As this goes live, I am landing on a runway at Narita International. At least I certainly hope I am! I mean, I am happy to be wrapping up another issue of GameSpite, but I feel like maybe this isn’t the final legacy I want to leave the world. After all, we’ve gone and harshed on entries from three world-class game franchises this week. They’re not even bad entries! Just demonstrably flawed chapters whose shortcomings keep them from living up to their respective legacies. So let’s hope I’m enjoying a secure touchdown rather than a watery splashdown. I don’t think I quite trust that those seats effectively double as flotation devices after being compressed by a thousand pair of buttocks each year, is what I’m saying.
Dragon Warrior VII
M. Nicolai comes to pretty much the same conclusion here that I’ve held for a while: Dragon Warrior VII — or Dragon Quest, as they’d be calling it nowadays — was underwhelming on PlayStation. And overwhelming, in terms of raw man-hours to completion. I know lots of people who have logged 100+ hours into the game without finishing it! But as a DS remake, it would probably be pretty boss.
Metal Gear Solid 4
Calorie Mate, Talking Time’s second-biggest Metal Gear fanboy (the first being Tomm “Kojima is My Dad” Guycot), speaks out on the series’ conclusion and is…not particularly fanboyish. In fact, this is pretty much the article I was going to write, if all the shenanigans around reviewing is hadn’t made me want to avoid the series for a few years. Good on yer, ‘Mate.
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
And, finally, the Metroid Prime 3 article I started last August after finishing the game. I gave Corruption a solid score in EGM but had a lot of complaints on a “personal satisfaction” level that didn’t really belong in the review. In fact, I’ve held off on publishing this in case my irritation subsided, but it turns out my misgivings have proven to be symptomatic of a larger ailment, so. Here we are.
Great article of MGS4 there, pretty much summing up my own thoughts. Still loved it, but not the world-beater it could have been thanks to numerous questionable design decisions and an alarming lack of actual gameplay.
Sometime last year I won Dragon Warrior 7 off Ebay, and spent around 290 hours finishing it off (that’s what the ingame clock reads). I pretty much enjoyed it overall, but there is definitely a lot of unneeded fat that could easily be cut away without breaking the final product. Longest time i’ve ever spent on a game so far as I can remember.
Now I just gotta start Dragon Quest 8 sometime…
I clocked 120 hours on Dragon Warrior 7. I beat the game, beat the two bonus dungeons, and I even got God to live at my town. Freaking GOD. I could fight him whenever I wanted then, too, it was nifty.
But the article is right, the game suffered from being TOO LONG, and I only got that far because I was determined to. I’m still not sure WHY I was so determined when I was playing it though. But I know I have absolutely no desire to play it again. While a DS remake sounds nifty, I think I’ll give it a pass if it ever does happen. I’ve done my time.
Re: Prime 3, Parish is right on the money. I enjoyed MP3 during my first run, but felt strangely unfulfilled when I finished it. This was probably because of some of the freaking teasers Nintendo put out on that lame channel weeks before the game’s release. There were at least two fake-outs there. One of a Federation Trooper maybe going crazy with Phazon (you never fight troopers), and another of a screen that actually resembled Mother Brain’s chamber. With all the talk of AUs being organic supercomputers, I fooled myself into thinking ‘cool, maybe we’ll have a for real 3D Mother Brain fight!’
I think I wept a little on the inside when I saw the final boss.
I hold some hope for the Wii ports. The first two were much better games overall (yes, even Prime 2) and I really look forward to playing them with Prime 3’s controls. Provided that’s what they’re talking about. If the ‘Wii-based’ controls AREN’T the same as in Prime 3, then Nintendo would’ve dropped the morph ball entirely.
Feels like you’re channeling the late Wallace with those footnotes, nicolai. Great articles all around, the MP3 one particularly hit the spot with the Hunters comparison.
All I want to say is: Quantam Leap reference for the win!
