Quote:Nearing the last day of the year, many websites have their release lists, before-the-New-Year previews, and all that stuff. Doing some digging around, the status of Resident Evil 4 has been reasserted.
GameInformer reports that Resident Evil 4 has supposedly been retooled and is currently not a GameCube exclusive any longer. This has been a popular rumor on the streets for a while, but it's becoming more popular -- whether or not this is true shall be reported sometime in the not-so-distant future. Any further word on this, you guarantee Nintendojo will be on it. (ans)
Who's the better athlete, Mike Weir or Eric Gagne?? Grr, it should be no question, GAGNE! Weir was the third best golfer in the PGA, but Gagne was the NUMBER ONE player in baseball! Gagne made it into the record books this year, won the Cy Young (as a reliever) and absolutely destroyed the theory of 'nobody's perfect'. Sure Weir was a lefty and won one masters (first in over ten years to do so, and quite a respectable feat, as most courses are made to favour righties...bastards) but still...
I do not see how everybody seems to favour Weir over Gagne, when Gagne is clearly the superior athlete of the two.
I HATE how wall jumping is done in 3D games! They give you a corridor to jump straight up, and just as you FINALLY after like 10 minutes get the timing down to wall jump (it's NEVER as easy as just hitting the jump button rapidly when ya hit the wall to quickly find out when in the sequence it occurs, oh no), you end up finding out you need to HIT THE WALL AT EXACTLY THE RIGHT ANGLE AT THE START TO KEEP FROM THROWING YOURSELF OUT OF THE LITTLE CORRIDOR AND DOWN A FRICKIN' RAVINE TO YOUR DEATH! Wall jumping should AUTO-STRAIGHTEN!
The game I am talking about it Disgaea, as strategy-RPG released in November by Atlus. Apparently, Atlus decided that for someone reason people didn't want to play it so they only released about two copies. Anyway, on to the game!
The story thus far: You play as Laharl who is a demon prince. He awakens to find that his father, the king, has died...two years ago. Other demons are now fighting for the position of king. Laharl decides that he won't sit around while they take his rightful position so he sets out to make sure everyone knows who the next king is. Mild insanity insues.
Graphics: Well...it HAS graphics. For a PS2 game the graphics aren't that advanced, not to say that they are bad, but they're fairly simple. The 3D graphics are clean, however, which should be enough. The 2D models are about what you'd expect, nothing fancy, but they look good none-the-less. Overall it looks like a game that was originally meant for the PS1, but for some reason or another was delayed till now.
Gameplay: Like most strategy-RPGs the battlefield is set up like a grid. However, Disgaea offers some unique aspects to stir things up a bit. You can "Lift" characters and objects and "Throw" them to other parts of the playing field. This option allows you to move your characters to areas that would otherwise be unnacessible. Also you can lift enemies and throw them onto other enemies, this elimates one of the enemies, but the remaining enemy games several levels making it harder to beat.
Another unique aspect is Geo Crystals, which are different colored crystals which grant bonuses or penalties to characters who are standing on spaces whose color correlates to the crystals. The crystals can be destroyed however, and if you destroy the crystal on a colored space different from the color of the crystal it will change the color of all those spaces to the color of the crystal, and will do damage to all characters [friend or foe] who happen to be standing on those spaces.
What more unique stuff?! Yes, there are in fact two more things left to discuss. From time to time you must lobby the Dark Assembly for various things that will help you on your quest, such as funding, better items, and so on. Sometimes the senators don't feel like helping out so you can either bribe them or fight them to the death for their vote. That's demon world politics for you. Next, is the Item World, which I think is one of the coolest things about this game. You can enter inside of your items and fight hordes of various monsters. Not only does this allow you to level up you characters, but you can also level up the item and recieve money and goods along the way.
The battles: The battles are about what you'd expect from an SRPG. If your characters are in the right places you can pull off combos which deal out more damage than regular attacks. Other than that I can't really find anything special about it. Standard fare, though not in a negative way.
In-between battles: The story is told mostly through conversations between characters. High quality images of the characters are displayed on the screen as they talk with each other. It sounds kind of boring, but there's enough humor in this game to keep things moving.
This was my first ever live interview, and I hope I did a good job. The guy I interviewed wasn't from Brownie Brown so I couldn't really ask him specific questions in regards to the development of Sword of Mana, but he did talk a lot about what I asked him. You are all actually seeing this before it is officially posted so I hope you guys feel special. Anyway, hope you all enjoy it:
Quote:Richard Amtower is a localization writer for Nintendo, and he previously worked at Square making him perfectly suited to market the Brownie Brown-developed Sword of Mana for Game Boy Advance. We talked with him a little about the new RPG for Game Boy Advance.
N-Philes: First off, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role in the development of Sword of Mana?
Rich Amtower: I’m a localization writer/editor, and usually that means that my role is to work with the translators to get, essentially, the best translation that we can out of a game; the best rewriting, creative writing problems, to basically get the best match of words and gameplay. To make text that fits the style of gameplay as well as the game’s art style.
For Sword of Mana my role was a little bit different because whereas if the localization needs help on this I’ve been operating more in a sort of marketing sense where I can handle as best as possible the questions you guys might have.
