Daily Archives: Thursday, April 15th, 2004

Igarashi: For the Nerds

  • Reading time:3 mins read

A few things I don’t remember seeing mentioned anywhere:

When Leon renounces his title in order to go searching for his woman, he is forced to leave his sword behind. As a result, Leon is unarmed when he rushes into the vampire’s forest. This is why, when Leon runs into this Gandolfi fellow, Leon is presented with an alchemically-fortified whip (later, I assume, to be dubbed “Vampire Killer”), with which to defend himself.

It always did seem a bit out-of-place, did it not?

To go with the whip, Gandolfi then treats one of Leon’s gauntlets, giving it energy-absorbing powers. This allows Leon to block near any attack, and also to absorb magical power with every blow the gauntlet withstands.

Whenever the player defeats an Elemental (in the Dungeons & Dragons sense of the term), that Elemental’s power may then be applied to Leon’s alchemical whip. So the way you get a flame whip is to kill a fire elemental (modeled after Weta Workshop’s idea of a Balrog). Sort of clever.

You know those orbs that you collect after you defeat a boss in the older Castlevania games? They are kind of arbitrary, aren’t they. They refill Simon’s or Trevor’s or Juste’s life bar, and they mark the end of a level. That is about it.

In Lament of Innocence, the orbs are back. In this game, however, Leon collects the orbs; each contains a unique magical influence. Do you remember the Spell Fusion system in Harmony of Dissonance? The way it works is, Juste collects spell books — ice, fire, what-have-you — and then can apply those powers to whatever secondary weapon he might be holding. So if you have the ice book and the cross, a little ice crystal will follow Juste around and shoot at enemies. If you have the wind book and the dagger, Juste can throw a bunch of daggers really quickly.

Exactly the same deal here, with Leon — only with a logistical twist. Get a subweapon, equip an orb (claimed from a defeated boss), and you may use your gauntlet — and the power you have absorbed with it — to cast similar spells depending on which orb and which subweapon you choose. The important thing is, this relies on Leon’s enchanted gauntlet and on the old boss orbs. It… well.

I really like some of these details. It would take a while to explain why I find this as neat as I do.

The game is, indeed, getting more interesting now. That first level I entered — the one in the center — was bland and annoying. This second one — the one on the far left — has a lot going on (in comparison, if perhaps not absolutely). If the game continues to improve at this rate, it could be pretty darned satisfactory by the end.

Again, we will see.

1up

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The site has… not really fulfilled its potential. The reason, as far as I’m concerned, sits in coverage such as this.

Oy.

Good job, man. You not only noticed Mega‘s tiny booth; you found the courage to ridicule them for their obscurity. Use your knowledge well. Don’t waste it on bragging alone. Remember, you’re getting paid for this!

The sad thing is, what you see here is pretty standard behavior in the gaming media. On a good day.

Neon Leon

  • Reading time:5 mins read

I have progressed a bit in Lament of Innocence; I am now closing in on the end of the first level. All I have to do is beat the boss (I died toward the end of my first attempt), and I may move on.

The controls — I don’t know that there is any end of praise I can give to how they are designed. The only flaw I can find is that there is no way to cancel an attack with the block button. So if you see, say, an incoming spear, and your whip is extended, you can’t make Leon lift his gauntlet and block the attack until after his animation is completed. By then, it is usually too late.

Otherwise… well, I will dissect it all later. The mechanics are precise and splendid; they are exactly what I remembered from E3.

The real problem — again! — seems to be in level design. See, now I enjoyed the E3 demo. It was just room, room, room, room, room, room, boss. Clear all of the monsters; move on. Clear the room; move to the next room. Occasionally the player would face a small puzzle room or a platforming section; then he would move on. At the end, the boss.

That was it. It was fun! It was mindless, yet wholly entertaining. It was a straightforward action game, as with the original Castlevania, yet organized like the first well-made 3D brawler I have played. Castlevania: Fists of Fury. No nonsense. Just leap into the game and have fun with it.

When people complained of how shallow the full game was, I scoffed. Well, duh. Igarashi has already said that he intended the game to be a shallow hackfest. And it looked like he succeeded in making an enjoyable one. If the demo was any good representation of the finished result, then I did not see how a person could confuse the game’s ambition for anything else.

The problem with the full game — from what I have so far seen — is that it is no longer so focused. Now there is… wandering. And it is not particularly enjoyable wandering. It is not the sort of “backtracking” that one sees in, say, a Metroid game — which consciously exists to create a coherent sense of place, for the player. It…

Well, take the first level. There are two doors you need to open, to reach the boss. To do so, you need to go out of your way and flip six switches in far, unmarked corners of the level. To do that, you need to zigzag across the same collection of flat, almost wholly non-interactive (if pretty) rooms over and over and over again, fighting or avoiding the same respawning enemies over and over — to no benefit, given that the game contains no experience points (since it was supposed to be more of an action game).

There is almost no verticality to the rooms. When there is, it is usually just to hide a money bag or some other trinket; there is nothing vital on the upper plane. There is no sense of coherence, as the player wanders from one room to the next, as there is a scene transition every time the player opens a door. This, again, is because the game is supposed to be an action game: room, room, room. Clear a room; move on.

That ain’t how the levels are built, though. Instead, it seems like somewhere along the way, someone became worried that the game was too linear. So the rooms became connected to each other in a big enough network as to necessitate a map. In order to encourage the player to explore every corner of that map, the designers threw in obstacles such as those doors and switches. Puzzles now, instead of existing as a relief from battle, act as yet another hinderance, preventing the player from just trudging forward as she is supposed to.

At this point, I think you can see the problem as well as I: it is that Igarashi did not stick to his original idea. If he had just made the game he wanted to make, I am confident that it would have had a bunch of energy and would have been a blast to play. This is just tedious, though. Either someone interfered, and told Igarashi to make the game longer and more complex — although the game was not designed to work that way — or Igarashi himself lost confidence in his design somewhere close to the end of production, and tried to spice it up.

Not a good plan, that — as I am sure you are aware by now.

Oh well. Igarashi does have him some great ingredients, anyway. And heck, maybe the game gets more focused as it progresses. We shall see.