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What Paradise Blue can teach us about game design

24/7/2011

Cheers, it's PaulianCornet! (or PCororo) again! Before I start with the actual topic, the Disgaea article is still underway, but I moved so I didn't have the time to finish my research (mostly concerning languages though).

Aaaaanyway, today I'll be talking about Paradise Blue, an indie RPG made by Ocean's Dream which Maryfourdee covered a few posts earlier. So, the game was made by a normal guy on his PC at home and not in a colossal game studio. And it's free, so play it. But I digress.

There are a lot of indie developers these days, but very few actually any recognition outside of the Internet. (And sometimes not even on the Internet itself) PB was (or is?) quite popular, despite not looking like FF13 or having tons of boobs. And it can actually teach us a lot about game design? What exactly? I'll show you!

You can save everywhere. I can't tell you enough how much I and millions of other people appreciate this. Even if your game is supposed to be ultra-challenging, at least a quicksave option should be there, since we are people who might have business to attend while we're in the middle of a dungeon.
There is customisation and flexibility. You get four characters whose jobs you can change at any given time after defeating the first boss, and you can combine abilities of different jobs to create more-rounded or plain gamebreaker classes. Games with job systems usually restrict you to the abilities of a certain job that vanish once you chose a new one.
Experience is limited. This might sound terrible at first, but it actually prevents you from overleveling and breezing through the game, taking all the potential battle strategies away.
Tying in with the above, bosses have gimmicks/require special tactics to defeat. How many games have you spamming your strongest attacks and spells on an enemy until it's defeated? Too many. Some bosses here sorround you, some others have a phase where attacking them directly is not a good idea and so on. Definitely adds some colour to the boss battles.
Another tie-in with the above, bosses give no EXP. So if one of your characters remains dead throughout the battle, they won't miss out any super-high experience boosts!
There are no random encounters. If you don't feel like battling or can't hold yourself up anymore, just avoid them! They won't chase you either. No more frustration with lousy escape rates!
There's a quest log. Haven't played your favourite game in a long time? No idea where to go? No one there to point you in the right direction? Yes, we all know and hate it. PB nicely avoids this nasty problem with a handy quest log that keeps you up to date with your main goal and subquests!
Characters are blank sheets, yet there is a plot. Yeah. You create four characters yourself and they have no dialog whatsoever. Yet the creator managed to write a pretty nice plot around them, as they are mercenaries hired to guard the two actual main characters. Using the "the princess was kidnapped, go save her plot" is unexcuseable now.
The graphics are simple, yet beautiful. They resemble an 8-bit RPG, yet the visuals (especially the battle backgrounds) are absolutely gorgeous! There are tons of games using the premade RTP graphics, so it's better to stand out with graphics of your own. Even if they're simple, they work. A good example would be Earthbound, a SNES game which had barely any shading, yet looked really cool
The music is custom. While not mandatory, a game with its own soundtrack feels much better than playing twenty games with the Kingdom Hearts soundtrack.

So these are ten things Paradise Blue can teach us about game design, which is why every fellow RPG makin' dude/tte should try it out and grab some inspiration from. And even if you don't make games you should play it since it's awesome! :P

Nippon Ichi Strategy RPGS: Intro and La Pucelle

2/7/2011

Hey everyone! This's PaulianCornet and starting today I'll be writing a series of articles that'll cover the strategy RPGS made by Japanese developer Nippon Ichi. Why? Because actual, in-depth coverage of these games is almost-nonexistant. (Other than Hardcore Gaming 101's wonderful article)

Nippon Ichi is a small development house in the Gifu Prefecture. Before they became known for their mind-bending strategy games they developed small, dispansable puzzle games. Their first full-blown game was the rather dull Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure (or Marl Kingdom in Japan). The game proved popular enough to warrant two direct sequels and two spin-offs. One of the spin-offs is the PS2 game La Pucelle: Tactics (La Pucelle translates as The Virgin).

La Pucelle / La Pucelle Tactics / La Pucelle Ragnarok - Playstation 2, PSP (2004 / 2009)

"Long ago, there was a fierce battle between the Goddess Poitreene and the Prince of Darkness. In the darkest hour a young women, dubbed the Maiden of Light, rose to defeat the Dark Prince and restore peace to the world."
...something along these lines serves as the introduction to La Pucelle. As you might have guessed, the story takes quite some religious influence. It revolves three members of La Pucelle, a church devoted to defeating monsters and keeping peace around the world. The main character, Prier ("to pray" in French), dreams of becoming the new maiden of light, but her haughty attidute and foul tongue don't exactly qualify her for the task.

Tagging along is her little brother Culotte (a French piece of clothing), and the very devoted Sister Alouette, who is way calmer and more qualified for becoming the Maiden of Light. The group's first task is to cleanse a sewer of nasty ghosts.

