Games best left alone
Continuing my ever present brain-dump of miserable games I've sampled over the last period of time since I last updated. Today we'll be looking at:
Guitar Hero 5
and
Kingdom Hearts 365/2 Days
Guitar Hero 5
Maybe it's the hardware. Of our two guitars, one has a faulty red button that stops working halfway through a song, and the other seems to randomly strum itself without user input. Maybe it's the choice of music, with the usual collection of fun classics but ultimately a bigger collection of slow, dreary mush that I'm just not interested in, or maybe it's the even-more watered down and pointless career mode.
*Anyone* can make a multiplayer music game. The real challenge is a meaningful single player experience. GH5 tries valiantly with the inclusion of challenges for every song in career mode, then fails when certain challenges are locked to certain instruments or group play. Don't have a Drum Kit or 4 friends? No unlockable challenge points for you! Guitar challenges only!
The progression is kinda stiff too. Of the 7 or so songs in each setlist venue, you only need to play around 3-4 of them to move on to the next. There's no "Boss" encores, and the only varient that shows up every now and then is a random song where they pull in a visual avatar of the singer involved, be it Johnny Cash, Kurt Cobain or Shirley Manson.
All very nice, but all very shallow. You get the feeling that GH5 has given up its usually more interesting single player mechanics and has decided instead to just ape Rock Band again. With all the songs unlocked from the start in quickplay and multiplayer, there is absolutely no point in playing Career mode except to kit out your rocker avatar, made even more pointless by the ability to use your Xbox 360 avatar anyway.
So yeah. No thanks.
Kingdom Hearts 365/2 Days
Much like Crisis Core, KH:365/2 acts a prologue to a well known game. With CC it's FF7, with 365/2 it's Kingdom Hearts 2. You play as Roxas, who much like Zack is doomed to not be the main character for much longer, so we deal with his activities he was up to before Sora woke up, and the many events that connect the tangled web of plot that is Kingdom Hearts.
Unlike Crisis Core, where Zack marches bravely to essentially his death, Roxas mumbles about with no personality whatsoever. His design is dull. Everything he says is dull. He is more or less entirely overshadowed by Axel, filling both the "Big Brother" and "Crazy Assassin" stereotypes. Also unlike Crisis Core, where Zack takes part in some major plot developments (The whole Sephiroth thing), Roxas does more or less bugger all for most of the time. You hear about the events of Castle Oblivion but never actively take part in it.
The game chronicles Roxas' initiation into Organization XIII and what he does day to day. Mainly, he does missions where he has to kill heartless or collect some things. Rarely they'll throw him into a stealth mission or a miserable "Investigation" mechanic, but mostly you'll hit things with your keyblade. Not soon after, Member no. 14 shows up as Xion. Given she's never been mentioned anywhere and has appeared out of nowhere, it's a safe bet she'll be killed or vanish in a collection of white particle effects before the game is done.
The rest of Team Shadowy Evil consist of rejected villians from Naruto and One Piece. Every member has some whacky weapon from guitars to scythes to playing cards, and each act the stereotypical stab-you-in-the-back grumblenuts that Evil Secret Societies are full of.
Combat is initially slow, but gradually improves as you "level" up. However here Squenix's obsession with awkward grids for character development shows up, and you have to play tetris on the same grid to manage inventory, equipment, skills, magic and your level. It's simple enough, but seems unecessarily obtuse, adding pointless complexity to an otherwise simple game.
Every mission you complete more or less advances the plot slowly. Each mission also has optional challenge modes unlocked via finding special badges hidden in the level. These add some nice longevity, and rewards unlock greater prizes from the nearby moogle shop, but can pretty much be skipped by all but the most die hard.
365/2 tries to be as any good Portable game does: Split its gameplay into simple bites - missions - so you can pick it up and put it down. From there it gets everything else wrong. The plot proves that a Kingdom Heart game without all the Disney interaction shows its colours as a dull and miserable fantasy world with flat characterization and spikey hair. (Sure, Aladdin and Beast all show up, but for brief 2 second intervals with minimal interaction). The key is to tell the story of the mysterious shadowy cult behind all the bad in KH1 and 2, but when you see just how dull they are, even their plight and purpose won't make you care for them. Roxas himself isn't interesting, and as fun as Axel is he's nowhere near a replacement for the comedy interactions between Goofy and Donald.
In KH2 you felt like the hero, but in KH:365/2 you feel like a minor villian on clerical duty for the more important villians. A Desk villian. Obsessed with blue Ice Cream.
I'm sure it will get a bit more interesting later on, but 4-5 hours in it hasn't sold me. Only true fans of the Kingdom Heart games willing to learn a bit more about the behind-the-scenes events of the mangled story, or people obsessed with drawing Axel Yaoi on DA, will enjoy this game.
