And reading more about the game didn’t help. From a mainstream source I get the impression that it’s a brawler mixed with a bad GTA clone; I was fairly sure that the review was missing something important, but just what? Moving on to territory where I feel more comfortable these days, I’m happy to learn that, as a devoted gamer, I’ll enjoy it, but how exactly? All comers agree that it’s over-the-top violent, in a way that’s intended to be funny; I’m not really sure how I feel about that these days.

Eventually, I got around to playing the game. And, at the beginning, I still wasn’t sure what to think. The brawling gameplay was pleasant enough, I guess, but a bit repetitive. I quite liked the floating icons made out of 3-D pixels; the lack of antialiasing in the overworld made my eyes hurt, though.

So I was rather surprised to find myself quite enjoying myself at the end of my next play session in the game; I was even more surprised to think about it a bit and realize that my dominant emotion was simple delight, that the adjective that I would use to describe the game at that point was “charming”. The aforementioned 3-D pixel icons; the lawnmowing task to earn money; the cat in your apartment (and its fondness for pounce toys, belly rubs, and ceiling fans); Travis’s accent (just where is that accent from, anyways?); the dojo master (hmm, maybe “charming” isn’t quite the mot juste there); Blueberry Cheese Brownies; Sylvia (the gameplay mechanic for the calls, her accent, her predictions of your impending doom); the rank up screens (the rank up music, ah the rank up music!); the Easter Island heads. In fact, even the over-the-top violence turned out to register on the charming scale: something about one of the missions where you had to kill 100 people, each of whom saw fit to complain about their spleen rather than, say, the fountain of blood coming out of their neck where their head used to be attached, just made me smile.

And I was even more surprised to find myself rather addicted to the gameplay by the end of my next session, and (as I dug into that feeling a bit more) to realize that I felt it was one of the best paced games I’d played in ages. I’ve played game after game that takes a game mechanic and runs it into the ground: I’ll be happy if I never see a JRPG overworld again, and even very good games can be prone to excessively long levels.

Not so with No More Heroes. The gameplay goes in regular cycles: fighting a sequence of enemies to reach the boss; fighting a boss; exploring what new there is to do in town; doing a non-combat job; doing the newly opened combat jobs; repeating a previous job or two if you don’t have enough money. (Further punctuated by cut scenes involving Sylvia and/or the boss.) That sounds like it might be repetitive, especially done nine and a half times over, but it’s not: each individual part is reasonably pleasant (and frequently surprisingly charming, see above), and (more important) each part only lasts 5-15 minutes, meaning that you have a change of pace before it starts feeling like a grind.

And there were enough variations on that structure as the game progressed to keep it fresh. In your first couple of iterations, you’re just getting to know the game and the city, seeing the new shops that open up. While doing that, I’d happened to run across the Lovikov balls, but didn’t know what they were for; but then you learn, and in fact learn that they affect game play, so I spent a bit more time on my next city break looking for them. And on the city break after that I decided to really hunt for them, and noticed them on my map (I’m a slow learner); if I’m remembering correctly, the balls kept me amused through three bouts through the city, including starting to get frustrated by not being able to tell them apart from money on my map, discovering how to locate the money without stabbing at random into the ground, still not finding the last ball, and then correctly hypothesizing how to find the last one and succeeding at doing so. (And also finding some amount of money and T-shirts from dumpsters: note that the map tells you how to find the visible useful collectible and the invisible (largely) useless collectible, while not telling you how to find the visible useless collectibles, which is the correct gameplay choice.)

And, as that was ending and I was starting to have my fill of the city, the game again reacted accordingly: it changed up other aspects of the missions (e.g. the boss that you didn’t have to fight, the random old arcade game sequence thrown in one of the approaches), and the pre-boss sequences got shorter and shorter. (Especially the last two.) It was similarly sympathetic to pacing in the job fights: while it would occasionally ask you to kill 100 enemies, it would never do so without having those enemies be especially underpowered. And, while I rarely found the main game challenging, I expect it would have been if I’d played at a harder difficulty, and there were the optional single-death missions for those who wanted to hone their craft. I was also expecting the pre-ranking-battle money earning to be a grind, but it wasn’t: I did a fair amount of shopping (buying all the non-clothing items except for the last sword, and some amount of clothing), and I don’t think I ever spent as much as 10 minutes just earning money to advance after having finished all of the new jobs that had opened up.

