Shenmue I & II (PS4)

 It is the first of April again, and as tradition dictates, it's time to write about a game that's a bit more well known than the usual fare. And this year, it's the turn of SEGA's divisive, absurdly ambitious adventure (and its sequel). In case you're wondering, I'm firmly in the pro-Shenmue camp. 

 

For those who don't know, the Shenmue games tell the story of a young Japanese man in the mid-1980s named Ryo Hazuki, and his quest to get revenge on Lan Di, the mysterious martial artist who killed his father. Well, they tell part of that story anyway. Unfortunately, though the games are absurdly ambitious, those ambitions never even came close to fruition. This story's been told many times before, but the original intention was for Shenmue to be twelve games, all as long as the first. Shenmue I is the first chapter in its full intended length, but then chapter two was skipped entirely, and the second game comprises chapters three-to-five. I haven't played the third game yet, but I do at least know that the story still isn't finished after twenty years.

 

But anyway, despite the reduction in scope from the original plans, these games are still incredible. They're open world adventures where you gather information, occasionally get into fights, and if you feel like it, you can waste time playing various side games, including a bunch of actual SEGA arcade games contemporary to the setting. Though they weren't the first open world games, you could make the argument that they were the first modern-style ones, with all kinds of distractions and things to do alongside the main quest. 

 

I could also talk about the way every character in the game has a name, backstory, and daily schedule, no matter how minor they are, or all the other bizarre and incredible things that are in these games, but to do so would be to do them a disservice. They're games that are much more than the sum of their parts. There's just a certain magic to them that's hard to describe, and judging by the way some people have reacted to them over the years, it's something that you either get or you don't.

 

Though I finished the first game a few times back on its original release, I never got all the way through the second until its HD rerelease. Furthermore, though I was always a fan of the games, it wasn't until I'd played all the way through both that I really realised how special and beautiful they were. Beyond the specifics of the plot and mechanics of the games, they're also a celebration of life, with themes of personal growth, the way people, places and events come and go with ever-shifting levels of importance, and all that kind of stuff.

 

There's a lot of stuff to see and do and find and collect in the games, but they aren't really made for completionists. Instead, it makes everyone's experience of the game slightly different: most of the main points will be seen by everyone in mostly the same way, but there's plenty of stuff you'll see that your friends might not, and vice versa. I mentioned earlier that I played through the first game a few times back on the Dreamcast, but on my recent playthrough of the PS4 port, I saw for the first time a pretty lengthy dialogue seen that is not only fully voice-acted (like all the game's dialogue), but even has a unique flashback cutscene. And unless you do a specific set of actions, you might never see any of that stuff! And there's a whole bunch of things like this in both games!

 

The atmosphere of the games is also noteworthy, in how immersive it is. There's some kind of magic captured in these (by 2021 standards) low polygon models and grainy textures, such that you can practically smell the environments you're exploring. Even playing back then, as a fourteen year old in the north of England, I recognised that these games were instilling in me a nostalgia for places I've never been to, at a time (slightly) before I was even born. I know lot of people don't think highly of these games, but to me, they're two of the best and most important ever, and I think everyone should play them both at least once.

Girls und Panzer Dream Tank Match (PS4)

I thought this a few years ago, and it still seems to be true: there's surprisingly few videogames about tanks. But here's another one, based on the anime, Girls und Panzer. In case you aren't already aware, the anime is set in a world where Panzerfahren is seen as a respectable and feminine sport for young women to participate in. Panzerfahren is the waging of tank battles, in actual World War II tanks. The insides of the cockpits have been treated with a special carbon coating, so no-one actually gets hurt, despite them shooting live ammunition at each other. Totally believable, I don't know why we don't do that in real life.

The game is surprisingly structured like a home port of a fighting game: there's a story mode, where you play through the events of the movie, "domination mode", which is essentially arcade mode, having you pick one of the available school teams (each one very loosely themed around a country involved in WWII and driving that country's tanks) and play through five randomly assigned battles, and "extra mode", which has a bunch of special challenge missions. In all but extra mode, there's also ludicrous amounts of dialogue before and after each battle, which can luckily be skipped, since each conversation takes two or three times more time than the battles themselves. I started the game intending to watch them and find out about the characters, but they really are too long.

So, the important question: are the battles actually fun to play? Luckily, yes! There's various kinds of battles on offer, like straight up team battles, kill-the-captain "flag battles", one-on-one battles, and a weird kind of gauntlet thing. The gauntlet, referred to in-game by the unwieldy title "arrive at the destination", is almost the most interesting type of battle.  You play it alone, and the aim is to drive your tank to the end of a treacherous mountain path, along which are the five members of the opposing team, who'll take pot shots at you as you go. The one thing holding it back is the fact that there's only one map that you play every time this match type comes up. What a shame!

