spend with a game. I can browse through my PS3′s memory and handily see that while I’ve invested a whopping 73 hours into Armored Core: For Answer, I’ve barely soaked 8 hours into Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2. Clearly, AC4A is the better giant-robot brawler–it’s the obvious conclusion. But this way of thinking is a fallacy, one I’ve willingly bought into for years–and I know I’m not alone.

But the gaming industry has come a long way in the past decade. Everyone, developer and gamer alike, see gaming as mainstream. It’s an art, now. It produces summer blockbusters just as well (or better than) Hollywood. Almost every time you read a developer interview, someone drops a quote about how modern games are becoming so much more like movies.

They’ve got the action, they’ve got the characters and, boy-oh-boy, they’ve got the audience. Recent polls suggest that more than 50% of the adult population in the United States consider themselves gamers. That’s roughly the same proportion of adult Americans who fell out of their homes to vote in the 2008 presidential elections.*

So if that’s true, and games are becoming more like movies, why aren’t they short like movies? The typical format of almost any game follows the same basic pattern: kill stuff, watch a cut-scene, and repeat. We can groan with disappointment that Uncharted took us only 8 hours to beat, but what if you were watching those same 8 hours play out in a theater? I’d walk out. Movies have two-hour lengths for a reason: people have short attention spans. If games are to be more like movies, let’s start with cutting down the length, a lot.

Here’s my bold new vision for the future of gaming: make the games really, really short. Allow us gamers to move from opening titles to credits in one, easy sitting. I’d love to be able to start and finish a game in the few hours I have each morning before class. And give us more control! Interactivity is the biggest (read: sole) selling point of games, and to continue with the movie analogy, why not let us manipulate more than just the action scenes.

Imagine a game with a truly branching storyline, where you control every action the protagonist takes. He or She could be a hero, or a villain–even a victim. The story could play out dozens, or hundreds of ways. Imagine watching a movie where you could decide exactly what the protagonist does (or says) at every opportunity? Give us choices and consequences with the gameplay. What I’m talking here is the kind of freedom in games we’ve been promised for years, but never actually seen.

Mass Effect promised us choices, but neglected to give those choices any real consequences. Fallout 3 promised moral ambiguity and sufficient choices to effect hundreds of alternate endings, yet delivered a system whereby we were awarded points for every evil act or good deed, drenching the entire affair in moral absolutism–and delivered one of the worst, most poorly-conceived endings in gaming history (oh, yeah, right up there with Suikoden IV). So what’s wrong? What’s keeping these games from truly becoming interactive films?

Oh, yeah–it’s the runtime. The reason games don’t have long, fully-branched storylines is, simply, that there’s too much to script. When gamers demand at least 12 hours out of the average game–and at least three times that number for an RPG–the costs involved in making a truly compelling tale where player choice has any noticeable effect is all but impossible.

But what if those twelve hours become two? Uncharted could have been four different games–each as long as a movie–with the same amount of work that went one 8-hour experience. Imagine starting up an RPG where you can save the world, destroy the world, or simply try to survive it–and imagine seeing a fully fleshed-out, scripted story no matter which path you take. I’ve got goosebumps already, I do.

Developers simply need to stop fixating on game-lengths. And gamers, we need to bloody-well stop demanding it of them. The hundred-hour game is a relic of the past, and if gaming is ever to evolve, it’ll need to move past such temporal concerns. Isn’t the industry sufficiently established now that we can hope for quality over quantity? Let’s see if we can’t get the game industry to embrace the same level of diversity and imagination that’s made Hollywood such a success–I promise you, that’s where the future lies.

*It’s a bit interesting (and disheartening) to consider that the first statistic (50% gamers) covers the entire population of adults in the USA, whereas the second statistic (50% voters) covers a smaller demographic–sans immigrants, convicts and aliens.

Sources: PewInternet, InfoPlease

Make no mistake about it: Final Fantasy XII is an average game. But it’s a kind of average that most games can only dream of. It is spectacularly average, and could very easily have been an all-round superb experience if not for all the ways it went wrong.

