100 Minutes With . . . Super Princess Peach

Ever since stumbling across Super Mario Bros. in an arcade I’ve been terribly interested in the naming conventions of the Mario franchise. Why was it Super Mario Bros.? Did it have any relationship to Bros the boy band? It was a puzzle.

Many years later I still find Nintendo’s stock of prefixes and suffixes intriguing. Like primary colours, they can be mixed together to create more interesting shades; case in point, Super Paper Mario--the name defines the game. With Nintendo so reliant on wringing out their old franchises, it’s easy to imagine a large fruit machine on one floor of their headquarters, with every prefix, suffix and middix Nintendo have ever used on its reels. Iwata steps up, gives the handle a tug and the next year’s releases are designed by rote. Go on, give it a try. Imagine the E3 crowds going crazy for Paper Mario Party, Bowser Sports Resort, or Luigi’s Haunted Kart.

My point is you know what you’re getting when you buy a game from the Mario family. The characters are so clearly defined they tint the games around them. Luigi is timid. Wario is bullish, obnoxious and grasping. Their games perfectly reflect their personalities.

So you have to wonder what was going on in the Nintendo hive the day they played the one-armed-bandit and rushed Super Princess Peach into production.

Peach has never been one of gaming’s feminist icons. I get the impression here, taking centre stage for the first time on a console that--thanks in no small part to Nintendogs--was beloved of little girls around the globe, this was Nintendo’s attempt to snatch the juvenile female market away from Imagine Babiez and Babysitting Mama. Peach is a cipher whose in-game abilities heretofore amount to floating, baking cakes and being kidnapped. As with Yoshi’s Island and Wario Land, in Super Princess Peach Nintendo had the chance to craft an identity for her. They could have made a statement: the sisters are doing it for themselves.

And if you’d only seen the game’s intro--in which Mario, Luigi and Toad are kidnapped and Peach vows to rescue them--you might think that’s exactly what they were trying to do. In Super Princess Peach our heroine isn’t beholden to any man or mushroom; she is a force unto herself, taking on all comers with only a brolly for self defence.

So imagine the titters that arose as developers designed Peach’s arsenal of moves, her--good grief--vibes. Instead of collecting fire flowers and tanooki suits, with the help of her ‘vibe wand’ Peach assaults enemies with her emotional states. She’s a quivering pre-menstrual nightmare, dashing in floods of tears one minute, the next minute setting fire to things in an irritated huff. When she’s happy she floats on a cloud of pure bliss and when she’s merely content, in a yogic trance she heals her physical well-being. You can practically hear the guffaws of Nintendo’s corporate suits: “Women--so emotional!” As a demonstration of nuanced characterisation it makes flatulent fattie Wario look like Sidney Poitier.

Triggered on the touchscreen, each of Peach’s emotions is used to negotiate some obstacle or puzzle, or dispatch the foes in her path. Not that the puzzles are particularly troubling. Super Princess Peach is simple, and only in its final stages does it present even a hint of a challenge. There are no lives to collect and no penalties for dying, and every puzzle is preceded by a hint block which tells you exactly how to overcome it.

With its candy colours and a twee art-style reminiscent of--yet inferior to--Yoshi’s Island it might be the perfect introduction to platform games for young girls. But as a Nintendo platformer it’s deeply unsatisfying. Compared to sister title The Legendary Starfy, Super Princess Peach lacks charm and intelligence. Peach’s world isn’t memorable, it doesn’t contain the tricks and sparks of inspiration we’ve come to associate with this kind of game. Though never less than amiable, it treads a fine line between being enjoyable in a simplistic sort of way and being the kind of bargain bucket dross that overwhelms the DS market, the Nicktoons branded kind best ignored out of hand. Without its pedigree it might have been a diamond in the rough, but with Nintendo’s name on the box I certainly expected more.

My expectations have d coloured my opinion--it’s hard for them not to. After all, Super Princess Peach follows a grand legacy containing some of the best video games of all time. While I was playing Super Princess Peach my wife was playing Super Mario 3D Land beside me. Whenever I looked over her shoulder I’d see some exciting new power up, or some twist on the formula. “Look at this!” she’d say, showing me this or that crazy level: platforms that march in time to the soundtrack, a stage filled with doors that teleport Mario here, there and everywhere.

