Television Review: Power Rangers Time Force

Super Sentai Equivalent: Mirai Sentai Timeranger (Future Team Time Ranger)

In the year 3000, delivery boy Fry is thawed out after 1,000 years in cryogenic suspended animation... wait, no, wrong series. Let's start over.

In the year 3000, Earth has become a peaceful planet where war and strife and even crime are a thing of the past... almost. Ransik and his army of evil genetic mutants have terrorized the world, but one by one they've all been captured and cryogenically frozen by the Time Force patrollers. Ransik comes up with one final desperate plan... stealing an entire prison full of frozen mutants and traveling back with it to the year 2001, where there is no Time Force. The only hope of stopping him is the same crew of Time Force patrollers who were disgraced by his escape... stranded in the past with him, they'll use their future tech to become a new generation of Time Force Power Rangers and transform all the villains back into action figures!

Time Force would end up being the last series of Power Rangers produced by Saban Entertainment before they were bought out and merged into the Walt Disney Corporation, who continued producing the series themselves for a decade or so before its original owners would pull themselves back together as Saban Brands and buy it back.

So is it a worthy send-off? For the most part, yes. The writing is pretty decent. The villains have a fair level of complexity to them, approaching In Space levels. The Rangers are pretty decent. There are a few moments here which could be counted among the top moments for all of Power Rangers. (Which you'd better believe is a list I'll be writing someday in the future when I've gotten through more of the series.)

That said, it isn't perfect (though, did you really expect it to be?) There are also a lot of really bad moments, and episodes where a character grabs hold of the "Idiot Ball" and starts acting like a moron just so that the audience can learn a moral lesson, or so that the villains' plan of the week can get off the ground, or even just because.

My major complaint about Time Force is that I felt it wasted its premise. (You may recall I also listed this as a major complaint when I reviewed Power Rangers Turbo. Get used to it, because it's not going away anytime soon.) When I first heard about Time Force I imagined a crazy adventure through time, visiting different time periods. They even show this happening in the show's intro sequence, with clips of battles being fought in a jungle full of dinosaurs, and one in ancient Egypt.

This doesn't really happen in the show... there's some time stuff, of course. The villains and most of the heroes are from the future. (All except the Red Ranger, who is the original Time Force Red's distant ancestor.) The Rangers hang out in a clock tower, their powers and weapons have a clock theme to them... there are a few episodes that involve actual time travel, but these number in the single digits. For the most part it's just typical "Rangers saving the city" action. Honestly, I'm not really surprised... but still a bit disappointed.

In the end, though, Time Force is a worthy enough send-off to the Saban Entertainment era of Power Rangers, and a decent show.

KR Rating: [4] GOOD

PROS:	CONS:
+ Some really good story moments.	- Also some really bad story moments.
+ A lot of cool creative ideas.	- Wasted its premise.

Seven Things that Superhero Stories Need to STOP DOING

Between the glut of Marvel movies we've been getting, and my own masterplan to watch every terrible-to-almost-decent series of Power Rangers, I've been watching a whole lot of superhero stuff lately. Below are 7 things I really wish that superhero stories would stop doing.

Oh, and before I begin, I'd like to point out one thing - this isn't necessarily a negative review for any of the stories I mention below. A lot of them are good or even great... but that doesn't change the fact that there are some things they need to stop doing.

7. Secret Identities For Their Own Sake
Do note, I'm not complaining about secret identities as a concept. I totally get why there is a need, on occasion, to fight from the shadows. I get that.

This entry is about secret identities that seem to exist just because heroes are "supposed" to have secret identities. To give an example of what I mean, I'll tell you when I first started thinking about this one. It's when I watched the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. I found myself asking, "why are the Rangers using secret identities?"

The usual explanation is to avoid the villains knowing who you are for fear of them going after your friends and family. Fine, except that Rita Repulsa and Lord Zedd already know who the Rangers are, and target them out of costume regularly. The first fight in the entire franchise is out of costume, in fact. There's no one to hide from and they know it.

Alternately, sometimes it's to avoid the heroes getting in trouble for vigilantism, such as is the case with Batman. Again, fine, except the Rangers aren't vigilantes. They fight monsters that no one else can handle, and there's nothing in the show to suggest that the rest of the world has anything but undying love for the Rangers.

Maybe there was a logical reason why the Rangers needed to hide who they were, but the show definitely never told us, unless you count "because Zordon said so" as a logical reason. It felt like it was only being done because "the rules" for superhero stories say you need to have a secret identity... and yeah, that's probably exactly why they did it. Mighty Morphin' wasn't a good show, what do you expect?