Final Fantasy XII is the second traditional Final Fantasy Title to be produced for the Playstation 2. It is also the last. FFXII incorporates many features new to the franchise–most notable a real-time combat system–that has unjustly polarized fans. You either love it, or you hate it. Indeed, it seems that the game in its entirety is either loved or hated, depending upon who you ask–and when you ask him or her. It’s all very subjective, and very messy.

Much of the strong emotion swirling around this title seems to be sorely undeserved. Final Fantasy XII, is should be nowhere near as polarizing as it is. It’s a game that fails to add any substantial new element to the ever-more tiresome RPG genre, and fails even to produce a strong narrative–something that has been, traditionally, the hallmark of the series. In some areas FFXII does very, very well. In other areas, it does very, very poorly. In the end, it’s nothing but a mediocre affair.

Who was the protagonist, again?

The aspect of Final Fantasy XII that gets the most (unwarranted) criticism is the combat system. The game gives the player expansive, detailed environments crawling with a variety of beasts to fight. You engage in combat by approaching any monster you choose (or are forced into it by the monster choosing you) and thereby initiate combat.

The game uses the very same active-time battle system that was featured in FFVI, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy IX and Final Fantasy X-2. Instead of the game automatically deciding when a turn ends–and thereby when you can issue commands to various party members–you get to choose when to pause the game and issue commands.

Because all actions occur in real-time in the overworld map (the ONLY traversable map in this game) there is always the possibility that additional monsters can join the fray. Also, when an enemy retreats you are able to pursue it–just as the enemies can choose to pursue you, should you choose to flee. It’s the same combat system we’ve always had with some flash and dazzle sprinkled on top–and the cosmetic changes work marvelously well, turning what would otherwise be a lethargic repeat of games past-played into something seemingly new and invigorating.

A particularly well-embraced feature of the game is the Gambit System. The gambit system is little more than an artificial-intelligence that you can customize for each individual character that determines which actions they take in particular situations. Other games (notable the .hack and Tales of… series) have had similar features, but Final Fantasy XII’s Gambit system is by far the most detailed.

Gambits range from the very-general–such as having a character set-up to immediately attack any enemy that is targeting the party leader–to the very specific–having a character use the spell Firaga whenever an enemy’s health is below 30%. Gambits direct the initial actions of the other characters in the party, but individual orders from the party leader (the player, naturally) will Always override the gambit. Gambits can be turned on or off, depending on the player’s preference.

In addition to the over-abundance of mundane monsters (too many of which use the same models with different coloring) that must be fought for hours on end in order to level up and/or attain that precious gil there are three types of “special” enemies. There are rare monsters, that only appear after certain conditions are met, there are “Hunt” monsters which compose the majority of the side-quests in the game, and, as always, there are bosses.

Above all else, it is important to mention that Final Fantasy XII’s combat system is actually fun to play. Yes, it gets repetitive–but it is addictive and it is fast. No other RPG comes close to this level of sheer enjoyment in combat–from big bosses to mundane random monsters wandering the desert. It’s the same system, at heart, as it’s been for years–but in Final Fantasy XII it has an energy that previous titles have lacked. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that you can speed up or slow down the pace of the game, at your leisure.

Space: the final frontier. Let’s face it: outer space is awesome. The reality, the possibility, everything about the universe beyond our small blue planet is infinitely compelling and interesting. And the vehicle we use to traverse this great expanse of pulsars, nebulae and impenetrably dark black holes—science fiction—has infinite reach. Enter the universe of Star Ocean: The Last Hope, and prepare to take those bold first steps beyond the Oort Cloud.*

To the uninitiated, the Star Ocean series occurs in a universe very-similar to that of Star Trek. You have analogous versions of the United Federation of Planets, the Prime Directive, and Vulcans. But The Last Hope is a prequel to the other three Star Ocean titles, and it takes place long before any of those exist. The story opens at the dawn of human space exploration—the protagonist, Edge Maverick, is one of the first humans to travel aboard a faster-than-light Starship. You leave Earth wholly ignorant of the great universe beyond, on a mission of discovery. Of course, this premise is entirely reminiscent of the oft-maligned Star Trek prequel, Enterprise. You’re on your own out there, with no one to rely on but yourself.