In return I had nothing to show except Peach’s moods, which--in a lazy move that’s also one of my own personal bugbears--more often than not replace keys as a way of unlocking doors. Melting ice doors, blowing away cloud doors, dousing flame doors--is this really the best the developers could come up with? Even when slightly more exciting gimmicks are introduced--a level where you have to fight gusting winds, or one where buttons tilt platforms ninety degrees, changing the direction of the gravitational pull--they’re used half-heartedly. Most of the time Super Princess Peach feels so hollow because it plays like a proof of concept, a demonstration of features that are repeated and recycled in lieu of new ideas.

Padding out the game are lacklustre power-ups bought with your collected coins (because girls love shopping, don’t they?), a few touch-screen minigames, submarine shoot-em-up segments leftover from the original Super Mario Land, and--the last cry of desperation from any DS game developer--an extensive selection of jigsaw puzzles. Considering its lack of variation, its amazing that the game’s elements manage to feel so disparate.

Sadly, that’s the most interesting thing you can say about Super Princess Peach. It’s a reasonable amount of fun, and the younger you are--and the more you like the colour pink--the more you’ll get from it. But its still a shallow grab bag of half thought out ideas, so padded with dull minigames its few original ideas are smothered beneath them. It’s an experiment in mediocrity foisted upon a public who want and deserve better.

It may have been conceived to capture a certain elusive demographic, but with its contents as randomly assembled as its name, the only demographic the finished game truly appeals to is one Nintendo would be better off without.

100 Minutes With . . . Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies

Dragon Quest is a legend, not a game. It’s said that the release of every new title in the series stops Tokyo in its tracks. People of all ages, from all walks of life schedule time off school and work just to play the damned thing. As a video game franchise, it’s as big as they come, yet for many years it was virtually unknown outside its home country. While the Western world was wowed by Final Fantasy’s cinematics, back East, Japan suckled at the Dragon Quest teat. This was the series that separated fan boy from otaku. This was the JRPG at its purist.

It took Dragon Quest VIII to introduce the West to the franchise’s allure (and no, it wasn’t the first Dragon Quest game released outside Japan; just bear with me, okay?) because Dragon Quest VIII was the first game in the series to have a lush, 3D world and a localisation that wasn’t just acceptable, it was enjoyable. It had been translated into English so well it made every Japanese game ever given a PAL EU release sound like it was channelling Dick van Dyke. Dragon Quest VIII had proper cockneys and Scots and Welshies and everything in between, and while it wasn’t perfect, chances are you were too busy grinning to notice its imperfections. It was a bright, joyous affair, the perfect counterpoint to the steampunk Star Wars antics of Final Fantasy XII which was released soon after. Back to back, the two signified a golden age for the JRPG. If this was what we could expect from the Squaresoft/Enix merge then the gaming world was a better place for it.

Dragon Quest IX is its follow-up, somehow bigger and better despite being crammed onto a DS card and promoted by Jedward. That Jedward--the mutated offspring of the Judderman and the Twins from The Matrix Reloaded; a pair of twinned popstrels discovered by Simon Cowell in a Morlock cavern beneath the X-Factor studio and through unthinking malice unleashed upon the nation--should advertise a video game--and a JRPG at that--speaks volumes. Until this point Nintendo had pop stars and celebrities schilling for family friendly games--Wii Sports, Nintendogs, Mario Kart--and educational software that taught pensioners how to draw or play Sudoku. JRPGs aren’t about waving Wii-wands; they’re not made for the Redknap family. Dragon Quest otaku had every right to be up in arms about Jedward--a couple of toilet brushes with learning difficulties--advertising this most prized jewel in the JRPG crown.

Except, as Jedward are to people who don’t like music or human intelligence, Dragon Quest IX is a game for people who don’t really like video games. It’s therefore perfectly suited to being advertised by stars who have problems telling left from right. “Heresy!” I hear you cry--but please, for the second time this article, bear with me.

