Post by Warlock on Jan 22, 2014 22:20:32 GMT -5
Sometime, late at night in the middle of December, my phone up and died on me. The tale of getting it fixed and eventually replaced is an epic one, replete with spare parts, broken spludgers, ribbon cables, and eventually accepting fate and upgrading, but that's a tale for another time.
It turns out that an "iPhone 3GS Dock Assembly" and an "iPhone 3GS Dock Flex Cable Assembly" are in fact different things. I just thought I'd get that out there.
That being said, when The Incident occurred, I was halfway through playing the iOS port of Final Fantasy V; looking for something similar while my phone was in the shop. I ended up firing digging up Paradise Blue and playing through it again- having just finished with it today (including both optional superbosses), I thought I'd write it up a little bit.
An RM2K3 game originally released back in 2009, Paradise Blue is pretty clearly inpsired by Final Fantasy 5- it has the same sort of class system (in this case, hacked together from the game's equipment system), wherein you can change classes at will and can equip both a command an an intrinsic ability you've already learned from another class. It's a pretty decent system, featuring a dozen or so different classes with three or four abilities each; there are some awfully powerful combinations to find. The addition of NPC "helpers"- characters who do something at the beginning of battle, such as putting a beneficial status effect on your whole party- adds another set of options. It's always fun to mess around with new combinations in a system like this, but one of my observations is that the game doesn't seem particularly well-balanced; there are some incredibly powerful setups available almost from out of the gate (give a character a bow, the L3 Attack Up ability, and hire an NPC who gives you first strike, and you'll be able to wipe out most enemy parties in a single turn for a large portion of the game). I was also a bit disappointed that there was no bonus from mastering classes; I'd kind of like to have seen a permanant stat bump or some such.
The visuals have an NES-ish look to them; the game looks, in many ways, like something that Square produced in the parallel universe where they never started making games for the Super Nintendo. The game is a bit inconsistent about whether it wants to stick to an NES palette or a larger one at times, but it's otherwise fairly attractive in it's blocky way.
The biggest weakness of the game is the storyline- it follows the tale of a power struggle between two factions in a small island nation, fighting for the recently-vacated throne. Your party members are guards ordered to escort an assassin and a slacker as they work to help consolidate their faction's power; the thing is, there's very little discussion of the power struggle or the motivations of either faction until the very end of the game. Many of the players are barely introduced, and the situation is mostly glossed over. None of the townspeople you meet seem to particularly care about it, either, leaving me mostly lost as to who's involved in the power struggle or why I'm working for the faction that I am. It's a strange oversight. Honestly, there's a lot of 'town dialog' which seems to be either authorial injokes or related to things which wer cut from the game; I can't help but think that maybe a little more editing would have been done.
The other big drawback is the buggy RM2K3 battle system; in the time since I last played Paradise Blue, I'd totally forgotten how frustratingly crappy it was. I'm really hoping that at least some of the weird behavior I saw- spells being cast but not having effects until some time later, characters stepping forward to act and then not stepping back to the party ranks, and so on- was the result of running the game through WINE, though somehow I doubt that's really the case. Harping on this too much seems a bit unfair, but playing the game is going to require accepting that the battle system is going to be kind of wonky.
All around, Paradise Blue is a pretty solid effort- it certainly imroved my commute for a couple weeks. Last year, the author wrote up a blog post about stuff that didn't make it into the game; I found it to be pretty interesting reading, if you like hearing about how the sausage is made. The author himself is still active, and has worked on some other games since which might be worth looking into as well.
- HC
It turns out that an "iPhone 3GS Dock Assembly" and an "iPhone 3GS Dock Flex Cable Assembly" are in fact different things. I just thought I'd get that out there.
That being said, when The Incident occurred, I was halfway through playing the iOS port of Final Fantasy V; looking for something similar while my phone was in the shop. I ended up firing digging up Paradise Blue and playing through it again- having just finished with it today (including both optional superbosses), I thought I'd write it up a little bit.
An RM2K3 game originally released back in 2009, Paradise Blue is pretty clearly inpsired by Final Fantasy 5- it has the same sort of class system (in this case, hacked together from the game's equipment system), wherein you can change classes at will and can equip both a command an an intrinsic ability you've already learned from another class. It's a pretty decent system, featuring a dozen or so different classes with three or four abilities each; there are some awfully powerful combinations to find. The addition of NPC "helpers"- characters who do something at the beginning of battle, such as putting a beneficial status effect on your whole party- adds another set of options. It's always fun to mess around with new combinations in a system like this, but one of my observations is that the game doesn't seem particularly well-balanced; there are some incredibly powerful setups available almost from out of the gate (give a character a bow, the L3 Attack Up ability, and hire an NPC who gives you first strike, and you'll be able to wipe out most enemy parties in a single turn for a large portion of the game). I was also a bit disappointed that there was no bonus from mastering classes; I'd kind of like to have seen a permanant stat bump or some such.
The visuals have an NES-ish look to them; the game looks, in many ways, like something that Square produced in the parallel universe where they never started making games for the Super Nintendo. The game is a bit inconsistent about whether it wants to stick to an NES palette or a larger one at times, but it's otherwise fairly attractive in it's blocky way.
The biggest weakness of the game is the storyline- it follows the tale of a power struggle between two factions in a small island nation, fighting for the recently-vacated throne. Your party members are guards ordered to escort an assassin and a slacker as they work to help consolidate their faction's power; the thing is, there's very little discussion of the power struggle or the motivations of either faction until the very end of the game. Many of the players are barely introduced, and the situation is mostly glossed over. None of the townspeople you meet seem to particularly care about it, either, leaving me mostly lost as to who's involved in the power struggle or why I'm working for the faction that I am. It's a strange oversight. Honestly, there's a lot of 'town dialog' which seems to be either authorial injokes or related to things which wer cut from the game; I can't help but think that maybe a little more editing would have been done.
The other big drawback is the buggy RM2K3 battle system; in the time since I last played Paradise Blue, I'd totally forgotten how frustratingly crappy it was. I'm really hoping that at least some of the weird behavior I saw- spells being cast but not having effects until some time later, characters stepping forward to act and then not stepping back to the party ranks, and so on- was the result of running the game through WINE, though somehow I doubt that's really the case. Harping on this too much seems a bit unfair, but playing the game is going to require accepting that the battle system is going to be kind of wonky.
All around, Paradise Blue is a pretty solid effort- it certainly imroved my commute for a couple weeks. Last year, the author wrote up a blog post about stuff that didn't make it into the game; I found it to be pretty interesting reading, if you like hearing about how the sausage is made. The author himself is still active, and has worked on some other games since which might be worth looking into as well.
- HC