My merging a Roddenberry-esque Star Trek setting with typical Japanese panache and role-playing staples, Star Ocean creates a setting that is familiar to the average gamer, but still retains a unique character—and even charm—all its own. To those who have played through previous iteration in the series, The Last Hope is precisely what you’d expect to see in a Star Ocean game: it deftly manages to be both insanely enjoyable and utterly infuriating, in equal measure. Is The Last Hope a fun game? Yes, by the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly, it most certainly is. But is it a good game? That, dear friends, may well be an entirely different matter.

Combat is fun and has a lot of depth: though many fights can be tedious, boss-fights are incredibly fun.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope is a role-playing game with real-time combo-based combat. Ten years ago, that would have been a huge badge of honor. These days, real-time combat in an RPG is pretty old-hat. And to be fair, the way in which The Last Hope implements the combat system is fairly archaic in its own right. When you run across the field, you encounter monsters. Once you encounter monsters, you leave the field and transition to a special combat-arena: a small enclosed space (generally only one per area). After you load the fight, the game’s camera will zoom in on each enemy individually. Ostensibly this would happen to alert the player to the type of enemies he or she will be fighting, so the player can plan accordingly… only there’s really not a lot of room to plan in an action-RPG. Frequently, you will be spending more time waiting for combat-areas to load and the camera to display each enemy than you will actually fighting those enemies. And once you win, you must endure the typical post-victory fanfare—all of which consumes just a little bit more time than it ought to, and quickly becomes no more than an annoyance.

The combat itself is fast-paced and fun, though there are a few things I didn’t care for with the basic mechanics and controls. Fortunately, all of the buttons can be assigned to different commands, so most issues are easy to resolve. You can directly control any of the party-members, almost all of which are fun (and effective) to use, and can switch between them mid-battle with ease. Combos can be built up with normal attacks, special attacks and various symbolic (read: magic) techniques, and can be quite rewarding depending on how much time you invest. The addition of several other elements—rush mode and and blindsiding—make combat a whole lot of fun. Though, admittedly, at the easier difficulties most battles entail little more than tapping the attack button and waiting for everything to die.

Similar to the other big science-fiction epic role-playing game on the Xbox 360, Mass Effect, The Last Hope gives the player a galaxy map and several different planets to explore. The number of locations you can visit is rather limited, though each planet has a unique “identity” to it, but each area is very large with tons of areas to explore–and rest assured, you will be revisiting planets plenty of times, finding new treasures and toppling new foes.

The areas you’ll be running around are enormous and look fantastic. Though many of the basic terrain textures and models are overly simple (the world can look very outdated at times) the water and lighting effects can be astonishing—and the level of detail in the design, textures and animation of the various monsters you’ll encounter can be downright jaw-dropping. The various magic-attacks are equally impressive, and make exploring and fighting a visual feast. Just exploring the world at a leisurely pace, and watching the various creatures dart about their world, can be entertaining. The one concern I have is that, perhaps, the areas are too big. You can spend a great deal of time running around, exploring every little nook and cranny of the map, without really getting much of a reward. There are a few items you can find in the dimmest periphery, but they’re typically the same generic items you can buy in a store for a lot less trouble.

Not quite the word I'd choose....

As amazing as the exterior environments are, I feel The Last Hope’s interior levels could use a bit of work. My problem is twofold: first, though we can rotate the camera, we cannot set the camera’s distance from the player character, which can make narrow interior areas feel incredibly claustrophobic. Navigating these narrow paths is also a bit iffy as Edge never seems to move at the right pace. You can toggle between walking and running, but walking always feels a bit too slow to me, and running a bit too fast. Because the interior environments are just as detailed as the outside environments—lots of tiny details, blinking lights, consoles, etc.—running can be dizzying, but if you walk it’ll take forever to get anywhere.