And then I came to the last two boss fights; at first, I thought that both of them were a drag, and they (combined with the bad ending) were a downer. So: a pity for the game to end on such a note. Now, though, I’m not so sure: while poking around the web doing some reading in hopes of finding enlightenment, I ran across this Cruise Elroy post, and there’s definitely more coming to the surface towards the end of the game (but present throughout) than I’d been paying attention to.

Until I’ve figured that out, though, I’m happy enough to stop with my earlier assesment: No More Heroes is charming and exquisitely paced. And if I were prone to losing faith in this medium, this game would point out in no uncertain terms how wrong that would be.

Some interesting links I ran across while preparing for this (and thanks to Matthew Gallant for his suggestions of reading material); I wish I could have taken more account of them:

• The Brainy Gamer.
• Fullbright.
• Destructoid.
• Schlaghund’s Playground.
• The Aberrant Gamer.
• Cruise Elroy.
• Discount Thoughts.
• Mitch Krpata in The Phoenix and Insult Swordfighting.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s quite good for what it is, I’m just not so interested in that right now.

My confusion as to how to label it is all to the good: I’ve been known to enjoy the occasional traditional JRPG, but that’s unquestionably a genre that has gone stale, indeed whose shelf life expired quite a few years ago. And the innovation doesn’t stop with its boundary-blurring nature: in particular, the most noticeable aspect of the game is that you fight on both screens at once, controlling the bottom screen with the stylus and the top screen with the D-pad.

Which I found somewhat less confusing than I expected, actually. The game will control the top character for you, if you wish, and I left that setting at its default value (computer takes over if you don’t do anything for three seconds) the whole way through the game. The computer-controlled actions aren’t all that great, and in particular it’s quite hard to build up the combo meter that way, but I didn’t find it all that difficult to pay enough attention to the top screen to build up the combo meter while tapping and slashing enough on the bottom screen to do a fair amount of damage.

Not that I would want this sort of gameplay to be the norm, or indeed something other than a rare gimmicky exception. In particular, while I could attack reasonably well on both screens at once, I gave up almost completely on the idea of defending. I think my brain and fingers did a reasonable job of keeping on track of two of the four tasks of attacking bottom, attacking top, defending bottom, and defending top, but doing more than that was almost completely impossible. So there’s some amount of potential richness in the fighting system that I just didn’t have access to, which was a pity. Also, each of your partners (there are three, you have a different one each week) has a slightly different mechanic, and the third partner’s mechanic was frustrating in that, if you let him autoplay, he may well take actions that actively work against setting up your combo meter. I did end up fighting enemies in the game somewhat more than was necessary, which at the least is a sign that I thought the fighting mechanic was intriguing, and probably enjoyable.

A lot of the buzz for the game has been around its style; it’s certainly nice to see a game set in (a variant of) modern Shinjuku instead of a fantasy or SF setting, and I liked the art design. (I do hope a future Vintage Game Club round can revisit Jet Grind Radio…) I didn’t like the music, however, and the drawing of your first partner was pretty creepy: a not-all-that-old teenage girl with a broad hips, a wasp waist, low-cut pants, and practically an arrow drawn on her saying “this is her crotch”. Ick.

For collectors, there are a lot of badges and clothes to accumulate. I didn’t spend too much time on clotches, and it didn’t hurt me very much; badges are more important, but you’ll get enough of the important fighting badges through the normal course of the game as long as you don’t go out of your way to avoid battles, so there’s no need to obsess about collecting if you don’t want to. To make matters a bit more interesting, you can lower your level when fighting battles: this increases your chance of getting badges while allowing you to have a bit of a challenge even when fighting monsters that you would otherwise far outclass.

