Games: What games are you currently playing? [OT!]

**mrwiseman** · November 18th, 2003, 12:00 AM

I've borrowed Suikoden III, here's an early "1st hour" review:

I was expecting a lot from this game, having played Suikoden II and having heard that the third game is 3D and has three different points of view/substories (a la Sonic Adventure 1).

But I'm somewhat disappointed with the game. I haven't seen anything spectacular, and while the three PoVs thing looks promising, and the combat system looks ok or good, I'm seriously annoyed at the terrible animation of everything. Dammit, the characters walk like drunken pigeons!

So here are my first thoughts on the game:

Graphics: The graphics started very good, with a lot of characters at screen waving their hands at the girl. Sadly, that was about the only great thing about them. Then I realized how bad textures were. I know the PS2 sucks at textures, and it pretty much sucks at graphics all around, but I've seen way better things than this. But if it were only for the textures, I wouldn't complain too much. The characters' faces remind me of Skies of Arcadia, which is not a good nor a bad thing. The graphics look kind of kiddie (but they are bearable), especially when stretching the image on my widescreen TV and everyone's fat (this doesn't happen in other games, but this one really suffers from it, so I'm considering the 4:3 mode with left/right black borders). A worse issue is the framerate. While Skies of Arcadia kept a constant 30 fps, and it was fairly good because of this (it could go at 60, especially considering the power of the Dreamcast and the very few polygons they used), this game tries to go at 60 fps, which looks great, but it keeps slowing down in towns. Just a little, nothing important, just 30-45 fps, never lower than 30, but annoying anyways. I would have preferred to have a rock-solid 30 fps than a sluggish 60 fps. So the characters are ok (good polygon counts but no textures), and the scenery can be nice sometimes (nothing spectacular though, reminds me of Evolution). However, if you take some shots like when they are talking in that tribe, turn off bilinear filtering of the floor, and maybe decrease the visual quality around corners a little, you have a PSX1 game. PSX1 games like Xenogears look better when run in an emulator.

But nothing of what I've complained about is 10% as bad as the animation. The animation in this game, of anything and everything, characters and animals, walking and talking, combat and towns, sucks so much ass I'm actually impressed at it! I have seen Genesis games with waaaaaay better animation. Whoever made these animations, they need to hire somebody else. Not only it's majorly keyframed (something I can perfectly stand), but it's bad to pathetic... There's no sync between feet and character movement, so the characters move forwards regardless of what they are doing with their feet, and they seem to be walking over ice, because they move forwards legs on the floor, etc. Again, I can get used to this, it happens often, it's hard to do a great walking animation you know. But it's not like they just move forwards at constant speed... they actually tried to make it realistic and they completely messed up! The characters move choppily, like a pigeon, but on top of that, the animation keyframes are so poorly done they look like a drunken pigeon actually. This is surely the 3D game with the poorest animation I have seen in the past... 3? 6? 9? 12? 24? months. Maybe more. And the characters, they try to move their lips... but they look like they are sort of kissing in fast motion... terrible lips movement textures too. Even the animals (cats etc) move ridiculously. And don't make me talk about the "I swing my sword in Barcelona and hit the guy in San Francisco" combats.

Basically, anything that moves in this game sucks. Majorly. I couldn't be more disappointed with its animation, in fact, I don't find enough words to describe how much ass does it suck.

Sound: No sound, and music seems to be your average RPG music, which is good, but not spectacular.

Gameplay: Looks good. The combat system seems to be above average, having more options and characters going in pairs. I haven't learnt how to use it though, so I can't say much. It's cool to see the characters in town walking together, showing stuff to each other (not that kind of stuff, you pervs [img]wink.gif[/img] ), etc., if only I could abstract from how badly they move.

Intro: The intro was dull and colorless. Ok music with some potential, and very nice anime, yet they took all that anime and just tossed it into the intro in random order, adding no personality or meaning to the intro. Another wasted intro. This also happened to games like Shining Force III on the Saturn (and this one had GREAT music I had listened to before watching the intro, I was waiting for the most spectacular/emotion pumping intro ever, and I found random crap that doesn't make any sense).