Outside of the strong, central storyline that will take anywhere from 40-50 hours to complete, The Last Hope holds a breadth of additional content for players to wade through. There are tons of side-quests to complete, tasks to take, character-based ending to unlock (there are a total of nine), items to craft (and invent) and various interactive scenes with your party members to participate in. There’s a lot to do, and all of it’s fun. One of the first things that stood out to me was that the jokes in The Last Hope can actually be funny, and it’s been a long time since I’ve played an RPG that made me laugh. The entire game is infused with Aoi Sakuraba’s soundtrack, which makes even the most mundane of scenes seem, somehow, epic. The Last Hope is the kind of game where you can have a great deal of fun, no matter what you’re doing.

But not every star shines brightly in this Star Ocean. While a vast majority of the game can be insanely fun and enjoyable, just enough flys off in the opposite direction—aspects that are irritating, infuriating, and downright bad.

*The Oort Cloud is a hypothetical spherical-shaped cloud of comets surrounding Sol, whose outer extent defines our Sun’s gravitational boundary. Also called the Hill’s Cloud, it is supposed to exist 50,000 AU (slightly less than 1LY) beyond the Sun.

Braid. Flower. Linger in Shadows. Even Prince of Persia, Valkyria Chronicles, Street Fighter IV, Echochrome and Killzone 2. All of these games—and far too many more—have been called “art.” We’ve all heard someone say that a certain game somehow blurs the line between gaming and art. We’ve all heard of the games that are nearly indistinguishable from art. Games that are, in fact, actually art.

It seems nearly everyone is pushing the same, tiresome argument. Be they members of the industry—developers, marketers and the self-styled journalists—or the general gaming populace. One week cannot pass without a story hitting N4G declaring the artistic value of one title after another. Games, too many people say, are rapidly becoming a new form of artistic expression.

The whole notion is brimming over with hot-air and bullshit, if you ask me.

A Stunningly Beatiful Game? Yes. A Work Of Art? No.

How? More importantly: why? Games aren’t art. Games incorporate art, but cannot be art. Let’s look for a moment at what we’re dealing with. What is a game? What is art? To say it simply, art is subjective. Games are objective. The two concepts are diametrically opposed. That is, after all, why games have objectives. This generation we call them Achievements, or Trophies. You take two people, sit them in front of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and ask them what they see—you’ll get two different answers. Do the same with a game—with two hundred people—and you’ll only get one. The nature of any one artistic work varies according to the perceptions of the person viewing it, because when we look at art, we’re very rarely told how we should view it. Art isn’t explained to us—it’s something we explain to ourselves. How could anyone possibly think the same applies to games?

So there you have it. Games are not art. Games will never be art, ever. It is an impossibility. Why, then, do so many people wish so fervently for this mad dream to be truth? I see three possible explanations, all of which are likely at play.

Let’s look at Braid. An unconscionable number of people have leaped forth to label Braid as a work of art. Why? Explanation #1: it’s pretty.

Gee Golly. Ain't That There a Purdy Sky?

That seems to be the most common argument for most games. If it’s pretty, surely it must be art! Braid is indeed a very pretty game. I won’t even try to argue that point. The backgrounds look lovely, and the music is beautiful. When you put everything together, the whole bloody symphony of color, sound and motion, it’s breathtaking. But is Braid art? No. Braid is a game. In fact, it’s a very familiar game—it’s Mario. It’s a spruced-up version of the same two-dimensional platformer we’ve been playing in various forms for decades. Yes, it has a nifty time-manipulation gimmick. Yes, it’s very pretty—but it’s very much, undeniable, a game.

So there’s the “how,” of the explanation. We gamers see a varied palette—a tragic rarity these days—and we take notice. Hell, these days any game that’s not a first-person shooter with a gritty, violent atmosphere demands our attention, few though they might be. The more spectacular the art in a game, the more likely we are to look past the game and see only the art. But we must remember that art is only one aspect of these games, not the sole aspect. Art is art, and games are games.

Why do we even want games to be art, anyhow? Even I think it’s pretty damned pretentious to go around saying one thing is art, and another thing isn’t. Good God—that’s what artists do. The people who hang out in museums and coffee shops, constantly criticizing the work of others instead of producing anything ourselves. All artistic communities thrive on arrogance and pretension. I, myself, have spent an uncomfortable amount of time with the literature-elite: writers and editors that exude an almost tangible aura of asinine snobbishness and narrow-minded stupidity. Why on Earth would any gamer want anything at all to do with the cult of art?