There’s an unusual variety of leveling up mechanisms: you can level up your character, you can level up your badges, and you can even do this while you’re not playing the game. Which I thought was pretty neat when I started playing the game, but as the game went on, it didn’t work as well for me. At first, you only have a few badges, and you can level them up reasonably quickly when playing against the first monsters in the game. Pretty soon, you have access to a much larger number of badges, so you have to actively choose which ones you want to level up; that’s not so unreasonable, that’s part of shaping your character in an RPG. But, as the game progresses, it takes longer and longer to level up a badge, and you start getting new badges with the same mechanic as older badges but with more power; as this goes on, leveling up your badges stops being a particularly, important mechanic, replaced by just making sure that you’re using the most powerful badges whose attack mechanic you don’t mind too much.

Damage doesn’t last from battle to battle: like Puzzle Quest, you start each battle with a fresh slate. Unfortunately, TWEWY could have learned something else from Puzzle Quest: in the latter game, if you lose a battle, the game simply dumps you back out on the overworld, letting you fight the battle again. TWEWY, however, puts you at a “game over” screen when that happens. Once you get a few days into the game, you have the option of retrying the last battle at that screen, possibly at easy difficulty level, but that isn’t good enough: you may want to change the experience level that you’re playing at and/or your badge selection, and you don’t have the option of doing either of those at the game over screen. So the upshot is that you want to save your game before almost every battle, or indeed before almost every screen transition or after every lengthy bit of dialogue, which is a pain, and a completely unnecessary one.

At least you can save anywhere, though. Or at least almost anywhere: during the sequence of final bosses, you don’t have that option. You can adjust your badges between battles (and you’ll presumably be sensible enough to be fighting them at full strength), but woe be it to you if you enter one of those battles with an inappropriate set of badges. (Which, fortunately, didn’t happen to me.) In general, I wasn’t impressed by the final boss sequences: rather than having those battles be a capstone of what you’d learned before, they significantly changed the playing mechanics at a couple of points in those battles, forcing you to fight without your partner or without your badges.

I’m glad I played the game: it has several new ideas, some of which I genuinely enjoyed. I’m not sure exactly what specific ideas I want other games to learn from it, however. And it was a bit longer than I’d liked: about halfway through the second week, I felt (correctly) that I’d learned pretty much what I was going to learn from the game, and battles were starting to turn into a chore at times. But they did a reasonable job of not dragging out any individual part of the game, and I enjoyed it enough to be happy that I saw the game through to the end.

My first impressions were good. I pretty much decided I had to play it as soon as I heard that it took place in the imagination of a dying Frederic Chopin; they didn’t do as much with that theme as they could have, but there were other compensating virtues. The art style is very nice: I loved the color palette, and it used cel-shading in a subtle, less stylized manner than other cel-shaded games that I’m aware of, to good effect. You could see your enemies and avoid them, should you chose (in particular, there weren’t any random monsters), and the battle system was reasonably clever, with you taking an active role controlling movement, with light and dark areas on the battlefield giving access to different powers, and with a party level system making the fights more complicated (albeit not much more complicated) as the game went on.

It started to go south in chapter 2, in the Fort Fermata dungeon. This is the first puzzle dungeon (almost the only one, really), where you press switches that cause a few of the rooms to move; you’re supposed to figure out the effects of the switches and gain access to areas of the dungeon that you couldn’t before. Unfortunately, there were two problems with this. The lesser problem was that it, frankly, wasn’t a very good puzzle: it was hard to tell the effects of the switches, so ultimately I ended up wandering around more or less at random until I eventually noticed a new room that I couldn’t get to before; repeat three times and you’re done. Which would be okay, except that the areas were quite large, with almost all of it unaffected by the switches, so it was heavy on wandering and light on thinking/progressing.