6. Heroes Never Kill
Before you say it, no, I'm not saying that every hero needs to be The Punisher. No one is saying that Batman and Superman need to start just executing random street toughs. ...but seriously, why hasn't Batman just killed the Joker already?

You're never going to rehabilitate the Joker. Even if I believed that it was possible to rehabilitate somebody like Joker, why does he deserve that chance? More pertinently, why is it our responsibility to give him that chance? Why is it the obligation of all the good and innocent people in the world to just keep turning the other cheek and agreeing to let ourselves be victimized over and over until Joker finally decides he's done killing people?

Hell, not only are you never going to rehabilitate Joker, you're never even going to actually keep him locked up, and you definitely should know this now that he's broken out for the gazillionth time. Every time you take Joker back to Arkham, you do so with full knowledge that he WILL - not might, WILL - break out and go kill more people, including... wait, including Jason Todd, the second Robin?! Then you saved the Joker's life when Jason Todd came back from the dead and tried to do your job for you?! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU, BATMAN?!

5. Heroes Also Never Cheat
Obviously cheating is bad... in certain circumstances. If you're playing a game, yes, cheating is bad because it goes against the spirit of competition. If you're in school, yes, cheating is bad because cutting corners costs you the opportunity to learn and really only hurts yourself. In those circumstances, yes, cheating is bad.

But when you're a superhero facing off against evil villains... when losing means that you die, your friends and family die, everything you care about and everything you've fought for are wiped out forever... then why on Earth would you ever fight fair? And I do mean "EVER." I'm not just talking about cheating when you have to - if someone wants to kill everyone you love and you give them a fair chance to do so, even if it's because you're sure you'll win anyway, then you're a traitor. A person who isn't willing to cheat, is a person who clearly has nothing worth winning for.

4. All the Villains are Secretly Good
Hello there, Marvel. I see you've been doing this one a lot. Every villain is a well-intentioned extremist who wants to fix the world but is going about it in a bad way, even villains that were never actually like that in the comics. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, just watch Avengers: Infinity War. Notice how Thanos is a contemplative individual, who is dedicated to his cause of trying to curb overpopulation, is willing to make the same sacrifices he demands of everyone else, and who sheds real tears for those who've fallen at his hands? Yeah, in the comics... he's trying to impress a chick, and he cares nothing for what happens along the way or who it happens to.

That's not to say that I don't enjoy this kind of villain every now and then. I really liked Movie Thanos, I did! But it shouldn't be every single villain ever. From a storytelling perspective, it's boring to see the same villain archetypes presented in every single story. It also hinders my enjoyment of a work when I find myself feeling that the bad guy's arguments are making more sense to me than the good guy's are. From a moral perspective, it feels like you're training people - either intentionally or unintentionally - to think that this is what evil looks like, especially when you combine this with...

3. Heroes Save the World (But Don't Fix It)
I mentioned Infinity War already, so I'll keep going from there. I talked about how complex and sympathetic Thanos is in the movie, but the Avengers... well, they're the opposite. They have no counter-argument to anything Thanos says, and no better plan for how to deal with the real, serious problem he's taking on. The closest anyone comes is Gamora, whose entire argument consists of one line and who is instantly silenced afterward. The Avengers themselves have no motivation beyond "we got hurt and now we're pissy."

(And before you say it, yes, I realize that this is exactly what Marvel was going for and I'm sure the next Avengers movie is going to build more on it. Again, I'm not trying to criticize individual movies, but rather to make a point.)

This is something TV Tropes refers to as "Villains Act, Heroes React". It doesn't even just apply to superhero stories, or even just to movies. In Grand Theft Auto 4 Niko Bellic, the murderous criminal, comes across as a veritable saint because all he does is in response to things other, worse people did to him first.

The short version is: it's easy to look wise and heroic when all you ever do is thwart the stuff everyone else tries to do. Everything in the world has flaws. Every grand plan has sacrifices to be made, and every creation has imperfections. Trying to make a real change in the world means losing your purity and risking being seen as the villain. It's much easier, and makes you look so much wiser and braver, to just point out and attack everyone else's flaws. This isn't heroism, it's sophistry.

2. Evil is Mindlessly Destructive
...and hates music and fun, and wants to kill everybody because smiles piss them off. This sort of black-and-white morality is one of the biggest problems with superhero stories.

"But wait!" I hear you screaming. "You just talked about how you hate superhero stories trying to have conflicted and complex villains! You don't know what you want!"

Except the issue above wasn't really about villains being too complex or interesting, it's about superhero stories presenting "trying to fix problems" as being something that evil people do.

