moving block puzzles
Tales of Graces f
It was four minutes into Tales of Graces f that I met the amnesiac
with the impossible purple pigtails. She didn't know who she was, or
where she came from, or anything really. She was a deadly martial
artist, but nearly walked right off a cliff. Later she asked the meaning
of the word "friend." I threw up in my mouth a little and realized that
Graces f would be a tale quickly forgotten. In hindsight, I guess the
cover art should have served as warning.
But if the whole game boiled down to waiting for the kid in the Elvis getup to realize that the king is possessed by a demon, I wouldn't have played it for almost ninety hours. Yes, a lot of time is wasted running errands through copy-paste corridors while the characters say how they feel and explain magical jargon. But then you run into a giant spider, and the kids' anime story melts away for a few seconds of glorious battle.
I'll even say that Tales of Graces f has my favorite RPG combat, taking the crown from predecessor Tales of Symphonia. Graces f layers new abilities and limitations onto Symphonia's melee-and-magic arena skirmishes, and the end result is a more dynamic structure that makes earlier games in the series look like button mashing. It's also complicated as hell.
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
Hollywood and video games have never had a healthy relationship. Ever
since the Super Mario Bros movie ruined millions of childhoods, video
game franchises of all kinds have received blasphemous silver screen
adaptations. The latest mainstream abuse of a video game license comes
from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. I'm not one to praise the
narrative of most games, but I really enjoyed the bittersweet fable of
the Prince and Farah that the 2002 hit presented. I've heard less
favorable things about the movie, and I don't think I want to see how it
ended up.
The existence of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
is the result of one of the strangest cross-media cycles I've ever
seen. The Forgotten Sands, a sequel to the Sands of Time video game, was
released alongside the Sands of Time movie, an unrelated adaptation of
the Sands of Time video game. Even stranger, Sands of Time already
has a pair of sequels (Warrior Within, and The Two Thrones), but Forgotten Sands apparently precedes them. Even strangerer, the Wii
version of Forgotten Sands is actually an alternate tale to the version
of the game available for PS3, 360, and PC!
I'm still trying to
wrap my head around all that. The plotline of the Sands Trilogy was
already mind-bending enough with all the time travel going on, but now
Hollywood's gone and made everything worse! Oh well. I guess the more
pressing topic at hand is just how forgettable Forgotten Sands is on the
Wii.