The more serious problem, though, was that this was where the monsters started getting to me. There was a reasonably high density of monsters in this dungeon, but the monsters (like pretty much all (non-boss?) monsters in the game) just weren’t that much fun to fight. So about five battles into the dungeon, I’d gotten all the pleasure I was going to get from fighting in the dungeon, and was only fighting battles to make sure I’d be appropriately leveled up when I reached the boss; ten battles in, I was actively avoiding the monsters, and cursing when I accidentally touched one of them.

Even that might have been okay, were it not for one very serious flaw: the monsters respawn each time you re-enter an area that you’d previously left. So if I find a room and press a switch, the monsters outside will reappear when I exit. The dungeon was divided into two halves; each time I went from one into the other, the monsters respawned.

There is, as far as I’m concerned, no justification for this. Maybe there is a video game player who would fight all thirty or forty monsters in that dungeon and still be thirsting for more; I have to believe that such players are few and far between. More seriously, there are only so many ways you can enjoy the core mechanics of a game like this; one of those ways of enjoying the game is exploring, seeing what’s around the next corner. But the respawning directly attacks that way of enjoying the game: if poking around a corner brings you into a new area, and then you decide that you wanted to look around the original area some more, tough like, you’ll have to refight all those monsters again. I really would like to know what the thinking was here: did they not think about the matter at all, did they think that players would enjoy respawning monsters? Did they playtest the game or not; if they playtested it, did this issue come up?

Fortunately, that dungeon was the one that was most hurt by that flaw. Having said that, the respawning enemies problem kept on biting me on a lesser scale. Most dungeons were relatively linear, but you frequently came to a fork in the path where going in one direction would keep you in the same area and lead to a chest while the other direction would lead to the next area. The problem is that you couldn’t see the chest from where you were: you’d have to go part way down, and then the camera would shift for you. And if you picked the wrong one, it was very hard to figure out how far to go before deciding that the camera should have shifted by now; if you went too far, you’d be in the next area, at which point you’d have to go back (assuming you didn’t want to skip the chest), and the monsters would respawn.

I should emphasize that there are a lot of traditional RPG mistakes that they didn’t make. As I mentioned above, the battle system was better than normal, and at least you could see and avoid the respawning monsters. And avoiding them was a realistic possibility: most of the time, you could avoid almost all of them if you wished, and while doing so would mean that you weren’t leveling up enough for the boss battles, you certainly could skip several of the monsters and still be strong enough to fight the bosses without breaking too much of a sweat. You had up to nine people in your party, of whom only three could fight at once, but the others leveled up anyways; I believe they leveled up at a somewhat slower rate, but not enough to make the characters unusable if a plot twist forced you to use somebody other than your favorite characters.

The overall rhythm was off, too. Typically, RPGs have a mixture of fighting, exploring your environments, and plot advancement. As I’ve said above, the fighting got in the way of exploring your enviroments in the overworld and dungeons; unfortunately, you spend far too much of your time such environments. The towns are nice enough, but they generally felt like way stations that you’re just passing through. As far as plot goes, I like it, but it’s conveyed by cut scenes that are way too long: about once per chapter, you’ll run into a cut scene that is long enough that your controller will go to sleep if you don’t fiddle with it during the cut scene. (I believe that the sequence of cut scenes at the end of the game lasted a full thirty minutes.)

Having said that, the cut scenes are pretty good. Mostly they’re advancing the plot of the game, but once per chapter there’s a cut scene (usually paired with a traditional one) that consists of somebody playing a piece by Chopin, along with pictures showing places where Chopin spent his life and subtitles explaining that portion of Chopin’s life. So you get some quite nice music and reasonably interesting history mixed in with your adventuring. Also convenient for me was that you can set the game to Japanese voices with English subtitles, so the cut scenes (and many other areas, e.g. battles) let me practice my Japanese; I certainly wouldn’t have been able to follow most of the conversations without the subtitles, but I was glad to be able to pick up words and phrases. (Warning for other people who do the same thing: for whatever reason, they leave off subtitles for most of the final cut scene, so you might want to switch back to English right before the end.)

