2012
18JUL
Rainbow Moon
Title: Rainbow Moon
Genre: RPG
Platform: PS3 (PSN Downloadable)
Enjoy the picture; it looks far worse in motion.
Who are we to continually demand the trappings of the "old school RPG," when hardware capabilities, cultural tastes, and developer tool accessibility have left the genre in the dust? There are hundreds of thousands of hours of emulation gold available a mere Google search away, as well as thousands of RPG Maker games of varying degrees of success, all for free, and yet, any time a self-proclaimed "old school RPG" materializes in the "real world," it generates a mild hullabaloo as oldsters (read: anyone who hadn't yet reached puberty when G.I. Joe was still on the air) proclaim a faithful return to the genre. To that, I ask two questions; where did the genre go, and why would we want it back?
Now that that's out of my system, let's talk about the game itself. Rainbow Moon will set you back a measly 15 bucks, yet claims to sport a hundred or more hours of treasure chest raiding and turn based combat, all gussied up in next-gen HD graphics. But, unlike a handful of other recent fauxld-school RPGs to appear on the PSN and XBLA marketplace, this one fails to a spectacular degree - not in any one major way, but in lots and lots of little ways that creep up on your until you (depending on your personal pain threshold) finally decide that enough's enough. In short, they aren't fooling anybody.
Let's start with that 100+ hours of gameplay. Do you know why this is possible? Because the game gives new meaning to the word grindtastic. It's a tortuous slog that still pokes its nose out of its hole in the ground from time to time, but this time it's touted as a feature? Sure, a grind - when done properly - can be a cathartic way to relax after a long day of work, but it's not about length - it's about quality and pacing. This just in: you can double a game's length by halving the amount of experience enemies yield. Now it's 200 hours long! There is no magic to the grind; it's a mathematical formula of integer division. And yet, it's a bullet point that is clung to with a sort of sweaty, neckbeardish sense of pride.
Not that this game needs any help in the length department, because experience is already extremely scarce, but for a sinister reason that I'll get to shortly. Worse yet, there are distinct level plateaus where no sane amount of grinding will get you the next level you'll think you need to overcome the roadblock encounters and bosses that this game is so fond of. At level 5, you'll need 350 experience to level up, and the most generous of enemies is still giving single digit experience. So what do you do? Well, there is a secondary grind in the form of rainbow pearls, which let you train up your stats directly up to a certain limit based on your current level. At this point in the game (I would say early, but this is probably 3 hours in, in all honesty), you're getting one pearl per kill, no matter the enemy. This has a secondary effect of meaning you have to feed kills to your less-powerful party members, because not only do they start out weaker than you but they will never get any stronger and will quickly be left behind in usefulness entirely if you don't set them up for the killshot, which is a mechanic even a grindfest like Disgaea had the decency to drop after the first game. So, you go back to the starting area and fight level one enemies who pose no threat whatsoever until you amass enough pearls to cap your strength and defense so you can take on the harder encounters. Dozens and dozens of the same two enemies: malformed imp things and gigantic "tiny" bees. Over and over, for the better part of an hour.
Does it sound tedious? It should, and the developers wanted it that way. Want to know why? Why the grind is as hellish as could be, and why this game is a total wash in my book? Two words, and an acronym: Day. One. DLC. Specifically, in the form of in-game currency and upgrade pearls. Yes, you are reading that correctly. The game is specifically designed to be as tedious as possible to play to better the odds that you will break down and bribe your way to victory (or at least maxed stats). This is goddamned inexcusable, people.
Not that the game itself has anything to offer besides. Despite skirting along under the guide of being an "old school experience," it is very clear from the start that none of the designers have actually ever played an RPG or strategy RPG in their lives. The entire package - from the stiff walking animations to the skill handling to the apparently three-digit maximum level - feels like the product of someone who watched someone else play Disgaea on YouTube without actually knowing how the genre or its conventions work. I will give you an example. No, I will give you many examples. One of the bullet points I've seen tossed around is the addition of "western RPG conventions" (and, technically, it is a western RPG masquerading as an eastern one already). What does this amount to, exactly? A super-fast-forwarded day/night and day of the week system, for one, which is not nearly affecting enough on the world to be noticeable aside from a few minutes of "can't see shit." There is also a completely stapled-on hunger system, which you replenish with the mountains of food and water that the game throws at you. Even having played for several hours, I never had to buy food, and I never dipped below 70% in the gauge, so I don't know if there are consequences of letting it drop to zero. The designers clearly don't understand what this mechanic is supposed to add to other games of the genre, so it's thrown in as a transparent attempt to demonstrate depth by adhering to genre conventions without knowing what the mechanic actually means.