When it was first announced, Infinite Undiscovery was one slick looking game. On the surface, it looked fantastic: developed the Tri-Ace, the team behind the relatively popular Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile games, replete with a stunningly creative premise, an entirely new gameplay engine, and stunning next-generation graphics. The central concept of the story—that of giant chains reaching up into the sky and wrapping around the moon is intriguing both thematically and aesthetically, seemed like an excellent premise for a new RPG franchise that might one day rival the behemoth Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests of the world.

But, somewhere along the way, something went wrong. Infinite Undiscovery, a game that should not just have been good—it had the pedigree of an instant-classic, after all—fell apart. Infinite Undiscovery is a game built around a plethora of new ideas—many of which are very good—but none of which are implemented into the game very well. In fact, nearly every aspect of the game is implemented poorly, almost as though Infinite Undiscovery was created as an example of what not to do in a game. If we’re lucky, perhaps someday in the future developers will use it as exactly that: a guidepost on how to avoid making another infinitely underwhelming game.

Can't You Just Feel The Tedium?

Infinite Undiscovery boasts a fully real-time combat system that utilizes the general field locations for combat rather than transitioning the player to a separate area for battle. It sounds all well and good on paper, but, as is usually the case with boasts, the concept falls flat when you look at the reality of the situation.

As Capell (and only Capell) you run around outside fighting monsters. After you defeat monsters, they will eventually respawn, though there is a mild delay. You can sheathe and unsheathe your sword: you can’t fight without your sword in your hand, and you can’t interact with objects with a blade between your fingers. Constantly switching between the two is tedious and unnecessary. You have access to two basic combat moves, a fast attack and a heavy attack, which can be chained together for a small number of combos. You can also play Capell’s magical flute to use a small number of magic spells, or ask for healing. The magical flute doesn’t contribute much to either the combat or the story of Infinite Undiscovery.

One of the principal gimmicks of Infinite Undiscovery is the large cast of characters that can join your party, for a total of eighteen.  Unfortunately, most of those characters have very little development, and aren’t all that useful in gameplay. In comparison to Suikoden V, Infinite Undiscovery’s inability to incorporate a mere 18 characters into the game is physically painful, and indicative of the overall laziness on the part of the developers. For one inane reason or another, Infinite Undiscovery does not allow you to control any character other than Capell, although you can temporarily assume control of their special abilities. For example, you can take over control of one character to shoot an arrow at an exploding barrel, or mind-control a monster.

Sound fun? It’s not. The controls are pretty clunky. That arrow you want to shoot at that barrel (which, of course, will explode, damaging any nearby enemies) requires you to manually aim the arrow. By the time you turn the character around to even seen the barrel–and the character turns very, very slowly–most of the enemies will no longer be at the barrel. They will be right next to you. Attacking. Ouch. But what about the mind control ability? That sounds fun, too, doesn’t it? It’s not. Nine times out of ten one of your allies (which, as I’ve mentioned, you cannot control) will kill the enemy monster before you can mind-control it. And when you do succeed in mentally dominating the beast, you’d best be careful, because it will wear off very quickly and you’ll have to be fast (and lucky) if you want to re-cast mind-control before your allies kill the beast. This can be particularly infuriating when the game forces you to use these special abilities to proceed with the story. All of the characters have multiple abilities, and none of them are implemented well. To be blunt, it’s a complete mess.