It’s a quite good game; I’m happy to have played it, though I’m also happy that it’s now over. Miranda really liked it, and has started playing it herself; I’m curious how far she will get. They made several decisions which I consider boneheaded, and which soured me on the genre: Lost Odyssey is getting some amount of buzz right now, for example, but I’m going to stay away from that one. (Admittedly, enough games are clamoring for my attention right now that I would probably have stayed away anyways.) But there are more than enough surprising good decisions that the good outweighs the bad.

Though I won’t go into the book in general any more than that. But, a few thoughts that it triggered:

One thing I liked about the book’s discussion of “once and only once” (pp. 316–317) is that it spent some time on the first “once”. I’m used to thinking of the sentence in terms of eliminating duplication, which is great. But the first part of that sentence is important, too: as they say, “don’t just eliminate duplication; make sure that every important concept has an explicit representation in your design”. That way, you have a place to store behavior related to that concept: e.g. having a Dollar class may not seem like a big win over, say, just representing dollar values as integers, but it gives you a place to stash code for formatted output, or parsing, or conversions to related types.

I also really liked the discussion of levels, rhythms, and frequencies of refactoring in the “Incremental Design and Architecture” section. (pp. 321–330.) They distinguish between standard incremental improvements and “breakthrough” changes: the latter are “idea[s] for a new design approach, which will require a series of refactorings to support it. … Breakthroughs happen at all levels of the design from methods to architectures.”

After which they talk about how frequently you do various sorts of refactorings, and how to make time for them. At the method level, “Method refactorings happen every few minutes. Breakthroughs may happen several times per hour and can take 10 minutes or more to complete.” At the class level, “Class-level refactorings happen several times per day. Depending on your design, breakthroughs may happen a few times per week and can take several hours to complete.”

The latter raises the question: several hours is enough to make a noticeable blip in your team’s work for the week, so where do you find the time, if you see something that looks valuable but isn’t on the shortest path to completing a feature? Their answer: “Use your iteration slack to complete breakthrough refactorings.”

And then there are architectural breakthroughs; I’ll quote them at length on the subject (p. 325):

In my experience, breakthroughs in architecture happen every few months. (This estimate will vary widely depending on your team members and code quality.) Refactoring to support the breakthrough can take several weeks or longer because of the amount of duplication involved. Although changes to your architecture may be tedious, they usually aren’t difficult once you’ve identified the new architectural pattern. Start by trying out the new pattern in just one part of your design. Let it sit for a while—a week or two— to make sure the change works well in practice. Once you’re sure it does, bring the rest of the system into compliance with the new structure. Refactor each class you touch as you perform your everyday work, and use some of your slack in each iteration to fix other classes.

Keep delivering stories while you refactor. Although you could take a break from new development to refactor, that would disenfranchise your customers. Balance technical excellence with delivering value. Neither can take precedence over the other. This may lead to inconsistencies within the code during the changeover, but fortunately, that’s mostly an aesthetic problem—more annoying than problematic.

Definitely something to think about: over the last few years, my team has made some progress in terms of lessening the technical debt that we’re adding to the system, but we still haven’t done nearly as well on that as I’d like, and we’ve done a bad job in terms of actually eating away at the technical debt. (As you might suspect from my using the term “last few years”.) We’re just not good at maintaining a good refactoring rhythm at the various scales that are necessary; maybe the authors’ advice on the subject will help, by giving an idea of what our behavior would look like if we were successful.

Note also the importance of slack in carrying this out successfully.

So we got her a copy of that, she’s been playing it off and on. (She doesn’t focus on one game the way I do, so she’s still playing both Harvest Moon games, both Animal Crossing games, and occasional spurts of other games.)

And then Liesl was bored last weekend, and picked it up. And now, every evening, I’m sitting here reading blogs while Liesl is next to me gathering wood to build a barn so she’ll be able to successfully woo the archaeologist, or something like that. Pretty convenient, actually, since it means we don’t have to fight for the computer. (Though it’s a good thing this week was a vacation week from school, because we’ve stayed up rather later than was wise on a few occasions.)

