Adventure Time: Pirates of the Enchiridion

One fine morning, our two intrepid heroes wake up to discover the whole of Ooo has been flooded! Is this judgment from a vengeful Glob? Is it revenge from BMO for the heroes missing breakfast? Is it just Ice King being an idiot? Turns out, it's that last one, spoilers except not really.

Adventure Time returns to the world of video games once again, this time as a turn-based Role-Playing Game. Finn and Jake travel the world of Ooo on their trusty boat, Jeff, searching for the Ice King's lost crown so they can make everything right!

Gameplay: 0/5
I like RPGs. I mean, I really like RPGs. The first website I ever made was a no-longer-existent AOL site dedicated entirely to RPGs. My favorite games of all time list includes a lot of RPGs like Tactics Ogre and SaGa Frontier. So know that there isn't any bias against RPGs when I say this: Pirates of the Enchiridion's gameplay is TERRIBLE.

Pirates is very basic. Game progression is a succession of very basic fetch quests. Combat is very basic attack, defend, use special attack (and before you get excited, know that "special attack" here just means "basic attack plus elemental damage"). I get that it's aimed at kids and not seasoned gaming veterans, but you know what? Pokémon is also aimed at kids and it's way deeper than this. Kids aren't that stupid... especially not if they're watching Adventure Time which actually gets pretty deep in the later seasons, to an extent that I'm forced to wonder if it's truly meant to be for kids at all.

But just being a crappy, generic RPG is not enough to earn a 0. The game is also extremely unoptimized and unstable. First, load times are insane. There are minute or more long load times whenever you change area, and pretty long load times before each battle too. Seriously, you made it ridiculously easy because you were scared you'd drive kids away, but you expect your average ten-year-old to keep their interest up through a three minute loading screen? What is wrong with you?


Get used to this screen, you'll be seeing it a lot.
The game also froze up on me once, and I encountered a glitch where, if you finish a battle with a party member in the "sleepy" status then the battle won't end and you'll have to reset. So yeah, that was fun.

Presentation: 3/5
It's Adventure Time. What do I need to say?

Okay, but seriously, the show isn't the worst. Animation is good, the colorers managed to stay in the lines... noodle arms and ball heads are silly but that's what Adventure Time is.

The game... it looks like someone tried to redraw the show with half the budget and one third the talent. It's not horrible but it has issues.

Story: 4/5
The story is the one saving grace of this game. They brought in actual writers and voice actors from the show, and the result is that it feels just like you're playing through an episode of the show.

That said, it's still not perfect. The biggest issue is that it feels a lot more mundane compared to the show. To be fair, this is not entirely the fault of the writers, but an inherent limitation of the medium. A video game has to follow hard set rules, so it isn't entirely fair to compare it to a cartoon that can just do whatever wacky thing it wants and is well known for doing so.

Of course, if you're not totally caught up on the show then none of this story will mean anything to you anyway... but then, why are you even playing the game and why should the writers pander to you?

KR Rating: [2] BAD

In summary, there really is something to like here. The story is great and legitimately fun, but that's assuming you can stand the boring gameplay, tedious loading screens, and bugs long enough to see it. AT fans definitely deserve a better game than this.

PROS:	CONS:
+ Uses writers and VAs from the show, captures the feel of the show perfectly.	- Generic fetch quests and boring, zero-strategy combat.
+ Legitimately hilarious. I especially love the terrible-on-purpose sea shanties.	- Load times so long even Ice King would die of old age before they finish.
+ Still a better pirate game than Sea of Thieves.	- Freezes so much I think Ice King wrote the code too.

Television Review: Power Rangers Lost Galaxy

Super Sentai Equivalent: Seijuu Sentai Gingaman (Star Beast Squad Ginga Man, named for the Ginga Forest where the characters live)

Following Zordon's sacrifice at the end of In Space all monsters have finally been wiped out from the galaxy. At last, humanity no longer needs to fear destruction at the hands of space demons and so turns their attention fully to space exploration with the first colony ship, Terra Venture. Meanwhile in a distant galaxy where monsters still live, the evil Scorpius and his minion Furio invade planet Mirinoi hoping to gain the ultimate power of the magical Quasar Sabers. Shenanigans ensue and a squad of young soldiers from Terra Venture's defense force find themselves transported to Mirinoi where they draw out the Quasar Sabers and become a new generation of Power Rangers!

Lost Galaxy was the first series of Power Rangers to not directly continue the story from a previous season, though there are still a lot of carryover elements from In Space. The Astro Megaship returns along with Deca and Alpha 6, and there are memorable reappearances from the evil Psycho Rangers and a now-good Astronema.

Lost Galaxy also did manage to keep up some of the things that made In Space so good. Notably, it kept the idea of having complex villains each with their own unique motivations and agendas. It also gave us some of the best villains up to its point. There's Trakeena, the spoiled daddy's girl who tries to fill her villainous father's shoes after his destruction, noble demon Villamax whose only goal was to serve the person he saw as the universe's rightful ruler, all the way to the other end of the moral spectrum with sleazy traitor Deviot who played every side for his own ends.

