Valerie's Writings

So I just had a taste of what I might be able to call “the worst RPG I’ve ever touched.”

Yeah, I don’t want to be too harsh since I only managed to play the game for about 45 minutes – far too brief an encounter to really pronounce final judgment – but seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever felt like both crying and laughing at the same time quite so much in the first half an hour of a game as when playing Spectral Force 3. To be honest, I don’t know if I can even call what I did “playing.” It was far more like work. At best, I could call it a “study” of game design – studying how not to make a strategy RPG.

Let’s start at the beginning. How did this game come into my hands in the first place? Well, lately I’ve been in the habit of visiting certain bookstores and libraries in my city, as a means to escape the stifling conditions I’m forced to live with at home at the moment – once I found out our central library stocks games I was quite sold on the idea of visiting on a regular basis. Anyway, I had already taken out Blazblue: Calamity Trigger and Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, both quality games which I’ll probably talk about another time, and unfortunately that pretty much was the extent of the “A list games” they had there. So I decided to pick up the only console RPG that was available on their shelves: Spectral Force 3.

Since I’d never heard of it before, I knew it was probably a shit game; in fact, I could just tell by the cover presentation and packaging (and the fact that it’s an Atlus game…) that it was a shit game. But I figured the characters might be interesting enough to make it worth my while. You never know where good writers or character designers could be lurking. Besides, it said something about being a “true SRPG” on the back – I could only take their word for it.

So why do I seem to find this game so pathetically laughable?

I was surprised, actually, that they even went to the expense of creating fully animated movies for the beginning of the game and having extensive (well, at first, anyway) voice acting. If you don’t mind the fact that everything and everyone looks like it came straight out of an old-school fantasy anime you may already know of (Record of Lodoss Wars?), the anime sequences aren’t even half-bad.

It’s when you get to the actual “meat and bones” of the game that things start becoming very apparently wrong.

The story is told through the old “Fire Emblem” style of having a bunch of half-body portraits (usually two at a time) appearing on the screen above a big box of text. Only it somehow looks much, much worse than it does in most other games that use this style… Why? Well, the character designs aren’t exactly much to look at, but besides that, the text is presented in a very unpalatable format, and one doesn’t get a clear sense of scene perspective (usually given by having a distinct, descriptive background, showing the characters in proportion to their actual sizes/heights, having characters clearly facing each other or turning their backs, etc).

The story basically starts off with some animated scene involving a creepy, androgynous-looking, really quite revolting elf-like mage person shooting tentacle-like weapons at a bunch of soldiers and killing some important horse-mounted king. Next thing you know, you’re suddenly thrown into the “game” with a bland portrait-based scene and about 6 different characters (mercenaries) who you’re neither properly introduced to nor have any reason to care about. They all look pretty “blah” and they’ve also violated the standard RPG rule where you can’t have a party of characters who are all one gender (in this case, male). It’s just boring, y’know? And it makes it just so hard to tell apart one character from another.

Character Introduction

Let me give you a brief (satirical) introduction on the first few main characters you get to know:

Begina: His name is not pronounced like the other similar word beginning with V, but rather it’s basically pronounced just like “beginner.” (yay for subtle puns) As the name indicates, he’s the ordinary teenage guy with a sword who, despite being a shrimpy little rookie, is obviously going to end up becoming a great hero and saving the word. Umm… no, I can’t speak of any personality. He’s black-haired, armored, and kind of wussy (or just ordinary) looking. At least his voice is decent.

Judo: Big tough guy who’s the captain of the mercenaries. Also, since he starts at level 11 while all your other characters are level 1, you know he’s obviously going to die very soon. True to his nature, he does. Right after the second battle. (incidentally, probably amongst the funniest and most irritatingly drawn-out death scenes I’ve ever seen) Of course, once he dies “Begina” inherits the captaincy despite having no special aptitude whatsoever.

Cassius: Some long-haired guy who looks elfish and uses a spear. Hmm, yeah. That’s pretty much it. I think he was supposed to be the “dashing, mysterious lady’s man” sort of type, but he doesn’t really have a personality actually.

Dragan: Yay for more subtle names. Yes, it’s pronounced just like “dragon.” At first (looking through the manual) I thought he would be the “tough, strong but silent mercenary” type. He certainly looks the part. But actually, he doesn’t really do anything but be constantly annoying and assish. He’s basically cocky, arrogant, always complaining, doesn’t follow orders, etc. His voice has got to be one of the most annoying voices ever.

Diaz: Probably the character that I would have liked if they had done him properly! I mean, Jesus, they should have a “Characters for Fantasy RPGs 101”; the people who wrote the dialogue for this game certainly could use it! So, this guy’s a young healer type who’s Begina’s longtime friend. From the moment he appears you can already tell there are going to be some pretty gay (literally) scenes between the two of them. He’s got a soft, surprisingly non-annoying voice, and has self-esteem issues (don’t they always?). As for character design, I’ll just say this: I had to look in the manual at first to find out if he was a guy or a girl. Well, to be honest, I had a gut feeling he was supposed to be a guy, but honestly do they really need a bazillion male characters (with varying degrees of actual maleness) in this game with no females in sight?

Why do I say I would have liked Diaz? He’s effeminate, for starters. That’s generally a good thing in my world. His character design is at least somewhat appealing. He’s a male healer (when’s the last time I saw that?). And he actually has some semblance of a personality (as cliché and improperly done as it may be). In about 100 lines of dialogue, I think he was the only one who actually had a personal opinion on something.