Guitar Hero 5
and
Kingdom Hearts 365/2 Days
Guitar Hero 5
Maybe it's the hardware. Of our two guitars, one has a faulty red button that stops working halfway through a song, and the other seems to randomly strum itself without user input. Maybe it's the choice of music, with the usual collection of fun classics but ultimately a bigger collection of slow, dreary mush that I'm just not interested in, or maybe it's the even-more watered down and pointless career mode.
*Anyone* can make a multiplayer music game. The real challenge is a meaningful single player experience. GH5 tries valiantly with the inclusion of challenges for every song in career mode, then fails when certain challenges are locked to certain instruments or group play. Don't have a Drum Kit or 4 friends? No unlockable challenge points for you! Guitar challenges only!
The progression is kinda stiff too. Of the 7 or so songs in each setlist venue, you only need to play around 3-4 of them to move on to the next. There's no "Boss" encores, and the only varient that shows up every now and then is a random song where they pull in a visual avatar of the singer involved, be it Johnny Cash, Kurt Cobain or Shirley Manson.
All very nice, but all very shallow. You get the feeling that GH5 has given up its usually more interesting single player mechanics and has decided instead to just ape Rock Band again. With all the songs unlocked from the start in quickplay and multiplayer, there is absolutely no point in playing Career mode except to kit out your rocker avatar, made even more pointless by the ability to use your Xbox 360 avatar anyway.
So yeah. No thanks.
Kingdom Hearts 365/2 Days
Much like Crisis Core, KH:365/2 acts a prologue to a well known game. With CC it's FF7, with 365/2 it's Kingdom Hearts 2. You play as Roxas, who much like Zack is doomed to not be the main character for much longer, so we deal with his activities he was up to before Sora woke up, and the many events that connect the tangled web of plot that is Kingdom Hearts.
Unlike Crisis Core, where Zack marches bravely to essentially his death, Roxas mumbles about with no personality whatsoever. His design is dull. Everything he says is dull. He is more or less entirely overshadowed by Axel, filling both the "Big Brother" and "Crazy Assassin" stereotypes. Also unlike Crisis Core, where Zack takes part in some major plot developments (The whole Sephiroth thing), Roxas does more or less bugger all for most of the time. You hear about the events of Castle Oblivion but never actively take part in it.
The game chronicles Roxas' initiation into Organization XIII and what he does day to day. Mainly, he does missions where he has to kill heartless or collect some things. Rarely they'll throw him into a stealth mission or a miserable "Investigation" mechanic, but mostly you'll hit things with your keyblade. Not soon after, Member no. 14 shows up as Xion. Given she's never been mentioned anywhere and has appeared out of nowhere, it's a safe bet she'll be killed or vanish in a collection of white particle effects before the game is done.
The rest of Team Shadowy Evil consist of rejected villians from Naruto and One Piece. Every member has some whacky weapon from guitars to scythes to playing cards, and each act the stereotypical stab-you-in-the-back grumblenuts that Evil Secret Societies are full of.
Combat is initially slow, but gradually improves as you "level" up. However here Squenix's obsession with awkward grids for character development shows up, and you have to play tetris on the same grid to manage inventory, equipment, skills, magic and your level. It's simple enough, but seems unecessarily obtuse, adding pointless complexity to an otherwise simple game.
Every mission you complete more or less advances the plot slowly. Each mission also has optional challenge modes unlocked via finding special badges hidden in the level. These add some nice longevity, and rewards unlock greater prizes from the nearby moogle shop, but can pretty much be skipped by all but the most die hard.
365/2 tries to be as any good Portable game does: Split its gameplay into simple bites - missions - so you can pick it up and put it down. From there it gets everything else wrong. The plot proves that a Kingdom Heart game without all the Disney interaction shows its colours as a dull and miserable fantasy world with flat characterization and spikey hair. (Sure, Aladdin and Beast all show up, but for brief 2 second intervals with minimal interaction). The key is to tell the story of the mysterious shadowy cult behind all the bad in KH1 and 2, but when you see just how dull they are, even their plight and purpose won't make you care for them. Roxas himself isn't interesting, and as fun as Axel is he's nowhere near a replacement for the comedy interactions between Goofy and Donald.
In KH2 you felt like the hero, but in KH:365/2 you feel like a minor villian on clerical duty for the more important villians. A Desk villian. Obsessed with blue Ice Cream.
I'm sure it will get a bit more interesting later on, but 4-5 hours in it hasn't sold me. Only true fans of the Kingdom Heart games willing to learn a bit more about the behind-the-scenes events of the mangled story, or people obsessed with drawing Axel Yaoi on DA, will enjoy this game.