ethene ea. | Iain W. Reeve, A&E Editor This is Your Last Ghance, George Lucas his installment of the idiot box is | for Star Wars fans only, so if you are not one you should probably move on, as I’m about to get pretty geeky. Revenge of the Sith comes out this week, and I’m not holding my breath. I have been a Star Wars fan since my parents first sat me down to be terrified by Jabba the Hutt when I was only about four or five years old. I then went on to be enchanted by A New Hope with repeated viewings in a friend’s basement (he had a copy of the film recorded off TV onto betamax). The love affair was concluded when I saw The Empire Strikes Back while recovering from an ear operation. The odd order I saw the movies in caused me to believe that Darth Vader had risen from the dead after Return of the Jedi. So there I was in 1999, lined up to see the midnight showing of The Phantom Menace, only to be disappointed to the point of nearly vomiting. It was only after many successive viewings, all the while praying somehow that this movie was bet- ter than I thought it was, and the realization that I was not the only disillu- sioned fan out there, that I came to accept it. Attack of the Clones surpassed all expec- tations and was even bigger garbage. I was astonished that as bad as little Jake Lloyd was at playing baby Darth Vader, some- how local “talent” Hayden Christiensen managed to do worse at playing angsty young adult Vader. Well this is it, Lucas. I’m done going in with high expectations and being disappointed by horrid acting and cash-grab characters like Jar-Jar Binks. I’m expecting Luke and Leia to be Obi- Wan’s kids. I’m expecting Kermit the Frog to show up and engage in mortal combat with Yoda. I’m expecting Chewbaca to turn out to be made up of five Ewoks that join together Voltron style to fight evil. I’m ready for anything you’ve got, you bastard! And if you somehow manage to screw up the amazing story of Anakin falling to the dark side, so help me I'll come down to Skywalker Ranch and force-feed you every piece of Star Wars merchandise I own. And I hope you’ve got all day, Lucas, cause I have a lot of Star Wars crap. Shin Megani Tenset: Digital Devil Saga Nick Hogg, Long Lost OP Game Guy ou think you’ve gotten rid of y game guy? That I’ve been silenced? Think again. You might think that some govern- ment agency has silenced me, or that I was taken down by an angry mob of hippies, or worse, Xbox fans. But the truth is, I was lazy and spent far too much time on homework, and Disgaea, which is better than homework. But Pm back to mention Digital Devil Saga (DDS), an RPG where you not only fight demons, you are demons. And you eat other demons. Dare I call it demon-riff- ic? Maybe, but it’s about time that a RPG lets me devour my tasty foes, for God’s sake. There’s a lob- ster demon—how can you pass that up? But if you’re a vegetarian, I don’t think this game is for you. There are no demon vegetables in the game. DDS comes in a fancy large box that’s meant to hold DDS 7 and the sequel DDS 2, which comes out at the end of summer. Included in the box is a soundtrack for the game, I do have to say it’s nice to get an RPG soundtrack for once when buying the game that actually contains all of the songs from the game. As for the music , it’s a lot of slow piano pieces, mixed with soft- to hard-rock pieces, most of which are really good. And in typical Atlus fashion they found some band most people have never heard of to do a song for the opening, a band called Ero Anime, who did a song called “Danger,” which isn’t included on the soundtrack. While I’m still in the packaging realm, DDS is a 16 | www.theotherpress.ca bit of an oddity without a strategy guide. Maybe I’m lazy, but I like having guides so I don’t have to do any guesswork with bosses, or use scan every second fight because I forgot what electric tigers are weak against. As for the graphics, ’m so happy to see that some companies ate tired of making games that have to look like they’re real. Digital Devil Saga uses cell shading to achieve the effect of drawn art. No matter what’s going on, the art style is apparent. I absolutely love this aspect. I seriously wish more game companies would take this approach, instead of mak- ing the most realistic water ever, or the most advanced boob-jiggle engine ever conceived. I'd like to explain what the game’s story is about, but I’ve finished it and I still don’t really know what’s going on. Basically, these people live in tribes in a place called the junkyard. These tribes were in a never-ending battle to destroy each other, until a weird object showed up in the middle of the battlefield. This object cursed everyone by giving them the ability to turn into demons. Oh, and a mysterious girl named Sera appears with the power to help control this curse. The game does have some pace issues, the dungeons ate rather long and the story sequences are kind of short. But this can easily be overlooked since the story is very interesting; it’s one of those mystery-type things where the more it reveals the more questions you have. Plus, it’s got one the best turn-based battle systems I’ve seen in years. It’s the turn-press system: you go in a series of rounds with the enemy and you get turn icons each round. Now, where the fun lies is if you hit an enemy with something it’s weak against, you only use half a turn, meaning that by playing on weak- nesses, you get more attacks. But on the flip side, if you use an attack the enemy is strong against, you lose two turns. What this makes you do is play smart. You can’t just go into fights and cast whatever you want; you’ve actual- ly got to think the battle through. And the best thing is that you cart really over-level in this game, levels are pretty much meaning- less. It’s all based on taking the proper skill. Case in point: regular random encounters can kill you quite easily by exploiting your weaknesses. So, basically, the game can be pretty challenging and quite a bit of fun. What we have then, is an excellent looking cell-shaded game, with an impressive sound- track, solid turn-based battle system that emphasizes strategy, and demons who eat other demons. What more is there to ask for? I’m just hoping the sequel due out late this summer will answer most of the questions in the story, but this is shaping up to be one of the better RPGs I’ve seen in 05. May 11/2005