I have never had to criticize the controls in an RPG or strategy game, so here we go: this game has the worst controls of any RPG I have ever played. Walking around on the main world is decent enough, if a bit slow and stilted, but the battle controls again demonstrate a misunderstanding of how the genre works. Almost every action is done with the a combination of menu surfing and the directional arrows. That's right; moving and attacking are done by pressing in the direction you want to go or do, so right away the finicky analog stick is out. Never mind that the entire game is in isometric perspective, so the oblique angle does not align with the directional pad anyway. To its credit, if you sit for a second, the squares around you will light up with an icon of the D-pad and its corresponding direction, but like I said before, it's a bunch of little things that hammer into your skull. The way the menu's appearance doesn't change after you enter move mode, meaning you will move once, then try to arrow down to the "Skill" menu choice and end up moving again and ending your turn. Or the way skill handling uses a completely different set of button actions to rotate, aim, and initiate. Or the way you have to attack with the directional pad, and the direction you attack from (i.e. from behind) makes absolutely no difference. Or how you never get confirmations for anything, and there is no way to back up if you mess up a movement or do the wrong action. Like I said, it's like the designers watched someone else playing a grid-based strategy game without seeing the controller, and so they made it up on the fly.
Not that combat requires a lot of finesse other than "have bigger numbers than the enemies," because the purported strategy portion of this battle system deserves a look. Actually, it treads a fine line that gave me pause for thought, and I am bewildered as to whether I should be impressed or if I'm just thinking about it too much. You see, the AI is extremely simple: get beside an opponent and attack him or her. The challenge is supposed to come from the fact that you can see as many as 20 enemies on the field at once time, while you're limited to a party of 3, but a single unconventional twist is what makes the whole ordeal strange. You see, combat is divided into turns, which are divided into sub-turns: there is no move-and-then-attack pattern here. If you get 2 sub turns, you can move and then attack, or attack and then move, or use an item and move, or move and move, and so forth. Good idea on paper, except the AI has no use for items and will just attack twice anyway, meaning you will die extremely quickly if you're ganged up upon, and also meaning that the best course of action is always, always "make your last subturn action Defend." You can still attack once, and you'll take scratch damage from any surrounding enemies.
That's not the actual strategy, though.
See, the other quirk is that there is no same-team displacement. Since actions are taken one step at a time, you can't walk through allies, and neither can enemies, so ideally you hole up in a corner so you only have to take damage from two fronts at once. Here is where it gets weird. Slain enemies will randomly drop treasure, which takes up the square they were standing in. Take a deep breath, and read that again. You see where I'm going with this, right? The best strategy becomes surrounding yourself with dropped items on the field, forcing enemies to go around them to get to you. There is no incentive to pick up the treasure, as it is given to you at the end of the battle anyway and it is very rarely something like a health potion that will help you out immediately. The mental image of an 8-foot-tall earth golem being thwarted by a single rainbow coin on the ground is pretty amazing, I'll be honest. So, even though there are 20 enemies on the field, 19 of them will spend their turns pacing back and forth as the pathfinding is not smart enough to coordinate and reach the player, and with a little luck, you'll only have to deal with one enemy at a time.
But it gets even better.
Some enemies, like said earth golem, will use their wacky AI sense to only ever go for a specific ally, like your first partner (the female in the picture above). I am almost positive this is due to the weapon triangle system, which is actually a weapon hexagon: there are six different weapon types that all allies and enemies can use, and each one has a rock-paper-scissors relationship with two others, and seriously were the developers expecting me to memorize the whole thing when there is no logical flow from one to the next? So, anyway, the enemy will completely ignore your other character and do nothing but stomp after his target, who of course can run away at the same pace. This means you can literally kite this enemy in circles around your player character, who will attack with impunity because the AI will never go for him as long as the monster isn't rooted in place.