I realize I’m focusing on the negative here–and to be honest, there’s little else to see. I will take care to say that the battle system can actually be fun. At times, given the proper planetary alignment and stellar positioning. The AI for your allies is passable–they’ll heal you frequently and fight the enemy on their own, and I’ve not seen any major path-finding issues. Running into a group of giant, angry cobras and swinging your sword around wildly can be a lot of fun. The controls, though a bit laggy, are sufficiently responsive that when mixed with the above-average combat animation and visual effects draw the player into a rather visceral combat experience. You can really have a lot of fun just going around fighting weaker enemies. I say weaker with a bit of a bite, you see, as fighting enemies that are stronger than you is not at all fun. In fact, that brings me to the single greatest flaw in the recipe that is Infinite Undiscovery:

If you want to use an item in combat–say to heal yourself, replenish your magician’s mana, or cure a status ailment–you’re sorely out of luck. The game does not pause for the menu. Well, that’s not entirely true. When you open the menu, your characters pause–they stop fighting and stand still–but the enemy doesn’t. Oh, and there’s also a bit of a lag when opening up the menu. If it doesn’t sound like much fun, it’s because it’s not. You really have to get used to fighting and winning all of your battles without using any items. This, coupled with the myriad of other flaws in Infinite Undiscovery, makes me think that Tri-Ace either never bothered with the playtesting phase of development, or simply ignored the comments their testers made. It’s rather inexcusable for Infinite Undiscovery to be lacking such a simple feature.

Gundam Battle Universe is the fourth iteration in the Gundam Battle series of games for the Playstation Portable, and easily surpasses the previous three in terms of content, depth and fun. Gundam Battle Universe is a stunningly addictive action-combat game that can be played in either a third person or first-person perspective, where players assume control of giant humanoid mechs, called mobile suits, in battle after gut-wrenching battle. It is also the single best game to land on the Playstation Portable.

Offering more than one-hundred and thirty different mobile suits, all with multiple weapons, optional equipment and infinitely-customizable stats, Gundam Battle Universe provides an unprecedented degree of player freedom. Covering the entire first half of the Universal Century, from UC 0079 to UC 0093, Gundam Battle Universe is guaranteed to make any Gundam fan let out an unrestrained howl of glee at the sheer spectacle. Make no mistake, Gundam Battle Universe is a game with a massive scale—but even if you choose to ignore the ambitious size of the game, you’re still face to face with a lighting-fast action game that will, I promise, demand hours and hours of your time.

At its heart, Gundam Battle Universe is an astoundingly engrossing experience, and certainly stands at the top of any list of the best Gundam-themed games of all time. Even beyond the franchise, Gundam Battle Universe stands proud as an excellent game that belongs in every PSP gamer’s library.

The Level Of Detail Is Unprecedented In A PSP Game.

Although Gundam Battle Universe provides both an “instant action” single-player versus mode and the ability to connect with another PSP for either cooperative or competitive multilayer matches, the glistening core of the game lies in its single-player campaign mode.

Because Gundam Battle Universe covers such a vast expanse of the war-torn history of the Universal Century, each campaign mode is divided into smaller sub-groups defined by the year, and each player-created pilot is only able to ally with a single faction during any of these years. For example, in UC 0079, during the infamous One Year War, you can choose to side with either the Earth Federation or the Republic of Zeon—and once you’ve made your choice, there’s no going back. Once you move into the 0083 campaigns, you’ll be able to choose your faction again, so you’re never locked into a single faction for the whole game. For example, you could choose to be an Earth Federation pilot in UC 0079, only to side with the Zeon remnant in UC 0083.

Mobile suit combat can be a chaotic affair when you first start out. The battlefields are filled with enemies and allies, giant beams of ignited gas burn through the air and immense volleys of missiles streak through the skies. The key to victory lies in being fast—if you don’t take any hits, you can win. This is especially true later in the game, when several of the enemies possess special attacks that can blast through all of your armor with a single hit. You have to constantly boost up and down, dashing from side to side, all the while switching between weapons, watching your objectives, and taking out multiple hostile units. It can be quite a handful, particularly for new players. Luckily, the game’s customization feature allows you to tweak the stats of your mobile suit and its weapons, doing anything from increasing your mobility, armor and thruster speed, to increasing the accuracy and firepower of any of your different weapons.

Everyone who’s ever lifted up a controller, or set hand to a mouse, to play a game knows that some games  are good, some games are bad, and some games can be so enthralling experience that they defy any such  label. Those are the games we find ourselves playing when the alarm clock buzzes at six in the morning,  and we realize we forgot to sleep. Those are the games that drive us to become what we are: gamers.

