Mass Effect - Review and Analysis

So last time I did an analysis was quite a long time ago and I haven't posted in a while, I've been busy with some game projects.

So Mass Effect is an western RPG released in 2008. Here is a trailer if you never heard of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqJuJTIus7U

I'm normally not a fan of western RPGs, because I rarely get immersed since the choice making system hardly interests me because I feel like the storyline ends up worse because of it, but Mass Effect managed to stay with me during the entire experience, so I finished the game.

Gameplay
The battle system is ok. It's a shooter with RPG elements. Basically you get to equip weapons and armors, manage inventory, choose special ammunition. You also level up and you can customize your character by choosing specific points to invest in to. So far it's basic RPG stuff with a space theme. But when you get down to the battling it's a shooter. A cover-up shooter. So basically you have biotic powers, special weapons, customizing options, but the battle boils down to hiding behind something and shooting until the enemy is dead. That's it. If you hide in a place too close to the enemy he might try to swarm you. If you hide too far away your shots might miss more. All the customization you do  pretty much boils down to being able to kill enemies faster or surviving longer. It's unrewarding, which is bad.

It can be fun though, shooting things and hiding and stuff. But it feels kinda dumb. You rarely die in the main combat system and when you do, it's because you didn't hide in a good spot. Or you didn't hide at all. Not smart. So is this a good battle system to make? Not really. Sure, it's fun and it uses the old and tried formulas of rpgs in general, but it doesn't try to be anything more and it feels dumbed down. The inventory system is also as well a pretty big let down, since your inventory ends up full of useless stuff that you have to manually delete. That can take a while. Bad design decision.

Outside of the main battle system you get a bunch of quests that you can go do. Sometimes it's boring, others it's good. I didn't do all the quests, maybe around half? The NPCs are pretty interesting though. They rarely make you go "Wow, this dude is amazing, what a complex person!", but they never make you go "damn, they rushed this one". But the quests feel quite generic and repetitive. It could've been done a little bit better, but then it's optional content, not sure how much polishing should go towards that since developers have to meet deadlines. But the player ends up with a "another quest like that..." taste in his mouth. Not good. But not that bad either, specially from a game creator's point of view.

There's a vehicle though, called Mako. It sucks. That was a horrible design addition, it feels clunky and it takes quite a while to finish battles in it. Maybe if it had some overpowered, some cool weapons and maybe if it made you feel powerful it could've worked. But it's just bad in every sense.

Other than Mako, Mass Effect doesn't really do anything too wrong gameplay-wise. But it never does anything in a excelling way either.

The main battle system is average, but better than the tank

The Story
This sucks. No, really. It feels like an action movie. So this bad guy wants to destroy the universe and you have to stop him! No plot twists. No shocking revelation. No objective change. No new perspectives. The plot feels generic and weak. How did they mess this up so badly? Except that they didn't really mess up, they just didn't try to do it. The plot is weak because it doesn't even try a little bit to be strong. This is ridiculous, really. This sort of story should go in to an action game, not in to a RPG-like something that wants to tell a story.

The universe, though, is pretty well fleshed-out. The races and NPCs, the technology, the dialogs, the way things interact is pretty good. It feels immersive and detailed. Immersion is important. But it feels like the game created this amazing world for you to play in, but it didn't really try to create amazing things for you to do. Sad, sad. But it is a great universe.

Characters
They suck. Even worse than the story. It's a bland, non-interesting cast. They have no motive, they pretty much just follow you around in your quest to save the universe for nothing. It's ridiculous, really, they could've all been removed and everything would stay the same. You could take away the characters and make the game a solo game and it would be the same. You could change the main plot to becoming a pole dancer and keep the same characters and it would be the same. This is sad.

The characters try to have some back story, but it's all bland and non-interesting. And they're all "fleshed out" through conversations, they never develop the character through story and plot. This is just ridiculous. This is why they say games have bad writing. Please, I beg you, make your own characters better (:


Graphics
The models are pretty well detailed. The citadel looks pretty. Everything has a good degree of quality. It lacks artistic power though, I mean, everything is pretty but nothing is beautiful, but I guess that's because of the setting. It's worth of praise, though.

Sounds
I don't remember the soundtrack, so it's not memorable, but not annoying either. The sounds effects feel good too. I suppose it all works together to create the immersion.

Summary
Don't look in to Mass Effect for anything but for a direction in to creating and detailing an amazing universe. The writing(story and characters) is mediocre, the main battle system is simple fun but otherwise average. But from this game you can get some knowledge for improving your game universe and you overall immersion, both of which are important(specially immersion), so maybe you should check this game out. If you have the time.

From Google images, expresses how I feel about the tank. Don't make anything like this, please

Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky Review & Analysis

So I'm going to review and analyze the game, trying to point out relevant points about the design of the game.

Legend of Heroes is an JRPG(Japanese RPG) series, that has been growing lately in it's home country. So this one game(Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky, for the PSP) got a great translation from Xseed and got a small presence in the west. I'm around 20 hours in to the game, and I have a lot of thoughts about game design from playing it.

Check out the game trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpSyTj7m-wM


Gameplay

The battlesystem. Notice the bar in the right. Turn order with bonuses!