So, I have to ask...are these quirks intentional? Is the basic strategy of the game actually centered around exploiting flaws in the AI and terrain system? Does it constitute a strategy at all if there is no logical real-world equivalent to what's going on? Is it a deceptive satire of grid-based strategy games, where the only actual challenge (apart from having high enough numbers) is actually a purposefully-terrible control scheme? I want to believe.
Gameplay is about all you get, as there is no deep or interesting story to be had whatsoever. Your main character is a blank slate with no personality who's thrown through a portal to a new world inhabited by dozens of clones of the same 5 or 6 NPCs who sporadically pop up to fulfill the typical RPG NPC needs. I haven't seen a hint of any underlying plot brewing, but it will probably be something trite like "save the girl/world/moon and get to go home" because this is old school, remember. Quests and such are told through poorly-translated walls of text that I am not going to read because they are in tiny blue print on an eye-searing cyan background so no thank you. At least there's no voice acting, apart from silly little chirps the NPCs make when you talk to them. So, you're essentially playing for the grind, and the progression, flawed as it may be.
Graphics are colorful but repetitive, and the animation is terrible all around. In addition, character art is devoid of in-game resemblance or personality, and seems to have been traced from a "Draw Your Own Manga" book with 17-point perspective applied. The main character looks nothing like his Drag Queen Dragoon (coming fall 2013) character art drawing, which greets you constantly on every status and battle screen, so someone was clearly proud of it. Even though I am a terrible artist myself, no doubt because I actually have a pair of dead tree frogs instead of opposable thumbs, I can still call out something derivative when I see it. Music is a nice effort, but is pretty forgettable all around, which most definitely does not fall under the old school excuse. (Dahdahdah dah daaaaaah, dahdah daaah daaaaaah...quick, what tune is that?)
Really, it's hard to label the package as appealing to old school RPG fans. A hellish grind is only a tiny part that triggers the nostalgia center. You probably think I'm being harsh on a little $15 independent game (don't forget the DLC too), but the fact is, you can get actual, high quality PS1 RPGs for less than $15 on the PSN already. It's not a niche that needs to be doubly-filled, especially so poorly. I'm reminded of what little I saw of the newest iteration of the Penny Arcade RPG series: never mind that maps are lifeless and static and look like bitmaps exported from Game Maker, or that the sprites are literally tweaks and recolorings of Final Fantasy VI characters, or that the solution to random encounters is, like with Rainbow Moon, to just make them static encounters that are spread about randomly. (Although I'm kind of guilty of that last one myself). The only recently-released game that's done it right is, for all its perceived faults, Pier Solar, and do you know why? Because it was actually made for an old school system. The charm and spirit and frustrations of the genre are due to actual constraints, and not artificial ones imposed upon the player and the developer in order to artificially recreate the feeling. When you're limited to an actual 256-color palette and 40-character-wide display, you make some clever workarounds in the interface and playfield both, which is what subconsciously translates as impressive and engrossing to the player.
Rainbow Moon also falters on the world aspect. Old school RPGs are not just random encounters and level grinding and equipment buying. Remember when you left Midgar for the first time in Final Fantasy VII and thought, holy shit, that was just one town! There's an entire world still left to see! Or in Phantasy Star IV, when you boarded a spaceship and flew to another planet entirely? What do you get in Rainbow Moon? You grind and quest and dungeon crawl for 3 hours, and you get a raft, which lets you sail to an nearly-identical town a stone's throw away to start the questing and grinding all over again. It's the point A to point B feeling that World of Warcraft popularized, whereas proper bygone-era RPGs were less forgiving with the hand-holding and aesthetic homogeneity.
If the world really wants RPGs with old-world trimmings, the indie sect is a good place to start. However, these flaccid attempts that throw out buzzwords like "grinding" and "100 hours" as a sort of ironic self-awareness when we're beyond those concepts as a gaming culture feel somewhat like betrayal or appeasement. Especially when you're asking for 15 bucks for the privilege. Plus DLC.
