© the other press ¢ Culture

 

January 21, 2004

 

Fanboy’s Corner

Nick Hogg
OP Game Guy V.20

 

Mobile Suit Gundam:
Encounters in Space

Well, despite that fact that it’s taken well
over a year for those of us in North America
to get another Gundam game, I do believe
that this installment was well worth the
wait. And with over 60 mobile suits and
armours to unlock and five different game
modes, it has huge replay value and staying
power.

What ultimately ends up being the most
important part of any game is the basic
game play, without this you really can’t call
anything a game now can
you? Basically Gundam
Encounters plays very simi-
lar to Zone of the Enders,
although seeing as how full
3D games with 360 degrees
of movement don’t come
along too often you should-
nt think of it as a rip off of
ZOE with Gundams.

They've gone through
great lengths to make each
of the 60 plus suits handle
similarly to what they were
capable of in the anime. So
despite the fact there are 12
variations of the Zaku 2
each one has its own
unique feel and handling.
But most of the game play
ends up with you dodging
around in 3D like a mad
man while you get shot at
from all directions, and
occasionally slicing up the
other mobile suits as it
were.

Now, as for the. replay
values, you're getting quite
a bit out of the games since”
it has five different modes
of game play, each of these providing quite
a bit of meat to the game. The first
mode is a white base mode that follows the
crew of the white base from the original
Mobile Suit Gundam series, and you pilot
the original Rx-78-2 for every mission. This
follows the basic plot for the last third of the
story, and the missions are interlaced with
redone animation scenes from the original
series. Although it’s nice to see all the redone
animation scenes, the original ones look
slightly dated. They might as well redo the
entire series, but it’s doubtful that they will.

The second mode is a side story of sort
with a new ship called Thoroughbred, and
next is my favourite mode of them all—the
Ace pilot mode. In this mode you get to
play through story missions for some of the
great ace pilots, most of which are from
Zeon, which more than makes up for hav-
ing to pilot “budget” federation suits.

There is also a mission mode where you
can make your own pilot in either the Earth
Federation or the Duchy of Zeon; they can
partake in eight missions with each mission

   
 
 
 
 
  
   
   
 
  
  
  
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
 

ranging in difficulty. After completing each
mission you can raise their piloting stats and
buy them new skills. This mode is a great
deal of fun as long as you play on the Zeon
side, the reason I say this is the federation
side has far too many missions where you
must pilot a ball. A ball is the military
equivalent in Gundam of having a giant tar-
get painted on you. It’s the same as trying to
take out a jet fighter with a VW Rabbit. But
death traps aside this mode is a lot of fun.

Finally is the 2-player ver-
sus mode, which is the only
mode that lets you play the
six alternate universe suits
included in the game. My
only complaint about this
mode is the inability to
change the split screen from
vertical to horizontal, but
that’s a minor complaint.

I felt that I should also
» mention the excellent pres-
Pyentation of the game
s through the audio medium.
ot only is a great deal of
he music form the original
series reproduced in superb
quality, but some new music
has been added that fits in
rather well. Even the vocal
. |}songs from the original
ae Gundam and from 0083 are

a included. And one thing I
was extremely impressed
with was the fact that there
is a soundtrack mode where
you can listen to any song in
its entirety. What's better for
an ace pilot than cranking
“The Gallant Cha?” Well
maybe if youre Johnny
Ridden you might have a problem with it,
but other than that you should be fine. Also
I should point out that there is no option to
hear the game’s voice tracks in their original
language of Japanese, but the English dub
was done by Vancouver's own Ocean group.
If you are familiar with anime you know
that they do some of the best quality dubs in
the business. The only thing that may throw
some people off is that the 0083 stuff that
was included was re-dubbed for this game,
due to the fact that additional 0083 scenes
where added.