Characters: The characters look good so far, especially the knight girl, who is pretty interesting, and that twisted council which I shall do my best to frustrate. I like it when the game lets you decide what to say, you can make the characters pretty funny things, at least in the beginning part I saw.

Overall, I'm disappointed with this game. I was expecting much more, but I found nothing spectacular, and while most of its weaknesses I can bear with, I cannot believe directors let such pathetic animation to be done and published, it's ludicrous.

I'm very interested in hearing what you think about this game, I'm currently deciding what to play next (now that I finished FF10); I'm deciding between this game and Final Fantasy 8, but the scale is heavily weighted towards Final Fantasy 8, and unless you say the Suikoden 3 story makes Xenosaga look like shit and its character development laughs at Grandia 1 and 2 together, I will be playing Final Fantasy 8.

[ November 17, 2003 08:02 PM: Message edited by: -Wiseman- ]

[ November 17, 2003 08:08 PM: Message edited by: -Wiseman- ]

**Xellos** · November 18th, 2003, 12:32 AM

Trust me Miguel, the first chapters on all the chars aren't that great, but the second chapters pick thigns up greatly, and then the 3rd of each char are rather short. Then the 4th and 5th are just plain awesome.

Beat LoK: Defiance, and the story pwns some more... I love LoK ^_^

Right now all I'm really playing is GBA Fire Emblem, (Besides the usuals, like WC3 and PSO [img]tongue.gif[/img] ) since I'm dying for X-2 >_<

**mrwiseman** · November 18th, 2003, 12:45 AM

Yeah, but what about the animation? And the cut-scenes? I've seen that Gryphon slowly turning around, then moving, like a 1960's robot; I've seen better cut-scenes than these in Quake mods, I can stand most of the game, but the animation is terrible... Do you get used to it after a while?

**Xellos** · November 18th, 2003, 01:09 AM

Meh, I've never really noticed or cared about graphics or animation in games...

**mrwiseman** · November 18th, 2003, 01:33 AM

I do find graphics, art, animation, music, sound and voices important for an optimum game experience. Just as easy as this: a Shenmue game wouldn't be as enjoyable if it had the graphics of Alex Kidd. I value story over all else, fun-factor over music, and music over graphic technology, but I do value everything, and this is one of the reasons why I love games like Grandia II or Xenosaga, which are (far) above average in every of these sectors. But then again, my favorite game ever is a PSX game with few textures, less polygons, and blurry characters, and I really love it.

I'd like to add that, as I'm always saying, I'm *expecting* to have good graphics and music besides story and gameplay out of new games; otherwise, why would I pay ?440 on a new system, modchip and game, when I can stick to good old SNES games for good stories and gameplay? You have to give me a reason to spend more money on them, something I don't already have in my old SNES games. I think it's pretty logical. The more I pay, the more perfect I want my game experiences to be, and this imples great story AND art.

[ November 17, 2003 09:38 PM: Message edited by: -Wiseman- ]

**Xellos** · November 18th, 2003, 01:35 AM

BTW, played FFIX yet? That is pretty awesome for me so far, you might like it, the chars are pretty interesting ^_^

**mrwiseman** · November 18th, 2003, 12:35 PM

Nope, I haven't seen much of FF9, I may give it a try but it'll have to be after I finish Chrono Cross; I have 3 RPG slots:

- Slot reserved for Xeno games and replay
- Slot for games I people recommend (currently used by Chrono Cross)
- Slot for other RPGs I want to play (Morrowind a week ago, then Final Fantasy X, now I'll fill it with FF8)

**Reitsuki** · November 18th, 2003, 05:16 PM

I didnt like FF9. Only Final Fantasy I liked were FF7 and FF tactics. 4 and 5 were pretty good too, but it seems to be that all FF after 7 were just trying to imitate 7. Unoriginality to the max. >_<