The Rangers themselves are fairly competently written too, though not quite as well as the villains. Quite often one of them (usually Maya, the Yellow Ranger and an alien girl from Mirinoi where apparently manners don't exist) would do something stupid for no reason except to allow the audience to learn a moral lesson. This lesson was usually some variation of "don't be a stupid jerk like this stupid jerk."

It's also worth mentioning that Lost Galaxy was the most expensive Power Rangers series ever made and it definitely shows. The space battles between the various factions in the show are fairly well made as far as late 90's CGI goes. Honestly, this show wanted to be Star Trek so bad it hurts. I swear the theme that plays over shots of the Terra Venture colony ship is only a few notes off from a lawsuit.

Also, for a series called Lost Galaxy, they only actually spent 7 episodes out of 45 in the titular lost galaxy, and then the total fallout from that event ends up being... nothing. Okay, it did finally convince Trakeena that Deviot wasn't on her side, but that's about it and she was already suspecting anyway. Honestly, the entire lost galaxy... "thing" is a perfect example of the indecisive writing this show sometimes suffered from, and why it can't get that full five out of five.

KR Rating: [4] GOOD

PROS:	CONS:
+ Some of the best villains in the franchise.	- The rangers aren't as well written as the villains.
+ Solid action, pretty good quality effects.	- Sometimes major plot points just go nowhere.

8 Rules To Follow For Character Creation or Customization in Video Games

As I mentioned in last week's post, I have a thing for character customization in games. It's what attracted me to a lot of my favorite game series and I'm willing to forgive almost any number of flaws in a game as long as the game does it well. Done right, it allows you to more deeply immerse yourself into the game's world and can add entirely new levels of replayability. Tactics Ogre remains one of my favorite games for just this reason, as I basically played it like a Lego set, making my own characters, giving them all backstories, and playing out battles between them in Training mode.

That said, don't think that character creation is a "get out of jail free" card for any game. In fact, it can easily become the one thing I hate about a game if it's done poorly. Following are the rules I would like for every game moving forward to follow with regards to character creation and/or customization.

8. Give me options.
Don't get me wrong. Being an artist myself, I totally get that making tons of alternate designs for a character is tough, and can take a lot of time and resources that could be better spent on other aspects of the game. That's the reason why this one is so low on the list.

That said, it is still important that you give me options. This is especially true if you're making the sequel to a game that had way more options than your current game does. You hear me, Soul Calibur 6?

7. If you're going to give me alternate outfits, make them look different.
I'd like to give special mention here to the first Dissidia, where most of the characters had terrible palette swap outfits that were 2 shades off from their default.

That's an extreme example, but this is a far more widespread affliction than that. Other offenders include The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, or for that matter the far more recent The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of War, where most of the armors you can find look pretty much the same except with a line going in a different direction, or a spike here or there. Boring. If you're going to half-ass it this much, you'd might as well just make palette swaps. Speaking of...

6. If you're only giving palette swaps, then give me LOTS of them!
Palette swap costumes aren't ideal, but I can still work with them, and I have before. I spent almost all of Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce with Lu Xun palette swapped to white, role-playing him as a paladin with fire powers.

So my request is, if you're going to just do palette swaps, give me LOTS of them! Palette swapping is super easy so there's no excuse to only give me one color change that's just two steps off from the original, and no I'm not going to let it go, Dissidia.

Or hey, better yet, give me a color slider so I can make my own palette swaps.

5. Give me control.
Obviously, the point of character customization in a video game is to be able to put a part of yourself into whatever game you're playing, whether it be role-playing as an imaginary character, or creating an idealized fantasy version of yourself. So, even more obviously, I need to have control over who and what my character is.

This one is a fairly rare offense, but it does happen. Examples include Final Fantasy Tactics A2 not giving you the option to name your characters, or Fable forcibly covering you in scars because it's impossible to not take damage.

4. Don't make my created characters worse than the defaults.
Speaking of Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics RPGs - especially those made by Ivalice Alliance and the former Quest Corporation - are a major offender on this front. Apparently nobody told them that the point of character creation is supposed to be to allow me to make my own characters. Instead they seem to be under the impression that character creation is just about recruiting expendable idiots to fill out my party until I figure out how to recruit the special people.

I'm not playing Tactics Ogre because I think Denam and Catiua are cool. I'm never going to use your characters, and giving them bonus stat points and access to exclusive classes is just an insult.

Actually, this one happens a lot more often than you'd think, and affects more than just character creation. Other examples include Galactic Civilizations II's spaceship builder, where the preset ships all come with more stuff on them than their chassis' weight limits should actually allow, meaning ship building is pointless because the presets (which, incidentally, are also the only thing the AI uses) are always better.

3. Make me feel like I'm a part of things.
Here's a surefire way to make me hate your game with a passion: let me create my own character, send me through hours of missions, then at the end reward me with a team photo that includes every character in the game except for mine. Go screw yourself, Syphon Filter: Omega Strain.

And no, I get that it would have been difficult to somehow put your character into a prerendered image... so maybe just, you know, don't paint yourself into that corner to begin with? If you can't make it work then just don't do it.

