Slackur's Obscure Gaming Theatre

Posted on Jul 13th 2010 at 08:38:42 AM by (slackur)
Posted under General, Writing, Resonance of Fate, stupid combat systems

My sporadic blog entries have been indicative of my life's events as of late.  Where I originally began writing again after a several year sojourn of busy fatherhood craziness in order to pick up the practice and train my atrophied creative skills, the craziness of fatherhood doesn't slow down.

Now I've come to stake my claim, to recommit to one of the few skills I believe I have the ability to develop beyond an acceptable, average level.  It is a goal of mine, starting this day, to write at least a little every day, and this blog is to be one of the outlets by which I hold myself accountable for persistent development. 

I debated this for far too long, surmising that this particular digital homestead has a pointed place and purpose, and many of the things floating about my inner cranium wishing to depart are not always (gasp!) directly video game related. 

But as of yet, I am under no specific obligation as to the nature of the content I post here, implied as it may be to fall under the gaming umbrella.  Should I write an op-ed piece, an article on some gaming trivia, anything within the expected spectrum this site caters to, it will (hopefully) automatically shuffle into place like a prepared tetramino.  But at the moment, this is one of the few regular haunts I visit regularly that I can use to return to writing as an outlet, as a developing skill-set, and perhaps even have a bit of fair criticism for my own betterment.

I have far too many stalled novels, unfinished short stories, and even some crummy poetry that seem adamantly unwilling to write themselves.  Should I ever wish to breathe life into them, I need to stop whining that my life is too busy and stressed, that I don't have the energy and resilience, and that the only blog I am writing should really be video game related because of its location.

On that note...


Resonance of Fate greatly appealed to me in a variety of ways.  It has a bizarre East-meets-West art style.  Mostly impressive pedigree in Tri-Ace.  Steampunk setting (HUGE plus for me.)  Good, moody soundtrack.  Gunplay-based realtime combat as opposed to traditional melee.  All things considered, I was more interested in this than Final Fantasy XIII, a series in which I own every entry.

Then I played it.

I consider myself a guy who can understand fairly complex systems within the realm of gaming.  I've GM/DM'd pen and paper games, wrote my own combat systems, played way too much Final Fantasy Tactics/Ogre Battle, and even coded a few simple computer games.
I don't think I've ever stopped playing a role-playing game solely because of a convoluted combat system.  I usually think of it as a fun type of challenge.  Even Knights in the Knightmare appealed to me, in an esoteric what-the-...-O.K.-sure-we'll-go-with-that kind of way. 

But in Resonance of Fate, when I had to keep replaying simple battles, even the tutorials, to try to understand what was expected of me, and still not really getting the idea, a mental warning flag popped up Windows 95 style.

Its not that combat in Resonance of Fate is grinding hard, like an old Phantasy Star.  Its not multi-layered hit-and-miss hard, like a Shin Megami Tensei.  Its not even endurance hard, like some bosses in a latter era Final Fantasy.  No, this is something different.

In an attempt to bring a fresh feel to every battle, even against lower class enemies, the combat system requires:

juggling the movement and turns of three separate characters in real time,

two different types of damage that have to be stacked in correct order (plus magic),

an annoyingly and needlessly complex overdriving attack system that requires the characters to always walk between each other on  their turn without firing,

turns that are lost if taken incorrectly,

Running around the combat area to retrieve pieces of your own battle gauge,

a day/night cycle,

correct application of range and capability of each weapon of each character (including status effects,)

and no guarantee that even if you are doing all of the above correctly, you will survive even normal random encounters without having to die a few times to know how to correctly defeat them.

If the above scenario sounds fun to you (it actually did once to me) then know that I enjoyed SMT Nocturne, Knights in the Nightmare, and the Etrian Odyssey games, and this one just broke me.  Not the challenge per se, but its just tedious for the sake of being tedious.  I tried to play it for several hours.  It has all of these other great points going for it, I paid more for it than I would have otherwise because of my interest in it, and yet I finally gave it up.  After so many hours of precious game time into it, I still wasn't having any fun, and that's when I had to call it. 

