Now here’s a question
for you: have video games lost their sense of adventure?
The simplest answer I
can come up with is “no.” But even an
answer that’s one percent more complex is “no, but…” People -- including me, distressingly enough
-- like to dump a lot of hate on this generation and hearken back to the days
of old. Games used to let you
explore! Games used to give you
worlds! Games used to mean
something! Games used to have character,
man! That was true of past games, sure,
but even today we’re still getting games that rival and even surpass the
hall-of-famers.
On the other hand,
we’re going to keep getting games that…well, I’ll use the phrase “missing the
point”. For one reason or another, I
feel as if a lot of developers are missing the point about why we play games --
and in exchange, substituting in their own, severely misguided point. Star
Ocean: The Last Hope is a good example of this, and not just because it’s
utterly snared by its anime trappings.
It’s a trek through space that forgets it’s a trek through space,
choosing to opt for planets straight out of an NES JRPG until suddenly
remembering “oh right, space! We can throw
in whatever we want!” And instead of
exploring the possibilities of its admittedly-cool villain/concept, we’re given
the same story arcs all over. Young
heroes with a mysterious power. Rescuing
the mystical waif from the bad guys.
Revenge diffused by a mere misunderstanding. Until the main villain is revealed, there
isn’t much in the way of a consistent threat from one planet to the next --
which wouldn’t be so bad if the game offered up more meaningful episodes. It didn’t.
Its cast is almost uniformly embarrassing, and yet the focus is on them
instead of making the worlds AND the characters fully developed. It’s a Spark Notes page that only has every
fourth word written.
So. How about that gameplay?
