This Prince puts you in the Movies

The Prince of Persia is one of the longer lived video game series. Born back in the age of the original Apple computer and the Commodore 64, Prince of Persia was an action puzzler that caught a lot of people's attention.

Reborn a few generations later with 3D graphics and environment interaction that hadn't been seen before, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was seen as another great game. And this version had a couple of sequels that appeared on the previous generation.

And now we have the latest incarnation, with a new "Prince" and a new concept of gameplay that challenges the definition of gaming.

Prince of Persia arrived from Gamefly and shortly went into my PS3 for a spin not that long ago. And that initial spin up was a joy.

The game's visuals were lovely to soak up, passing by the realistic for the art direction that made me think of a higher resolution World of Warcraft. Unified art is a good thing.

The controls were easy to learn and play with. Making the Prince wall run, slide down columns or swing from posts was setup in such a way that making mistakes in control were infrequent at best. For me, the toughest part in getting around the environments was transitioning from climbing vines to a wall run. Every now and then I found myself leaping off into space. This leads to that gaming change.

You cannot die.

Jump of a ledge, take one hit too many from a creature or boss, fall into some hazard that would kill you and your partner in world saving would use her magic to rescue you from which ever nasty would normally cause a respawn. This inability to truly fail makes this edition of Prince of Persia feel like you are playing a movie instead of a video game.

The benefit is a seemless experience that resonates unlike most other games that I've played before. No death screens, no re-loading, none of the restarts that you normally experience when dealing with most video games.

However, this path also suffers from making the game feel too easy. The challenge is lost when there feels to be a lack of penality for mistakes. And platformers, which is what defines Prince of Persia, live for making the player suffer.

So after my first round of play, I was torn whether to keep going to send it back as too easy. But the thought occurred that I could probably finish this game fairly quickly, and the dialog between the Prince and Elika had a quality that resembled the exchange between Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in the 1984 movie Romancing the Stone. They initially aren't interested, but they start to grow on each other and the relationship develops. This holds true for the protagonists of Prince of Persia and is a quality that kept me going for quite a while.

And then the second flaw hit me over and over and made me give up - that flaw was boss recycling. You fight each boss once in the intro for each section. Then you have three more opportunities, followed by a fifth time to finish the job.

So you've got roughly 26 levels, each one ending with a boss fight and a total of five different bosses. It wouldn't have been so bad if the one I kept facing could only be beat in a specific manner I could not seem to get the hang of. After several play sessions, back to Gamefly it went.

Oddly, it still remains the best experience that makes the player feels as if they're in a story more than a game. Most certainly worth the rental, and I may even pick it up if I catch it on the cheap.

So this gutcheck (which had a longer playtime than most checks) is very positive. Just be prepared for a smooth ride and start on the left side of the map for the most enjoyment out of the game.

Be seeing you,

Jon

Tactical RPGs, Disgaea and Me

When the first edition of Disgaea was sent my direction from Scott, I was entranced. Cool little boards, lots of number crunching, fun game mechanics, leveling up weapons through dungeon exploration, Disgaea contained all of that and more that I did not even scratch the surface of doing.

I probably put more hours into Disgaea than any other RPG or game except for possibly Final Fantasy X.

Before Disgaea, I had played Final Fantasy Tactics, but never got around to completing it since some of the scenarios were rather difficult and I was not motivated to power level characters.

Since then, I played a little of La Pucille Tactics, a little more of Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced, and actually completed Song Summoner - the Square Enix tactical RPG for the iPod.

Sure there was Disgaea 2, which I was scared away from thanks to the reviews, and a few other TRPGs but none really grabbed me.

When Disgaea 3 was announced, excitement started to build. The game started appearing on my short list of games to pick up - but that on going theme of "It cost's too much." kept rearing it's head and I held off.

Enter Gamefly and Disgaea 3 was shipped to me for rental purposes. Finally, I was going to return to irreverent, self-aware tactical RPG I enjoyed so much many years ago.

And it was good.

The plot begins a demon kid out to overthrow his father (the current Overlord of the Netherworld) this time the setting is the school for demons, so the subsystems of the game have been changed, which is fine.

There is a classroom where the player can influence who can combo better with whom, pass new bills to improve the goods available for purchase, and add characters to use in the dungeons.

Then there are new stat changing Evilities, clubs for the characters to join in the class room, Magichange abilites allowing a class character and a monster character to join forces and do lots of damage. The list of things to track and monkey about with goes on and on.

So we have this game with tons of stuff to do, funny scripting, and lots of approaches to take. And then there is the player who has two young children and is approaching forty in age. This doesn't look good for one of these two parties.

In this case, I was the one to cave and return Disgaea 3. Playing a game like this would require such commitment that I would not be able to finish it unless all other games were left behind. And I already kicked World of Warcraft to the curb once, no need to fill that gap.

So the gutcheck on this game, is to give it a shot if you have the time and enjoy a deep, but easy, tactical RPG. I remember no real challenge from the first Disgaea, and this release did not appear to up the ante. But the fun factor of fiddling with numbers and beating up the bad guys was present.

However, if time is at a premium, then give this a pass for now.

http://disgaea.us/dis3/