2. If it's character creation, don't tell me who I am.
A lot of people use the terms "character creation" and "character customization" pretty much interchangeably, so I feel I should define what I mean first.

Character customization is more like what you see in a game like Mass Effect. The main character of Mass Effect is Commander Shepherd. Period. You can decide whether Shepherd is a male or female, some facial features, abilities, armor, which is his or her favorite store on the Citadel... but it's still Commander Shepherd.

This is opposed to character creation, which allows you to actually make your own character who you play however you want.

It is very important that, if you are going to give me actual, legit character creation, DO NOT TRY TO TELL ME WHO MY CHARACTER IS. This is why Fallout 3 was great, while Fallout 4 was - at least from a story perspective - hot, steaming garbage. Fallout 3 didn't give me absolute freedom, no. I was from a vault, dad ran away and left me, yada yada, but beyond that I could play my character as whoever and whatever I wanted. Fallout 4 on the other hand could not stop bashing me over the head with its own idea of who it wanted my character to be. You are middle-aged, you have a child, your spouse is Nate and/or Nora. DO NOT QUESTION THE GAME.

And no, I get that they need to give you at least some amount of backstory just to connect you to the game, but it should be as minimal as possible. "You're a new adventurer looking to explore the labyrinth." "You recently left the vault, have fun." That's fine. Not only is it all you need, it's all you should WANT. If you want a singular, deeply nuanced character, then stop playing games with character creation.

1. Let me make an attractive male character.
I can tolerate a game pretending that picking a name and a hair color is character creation. I can play a game for a hundred hours knowing that my created character will always have only 90% stats compared to whatever Cloud Strife wannabe the dev wants me to use. I can even get into a game that tells me the young prodigy inventor I wanted to make is instead a middle-aged retired soldier with a wife and kid.

However, if there is one thing I can not abide, one thing that will make me hate your game with all the burning fury of a neutron star... it is being offered my choices of character, and seeing that my options are "Roid Mutant", "Scar Face", "Toxic Avenger", and "Girl" aka the only character whose face you can look at without dry heaving.

This is an epidemic that plagues almost all of the gaming industry outside of Japan. Seriously, what's up, game devs? Are y'all scared of being called gay or something? KNOCK IT OFF.

Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy (Video Game Review)

In the near future of Tokyo hazard cases are on the rise and only an elite team of teenagers with attitude can put a stop to it. But since the Power Rangers are busy in Angel Grove, we'll instead join up with Alice Mifune, teenage commander of the Xth (pronounced "zith") Squad - an elite paramilitary force of magitek-enabled high school kids - to save the day!

I'll start with the game's good side. One thing you may know about me is that I love character customization. Give me character customization - or even better, character creation - and I can overlook almost any number of flaws in your game. It's what attracted me to City of Heroes, Soul Calibur, Monster Hunter... hell, it's what convinced me to stick with Etrian Odyssey until I learned to love that series on its own merits, and Etrian Odyssey's character creation isn't even that good.

This is where Operation Abyss puts its best foot forward and is probably the game's one saving grace. There are two options to choose from. The first is Basic mode which gives you a selection of a dozen or so fairly cool character portraits to choose from. Basic mode sucks. The second, much better mode is Classic, which is just a straight up paper doll where you can pick all your own features, and equipment actually changes your appearance in game. Unfortunately this does mean you can end up looking like a colorblind clown if you pick all your equipment based only on its stats, but Abyss also gives you an easy way around that, with the ability to reskin any piece of equipment by converting it into source code.

All of that said, if you don't happen to share the same obsession with character creation that I do, then this game really won't have a whole lot for you.

Operation Abyss is actually a remake of Experience Inc's first two games ever - Generation Xth: Code Hazard, and Generation Xth: Code Breaker - and it definitely shows. The game is easily their least polished work.

The writing is passable. It's as goofy as you probably expect from a Dungeon RPG with some bizarre typos, but it's generally competent with likeable characters and plot twists you'll only see coming from most of one mile away.

Gameplay is also passable, in that it more or less works. Combat is boring with very few interesting strategic avenues to explore. The equipment developing system is interesting but also poorly explained. There's no real point to changing classes (or rather, Blood Codes) since no skills or spells carry over... in fact, you're kind of punished for changing class since you have to restart at level 1 whenever you do and you don't get to re-allocate your stats, meaning that if you specced for a Wizard then decided you wanted to be a Conjurer... well, yeah, you're gonna suck.

The game is also pretty short. This is alleviated somewhat by it being the first two games put together. If I had played the original Generation Xth and it was over as fast as the first half of this game, I'd have been pissed.

The environments are where they really dropped the ball. Even by DRPG standards these envrionments are lame with the vast majority of them all being basically the same design with the colors changed. Suffice to say, if "ruined skyscraper", "dank sewer", "haunted hospital", and "refugee shanty town" sound like very aesthetically diverse locales to you... then you clearly did not do the graphic design for this game. (Also there might be something wrong with you.)

As much fun as I did have with this game, I just can not honestly reccomend it. If you want to check out this developer, one of their later games will be a much better Experience. (Pun definitely intended.) I personally suggest trying Stranger of Sword City instead.

KR Rating: [2] BAD