Yep, completely agree with the Dragon Quest bit. I’m one of those who spent a 100 hours and didn’t finish it.
Having just recently purchased and beat MGS4, I mostly agree with it…
Except for the bit about beating a Ray with Rex beating the “The inferior one can win!” thing over the head. Am I remember different Rex and Ray fights? Raiden and Snake were using pretty much the same weapon against them except it took Snake way, way more shots to take down the Rex than it took Raiden to take down three (or more on higher difficulties). Metal Gear Rays just suck.
The thing is though Zereth- Ray was designed specifically to destroy Metal Gear Rex copies that had flooded the black market after the Shadow Moses incident. Its pretty clearly the inferior vs superior model in this case.
I’ve always thought of Dragon Quest VII not as an entire epic RPG, but as a collection of mini-RPG’s. To put it another way, if most traditional RPG’s are paced like movies or novels, DQVII is more like a DVD box-set of a TV show.
When DQVII came out, in the fall of 2001, I was a freshman living in the dorms without a Playstation. I could go home on a weekend and, in just a few hours, complete one island (including the present-day return trip). I loved it.
I can see that I wouldn’t have loved it so much if I’d tried to play it all at once (or as much as time allowed), as I did with FFX that winter. I’m just curious, though – did anyone else try to pace DQVII like I did?
I did pace things out the way you said Legion (except near the end), and I agree with you on mini-RPG’S thing. That’s one of the reasons I enjoyed the game as much as I did. A lot of the islands are their own little self contained quest, which helped push me forward. First to see how the story in the past played out, and afterwords how the future was changed.
Not the best Dragon Quest game in the series, but still a satisfying experience.
Dragon Quest VII came out in the West at about the same time as Final Fantasy X. I dutifully trudged through FFX. Slick and soulless, was and is my verdict. I turned to DQVII not really expecting all that much, but then WHOOOAAA! That game grabbed me by the throat and would not let go. It was pretty much the opposite of FFX, and it made me remember what I liked about RPGs. I would be embarrassed now to recount the length of some of my DQVII sessions. If I had had a social life at the time, it would have been wrecked.
The overall story isn’t really anything special; as several people have pointed out, it’s the little individual mini-stories that are the real draw. In spite of the lousy translation, the great majority of them are really surprisingly compelling, and they kept me playing–seeing what would come next was always exciting. The game does lose steam a bit once you reach the second disc, but hell, that’s a hundred hours in. There’s no stopping at that point.
I enjoyed DQVIII, but I definitely feel like something was lost in the transition to modernity. I think at this point, my status as a videogame luddite can be confirmed.
“Baptism in the blue ocean”? Very nice, Parish.
M. Nicolai – DQVII was my first DQ, actually, and it’s nice to see someone say what I always wanted to about it, only much better.
Metroid Prime 3 … terrible 3D Metroid, or terriblest 3D Metroid?
Now it’s official: terriblest. Sigh.
Metroid Prime on the Gamecube was awsome… it was new and fresh and brought the world of Metroid to life… it was great! Prime 2 added a whole bunch of scanning and needless garbage… Prime 3… well you summed it up rather well. For some reason Prime 3 seemed even graphicly (or maybe just the Metroid “feeling”) inferior to the original Prime… but the biggest problem I had with Prime 3… I AM LEFT HANDED! Wii games don’t like me. I feel uncomfortable holding the WiiMote in my Right Hand… and therefore hold it in my Left Hand… pointing is much more comfortable for me, etc. However while you can use whatever hand you want to point the WiiMote in Prime 3, the fact that Moving now requires me to use my Right Thumb on the nunchuck… is a MAJOR problem that every other console FPS game has brainwashed me into not being able to do this… I am used to LOOKING with my Right thumb… and Moving with my Left… So Prime 3 hates me… it may be the best controlling (from a casual point of view) FPS on a console… but not for longtime LEFT HANDED console FPS players… :( Maybe the Wii hates me in general…