NP: How did you get interested in videogames, and what are some of your favorite games?
RA: The problem is I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been interested in games. My gaming experience goes back to Pong, and I have been a fan of gaming all of my life. I just sort of stumbled into a career accidentally when I had a job game testing. I started as a game tester and I had to sort of work my way through a number of companies popping hither and yon until I settled into what I think is a pretty fun career.
NP: What a lot of people don’t release is Sword of Mana is actually a remake of an old Game Boy game. Why was the decision made the remake Final Fantasy Adventure and not make a new Mana game?
RA: My suspicion is, and I say suspicion because I haven’t talked to Brownie Brown about this or anyone involved, that over the years the Mana series has evolved rather a lot. If you checked out Legend of Mana they introduced a very distinctive art style that separates the Mana series from other fantasy role-playing action/adventure games. They also introduced very memorable characters and when you look back at Final Fantasy Adventure, as I did when I first heard that the game was going to be remade, they really didn’t have much in the way of technology on the Game Boy to tell a really expressive story on that system. So when they decided to make Sword of Mana one of the key goals was to bring the art style inline with the art of Legend of Mana, but one of the other goals was to tie the original Mana game back into the Mana universe a little bit more. They’ve expanded the stories of all the characters, or fleshed out all of their roles within the story, added a lot of character depth, and also added a lot to the story and world depth as well. So while I can’t say for certain what their motivation was the end effect is that they’ve done a great job fleshing out this world as a whole and tying this game into the other Mana series game, and adding a lot of depth to the world that they had fleshed out in Legend of Mana.
NP: There are already a lot of good role-playing games for Game Boy Advance. What differentiates Sword of Mana from the rest of the good Game Boy Advance RPGs?
RA: Sword of Mana has a very different visual style than other role-playing games. It almost has a watercolor aspect to it where it feels much more like a fairy tale to me. The story itself also has a light fairy tale quality to it. The gameplay is very easy to get into. At first glance it feels like a sort of hack-and-slash type of battle, but as you get deeper into the game you start discovering not only a deeper magic, but also a relatively a pretty impressive character building quality as well.
In terms of leveling up you can spend your level up points in a number of different job classes. At first you think all your doing is upgrading specific skills like your power or your defense or your magic points based on what you’re picking, but after you start putting enough points towards a different skill you change levels and you wind up switching from a very general character to a much more specific character with strengths in swordwork, or in archery, or in elemental magic, or in defensive and healing magic. As you get deeper into the game and you spend more points developing your character your character becomes much more specialized to the kind of play you’ve been working towards.
NP: At the beginning of Sword of Mana you can choose to play as either the hero or heroine, how does this affect the game?
RA: Ultimately, the story works out to be pretty much the same, however, both the hero and heroine have very different starting points and they also have very different character motivations. The hero starts off as a gladiator who’s escaped from the slave gladiator pits of the Dark Lord and the heroine starts off having her entire village destroyed and going off in search of her real parents. Each one of them has a very different set of experiences to work from, and they experience the different story elements in very different ways. They come together very early on and they play through roughly, depending on if you playing as the hero or heroine, the same series of events, but every not and then if you’re playing as the hero the hero will go his separate way and you’ll have a story sequence with just the hero in it. Then later the heroine will join up again. There are a couple of different dungeon split points as well like in Devius Manor when the hero and heroine separated through actual gameplay sequences and the hero will have a different set of dungeon levels to work through than the heroine. Mostly it comes down to a matter of different perspectives on the same sequence of events. However, sometimes you get an entirely different set of events that the other character simply isn’t there to see. At one point the heroine is kidnapped. Playing as the heroine you get to see what happens to her when she gets kidnapped, and you get to help her make her escape. Playing as the hero when the heroine is kidnapped you have to work your way to find her only to find out that she has already escaped. So the end result is roughly the same, but the way that they get to where they’re going is totally different.
NP: How’s the multiplayer link-up system work in Sword of Mana, and what does it add to the game?
RA: The multiplayer link-up system is called the Amigo system. It’s pretty straightforward actually. If you’ve been played the game for a while, let’s say you’ve got a level 10 character in the game, if you link-up you transfer over your character data to your friend’s system and your friend transfers his data to your system and your character is added to your friend’s Amigo list. You can do this with a number of different friends and you can get a number of different Amigos on your Amigo list. Then once per day within the game you can use your Amigo whistle to call on all of your Amigos basically to come in and join in on a group attack. It is a way of helping to soften up some of the bosses or to clear out tough areas. In essence it amounts to a summon. If you get enough Amigos you actually start summoning things other than your Amigos. You start summoning these things called the Wisdoms that are very different summon attacks. So your incentive to link-up with your buddies is that you can work your way up to get these much more impressive summons that aren’t available any other way.
NP: How much input did Square-Enix and Nintendo have on the development?
RA: I’m not entirely sure how much Square-Enix was responsible for, how much Brownie Brown was responsible for, and how much Nintendo was responsible for. I think most of it came down to Brownie Brown’s work since they were the original Mana development team, but I couldn’t tell you how much input anyone had on the project afterward.
NP: What are the chances of another Mana game for Game Boy Advance?