Furthermore, this point and the two above it aren't actually mutually exclusive. Quite often they're brought together and it makes all three of them exponentially worse. The villain is doing what they do because they believe it's right, except they're also a ludicrous, black-hat pantomime villain who kills for fun so they're impossible to take seriously, AND the hero has absolutely no counter argument or better plan which makes them look stupid and lazy.

So, again... from a story perspective everyone involved looks like a bunch of morons, and from a moral perspective it feels like you're training people to think this is what evil looks like, and conditioning them to ignore any less overtly destructive forms of evil, like greed.

1. Trying to Justify All the Above
When I reviewed Pokémon Black and White Versions I talked about the villains, and how I always understood that pokéballs were a seriously messed up concept, but that it didn't really irritate me until they brought it up. Well, this is basically the same thing.

Every point that I've complained about here has a reason why it's done that way.

Evil is mindlessly destructive so that we don't get confused about who the bad guys are supposed to be, and because we want to see a struggle with lots at stake.

Heroes save the world but don't fix it because making huge changes to the status quo of your world makes it more difficult to make a serialized story.

Villains have sympathetic motives because it makes them more compelling.

Heroes don't cheat because writers don't want to encourage kids that read comic books to think "if Superman cheated to beat Lex Luthor, then I can cheat to pass my test!"

Heroes don't kill because you don't want to lose your villains.

Heroes have secret identities because... okay, this one never entirely made sense.

The point I'm making here is that, while I'd like to see more stories that are willing to push the boundaries and challenge the status quo, I totally get why they do these things so much. I can accept that this is just how stories are written... until the writers themselves bring it up, only to have all of their arguments be logical fallacies, poorly argued, or both. If you have nothing to say, just don't bring it up.

Television Review: Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue

Super Sentai Equivalent: Kyuukyuu Sentai GoGoFive (Rescue Team Go Go Five)

When foolish treasure hunters accidentally release ancient demons from their 3,000 year old prison, the only people who can stop them are the secret government agency known as Lightspeed. To help with this endeavour, Lightspeed recruits five promising young adults to be their own team of Power Rangers.

Lightspeed Rescue actually took some chances with the material. For the first time the Power Rangers are said to be the invention of modern technology instead of ancient magic, the Rangers don't have secret identities, and this season marks the first use of an entirely original character - the Titanium Ranger was not actually in the original Sentai series at all and was made up entirely for the Western release. They even made their own uniform for him and assigned him his own Zord (the Solarzord, which in the original material was remote-controlled.)

Then again, in a way their breaking the formula really only served to enforce the formula. To this point every series of Power Rangers had included a "sixth ranger" who wasn't a part of the original team but joined later and had stronger powers than the first five - the Green/White Ranger from the original series, Gold Ranger from Zeo, etc. This would have been the first Power Rangers series (assuming you've managed to drink enough to forget Alien Rangers) without a sixth ranger storyline, had the Titanium Ranger not been added.

Still, creating a completely original Ranger for the first time was a ballsy move in its own way. They moved outside of their comfort zone and I give them credit for that.

The Rangers and their interactions were also pretty good. They started to fall back into the idealized frame of the first series, but this time around that's actually justified. In contrast to the original, where Zordon's request was "overbearing and overemotional humans" (famously shortened to "teenagers with attitude" in the opening sequence) here the rangers are actually hand-picked for their skills, not their attitudes. Lightspeed wanted ideal Rangers and that's what they got. In all the Rangers and their allies are pretty fun to watch and fairly well written.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the villains. They're boring and one-note, rarely legitimately threatening, and with not a single one of them actually coming across as sympathetic or interesting. They're not the worst in the franchise... but they're also not even remotely at the level we've come to expect coming off of In Space and Lost Galaxy.

Actually, I take that back. Vypra, played by Jennifer L. Yen, WAS one of the worst in the franchise. She was smoking hot, sure, and I suspect that was her primary reason for being there. Unfortunately, her acting talent was somewhere on par with an anesthetized Will Shatner, with a bad habit of misemphasizing words and inserting weird pauses into her dialog.

So what do I think of this series? I know it's gotten a lot of flak, mostly due to it being the first series of the franchise to have nothing to do with the "Zordon Era." I can understand that, but personally it doesn't bother me. Lightspeed Rescue is damn good. It's just a shame about the villains.

KR Rating: [4] GOOD

PROS:	CONS:
+ The rangers are really well written.	- Villains are not the best.
+ Willing to take risks with the source material.	- Vypra is in fact one of the worst.

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