Genre: RPG
Platform: PS3 (PSN Downloadable)
Enjoy the picture; it looks far worse in motion.
Who are we to continually demand the trappings of the "old school RPG," when hardware capabilities, cultural tastes, and developer tool accessibility have left the genre in the dust? There are hundreds of thousands of hours of emulation gold available a mere Google search away, as well as thousands of RPG Maker games of varying degrees of success, all for free, and yet, any time a self-proclaimed "old school RPG" materializes in the "real world," it generates a mild hullabaloo as oldsters (read: anyone who hadn't yet reached puberty when G.I. Joe was still on the air) proclaim a faithful return to the genre. To that, I ask two questions; where did the genre go, and why would we want it back?
Now that that's out of my system, let's talk about the game itself. Rainbow Moon will set you back a measly 15 bucks, yet claims to sport a hundred or more hours of treasure chest raiding and turn based combat, all gussied up in next-gen HD graphics. But, unlike a handful of other recent fauxld-school RPGs to appear on the PSN and XBLA marketplace, this one fails to a spectacular degree - not in any one major way, but in lots and lots of little ways that creep up on your until you (depending on your personal pain threshold) finally decide that enough's enough. In short, they aren't fooling anybody.
Let's start with that 100+ hours of gameplay. Do you know why this is possible? Because the game gives new meaning to the word grindtastic. It's a tortuous slog that still pokes its nose out of its hole in the ground from time to time, but this time it's touted as a feature? Sure, a grind - when done properly - can be a cathartic way to relax after a long day of work, but it's not about length - it's about quality and pacing. This just in: you can double a game's length by halving the amount of experience enemies yield. Now it's 200 hours long! There is no magic to the grind; it's a mathematical formula of integer division. And yet, it's a bullet point that is clung to with a sort of sweaty, neckbeardish sense of pride.
Not that this game needs any help in the length department, because experience is already extremely scarce, but for a sinister reason that I'll get to shortly. Worse yet, there are distinct level plateaus where no sane amount of grinding will get you the next level you'll think you need to overcome the roadblock encounters and bosses that this game is so fond of. At level 5, you'll need 350 experience to level up, and the most generous of enemies is still giving single digit experience. So what do you do? Well, there is a secondary grind in the form of rainbow pearls, which let you train up your stats directly up to a certain limit based on your current level. At this point in the game (I would say early, but this is probably 3 hours in, in all honesty), you're getting one pearl per kill, no matter the enemy. This has a secondary effect of meaning you have to feed kills to your less-powerful party members, because not only do they start out weaker than you but they will never get any stronger and will quickly be left behind in usefulness entirely if you don't set them up for the killshot, which is a mechanic even a grindfest like Disgaea had the decency to drop after the first game. So, you go back to the starting area and fight level one enemies who pose no threat whatsoever until you amass enough pearls to cap your strength and defense so you can take on the harder encounters. Dozens and dozens of the same two enemies: malformed imp things and gigantic "tiny" bees. Over and over, for the better part of an hour.
Does it sound tedious? It should, and the developers wanted it that way. Want to know why? Why the grind is as hellish as could be, and why this game is a total wash in my book? Two words, and an acronym: Day. One. DLC. Specifically, in the form of in-game currency and upgrade pearls. Yes, you are reading that correctly. The game is specifically designed to be as tedious as possible to play to better the odds that you will break down and bribe your way to victory (or at least maxed stats). This is goddamned inexcusable, people.
Not that the game itself has anything to offer besides. Despite skirting along under the guide of being an "old school experience," it is very clear from the start that none of the designers have actually ever played an RPG or strategy RPG in their lives. The entire package - from the stiff walking animations to the skill handling to the apparently three-digit maximum level - feels like the product of someone who watched someone else play Disgaea on YouTube without actually knowing how the genre or its conventions work. I will give you an example. No, I will give you many examples. One of the bullet points I've seen tossed around is the addition of "western RPG conventions" (and, technically, it is a western RPG masquerading as an eastern one already). What does this amount to, exactly? A super-fast-forwarded day/night and day of the week system, for one, which is not nearly affecting enough on the world to be noticeable aside from a few minutes of "can't see shit." There is also a completely stapled-on hunger system, which you replenish with the mountains of food and water that the game throws at you. Even having played for several hours, I never had to buy food, and I never dipped below 70% in the gauge, so I don't know if there are consequences of letting it drop to zero. The designers clearly don't understand what this mechanic is supposed to add to other games of the genre, so it's thrown in as a transparent attempt to demonstrate depth by adhering to genre conventions without knowing what the mechanic actually means.