No matter how much potential I saw in Resonance of Fate, the required investment was too much to ask from a game in which I simply did not enjoy playing.  If it were a mere few hours long, I could have perhaps tried to endure, but for every battle to be that frustrating in a game the length of your typical RPG, well...

There are a lot of other games I'd enjoy actually playing.

Oh well.  I hear Final Fantasy XIII has a nice 15 hour tutorial...



P.S.

Flash Gordon (1980) is now on Blu Ray.  I want to buy it.  But I'm not sure I know anyone I can convince to watch it with me.  Our friends enjoy MST3K-ing campy movies, but man, the goofy camp of Flash Gordon makes Star Wars look like Saving Private Ryan.

I think I just convinced myself to go get it. 


Permalink | Comments [3] | Digg This Article |


Recent Entries
The Top 5 Survival Horror Games for the Sega Dreamcast (2/20/2024)
Trombone Champ Is a Good Game (12/30/2023)
Exploring the Infinite Fusion Calculator (12/5/2023)
Thoughts on the Nintendo Switch OLED Model (11/21/2023)
Hypnospace Outlaw (10/30/2023)


Comments
 
You got guts, mate.  Every time I commit to doing something like this, RL gets in the way.  School, honey-do list, kids, you name it and what free time I have now I've been using to play Deadly Premonition.

Personally, I have a bunch of articles and reviews on deck, but in order for me to post, first I need to upload the images onto Imageshack, then I need to play with the code to make the placement right...  You see what I mean.  Maybe some where in the future I'll get around to it, but for now I think I'll just read yours.

Good luck.
 
@bombatomba:Thanks for the kind words.  I spend most of my week as a house-husband, raising my three boys (4, 2.5, and 6 month old) and laugh out loud at those who claim I must enjoy hanging out at home and playing games all day.  I had less stress and more free time when I used to work a full time and two part time jobs together to get my beloved through school. 

But you know, its worth it.  Nothing more important than my family.  Not even gaming.

At least until Reach comes out...Wink
I keed, I keed.

It has become more and more self evident lately that if I don't collect myself and start productive habits on a daily basis, it just falls by the wayside and I deteriorate.  Its not a matter of taking time and attention from my family: rather its about using the time I have left to do something that builds me up instead of allowing a slow decay.  The old saying goes, if I'm not moving forward, I'm going back.  I don't even think its a matter of being able to stay in place anymore- time passes too quick and if I don't dig in and climb, the mountain I want/need to overcome just sits there and my arms are still tired from holding on.  If I'm going to be tired anyway, might as well do something.


 
Very nice read. Glad to have more to read, I always like the blogs here. I can understand the drive to write and improve, sometimes it's use it or loose it.

As for Resonance of Fate... ugh. I played the JP PS3 demo and could get through it, but I am with you on the battle system. I love RPGs, but this system is just a hot mess of WTF-ery. I don't know why many JP developers think they have to cram in more action these days, and I've yet to see it done well. What is broken with turn-based combat? It has worked well for them for this long, please stop wrecking your titles.

As a big FF fan, XIII is awful, and a big let down after XII. I've yet to make myself get through that "tutorial", and the linear design kills it for me. FFVI for 3DS? Yes, please!

 Login or register to comment
It appears as though you are not a member of our site, or are not logged in.
It appears as though you can not comment currently. Becoming able to comment though is easy! All you need to do is register for the site! Not only will you be able to access any other site features including the forum and collection tools. If you are a registered user and just need to login then you can do so here.

Comment! It's easy, thoughtful, and who knows you might just enjoy it!
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
This is slackur's Blog.
View Profile | RSS
Thoughts on video games, gaming culture, concepts intertwining interactive media, my attempts at sounding intelligent, and other First World Problems.

Please don't leave a message, but a conversation. ;)
Blog Navigation
Browse Bloggers | My Blog
Hot Entries
Hot Community Entries
Site content Copyright © rfgeneration.com unless otherwise noted. Oh, and keep it on channel three.