As with any genre that’s been around for so long, JRPGs have long since rested on their laurels and adhered to a set code of conduct. Turn-based and menu-driven, there’s little separating Dragon Quest from its brethren. If aliens were to descend from the heavens demanding to be shown an example of our Earthling Japanese Role Playing Games, this would be the game we’d show them. Given that Jedward--like Lady Gaga was slit across her mid-riff and revealed to be a couple of imps standing one atop the other’s shoulders--are as close as the human race has to otherworldly beings, this is the game we gave to them, and to all their followers who, in complete contradiction to common sense, have made them an unlikely success.

I’m not saying Dragon Quest doesn’t require skill to play, or that there aren’t tactical depths concealed behind its charming exterior. But in the first hundred minutes--and for several hours thereafter--you won’t be plumbing them: you’ll be pressing the same button over and over again. For the first hundred minutes it takes as much thought to play Dragon Quest IX as it does to shriek “Cringe!” from beneath a hairstyle resembling a startled, anaemic bull-rush. In fact the most demanding thing you’ll do during this time is pick out a hairstyle from all the choices given.

Clocking in at playtime measured in weeks, Dragon Quest plays the long game. At times it deceives, presenting open fields to roam across only small corners of which hold anything of interest. It’s as padded as a supermodel playing Friar Tuck. Battles encountered after twenty hours of play require only marginally more attention than those encountered at the start--that’s twenty hours of repeatedly pressing the same button. Attack, choose your enemy, repeat--it’s like the back of a shampoo bottle stuck in a feedback loop. Your cohorts, should you take them with you (unlike the colourful cast of Dragon Quest XIII your party consists of randomly generated bots who can escort you or be abandoned as required) are either controlled individually or left to follow behavioural rules which have them fight aggressively or conservatively depending on your needs. They’re perfectly capable of looking after themselves, which leaves you at a loss for anything to do other than hit the attack button again and again and again. It’s like being a shepherd with a pack of particularly intelligent sheepdogs: you could whistle, but all you really need do is close the gate once they’re done.

The only scripted character accompanying you on your quest is Stella, a fairy cut from the same cloth as Ocarina of Time’s Navi, who berates you for anything improper, like, say, independent thought. Dialogue options (in the shape of questions with yes/no answers) are only included for show. Tell a villager that no, you don’t want to help him, and Stella chews you out; try to leave a town when you still have business there and she becomes downright irate. You’re tethered to the story with an industrial elastic belt: attempt to deviate from it and you’ll be pinged right back on track with Stella’s reprimands ringing in your ears.

By JRPG standards there’s a lot to see and do in Dragon Quest IX. The Battle Log contains pages of monsters, clothes, achievements and items to collect--it’s a set collecting game as much as it’s an RPG. The alchemy system unlocked several hours in scratches an obsessive compulsive urge--you’ll want to recreate weapons you already have in your inventory just to remove the question mark next to their list entry. But it’s the largest fish in a very small pond. Next door, Skyrim rules the western RPG ocean, defining openness as yelling a goat off a cliff, grabbing mayflies from the sunset sky and eating them in your pants, killing an entire village--quest-givers and all--just because one of them has an face you don’t particulartly care for. Dragon Quest’s openness extends to palette-swap enemies and a half-dozen sets of collectable animal-ear hair bands. It is a trompe l’oeil of open gameplay.

And I want to hate it for giving the illusion of openness, and for its battles throughout which my involvement boils down to choosing the same attack options regardless of my foes--for being, in short, the kind of game which deserves to be sold to Jedward fans.

But I can’t.

I can’t tell you exactly why I like Dragon Quest IX so much. I can’t tell you how enjoyable it is to visit my wife’s game world and run around like a superhero, eviscerating monsters she has trouble with in a single stroke. I don’t know why it’s fun collecting party tricks--MMORPG emotes--then binding four of them to a single button to make it look as if my character’s breakdancing. Why do I fight monsters for experience point despite there being no experience bar to catalogue them and despite having to return to a church to discover how close I am to advancing to the next level? Why do I put up with this constrictive, archaic system when other, wider games are more appealing and much closer to my heart?

It beats the hell out of me.