I have never had to criticize the controls in an RPG or strategy game, so here we go: this game has the worst controls of any RPG I have ever played. Walking around on the main world is decent enough, if a bit slow and stilted, but the battle controls again demonstrate a misunderstanding of how the genre works. Almost every action is done with the a combination of menu surfing and the directional arrows. That's right; moving and attacking are done by pressing in the direction you want to go or do, so right away the finicky analog stick is out. Never mind that the entire game is in isometric perspective, so the oblique angle does not align with the directional pad anyway. To its credit, if you sit for a second, the squares around you will light up with an icon of the D-pad and its corresponding direction, but like I said before, it's a bunch of little things that hammer into your skull. The way the menu's appearance doesn't change after you enter move mode, meaning you will move once, then try to arrow down to the "Skill" menu choice and end up moving again and ending your turn. Or the way skill handling uses a completely different set of button actions to rotate, aim, and initiate. Or the way you have to attack with the directional pad, and the direction you attack from (i.e. from behind) makes absolutely no difference. Or how you never get confirmations for anything, and there is no way to back up if you mess up a movement or do the wrong action. Like I said, it's like the designers watched someone else playing a grid-based strategy game without seeing the controller, and so they made it up on the fly.
Not that combat requires a lot of finesse other than "have bigger numbers than the enemies," because the purported strategy portion of this battle system deserves a look. Actually, it treads a fine line that gave me pause for thought, and I am bewildered as to whether I should be impressed or if I'm just thinking about it too much. You see, the AI is extremely simple: get beside an opponent and attack him or her. The challenge is supposed to come from the fact that you can see as many as 20 enemies on the field at once time, while you're limited to a party of 3, but a single unconventional twist is what makes the whole ordeal strange. You see, combat is divided into turns, which are divided into sub-turns: there is no move-and-then-attack pattern here. If you get 2 sub turns, you can move and then attack, or attack and then move, or use an item and move, or move and move, and so forth. Good idea on paper, except the AI has no use for items and will just attack twice anyway, meaning you will die extremely quickly if you're ganged up upon, and also meaning that the best course of action is always, always "make your last subturn action Defend." You can still attack once, and you'll take scratch damage from any surrounding enemies.
That's not the actual strategy, though.
See, the other quirk is that there is no same-team displacement. Since actions are taken one step at a time, you can't walk through allies, and neither can enemies, so ideally you hole up in a corner so you only have to take damage from two fronts at once. Here is where it gets weird. Slain enemies will randomly drop treasure, which takes up the square they were standing in. Take a deep breath, and read that again. You see where I'm going with this, right? The best strategy becomes surrounding yourself with dropped items on the field, forcing enemies to go around them to get to you. There is no incentive to pick up the treasure, as it is given to you at the end of the battle anyway and it is very rarely something like a health potion that will help you out immediately. The mental image of an 8-foot-tall earth golem being thwarted by a single rainbow coin on the ground is pretty amazing, I'll be honest. So, even though there are 20 enemies on the field, 19 of them will spend their turns pacing back and forth as the pathfinding is not smart enough to coordinate and reach the player, and with a little luck, you'll only have to deal with one enemy at a time.
But it gets even better.
Some enemies, like said earth golem, will use their wacky AI sense to only ever go for a specific ally, like your first partner (the female in the picture above). I am almost positive this is due to the weapon triangle system, which is actually a weapon hexagon: there are six different weapon types that all allies and enemies can use, and each one has a rock-paper-scissors relationship with two others, and seriously were the developers expecting me to memorize the whole thing when there is no logical flow from one to the next? So, anyway, the enemy will completely ignore your other character and do nothing but stomp after his target, who of course can run away at the same pace. This means you can literally kite this enemy in circles around your player character, who will attack with impunity because the AI will never go for him as long as the monster isn't rooted in place.