But I feel a bit left out of the fun! Harvest Moon DS only has two save slots (why?, why?); then again, I think I’d probably prefer Rune Factory, so if I really wanted to join in, I’d be better off buying a copy of that game instead. (Plus, we have two DSes, a fat one and a lite one, so it would avoid an unnecessary bottleneck if we had two games to play.) The truth is, though, that Eternal Sonata is taking up all my video game time (especially since we have too many series we’re in the middle of watching on TV), and there are other games I’d rather play on the DS when time frees up. (E.g. when we next go on vacation.)

But it is nice being surrounded by farmers. And I’ll join them eventually: it’s a charming series.

Of course, now that I’ve finished those, the question is: what next? To follow up the latter book, I’m trying to spend more time imagining ways to link radicals to characters when memorizing characters. And Amazon commenters recommended the book Chinese for Begninners, which is apparently really about the characters rather than other aspects of that language; I’ve ordered a copy, we’ll see if I like it or not.

To follow up the former book, I’d been tentatively thinking that I’d start going through Hikaru no Go: I have the first volume in both English and Japanese, so it seems like a good place to start testing myself against the language more. The problem with that, though, is that I’m not sure exactly where in my schedule I’d find time to read it in Japanese! Fortunately, the problem doesn’t seem very urgent right now: I’ve found other ways to expose myself to Japanese (watching episodes of Hikaru and Twelve Kingdoms in Japanese with English subtitles; playing through Eternal Sonata in Japanese with English subtitles), and I’m learning a fair amount from them. I get the feeling that I’ve gotten over some sort of hump: most of the time, I very much rely on the subtitles, but more and more often I can figure out individual words after the fact or even decode whole sentences after the fact, and there are even some very simple sentences that I can figure out without the translation.

Another cause for optimism: for whatever reason, I’m going through the textbook faster than I had been. The last three chapters have taken me two weeks each to finish, instead of the three weeks pace that I’d been going at before, and the pace feels sustainable. My guess is that I’d run into a patch of unfamiliar grammar before (while the recent grammar has been stuff that I’d been at least somewhat familiar with from other sources), and I’m also getting better now at learning new vocabulary, and those have combined to speed up my progress. I wouldn’t be surprised if I occasionally go back to three week chapters (or longer, if illness/vacation get in the way), but I’m now a good deal more optimistic than I was that I’ll manage to finish the last twenty chapters in about a year.

I’m also getting more out of my use of JapanesePod101. I’d been annoyed by two flaws with their RSS feed: they only list the last seven episodes, which makes me worried if I ever go on vacation or need to send my computer in for repairs (previously, when I’d checked, they listed all episodes since their inception in the feed), and they started to throw in “premium lessons”, which I had to download by hand. (I do have a subscription, but I did that because I wanted to support them rather than because I wanted to have special access to stuff; I wished they’d just make the premium lessons available for free and stick them in the main feed!)

So I poked around a bit, and realized that there was a feed available for paid subscribers. And it not only remedied both of those issues, it also contained more material that I was aware of but hadn’t been using. The occasional “bonus audio” tracks are amusing but nothing special; having the lesson-specific PDFs available in iTunes, though, means that I actually look at them (since I see them in iTunes when deleting episodes that I’ve listened to), and they’re a good tool for helping reinforce my learning. I don’t actually generally use them to follow up on the grammatical points in the lesson: their main benefit for me is that they write out each dialogue in four forms: one including kanji, one kana-only, one in romaji, and an English translation. Which gives me a lot more reading practice, and in particular is a good way to test my kanji recognition skills in a safe environment. So now I’ll recommend a basic subscription to other people learning Japanese: it’s not just good for giving yourself warm fuzzies, the extra material in the RSS feed really is useful. (I don’t yet have an opinion about the premium subscription; the price difference is such that I didn’t seriously give it a thought, given that I’m learning enough via other means.)

