A Few Comments on The Legendary Starfy

March 13th, 2013

The Legendary Starfy is the first game in the TOSE-developed, Nintendo-published series of the same name to be published in the west. The games have been around in Japan since 2002, debuting on the GameBoy Advance. The game’s cuteness and the franchise’s former status as a Japan-only hole in Nintendo’s western offering captured my initial interest. After completing the game a few weeks ago, here are my thoughts:

Young Audience Appeal

Cute characters, colourful visuals, and easy gameplay, The Legend of Starfy seems like a great game for kids, with the customisation options and secret treasure (random praise) likely to appeal more specifically to young girls. The dialogue, however, is layered on thick and full of uber clique speak. There’s no way that a 7-year-old is going to understand much of what’s being said.

Mechanics

Starfy has three types of mechanics: traversal, jumps, and attacks. They’re all fairly balanced and unique. The game balances the mechanics so that the player can choose between: swimming and star spinning, gliding and falling, and walking and dashing, ie. two sets of game speeds. The mechanics have some dynamics and nuance, but not a lot. Examples include:

All jumps and glide are affected by gravity.
Dash (Starfy’s run) has a slight skid (momentum).
Star Spin (Starfy’s attack) runs on an invisible cool down, spin too much and Starfy becomes dizzy. The player can also steer Starfy as he attacks.

The transformations primarily allow Starfy to activate specific level elements: they don’t add any new wrinkles to the gameplay. They also lack the nuance and dynamics of Starfy’s regular move set.

In some levels, certain areas are only accessible when playing as Starly, using her exclusive abilities, but the only way the player can play as Starly is if they have a friend to link up with. Since these areas hold treasures, they only way to 100% complete the game is to have a friend who also has a DS and a copy of the game.

The choice of game speed via the mechanics, optional treasures spread throughout levels, and ability to rack up more stars by comboing up enemy attacks allows the player to scale the difficulty.

Level Design

Each world is based around a game idea. For example, changing water levels or swimming in the air through bubbles. The individual game ideas aren’t very interesting, there’s little variation to them, they’re stretched too thin, and are never combined to create deeper, more engaging gameplay concepts. In a Mario game, one of Starfy’s game ideas would be enough for a level. In the Legend of Starfy, they make up seven or eight. To continue this comparison, Starfy’s levels tend to dawdle back and forth between the world’s game idea and unrelated distractions, while Mario’s levels are unified around the one concept. Where each arrangement of level elements in a Mario game offers a newer, increasingly more elaborate take on the game idea (variation), in The Legendary Starfy, each level only offers one or two arrangements based around the game idea, and the variation between each is slight. As a result of all these factors, Starfy’s world lacks a cohesive narrative of gameplay.

Not only are the levels not optimised for gameplay, they’re also far too open. Most of the player’s time is spent holding a button as they wait for Starfy to swim from one point to another. The game is just brimming with excess waiting to be trimmed out, some of which includes whole levels. Take level 8-6 as an example. I can’t believe they didn’t cut this. A rock, paper, scissors boss battle near the end of the game is an equally disastrous example of padding.

I want to thank Chic Pixel for helping me gather my thoughts on this game.

Storytelling Techniques in Judith (Terry Cavanagh)

March 10th, 2013

Judith is a short narrative game by Terry Cavanagh, the guy who did VVVVV and Super Hexagon. You should play it. Only takes 25-30 minutes. Here are some of the ways narrative is delivered in this game:

The text dialogue sets the context for the interactive sequences. It’s brief and well written, so it’s never intrusive.
The length of the secret passage creates dead space (where the player can only wait as the avatar moves forward) and thereby anticipation.
Repeated structures develop simple routines which the player finishes more quickly the more times they complete them. This builds into a climax, adding to the tension as the various revelations unfold. For Judith, the routine is leaving the bedroom, opening the secret passage, and unlocking the next door. For Jeff, this is going to the next room.
Music is used to set the mood, such as the piano notes at the beginning of each sequence and the prisoner’s cries.
Judith always begins her part next to the bed. This, along with the dialogue with her husband, creates a sense of time.
The hardest part of the game, uncovering the secret passage, is also the biggest revelation. So there’s a nice harmony there between difficulty and narrative.
Forcing the player to leave the secret passage without first prompting them to return the knife or necklace simulates Judith’s uncertainty.
Control is taken away from the player when Judith runs into the woods. This simulates the character’s fear of her husband and inability to do anything but run away.
In Judith’s final sequence, the passage door is left open for her (as her husband mentioned in the preluding dialogue). This small difference from the repeated structure asserts a feeling of unease.

If you’re interested, Don’t Look Back, Hero’s Adventure, and American Dream are also great little games that’ll only take a few minutes.

There’s a few good comments made by Jason Rohrer here.

