Wombat's Corner

A sequel to Okami was announced recently, which was as good a reason as any to finally pull the game off the shelf and pop it in my PS2’s disc tray after having left it untouched for likely close to a decade (my backlog of games is extensive and only grows larger). I was not inexperienced with the game, as even longer ago I had seen a Let’s Play of the title, but this is the first time I’ve put hands on it personally. It’s good. That goes without saying, right? It’s a classic game, one people remember fondly to this day. The announcement of its sequel led to dozens if not hundreds of screaming reaction videos, so it has to be good. But I do mean it’s just good. Don’t get me wrong, parts of the game are mind-blowingly fantastic. The animation and art style are absolutely stunning, and the soundtrack is a wondrous accompaniment, especially in the moments where you heal a Guardian Sapling and the camera pans over the entire field as the land is renewed and the music swells and yo...

  This article spoils the entirety of a major subplot in Dragon Quest 3 I’ve never had a strong relationship with my own father. We’d be sent off to his house for between two weeks to a month over the summer, and that was about it. He never made an effort to really be around, something that has carried on into my adulthood (though, for various reasons, I’m glad he keeps his distance). And I’ve never had the best of relationships with stepfathers. They’ve been bad for the stereotypical reason stepfathers are usually bad. This is all to say, I don’t relate easily to strong father-child bonds or extremely present fathers in the media. Dragon Quest 3 doesn’t give me a present father. My father, Ortega, left when I was a newborn, leaving my mother to raise me all on her own. Immediately, this is a situation I can relate with. Ortega isn’t around, and a void is left in his absence, felt by both me and my mother, a void that is desperate to be filled but, in the likely scenario of Ort...

       A great game is a great game, no matter when it’s released. And Dragon Quest 3 is a great game. I had never played any version of this game, nor have I ever beaten any Dragon Quest game, despite certainly pouring hundreds of hours into Dragon Quests 7, 8, and 11. Dragon Quest 3 is precisely the game I needed to resolve this.      Freedom. That’s really the greatest draw of Dragon Quest 3. The opening hours, as you’re first finding your feet, are (helpfully) fairly linear, with a couple of side paths to get distracted down like the fantastic sidestory involving Norvik and the Faerie Village. But help out enough people, find yourself in enough new cities, and you will eventually be rewarded with a ship. And that ship is freedom.      The game truly opens up in an extraordinary new fashion, and this was my favorite part of the game. You start on the western side of the westernmost continent, and you can go either north or south. ...

Chained Echoes is a rare example of one of these retro-inspired pixel art JRPG’s being more than the sum of its parts. Many parts are traceable to classics of the past (some more recent than others) and I could easily list where so many elements come from (and will, later), but Chained Echoes builds on the past in ways that demonstrate the indie JRPG truly has legs built of stronger stuff than nostalgia. Chained Echoes is the story of several characters; Glenn, mercenary-turned-hesitant leader of a rebellion; Lenne, runaway princess of a tyrannical, militaristic nation; Victor, Shakespeare-esque bard of untold age with mysterious ties to both Glenn and Lenne; and Kylian, Glenn’s brother-at-arms who turns traitor on the party near the end of the first act and acts as a villain of various levels throughout the game. With this group and the variety of characters that surround them (there are 13 playable characters in the game), a political tragedy unfolds as Lenne’s brother declares...

       I’m about 35 hours into an adventure filled with political intrigue, assassinations, kidnappings, betrayal, and open warfare. I’ve just bested my enemy on the open water, then destroyed a dam/military base by releasing the force of an entire lake into a river and discovered ancient ruins at the bottom of said lake. Propelled by a sense of adventure, I enter these ruins, excited to see what they have in store for me…             Five minutes later, I started texting a friend. Ten minutes after that, I got up to check my student e-mail. I began to browse Reddit after another five minutes. Almost fifty minutes after entering the ruins, I turned my PlayStation 2 off and have not turned it back on again. I had been sitting on the same loading screen, the music cutting on and off, that entire time.             This was not the first bad loading time of S...

             I won’t pretend to fully comprehend everything going on in Keylocker . At its core the game is a scathing, if heavy-handed, critique of capitalism and the systems we create in the name of perpetuating the status quo, which you play by defeating your incredibly difficult adversaries in a grid-based, turn-based system. Keylocker is an incredible game.             It’s also incredibly frustrating.             I have one complaint about this game and that is its teeth-grinding difficulty, mostly due to the inconsistency of the parry mechanic. When an enemy flashes white as they attack you, you’re meant to press the block button, negating all damage. Failure to do so can, in some instances, lead to you being one-hit-killed. However, sometimes, the flash is not indicative of the actual timing, which can lead to hair-pulling, want-to...

Wandering Sword is a fantastic shell of a game. The world is absolutely beautiful, the premise of being a growing swordmaster with a friend to rescue is immediately gripping, and the gameplay, on the surface, seems deep and complex. Then you actually play the game. Wandering Sword is plagued by perhaps too many ideas. An RPG stat progression system is perfectly lovely, until you introduce stats with vague use. What exactly does my ever-growing Sword Mastery stat do for me? Raising it never seems to affect my ability (or inability, as I’ll touch on later) to mow down enemies. So why should I be concerned with it? The main progression system of striking chakras(?) (I forget what they’re called) seems simple enough, until you realize that you don’t know what exactly would be most beneficial for you. Stats like Strength and Constitution being raised in increments of two or more are fairly self-explanatory, but what does it mean to raise my Evasion by 0.3 or my Internal Power by 2? N...