The problem isn’t in the character concept – all that the characters represent in this game have been done before in other games, quite successfully – it’s the execution, the presentation of the characters. Diaz is described in the game manual as being indecisive and easily pushed around by others, which is a perfectly fine personality for a character – but that doesn’t mean you’ve gotta have him acting like a total girly wuss all the time. You’ve gotta let the players actually respect him a little bit first before you show his insecurities. I mean, Jesus, even when it’s as simple as answering “Yes” to an order at the beginning of the game, he’s all “…!” (gasp/stutter/etc) multiple times. And later, when you get a scene that’s supposedly character development, where he and Begina are chatting about their situation, the past, etc., isn’t it a bit much to make Diaz act like an anxious little mouse who has zero confidence and can’t even talk normally to his best friend?

Not to mention the conversation between them was probably some of the most “feminized” dialogue between two guys that I’ve seen recently. Seriously, I’m all for making guys sensitive or a bit more buddy-buddy than they might normally be in reality, but there is a limit on where you can take this. There’s just a certain way guys talk and think – about themselves, about their friends – that’s distinctly masculine; to deny this is to essentially neuter the characters, making everything a senseless, incomprehensible mess.

Some things that guys don’t do (without sufficient reason/explanation):

-         act like they literally can’t live without each other

-         say that they’ll follow the other wherever they go

-         worry about how useless they are

-         suddenly burst out and tell the other person that they should stop fighting and go home because they’re afraid of dying (“And I don’t want you to die, either!”)

I mean, this is just from experience and I don’t literally mean that guys would never ever do these things, just that it’s much less likely than represented in certain bad dialogues, that it shouldn’t be done in video games unless you want to make the characters look totally ridiculous and/or unintentionally gay, and that if you are going to do it, there are very special, much more subtle ways of doing it than just dumping it in a random conversation.

Yeah, I’m getting way too into this, but hey, that’s just the way I am. I love nitpicking dialogue, characters, character development – hell, anything really. (Though I wouldn’t really consider this “nitpicking”… more like “touching the tip of the iceberg”)

So anyway, on to the gameplay, shall we?

Gameplay

It’s actually not as bad as it looks and the game could actually be fully playable if you don’t mind really bad controls and graphics/field design that looks like it came from the early PS2 era.

The map that you see when you’re battling is pretty similar to what you might expect – a tile-based field with different terrain heights, some elements like trees, bushes, treasure chests, etc., and units that occupy one square each. The gameplay is also pretty intuitive (at its base): select a unit, move it according to an “AP gauge,” use attacks or specials until your gauge runs out. All pretty standard. Actually, I even kind of like this whole idea of having an AP gauge which is used up both when moving and using moves.

Now, the problems. First of all, there’s absolutely no explanation for how to do anything and the captions for the buttons (your only guide in how to play) are tiny and really ambiguously described. For example, B = Cursor (um?), A = Back (back to what?) or RT = Assist (…?) You’ll literally be guessing what you’re supposed to do for the first 10 minutes, guaranteed. The controls are also hilariously bad. The menu is set up to be as irritating and non-intuitive as possible, apparently. It’s hard to explain why it’s so bad without visual examples, but basically, there are multiple “pages” or sets of button mappings, and in order to do anything you have to press a sequence of buttons to get to the right “set.” It’s certainly not always clear what order you should press them to get to a certain action. Just ending your unit’s turn is pretty hard to figure out how to do.

You’ll be given a bunch of options even when you do simple actions like attacking, for example “Heavy” “Medium” and “Light” – but what exactly do these mean? What’s the difference between a Heavy and Light attack? There’s no explanation whatsoever. You’ll just have to try it out and see for yourself whether there’s a difference or not.

The rules of the game seem somewhat intricate and perhaps even interesting to get to know, but unfortunately there is no explanation provided anywhere (I guess you could read the manual… but I never do). Leaving you to muck around and try to vaguely grasp how things work.

Supporting Elements

The graphics are pretty horrid. Some of the larger-size polygonal sprites aren’t that bad, but the sprites used in the battle map (where you’ll presumably be spending most of your time) are just… well, they’re tiny, not so detailed, and generally look like they belong in a game made about 10 years ago. The enemies look ridiculous. And yes, you’ll be fighting killer bees, cute blobby forest creatures and undead skeletons in your first battles. Original, eh?

Music is certainly nothing to speak of. Probably some new composer’s first assignment or something (well, it probably isn’t… I don’t mean to sound like a complete ass since the music isn’t the most horrible I’ve ever heard). The sound effects, though… I don’t know how they even made it to a real finished game. They’re just impossible to take seriously. A sword slash just becomes a dull “blah” of sound and all the footsteps sound identical and completely unrealistic.

The interface is pretty laughable. Looks like it came straight out of a low-budget PSX game or something. The main “base” you return to after each battle to tweak your equipment, units, get new missions, etc., has just about the most generic and “barebones” presentation you could expect.

Basically, nothing in this game has an explanation. That’s probably the worst part of it. If there was actually some kind of explanation for how to play, or something to set the scene for the main characters (I seriously have no idea who they are, why we should care about them, where they are, or what they’re fighting for), some introduction of some sort, the game easily could have been playable. As it is, I honestly can’t imagine anyone playing this game without feeling like they’re just stuck completing a repetitive chore.