So, I have to ask...are these quirks intentional? Is the basic strategy of the game actually centered around exploiting flaws in the AI and terrain system? Does it constitute a strategy at all if there is no logical real-world equivalent to what's going on? Is it a deceptive satire of grid-based strategy games, where the only actual challenge (apart from having high enough numbers) is actually a purposefully-terrible control scheme? I want to believe.
Gameplay is about all you get, as there is no deep or interesting story to be had whatsoever. Your main character is a blank slate with no personality who's thrown through a portal to a new world inhabited by dozens of clones of the same 5 or 6 NPCs who sporadically pop up to fulfill the typical RPG NPC needs. I haven't seen a hint of any underlying plot brewing, but it will probably be something trite like "save the girl/world/moon and get to go home" because this is old school, remember. Quests and such are told through poorly-translated walls of text that I am not going to read because they are in tiny blue print on an eye-searing cyan background so no thank you. At least there's no voice acting, apart from silly little chirps the NPCs make when you talk to them. So, you're essentially playing for the grind, and the progression, flawed as it may be.
Graphics are colorful but repetitive, and the animation is terrible all around. In addition, character art is devoid of in-game resemblance or personality, and seems to have been traced from a "Draw Your Own Manga" book with 17-point perspective applied. The main character looks nothing like his Drag Queen Dragoon (coming fall 2013) character art drawing, which greets you constantly on every status and battle screen, so someone was clearly proud of it. Even though I am a terrible artist myself, no doubt because I actually have a pair of dead tree frogs instead of opposable thumbs, I can still call out something derivative when I see it. Music is a nice effort, but is pretty forgettable all around, which most definitely does not fall under the old school excuse. (Dahdahdah dah daaaaaah, dahdah daaah daaaaaah...quick, what tune is that?)
Really, it's hard to label the package as appealing to old school RPG fans. A hellish grind is only a tiny part that triggers the nostalgia center. You probably think I'm being harsh on a little $15 independent game (don't forget the DLC too), but the fact is, you can get actual, high quality PS1 RPGs for less than $15 on the PSN already. It's not a niche that needs to be doubly-filled, especially so poorly. I'm reminded of what little I saw of the newest iteration of the Penny Arcade RPG series: never mind that maps are lifeless and static and look like bitmaps exported from Game Maker, or that the sprites are literally tweaks and recolorings of Final Fantasy VI characters, or that the solution to random encounters is, like with Rainbow Moon, to just make them static encounters that are spread about randomly. (Although I'm kind of guilty of that last one myself). The only recently-released game that's done it right is, for all its perceived faults, Pier Solar, and do you know why? Because it was actually made for an old school system. The charm and spirit and frustrations of the genre are due to actual constraints, and not artificial ones imposed upon the player and the developer in order to artificially recreate the feeling. When you're limited to an actual 256-color palette and 40-character-wide display, you make some clever workarounds in the interface and playfield both, which is what subconsciously translates as impressive and engrossing to the player.
Rainbow Moon also falters on the world aspect. Old school RPGs are not just random encounters and level grinding and equipment buying. Remember when you left Midgar for the first time in Final Fantasy VII and thought, holy shit, that was just one town! There's an entire world still left to see! Or in Phantasy Star IV, when you boarded a spaceship and flew to another planet entirely? What do you get in Rainbow Moon? You grind and quest and dungeon crawl for 3 hours, and you get a raft, which lets you sail to an nearly-identical town a stone's throw away to start the questing and grinding all over again. It's the point A to point B feeling that World of Warcraft popularized, whereas proper bygone-era RPGs were less forgiving with the hand-holding and aesthetic homogeneity.
If the world really wants RPGs with old-world trimmings, the indie sect is a good place to start. However, these flaccid attempts that throw out buzzwords like "grinding" and "100 hours" as a sort of ironic self-awareness when we're beyond those concepts as a gaming culture feel somewhat like betrayal or appeasement. Especially when you're asking for 15 bucks for the privilege. Plus DLC.