Summary: Pretty and worth looking at a little longer but very annoying and cliché.
In an effort to move through my Game Fly queue more quickly and accomplish something while I’m at it, I’ve decided (at gem’s suggestion) to write reviews of games after having played them for fifteen minutes each! First up is Steambot Chronicles for the PS2, published by Atlus and developed by Irem Software Engineering.
The game has some rather bland graphics for the general world, but the characters are done in a nice looking cell shading. The tutorial begins with some pirates finding two young children (teens?) stowed away, one of them being you. The captain offers to teach you to pilot Trotmobiles, and if you can do so correctly, she’ll let you stay and join. The tutorial was really boring. They go through steps just to teach you that it uses the two sticks for tank controls. Then it goes through some more steps to teach you that R2 jumps and L2 boosts. I figured out that R1 causes me to punch (or do something that looks like punching). I skipped the boosting tutorial because it seems my L2 is broken. Shortly after I gave up and quit the tutorial. It was very boring.
The game starts with a short quiz about how you’d respond to particular scenarios. I’m guessing this determines your personality. They were interesting and short at only three questions. Next your character wakes up on a beach unable to remember anything, and a young woman finds him. There are some dialog choices and a little bit of running around before you get a Trotmobile again.
Every time you run up to something you can interact with, an icon appears on the screen. After you press the X button, there’s some lag before a menu pops up asking what you want to do. Usually there’s just “do whatever you wanted to do” and “cancel.” Can’t the game assume I want to open the door if I walked up and pressed X? Why would I want to open a menu and then click cancel? There’s lag before every choice, menu, and dialog. Also, doing anything changes to a very small segment in which control is taken away from the player. Of course, there’s lag before these as well. The voice acting is not very good, but it’s not so horrible as to make me mute my television. Also, the game has the annoying feature that so many jrpgs do of making loud splashing noises when I run through water, crunching noises when I run through grass, and shuffling noises when I run through dirt. Worst of all, there are cicadas making noises constantly. What the hell is wrong with Japanese people putting these in anime and games?
And that was about fifteen minutes into the game. So, what did I think of it? The story seems pretty generic. I’m a young guy found by a pretty girl (so far called Pretty Girl) who can’t remember his past. How pathetically cliché. Despite the fact that the graphics have bits of ugly 3Dness, I like the cell shading a lot. The audio is very annoying, but I kind of like the talking in a bad voice acting kind of way. The characters have a tendency to do some sliding while running (common in older games especially), and I wish the camera would look left when I press left rather than look right. I haven’t reached any sort of combat yet at all or level system (if there is one). The game interests me enough to make me want to continue playing it at least until I see combat. If I don’t get a chance to tonight, I’ll still hold on to the game for a few more days. That said, if I don’t get to it by the end of the week, I’m sending it back anyways.