Persona 4 is one such game. I could call it a good game, or a great game, but neither term fully captures  the essence of Persona 4. Persona 4 is a game that will devour a great swath of time from your life—and  you will be thankful for every spent hour.

Are You In Love Yet?

Persona 4 is a Japanese role-playing game (JRPG) whose story revolves around a group of high school  students gaining superpowers, fighting bad guys, and having fun, while all the while balancing both the  supernatural and mundane aspects of their lives. Sounds clichéd? It is—not that it matters in this case, but  I’ll get to that later—and it should also sound very familiar. The premise of Persona 4 is painfully similar to  that of Persona 3, which was released to critical acclaim in 2006. It is true that Persona 4 introduces  nothing new to the JRPG genre, or even the Persona series itself. The premise, story-structure, character  archetypes, presentation, graphics and gameplay are virtually identical to Persona 3, and even were we to  forget that, the basic presentation and mechanics are nothing unique. But, even with that, Persona 4  remains an exceptional game.

Gameplay in Persona 4 is rigidly divided into two distinct areas: the “real life” part of the game, where the  player runs through town making friends, working, and going to school, and the “fantasy world” part of the  game, which is devoted almost entirely to combat. This rigid divide means you’ll always know when to  expect dialog-led social interaction, and you’ll always know when to expect a fight. Things can be a bit  predictable, but Persona 4 endeavors to maintain a laid-back atmosphere throughout, so the stark  juxtaposition never becomes too disconcerting.

The fantasy-world of Persona 4 is very different from Persona 4′s Dark Hour thematically, but very similar to  it structurally. The game plays out in the Japanese town of Inaba. At the player’s discretion, you can go to a  particular point in town and, from there, travel to the fantasy realm to progress through the story, level up,  or search for various items that the people of Inaba want you to find for them. There are a handful of  different dungeons you access one-at-a-time as you progress through the game. Each time a dungeon  opens up, you have a set amount of time to beat the dungeon (which advances the story) or the game will  end. Once you’ve cleared a dungeon, however, you can move back through it again, at your leisure, and  attempt to defeat that dungeon’s hidden boss.

Though the aesthetics of these dungeons can be very, very cool (ranging from a strip-club to an 8-bit  themed Dragon Quest tower) the actual layout of the dungeons is very simple. In a change from Persona 3,  the dungeons in Persona 4 are no longer random, so every level will always look exactly the same—though  there are some hidden and extra boss battles that spice things up. The various enemies are represented in  the dungeon map as either hovering black balls or floating semi-sentient black puddles. These enemies  move around along very short pre-determined paths, and when you encounter one you either attack it, or  flee. When you attack an enemy—or when an enemy gives chase and catches up with you—you initiate a  battle and shift to the combat portion of gameplay we’ve seen in every JRPG since the NES days. Attacking  an enemy in the dungeon can give the player an advantage, but letting an enemy attack the player will give  the enemy an advantage: the advantage is usually a full extra turn.

Kill It With Fire!

If you’ve ever played a JRPG, you should be pretty familiar with how Persona 4′s combat works out. You  control 4 characters—either directly, or allow the AI to control the three additional characters with a handful  of pre-selected behavior scripts—and take turns beating the crap out of monsters. The monsters also take  turns beating the crap out of you. It’s all so very… symmetrical. Certain enemies have weaknesses, which  will require the standard fire and ice-themed elemental spells to take down. The combat is fast-paced and  the battle music is catchy, so combat is generally fast and fun, but every once in a while you’ll find yourself  fighting a monster that is immune to ever single kind of attack save one. Those battle can be particularly  infuriating when no one in your party is capable of causing any damage.

By accident I found an early gameplay video of 2D Boy’s “World of Goo” last year. I immediately bookmarked the video and would frequently check in on the World of Goo website to see just how much longer I would have to wait before I could play the quirky-looking little game for myself. When I finally got my hands on the title, I was very pleased with what I saw. I waited a long time–and the wait was most-definitely worth it.