That's not to say the other battles are bad, though. The tanks are satifying to control, feeling big and slow and heavy as they trundle around the maps (I felt a similar way about the way the monsters feel in the excellent PS4 Godzilla game. Maybe there should be more games where you control big heavy things?). As well as moving, there's also satisfaction to be found in shooting. You can only do it once every few seconds, since you're driving a tank, and every shot needs to be loaded individually. There's an auto-aim option, but you really shouldn't use it, as a big part of the combat in the game is not just hitting your enemy's tank, but hitting the right part of the tank, as different parts take different amounts of damage, and you can temporarily immobilise foes by shooting their treads. Like movement, the combat is slow, heavy, and satisfying.

Girls und Panzer Dream Tank Match is a game I definitely recommend. It's fun to play, and there's a lot of it (other than the lack of maps for the gauntlet missions), and through the use of the anime license, it manages to be a game about vintage military hardware that doesn't have a boring, ugly macho aesthetic. The license also gives it an excuse for its fighting game-style structure, as opposed to being about larger scale, more realistic battles, which might have ended up been longer and a little more tedious. It never got released in the west, but an English version did get released in South East Asia, so track that one down if you're interested.

Sword and Fairy 6 (PS4)

Okay, so this game only came out a month ago, but I don't think it's got the coverage it deserves, so just this once, that's obscure enough to get it on the blog. It's a Taiwanese-developed RPG, and the latest entry in a series that's supposedly as popular in Taiwan and China as Final Fantasy is everywhere else. Like Final Fantasy, all the games are standalone stories, so we aren't left in the dark having missed the previous seven games (there were a couple of non-numbered spin-offs, of course). I'll start by addressing the twin elephants in the room, that every other review seems to have obsessed over.

The first, and biggest elephant, is the fact that this is a pretty unstable game. It glitches a lot: every time a new scene loads, the framerate takes a nosedive for a couple of seconds, battles start with a split-second of character models freaking out a little, and sometimes the menus act in strange, and unintended ways. The second elephant is slightly more subtle, and it's the fact that the translation is far from perfect. Some other reviews I've read and watch would have you believe that the dialogue is reduced to gibberish, as if it was translated by Alta Vista's Babelfish in 2001 or something. Really though, it just amounts to sentences sometimes reading a little awkwardly and occasionally the wrong word's been typed. But it's totally understandable.

Now that I have those two points out of the way, I can tell you the truth about them: they don't matter at all. I bought this game on a whim, since I just happened to be online when the limited edition went on sale, and it was pretty reasonably priced. So I decided to satisfy my curiosity about Taiwanese RPGs and get a game that sold out within a couple of hours. And I'm glad I did! The reason the above negatives don't matter is because over the past week of playing Sword and Fairy 6, I've totally fallen in love with it. It's hard to know where to begin in describing it!

The first thing you'll notice, and you can see it in the screenshots, is that this is an aesthetically beautiful game. It stars beautiful characters in a world made up of beautiful locations. The writing is also good enough to shine through the issues the translation has, too. I don't want to go into too much detail, because I really want you to go and play this game, and I'm trying to avoid spoiling anything so you can go into it with almost as much ignorance as I did. The story itself is a pretty decent fantasy saga (so far, at least. At the time of writing, I'm "only" about twelve hours into it), it starts with the protagonists investigating a cult that's been scamming and kidnapping people, and gradually escalates to involve gods and demons and hidden realms and so on. The best endorsement I can give is that as much as I normally hate cutscenes in games, this game's story is good enough that I can sit through some very long scenes of almost nothing but dialogue with no problem at all.

But it's the characters that are Sword and Fairy 6's real strong point. Every character has their own distinct personality and motivations, and they all feel like real people, not the usual scenery-chewing videogame hams made of stereotypes and cliches. Also of note is that in your own party there's a character who has trouble understanding interpersonal relations, and needs help knowing how to talk to people, and what people mean when they talk to her, and a character who suffers from depression and low self esteem, yet isn't depicted as a moping, spineless sadsack. The other characters are all interesting and unique in their own ways too, but again, it's hard to talk too much about them without spoiling anything.

It's not a perfect game, of course, and there are some lesser faults to add to the two big ones, like how the battle system is poorly explained and will take a few attempts to get to grips with (but basically: it's real time, but you only control one character at a time, which you do by selecting their actions from a menu. You select which character this is going to be by going into the "queue" section of the out-of-battle menu and putting them in the leftmost space in your party.) The subtitles are also a bit of a problem. All the cutscene dialogue is spoken in Chinese, and there are English subtitles. The problem is that these subs are small and white, and there's no thick outline or backing box, so that if the background behind them is light-coloured, they become pretty hard to read. This is a nuisance, but again, it's not a dealbreaker.

In summary, I strongly recommend Sword and Fairy 6 to anyone who has ever liked RPGs, and I honestly think it's an instant classic and one of the all-time greats. Playing it has made me feel the same way I did the first times I played Final Fantasy VII, Grandia, and Shining Force III. Can you give a stronger RPG recommendation than that?