You get more and more people to join you on your quest, all for different reasons and motives. The cast is very colourful, and the writing is always there for a good laugh. The story starts out fairly light-hearted and idealistic, but gets darker and more serious as it progresses, but there are still tons of comic-reliefs thrown in here and there.

Before you go to battle you can make preparations in the local town, Pot Au Feu ("Pot on Fire" in French). The townspeople also provide some information, as well as some of the funniest lines in the game.

Every character you get has four slots of equipment, and you equip whatever you like. You can equip Prier with four weapons and make her a total powerhouse but sacrifice her defence, and so on. Every new chapter will provide you with more equipment to buy, but it's also important to keep your equipments levels up to date. They go up as you fight while having them equipped, and high-level equipment is actually more important than high character levels, especially during post-game battles.

Talking about levels, every stat in this game has one! Your strength stat raises if you attack, yada yada, but it's nowhere as terrible as Final Fantasy II's retarded leveling system. It works a lot smoother, and your characters won't end up completely useless. The max level of any character is also, rather unusually, 9999! Don't be scared though, there's absolutely no need to ever reach that number. In fact, you can beat the final boss without being in your hundreds!

After you're done preparing you select one of the maps and fight. The battles seem to be your typical isometric tactical battles at first glance, but they definitely aren't. Any action (sans using items) will switch the view to a sideview battle field, where you see the attack / skill / healing executed. If you attack, everyone sorrounding you will join you in the tussle. Enemies can do the same thing, but you also get to counterattack. The one big problem with these "battle intermissions" is that they make the battles way longer than they could be. In a game where a moderate amount of grinding is necessary this definitely gets annoying, but still bearable.

Your characters will also learn a few combination attacks later on, allthough they eat SP for breakfast and require a lot of levelling until they become really useful.

Also new to the whole thing are the Dark Portals. They're streams of dark energy emitting from a central point. They will continously spawn new monsters until you purify, aka close, them. If you do so the energy will be released in the form of the portal's element (Fire, Ice and Wind are the default ones, but you can combinate them), causing every enemy who happens to be standing onto a stream panel to take damage. You can place your characters around to redirect the energy into a circle, which will have a mega-awesome effect, like dealing huge chunks of elemental damage to all enemies, or completely restoring your party's health. One of the big problems with this though is the fact that your allies will counterattack enemies when they attack you during their phase. This will often cause you to defeat all enemies, and thus ending the battle, without being able to pull the chain off, and setting those up requires quite some time, so expect to be frustrated in the end.

Also, talking about Purification, there's more to that. While the game doesn't let you create any additional characters aside from the story ones, you can recruit pretty much every monster by puriying them often enough, and then kicking the crap out of them. They will usually start at low levels, but they can become just as strong as your regular characters with some grinding.

The game is divided into several chapters, each of which has multiple endings. There are some special event panels scattered on the map, which will trigger events or additional battles. Activating them all will usually earn you the good ending. While every chapter has multiple endings, the main ending is always the same.

The game also has some of the smoothest animation seen in an SRPG. While the sprites aren't particularly high-budget, they're damn well animated!

The soundtrack by Tenpei Sato is also first-rate, with some really fresh songs that never fail to capture the mood of the situation. My only complaint is that there aren't enough tracks, but the ones present are wonderful.

Since the localised version of La Pucelle's spiritual successor Disgaea was such a success, Mastiff picked the game up for localisation. While the translation is very well done and contains a lot of humour, there is quite some censorship. One of the game's main characters, Croix ("cross" in French), always smokes a cigarette, which was edited out of his character art and sprites. However they didn't alter any of the animations, so you get to see Croix taking out nothing out of his mouth and putting nothing back in. All instances of crosses were also removed, which is quite fatal considering this is a game with heavy religious overtones.

The game contains both English and Japanese voiceovers, and both are very high-quality performances. (allthough the Japanese setting has more scenes voiced than the English one, probably due to budget restraints). Prier is voiced by Jennifer Hale, who masterfully captures her attitude problems.

In 2009, Nippon Ichi released a PSP port of the game, titled La Pucelle Ragnarok. It's essentially the same game with some nice updates. A good chunk of the interface has been redone to look nicer and be less number-infested. A lot of characters who didn't have an artwork now have at least one, and all the cutscenes are voiced now, instead of only selected ones. One of the best updates is that you can now set the battle scenes off, which turns the grinding en-masse into a much quicker affair.

There are numerous characters, some of which are DLC, while others can be obtained via post-game content.
The biggest addition, of course, is a completely new scenario starring Demon Prier. You get some all-new special abilities and two new plot routes, which allow for actual multiple endings this time, one of which is now considered canon.

Sadly, Nippon Ichi of America have officially announced that they won't be localising the port, for whatever reason. It's still rather easy to play with a guide and some minor knowledge of Japanese.

While La Pucelle may lack some of the polish that made later NIS games stand out so much, it's still a pleasant experience and highly recommendable for strategy RPG fans.

Next time I will be covering Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. Good bye!