What I can say is that much of Dragon Quest IX’s charm lies in detail uncharacteristic of the genre. The nameless, identikit NPCs all say different things depending on the time of day or how far you’ve advanced through the story. Equipment is depicted in-engine, meaning whatever weapon or item of clothing your characters are equipped with can be seen at a glance--you can tell the difference between worn cat ears and bunny ears even on the DS’s titchy screen. Monsters respond in a variety ways when in battle, sometimes choosing not to attack at all but to become enthralled with a certain member of your group or sit around dumbly, playing with daisies underfoot. This varied behaviour only adds to the charm of a menagerie that is already uniformly charming, as does seeing all parties involved in a fight scurry about between attacks, lining them up and interacting with one another, removing the abstract nature that usually accompanies turn-based combat. Every attack’s cause and effect are clearly on display and help give each battle a unique feel.

And let’s not ignore that this is a visually sumptuous game, arriving late enough in the DS’s life to take full advantage of the hardware. Playing a game so majestic on a humble handheld--the same console that played home to Cooking Mama, no less--is a thrill unto itself. When it was announced there was some fan consternation as to whether the DS could do justice to a mainline Dragon Quest title being as it was a step down in power from the Playstation 2 on which the previous game had been released. The DS acquits itself so admirably in this task that Dragon Quest IX genuinely feels more impressive than its predecessor rather than simply feeling impressive because you can play it on the toilet: it’s a sequel that feels like a sequel, rather than a game emasculated to fit onto a handheld.

Like World of Warcraft--which it resembles at times--Dragon Quest IX is a game of unlikely but undeniable charm. Large parts of it are spent performing repetitive tasks for little reward; it’s a time waster, but like fishing off a pier or pottering in the garden it somehow manages to be more than the sum of its parts.

It’s gentle, feel-good gaming, and do you know what? If it meant that more people played it, enjoyed it and smiled about it, I don’t mind that Jedward advertised it. In pop culture terms that’s as high as praise comes.

100 Minutes With . . . Monster Tale

Somewhere at the back of the toy room there’s a box of unwanted games.

Unlike the residents of the Raggy Dolls’ reject bin there’s nothing wrong with these games. They’re fun, capable of bringing great enjoyment to anyone who slots them into the console to which they belong . . . and therein lies the problem: so few gamers did slot them into a console--any console, even an old Vectrex case where they’d do nothing but make a pleasing rattle and catch fire when you plugged it in. They’re great games that would be fondly remembered if only people had given them a chance.

But you didn’t, did you? You bastards.

Monster Tale is the latest in a long line of handheld romps destined to be forgotten in the box at the back of the toy room. Quite why this is is a difficult case to crack It doesn’t have an over-sized Drill Dozer cartridge; it isn’t a spin-off from a niche RPG series a la Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime; it’s not as cutesy as The Legendary Starfy, dismissed as a ‘baby’s game’ and left to bulk out Game Stop shelves filled with Nickelodeon licenses, yet it never made it to Europe and remains relatively unknown.

So let me sell it to you, this game you’ve never heard of, this game you’ve never played. Let me sell it to you in a single sentence:

Monster Tale is a Metroidvania platform game in which you raise a virtual pet to fight your enemies.

Yeah, I know--that’s the sentence that sold the game to me as well. It’s the dissonance between the two elements that intrigued me--the same thing that sold me Culdcept on the basis it was Monopoly meets Magic: The Gathering. How do those ideas fit together? How can they possibly gel? Why is my brain melting? This will never work.

This is how it works.

You play Ellie, a little girl who finds a bracelet in a forest which transports her to a magical kingdom where kids own monsters and make them fight one other. In a distinct stab at Pokémon, these Kid-Kings are cruel masters, the villains of the piece, and you, being of pure heart and filled with good intentions, have to put an end to their reign.

The Metroidvania aspects play out exactly as is de rigeur with power-ups and dotted about the map allowing you breach previously unreachable rooms. Enemies patrol the walls and floors, and fly about levels spitting fireballs--it’s all very familiar, humdrum even.

What isn’t humdrum is Chomp, your pet monster found hatching from an egg early on in the game. Vowing to return him to his mother you take him with you and soon discover he’s a lot more useful than he first seems. He attacks enemies, pushes platforms and does various other things to help you through the game. The longer you have him helping you, the more actions you have him perform and the more hits he takes, the more tired he becomes; sooner or later you’ll have to return him to his sanctuayt in the bottom screen to rest.