Fun, turn-based battle, with a feel of strategy. Nothing wrong with the battle system, really, a lot of things done right, battles aren't boring, but they also aren't "omg, this is the best battle system ever!". One great thing about the battlesystem is that it involves both time and space. You can move in the battlefield and you can also mess up a little with the turn order, but none of the two elements are predominant. I think that turn based systems in general can be improved a lot by including time elements, being able to change the turn order in creative ways. The space element is done well too, reminding me a little bit of Chrono Trigger, in the way that the techs affect a certain area of space. It's good, but not enough, you don't get enough freedom.  One thing it does well, though, is rewarding you when you do "the right thing". The game special turn bonuses that help you or the enemy, so messing with the turn order to get bonuses feels good. This is good, because the reward comes as you battle, not only in the end of the battle. It's a solid battle system with great concepts! I just think the player should have more freedom with time and space.

It features no random encounters, has an option to retry battles, all of those are good stuff, so take notes. Random encounters should really be removed, they rarely add anything good but a outdated old school feeling, in my opnion

Outside of battles you get a lot of quests, which are fun, but often involve running around. Some of the quests actually provided immersion for me, since I kinda felt "ok, I'm annoyed a little, but maybe it annoys the characters too", but I think it's more of a flaw, but nothing too bad. The quests are well done, for the most part.

Story 
The story develops really slowly. I'm 20 hours in and everything I've seen of the actual plot is... Well, very little. I can't really say all that much about it, then, maybe I'll say more when I finish up the game. Up until now the game is made up of small arcs that don't really affect each other too much. This is definitely a design flaw, but since everything is pretty well written and there is a lot to read, it feels good. To me, anyways.
About the setting, well, it has a medieval feeling with some technological elements. The world is pretty well fleshed out.

Characters 
The game really shines here. The entire cast is interesting and they have a lot, and I do mean A LOT of dialog all the time, and it's really well written, like they really wanted to breath life in to the characters. They all interact pretty well with what happens in the game. They really hit a spot here, since everything feels pretty real. They are not my favorite characters ever, but they have a lot of quality, similar to the "Tales of" series. If you're making a story intense game, this is definitely something to aim for, even if your game is more plot oriented. And how do you do it? Quality dialog!

Graphics
Lots of 2D goodness here. Everything is pretty simple, but the sprites are pretty. The world is 3D though. The character design is in anime style. It feels a little bit generic, but it does the job well.

Sound
Nothing too fancy. The music is good, never annoys me, but nothing too memorable. Does it's job.

Summary
So, this game doesn't really have a lot of flaws, except plot continuity. This game is definitely a reference for writing good dialog and for making an effective turn based system, especially the latter, since those are rare gems in the industry.

Analyzing Games

One thing a game designer/programmer should always do is analyze other games. This should probably be obvious to you already, but I`ll write some stuff about it. 

Most of the time we only analyze a game after playing it, through memory. That is all good and nice when you're comparing your favorite games to see which you find best, but a game designer needs to take a different approach: he must be aware of the feelings. 

When you're thinking about gameplay, you're looking at happiness and frustration. At how you can make a player feel when they get a reward, when they win at something inside your game.

When you're thinking about a platformer game, you may remember something about the pretty level design or a certain song. But what you want to remember is how much frustration you felt when you died at the boss and how happy you felt when you finally won. Because that is the feeling you want to reproduce in your games. Did you feel betrayed because the upgrade you got from the boss was totally lame? You wouldn't want your players to feel that way, would you?

Have you ever used Gameshark or a cheat in the game to become all powerful? It may have felt good at first, but it got old, didn't it? If the game is easy, it may lose it's point and become boring. You should be aware of that when giving rewards and power ups in a game.

So maybe the cheat example wasn't the best, but a good one that comes to mind is Orlandu in Final Fantasy Tactics. Once you get him, which happens late in the game, you start to feel all powerful. His attacks are so strong you'll feel like nothing can stop you. And you didn't even do anything to get him, he just pops up in the story. I didn't feel so good about having Orlandu. That's the feeling you should watch out for.

The guy in the left is a bit of game breaker

As far as gameplay goes, I think those are the two more important feelings: happiness and frustration, they cover a lot of stuff though, and a lot can be said about them.  But one keyword here is reward. Playing games should be rewarding. 

Once you start looking at the story aspect of the game, a lot more feelings can be conveyed and felt, but when you melt everything down, through the story, you probably want to achieve two things:

1) Not boring the player.

2) Creating intense feelings.

Reaching those two points should be your default goal, but you need to aim higher if you're making a story-heavy game, like RPGs(my favorite genre) or Graphical Novels.

So when you're playing any games, try to look in to those two points: 

- Does the story bore you? Why does it bore you? Do other people find the story boring?

- What intense feelings did the story make you feel? How did it accomplish that? How did it build up to it?

Another aspect that I find important is pacing. I like high paced stories, so the quicker the story can go while still maintaining quality, the better. Games, however, tend to have slow pace, probably so they can make the game last longer or as a way to add lots of build up. Pay attention to pacing in the games and try to recognize how you feel about it.

I think that's that, really. So I'm going to try and analyze some games in my next posts, to show you what I mean. They'll be mostly RPGs, but I'll visit other genres and other media, like tv series and cartoons, to analyze them through the lens of game design.
See ya next time!

A little preview of what my next post will be about...