Overall I'd have to say this is the finest
Gundam game to hit the PS2 so far, and
even if youre not a huge fan of Gundam
itself the game is still a very solid gaming
outing. It pretty much breaks down to
whether or not you like robots and space
combat, if you answered yes, I'd suggest
tracking down this game. Although the
release of this game is far larger than the 12
copies of Federation vs Zeon released last
year, it’s still a pain to locate, so I forewarn
you to be prepared for a search of sorts.

ae Page 16 e http://www.otherpress.ca

 

 

Well, this Final Fantasy game has bro-
ken the rules its predecessors followed.
First off, this is the first Final Fantasy
game to have a direct sequel, so this is
the second part of Final Fantasy X or
ten, not 12 as some people thought it
was. Secondly, this is the first-ever
Final Fantasy game to have an entirely
female playable cast (although for those
of you paying attention Final Fantasy V
came real close). So for something that
breaks so many Final Fantasy conven-
tions, the ultimate question is does it
deserve its Final Fantasy moniker?
Since this is a direct sequel I suggest
anyone interested in this installment
should play Final Fantasy X first, unless
they're a fan of being in the dark. The

basic idea of this story is that it’s two

years after the end of Final Fantasy X,
Spira has been saved from Sin by the

high Summoner Yuna and_ her’

guardians. Now in her High
Summoning retirement, Yuna has
become a sphere hunter and is traveling
Spira with her group the Gullwings.
Along with Rikku from the last game,
and a mysterious new character called
Paine, they hunt down Spheres—obvi-
ously. The group kind of has that
Charlie's Angels Dynamic, or at least
that’s the best way to describe it. Yuna
is the leader. Rikku is, well, hyperactive
and can grate on a person's nerves.
Paine is the angry “I-dislike-most-peo-
ple-and-enjoy-hitting-things-with-
swords” type. And their support team
is made up of a guy named Brother
who oddly enough is Rikku’s brother,
who speaks broken English and a fic-
tion FF language called Al Bhed,
Buddy who, I’m not sure quite what he
does yet but I doubt it’s going to be
anything important, and finally Shira,
a little girl who is bundled up in a has-
mat suit and claims to know every-
thing. The cast dynamic is, to say the
least interesting, but each character
comes off realistic, and the three main
characters are convincing as people and
don't make me want to let them “perish
in battle.”

Characters are great and all but like a
lot of us it’s a battle system that can
ultimately make or break any RPG,
mostly since that’s what you'll spend
the majority of your time doing.
Thankfully, this battle system isn’t just
a clone of Final Fantasy X’s system, but
it does have many similarities. First off,
this battle system is now using fully
active time, not the sit-and-wait system
of FFX, meaning time waits for no
man—or in this case woman. Also,
since there are only three characters,
the battle-swap system is gone, but this
system does allow a charter to change

Developed by: SquareEnix
Published by: SquareEnix
Number of Players: 1
ESRB Rating: Teen

to any job class they have available.

This means you can change your party
dynamically during a battle to suit your
own needs. This may seem like a pain,
but as you get later in the game you
end up switching jobs every few turns
to get the most out of your abilities,
plus it throws the boss AI for a loop
when you do this. Each job is leveled
by performing actions with it, similar
to Final Fantasy Tactics, and there's a set
of 16 skills that take various amounts
of job points to master. So if you're
familiar with Tactics you shouldn't have
any problem dropping straight into
this battle system. It’s the most flexible
system ever used in Final Fantasy since
you can always change.

Now another thing that sets this
game apart from the other Final
Fantasy games in the series is the sheer
number of mini-games. It seems that if
someone could possibly be a mini-
game you better believe it’s there, along
with three other mini-games you
would never think could be mini-
games. Instead of having Blitz Ball
from Final Fantasy X we've got a new
mini game called Sphere Break that
involves doing math real quick. I’m
really not sure if this is an attempt to
test people’s math skills or if they just
ran out of ideas, but in the end it’s an
extremely difficult game to play, and
not very enjoyable.

We have a shooting game where
Yuna runs along the Besaid trails and
shoots various monsters, gaining points
for the more she can destroy in a row.
This one’s passable but gets annoying
extremely quickly, especially since
Yuna’s girly run is far more apparent
than normal. Then there is digging for
stuff out in the desert, the various
lighting rod calibration games, the
chocobo raising, and various others.
Some of these so-called mini-games
trail off into complete and utter point-
lessness. A lot of mini-games in other
games will pull you away form the
main story, most of these, however,
tend to get me back on track with the
main story within ten minutes.

As for the game’s soundtrack I
should mention its not done by
Nobuo Uematsu like the previous
Final Fantasy games were. For Final
Fantasy X-2 Noriko Matsueda and
Takahito Eguchi, who worked on the
Bouncer did the musical score. It’s not
quite as impressive in scope as previous
games, and none of the songs live up to
One Wing Angel or Dancing Mad, but
they are catchy, light, and seem to fit
the game fairly well. The voice acting is
another story all together. For some-
thing this big you would figure they'd

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