So: I still have a long way to go, but I’m happy with the recent concrete signs of progress.

One other tweak that I’m considering: I write up lots of vocabulary flash cards (which is clearly useful!); when I’ve decided I know the word in question, I put it in the box in alphabetical order. This takes a noticeable amount of time (not a huge amount of time, but time I’d be happy to eliminate), and is largely drudgery; is it actually useful?

In some circumstances, the answer is yes: if a kanji has lots and lots of readings, I’ll only memorize a few on my first attempt, and take the card out later to add more. But for other words (kana-only ones, compounds), I almost never take out the card once it’s gone in the box. So I’m tentatively thinking that almost all of the time I spend alphabetizing those cards is waste; and, if I decide that I’ve forgotten a word that I once thought I knew and want to take out the card again, I could always just rewrite the card from scratch.

So now I’m thinking I might just throw away cards that don’t correspond to a single kanji. I’m going to think about it for a few weeks, since that’s not a step that’s easily reversible, but it might be a good opportunity to reduce inventory.

It took me a little while to decide what I think about the game. Don’t get me wrong, it was obvious from the start that it’s a quite good game: it’s gorgeous, has the best conversation system I’ve seen, and is well plotted, which adds up to the most theatrical experience (in a good way) that I can think of in a video game. The intro world was pretty good, but there was a fair amount of combat, and I wasn’t sure how much I liked the shooter RPG idea. The main city after that had some interesting environments and fun tasks, but it wasn’t quite as large as I expected. Then I explored a couple of small side-planets (of which there are a dozen or two); pretty neat to have that wealth of side-tasks to complete, but they didn’t add much to the plot and reused environments in a big way. And I started Feros, one of the three main quests which are open to you at the start; about halfway through that quest, I was enjoying myself, but I kind of wished that there was more of a city there to wander around in.

And then things sort of clicked. To explain the “more of a city” comment: in a traditional RPG, your environment is divided into cities, overworld, and dungeons. Cities are great for talking to people and getting quests and doing commerce and such; dungeons are great for focused exploration and combat and key plot moments; overworld are great for, well, nothing, they’re usually just filler. I personally enjoy cities the most, but you need to balance them; in particular, it’s traditional to pair each dungeon with a city.

Feros wasn’t doing that for me. There was this small, weird town there, but it was really basically just one room, surrounded by… surrounded by what? I’m still not sure how to analyze it: there was combat in those areas, but it didn’t feel like a traditional overworld or dungeon. There were plot elements (stemming from quests I’d been given in the town), and I went back to the town afterwards, so it didn’t feel like overworld. There wasn’t one linear goal, so it didn’t feel like a dungeon. Maybe that whole chunk was one big town, just a particularly dangerous one? Once I’d finished that area, there was a bit of overworld, but it was mercifully short, then another tiny town next to something that did feel like a dungeon (because I had one specific goal), but in a somewhat townish setting. Then I went back to the first town, a new area opened up, and I had a small dungeon with a nice plot bit at the end.

Basically, my analytic categories had largely broken down, but it didn’t matter: I was having a lot of fun. Much more combat than I normally like, but I’d started understanding the combat by then (about which more later), and was rather liking it. Conversations, side quests, main quests, plot elements, cityscapes, less urban areas were all woven together, giving me a constant flow of challenges and rewards and story advancement.

About that combat: there are three basic classes, one fighter type and two magic-user types (technician and biotic). (Plus three hybrid classes.) I wasn’t sure what to start with: I’m usually drawn to the more magic-user types but end up taking a straightforward approach, which suggested I should be a fighter or a hybrid. But I really don’t like shooting or feeling like a brute, which argues against the former, and the hybrids couldn’t use enough weapons to really feel worthwhile. Ultimately, I went for technician, because I didn’t want to focus too much on shooting and because that would allow me to open up locked items without depending on having the right fellow party members equipped.

