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Published on January 16th, 2012 23:22
While Modern Warfare 3, FIFA Soccer 12 and Saints Row: The Third were all topping the PS3 and 360 sales charts in the final week before Christmas, in comparison, the five best selling games on the Wii were Just Dance 3, Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games, Zumba Fitness, Zumba Fitness 2 and The Legend of... actually no, the fifth spot went to Mario Kart Wii, while sixth, seventh and eighth went to Skyward Sword, an ABBA dancing game and "Now! That's What I Call Music: Dance and Sing".
As a Nintendo fan who grew up with a SNES and N64, these sales figures are a little hard to digest, because while I'm all for the expansion of the videogames industry I don't want it to come at the expense of core console games. And even though No More Heroes 2, Monster Hunter Tri and Sin and Punishment 2 have helped save thousands of AA batteries from dying in wasteful silence, they've been the exception rather than the rule.
But then August came along and something unusual happened. After being disappointed time and time again by the "Japan-only" stigma that struck Captain Rainbow, Fatal Frame IV and Sandlot's Zangeki no Reginleiv, Nintendo of Europe finally came good by localising Xenoblade Chronicles. Was this the act of a company trying to get back in touch with its core audience, or was Nintendo simply filling in a gap during the yearly summer drought?
Just like an episode of Come Dine With Me where the host undercooks the main but then pulls it back from the brink with an epic dessert, Nintendo of Europe seem to be making amends by giving the fans what they want. The only question is, are The Last Story and Pandora's Tower worth the wait?
The Last Story
Coming from the same studio that co-developed Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, The Last Story looks spellbindingly promising on paper. Rather than a typically turn-based affair as you'd expect from its creator, the father of Final Fantasy Hironobu Sakaguchi, this is a tight experience that restricts your sidetracking options.
Elza and his teammates can be resurrected a maximum of five times each per fight. It's a tad too generous.
It's a less than conventional action RPG that wants you to stay focused on the titular story, and even though the language barrier obscures the finer plot details in our imported copy, we were still able to grasp the general gist as we played through its 43 chapters.
You play the role of Elza, a typical JRPG lead who was orphaned at a young age and now works as a mercenary-for-hire with his eclectic group of friends. This includes a calm but slightly suspicious looking leader, a feisty female brawler who dual-wields a pair of blades, a meek sorceress who's handy with a healing spell and a young magician with a piracy fetish - all replete with trademark JRPG haircuts and outfits with superfluous buttons. The team are then plonked in a cave for the opening chapter where they have to tackle some Uruk-hai lookalikes.
This dungeon introduces you to the core mechanics and while things start out fairly basic - you simply have to walk up to an enemy to clobber them with your sword - a condensed yet flexible selection of techniques gradually emerges. The first is the Gathering ability that lets Elza coerce the attention of nearby enemies, giving your mages a bit of breathing space to work their magic. But rather than the traditional magic missiles, this casting system lets you place areas of elemental potency which can do everything from heal your team to inflicting debilitating status effects.
The boss battles can seem fairly tricky at first but each of them has a very exploitable weakness. This guy doesn't like bridges.
It's a genuinely refreshing combat system that doesn't involve huge lists of spells or vast spreadsheets of attributes, but instead asks you to put all that crossbow training into practise with an array of venom tipped arrows and banana peel bolts - the latter of which can be used to trip people up. The Last Story surprisingly shares a slither of its genes with Gears of War, as Elza can snap to nearby cover while taking potshots with his rustic sidearm. The game even makes the distinction between so-so shots to the body and booming headshots to the face.
But even though this is an action-RPG that breaks the mould with its mesh of gameplay systems - to the extent where one chapter sees you infiltrating a castle with tranquiliser darts that knock out patrolling sentries - its style and story still smack of a traditional JRPG. The aesthetic is best described as a cross between Renaissance art and anime with a magically arcane twist, while the narrative spirals from a star-crossed love story between Elza and a runaway princess into a war between two island nations.
There's also no escaping the fact that this is a fairly linear game. There are a few sidequests and an obligatory battle arena, but there's only one central city with no supplementary towns to speak of.
But Last Story makes its innovations elsewhere, such as an online multiplayer element that lets you play either cooperatively against bosses or competitively in a battle royal.
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