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Tags: judith, terry cavanagh

Complaining About Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

February 15th, 2013

Over the past 3 months, I’ve invested about 50 hours into Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. I usually don’t play portable games out in the wild, but my PSP has proven to be a great companion on the subway, particularly as I can charge it via USB when I get to work. The game itself has rekindled my love of SRPGs and prompted me to write a small pile of notes on the genre. I’m not quite ready to share those ideas, but I would like to talk about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which has a strong lineage with Tactics Ogre and its designers. Playing Tactics Ogre:LUCT reminded me of why I dislike Final Fantasy Tactics Advance so much. Because I haven’t played this game in years and don’t currently have the cart on me, I’m going to have to rely on memory, so don’t think of this post as being “proper” analysis. At times, I may be a bit loose with the facts, so if I’m feeling unsure, I’ll indicate so by ending the sentence with “I think” in parenthesis.

Laws

The core difference between the original Final Fantasy Tactics and the later games is laws. Each battle is governed by a set of arbitrary rules (I’m not sure if they’re preset or selected randomly, probably depends on battle type). These regulations prevent the player from using various abilities or weapons. If the player breaks a rule, they’re given a yellow or red card, depending on how serious the violation. Acquire too many of these and the party member in question is hauled off to jail and must sit out a few battles (I think you can pay money to reduce their sentence).

I guess that the intent behind law cards is to challenge the player to play in particular ways. They certainly do that. However, the specifics of the law system, quickly put the process on the nose. The rules can be viewed any time during a battle (and are shown at the start, I think). Yet, although they’re clear and unambiguous, it’s easy to forget that your archer is wielding a bow and not a crossbow, or your knight is equipped with a sword and not an axe (these are theoretical examples). And so mid-battle, I’d unknowingly break a law or two and have several party members instantly leave the battlefield, prompting me to reset my GBA and try the battle again. If I held on and eventually won the match, then I wouldn’t be able to use half of my party in the proceeding fight. If the prohibited abilities were marked in the selection screen, then there’d be much more clarity and the player wouldn’t find themselves losing units in the midst of an epic duel. More warning pre-battle, when the player’s selecting which units to send out, would help them avoid putting party members with banned abilities into play in the first place. A list of how the laws affect the individual units would be nice.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance also does a poor job of contextually justifying laws. It’s ridiculous that a law master (a knight on a Chocobo), a formal member of some government or association, would oversee every random, spontaneous battle that occurred between two groups of mercenaries.

Sending Units Off on Missions

Missions are the units of progression. Each tavern on the world map has a list of missions which the player can choose to take on. The idea is that the player’s party is a group of mercenaries for hire (I think). There are two types of missions: regular missions, which the player does directly, and adhoc missions, where the player sends out a unit or small team of units to go and fight independently. After a few days, the unit(s) returns and the player’s told the results of the battle. I found the adhoc battles to be intrusive and unnecessary. To accept these missions, the unit(s) needs to meet the level requirement. Initially, I had a designated gimp which I sent out to do all the side missions. Despite some initial success, it was quickly under-leveled, even though I’d included it in some of the regular battles too. Near the end of the game, the adhoc missions were draining my party of key units, but I had to do them in order to unlock the story missions. Because some of the adhoc battles require the player to complete X number real battles before the units return, I’d often be forced to go into battles with an incomplete team.

The other problem with the adhoc missions is that the player has no involvement in them, so it’s really hard to care about them.

Trail of Missions

The player needs to complete certain missions in order to unlock more missions and keep the game going. Although they’re told which missions they need to beat, figuring out how to access them can be tricky, as each tavern offers their own set of missions and if the player fails a mission, it might not come back around for some time. Factor in that some of these missions may themselves need to be unlocked (or the player needs to beat certain adhoc missions or have a certain item, I think) and the progression system quickly divulges into a tangle of loose ends. The last 20 hours of my time with this game was dedicated to untangling leads and heavy reading of GameFAQs.

Few Story Missions

The best missions are the story missions, where the map, enemy composition and layout, and laws are tuned to create deep and rewarding play. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of story missions in the entire game. Most missions are random battles in a preset location, where the enemies are randomly selected and positioned based on a few parameters.

Races

In Final Fantasy Tactics, any unit can change to any job, so long as they meet the conditions to do so. In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, each character belongs to a race, with each race being a container that houses a particular set of jobs. So, if you want a unit to have a certain job, they need to belong to the right race. This adds a layer of complexity to the job system.

I don’t like the races for two reasons. The first is that I don’t personally find the appearance and dialects of the races to be particularly interesting. The second is that the race system restricts party customisation and cross-pollination between jobs, the core asset of the RPG side of the game.

Story

Although the game’s premise of the characters being stuck in their friend’s dream is neat, the narrative is sparse to the point of near absence. I much prefer the dense political intrigue of the original Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre: LUCT. You don’t get a lot of medieval politics in video games.

So, as you can see, basically everything I don’t like about this game is everything they changed from the original Final Fantasy Tactics.

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Tags: Final Fantasy Tactics, final fantasy tactics advance

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