Here’s where things get interesting. Chomp, cute little bugger that he is, is a virtual pet similar to the A-life creatures found in Sonic Team’s games--in NiGHTS: Into Dreams and Sonic Adventure. Every so often a bad guy will drop an item for Chomp to play with, examine or devour. Sometimes these items will be weapons--a football, perhaps, that Chomp can kick about the screen--but they all boost at least one of Chomp’s stats or give him experience points. Raise his stats high enough and Chomp will gain a new ability, either passive feat or an action that can be triggered using the shoulder buttons. Raise them even higher and Chomp will evolve into a new form.

Each of Chomp’s forms has its own unique skill set. Crucially, Chomp can switch forms through a sub menu, meaning you can have a tricked out attack machine or a sleek, defensive speedster on hand as the situation demands. A grid displays progress towards Chomp’s various forms. He might be just the one pocket monster but Gotta Catch ‘Em All is a terribly appropriate catchphrase for Monster Tale.

Chomp is cute, you see: he’s adorable. He’s a swirly-headed idiot who floats about occasionally knocking barriers for six, but he’s full of character. I played the game in front of my sister-in-law’s kids; they soon gathered around in a sticky-sweet cloud, demanding to see Chomp gnaw another cookie to crumbs or drive another remote controlled car into his foes.

Although his skills can for the most part be ignored--bar dispelling the odd barrier, it’s possible to play Monster Tale through without using Chomp in combat--using them successfully is a thrill akin to pulling off a combo in a fighting game. While not especially deep, Monster Tale’s combat system is key to finding rare items and greater sums of money. The more hits you land on an enemy, the more stuff it drops. Get Chomp in on the act with some perfectly timed attacks and you can juggle bad guys long enough to get rich quick.

There’s some really smart stuff going on with regard to the DS’s duel screens as well. Don’t think just because you stashed Chomp on the second screen that he’s safe, in the first boss encounter you’ll have to switch Chomp from screen to screen, avoiding attacks while sending the wee beastie into battle. Seeing the boss’s heads extend across the screen right into what might as well be your inventory is one of gaming’s rare delights: something new. It mightn’t have the impact of, say, Psycho Mantis reading your memory card, but it’s the last thing you’d expect from a cheerful cartoon adventure, especially one so criminally overlooked.

Other monsters have other duel-screened attacked, from planting bullet-shooting seeds on the second screen to pink squid that send tentacles after you while hiding out of range. This oblique thinking to the DS’s two screens never quite fulfils its potential, but there are enough ideas there to keep combat fresh even late into the game.

Which is just as well. In melding RPG elements to a Metroidvania-style game developers Dreamrift have mated two of gaming’s worse crimes: back-tracking and grinding for XP. The off-spring is never as terrible as it might have been in less talented hands, but crossing the map back and forth becomes a slog at times--it feels like items and rooms have been deliberately spread out so you’d have ample opportunity to collect cash and items.

Even with so much footwork, it’s still not enough to ensure you’ll have everything you need when you get to the next location. I’d often find myself running through the same few rooms taking out the same handful of monsters, hoping to raise enough cash to buy a health or weapon upgrade so I could take on the boss that kept thwarting me.

Not that they’re difficult. The bosses are speed bumps on an otherwise smooth road. For some, the gentle difficulty curve will be too gentle; it’s generally an easy game, if not one you could play with your eyes closed.

As a game that’s destined to be forgotten it’s easy to espouse it as a hidden gem, a lost treasure, something that you have to play should you get the opportunity. And you should play it, because it’s fun, it’s fast, it has a smattering of originality--it’s the kind of game you spend too long playing, that you boot up for a quick blast when on the loo only to have someone knocking on the door telling you it’s been half an hour and are you dead or what?

It’s just not a great game. But that’s okay. Not every toy you’ve ever loved has been great. That teddy bear, Mr. Bloon, was he a great toy? His fur was matted! He only had one eye!

A good game, then; a perfectly enjoyable one. It has its flaws but let’s not consign it to the reject bin quite yet, okay?