World of Goo is a physics-based puzzle game where we get to mess around with silly semi-sentient spheres of ooze. The object of any given level is pretty simple—move as many gooballs from point A to point B as quickly as possible. We can build towers and bridges, break down your towers or bridges, or hoist gooey-pink balloons on top of other, denser oozing inkblots to lift our wobbling structures into the air. Some gooballs can even catch fire and explode.

Tears Of Joy

Though most of the levels are fairly simple, World of Goo offers some refreshingly quirky, downright silly art, with highly addictive gameplay. It’s been a long time since I’ve been so engrossed in playing a game that I lose track of time, so when I looked up from my screen to see three hours passed since I first clicked on the icon, I realized I was playing a classic. World of Goo is an utterly charming adventure that any gamer, or lover-of-fun would be severely remiss in avoiding. It’s not quite perfect, but it manages to capture an element not-often seen in more modern games: it’s a helluva lot of fun.

World of Goo is a one-button game. Because you only need to know how to click and drag the left mouse button, it’s incredibly easy for anyone to jump into a level and figure out the controls. Each level starts with a certain number of gooballs forming a basic shape—they link to each other by rigid goo lines somewhat reminiscent of saliva (which will bend or tear under too much weight) and a pipe somewhere off in the distance. The object of the game is to move the gooballs into the pipe so they can be sucked to freedom. Or into lifetime of indentured servitude. Or really big bottle—the game isn’t too clear on what, exactly, is happening, but that’s okay, because it’s awesome.

To build a shape you click on a moving gooball (they rove about the rigid goo-lines with cartoonish goggle-eyes and foppish grins plastered on their oopy-faces, and drag it to a point outside of the structure where, if you place it correctly, it will shoot out a few lines of goo-stalk to the nearest gooballs. The kicker is that when you place a gooball as part of a structure, that gooball becomes locked in place. When you reach the pipe, only gooballs that are NOT part of the structure will be sucked away. To clear each level players need to suck-up a certain number of gooballs, with point bonuses awarded for sucking up larger quantities of gooballs. Some gooballs can be removed from the structure, others cannot. For the hypercompetitive, 2D Boy maintains an online leader board to display just who in the world has the best score at each particular level.

Once You See It….

As you move your Goo-ladies and Goo-gents around the levels, you’ll be building towers and bridges, which sounds fairly mundane and simple, right? This is where the excellently-implemented phsyics engine comes into play. Towers will droop to the side. Bridges will sag down the middle. Add too much weight, and your structures will collapse into chaotic heaps of confused Goo-lings. Often, you’ll find yourself in a situation where you’ll need to tear down parts of your structer to build new elements in order to reach the finish-pipe. There are different types and colors of gooball that act differently on the environment. The typical black gooball is the simplest form of ooze. These normal gooballs can breath in clean watter—but if they fall into dirty water they’ll drown. Then there are the pink balloon-balls that are lighter than air: attach a balloon to your structure and the balloon-ball will pull everything skyward. There are green gooballs, close cousins of the inky-black gooballs, that are more resilient and can be plucked up from anywhere in the level to be placed anywhere on a goo-structure. There’s a certain degree of strategy involved in choosing which type of gooball to put where, which adds a pleasing bit of variety to the gameplay.

Some levels can even be manipulated by moving certain elements of the terrain—and certain elements of terrain (like spiked wheels of spinning death) will explode any gooball that gets too close. Other levels will see you trying to build a tower on top of a circular platform that will fall to either side if it’s not perfect balanced—and the more weight you add to the top, the faster it will wobble from side to side. Suffice it to say that there are a lot of different elements that effect gameplay, mostly based on the physics engine, that make playing the game a real joy. The physics are a lot of fun to watch in action—there’s little cooler than hooking a bunch of inflated pink goo-balloons to the top of a bridge and raising the hapless gooballs up to a ceiling of stalactites: the poor Goo-balloons pop and the bridge will wobble up and down. If the bridge wobbles too much, one end may douse itself in dirty swamp water, and all of the wet gooballs will drown. And, yes, you can hear their icky little screams.