Which turned out to be a great choice for me. Your characters (especially technicians and biotics) have special abilities (offensive and defensive) that you can select from a menu that you can bring up by pressing the right bumper. (Which also pauses the game and lets you change your aim at the same time.) And technicians have some nice attacks that work well against robots and well enough against normal humans/aliens with their shields and weapons; they don’t work well against zombie types, but there weren’t too many of those. (I really wish I’d started using A.I. Hacking against the Geth enemies much earlier than I did: some of my initial attempts failed for whatever reason, so I put it on the shelf, but once I got it leveled up a bit more and started using the technique, I quite enjoyed entering a room, hacking the first Geth I saw, and letting it soften up the room for me.) I still had to do some amount of shooting, but my special attacks were good enough to seriously weaken the enemies, so I didn’t have to be all that good at shooting. (And I got good enough at it by the time I was done with Feros.)

And they got one thing right that is so much more important than the details of combat mechanics that I don’t know why I’m talking about the latter: the battles happen in the regular environment and aren’t turn-based. Right now, I’m playing Eternal Sonata, which is a more traditional RPG (and actually one with a pretty good combat system as traditional RPGs go). And every time I enter a non-boss battle, I just get annoyed: I know I’m going to have to spend a minute or two on a separate screen, waiting for various turns to happen, just going through a battle using the same strategies that I’ve used dozens or hundreds of times before. I know I’m going to win, I know I’m going to end up with good health, I know I’m not going to have any interesting experiences honing my skills, it’s almost a pure waste of time.

Most battles in Mass Effect are also almost as lacking in real thought or drama. But they’re over a lot faster: no waiting for turns, no fancy animations of attacks. I’m spending all of my time focusing on what my main character should be doing right then, I don’t have to wait for anything, and in the mean time other parts of the battle are littering the ground around me. Also, the separate battle arenas of traditional RPGs have a real psychological effect: they force you to treat battles as a phenomenon to be considered in isolation, which raises the question of “are they good or bad in isolation?”, to which the only answer is “bad”. Whereas Mass Effect avoids that question: battles are one way of changing the texture of a larger sweep of action, and their effects on that texture are a generally positive one, as long as they’re not overdone. (Which they’re not here.)

From the end of Feros on, I was just having fun. I stopped doing as many of the side-planet quests, because they didn’t add much; that was fine, I’m happy to have optional tasks available for people who like them. The main quests continued to be very good, in different ways: the dig site was a much more focused dungeon run, Noveria had a reasonably satisfying city at the start of it and another small one in the middle, and the final dungeon run at the end of the game was satisfying without being drawn out in the way that the later parts of Jade Empire were. They continued to avoid stupid traditional RPG gameplay decisions. (Hint to other developers: if you’re going to make me chose a subset of the party to play with, have us all level up as a group, don’t punish me by having people level up individually based on how much combat they’ve seen.) The environments are extremely well done, and the theatrical nature of the conversation, plot, cut scenes, etc. was top-notch all the way through. Great alien races, too.

The only down side is that now I’m afraid to play other RPGs. I like the plot-driven nature of the genre, but a lot of the basic gameplay mechanics that the genre traditionally uses that are just plain broken. On the whole, that’s a tradeoff that I’m willing to make some of the time, but why oh why do I have to?

A few hours in, I’m quite happy to be playing it. At the core, it’s a not-too-outlandish JRPG, but there are several nice touches. The visuals are quite distinctive: lots of bright colors everywhere, and the characters are done in a sort of cel-shaded style, with a little less detail and flatter textures than the backgrounds, making for a distinctive but subdued look. The combat and leveling up system are on the action RPG end, with a real time component (including movement) to your turns, not too many options at any given time, and the playing field divided into light and shadow areas that give you different attacks. And there’s a concept of a “party level” which increases very slowly, giving rise to new nuances in the combat system, so while combat is quite straightforward now, I imagine it will get noticeably more complicated by the time I’m ten hours in.

It’s not my shaping up to be my favorite underappreciated 2007 game or my favorite RPG of 2007, but it’s certainly a good way to pass several hours.