To kick off our weekly columns, my good friend Alex offered to put together a review for us; FFXIII’s been a game Jenny & I have been intending to play since release, but never found the time. Agree or disagree, I hope you’ll join the discussion in the comments section. Take it away, Al!

~ Rob

As a self-confessed JRPG fanboy I eagerly anticipated the first foray of Square Enix’s flagship franchise into the 7th generation of game consoles. With Final Fantasy XII having taken several diversions from the mechanical canon of the series – with varying degrees of success – I was intrigued, and not a little wary, to see where Square Enix would take the series next.

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It’s dark inside Ceres Station.  The lonely bleep of untended computers echoes off bleak metal and scattered corpses.  With an intake of breath the door opens, and a bounty hunter appears, surveys the grisly scene from within her visored suit, and as it dawns on her what has been stolen she darts away in pursuit.

So begins Super Metroid, the pinnacle of 2D adventuring. Never since has a game provided so much freedom along with such depth of control, nor produced such a finely tuned tension, solitude and a sense of impending doom without resorting to cheap scares.  And somehow, it succeeds simultaneously as both a sequel and a reimagining of the original game.

A matter of minutes later, after your panicked flight from the collapsing ruins of Ceres Station you arrive on the surface of Zebes, the caves and passageways of which form your playground for the rest of the game.  With a heroic jingle you emerge into a hostile environment, desperately underequipped and uncertain of what to expect.  The obvious path lies silent and uninhabited, just as you left it all those years ago when you first escaped the firey destruction of the planet’s interior, your two-button NES pad gripped in triumph.  And as you delve a little deeper, you rediscover the shattered remnants of your final battle; Mother Brain’s glass tank, shattered and broken; your escape route, burned and decayed from a decade of disrepair.

Or as in my case, you miss all the relevance of this historical retread as you didn’t play the original, but even then the all-pervading silence and lifelessness – other than the tiny scavengers scurrying away at your approach – leaves you breathless.  I already knew I was in for an epic; that they included the complete map and strategy guide for free in the oversized box suggested that this was going to be no straight shooter.

What I didn’t expect was a masterclass in extraterrestrial potholing, mixing the old tradition of leaping from ledge to ledge with squeezing through the tiniest of cracks with the help of an ever-increasing arsenal of technical wizardry and high-payload weaponry, working ever deeper into the heart of the planet, down into the flooded environs of Maridia and the magma caverns of Norfair.  And with each rediscovered technology, you feel just a little more prepared for the incredible odds that await you round the next corner.

It’s not even that Super Metroid’s particularly hard – with a bit of careful exploration you rapidly become such a badass that only the most cackhanded playing will result in your untimely demise – but that even as a fully equipped power-suited badass you feel strangely vulnerable, trapped deep beneath millions of tons of rock, entirely alone.

Yet as the sirens wail and the unexplained planetary destruct mechanism ticks down, you know you’ll be back, stalking the corridors of Zebes, revelling in the solitude.

Of all the genres of gaming, the Japanese RPG often seems the most mired in tradition.  The genre staples of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest have managed to go a decade or more without significant gameplay evolution, and while current generation stalwarts such as Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey are technically impressive, they seem almost to have taken a step back in time with highly traditional, firmly entrenched turn-based rulesets.

At the same time, while JRPGs often have the most complex stories found in gaming, they too tend to rely on endless comfortable repetition of certain basic genre tropes, the band of young archetypal – often painfully emo – heroes pitted against the might of a military establishment with the fate of the world in the balance. Toss in a smattering of faux-mysticism, preferably a bunch of crystals or similar plot tokens to be fought over, then garnish with a frustratingly high occurrence of random encounters which can easily be surpassed by repeatedly hammering a single button.

And in many ways, Skies of Arcadia is a devoted follower of tradition.  Moon-crystals that hold the key to ruling the world – check. Team of archetypal young heroes – check. Military establishment bent on world domination – check. Bundles of forgettable random encounters – check.

So why is Skies of Arcadia one of those rare games I return to year after year? Where is the appeal amidst the cliches?

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Back in 2001, a first-party Sony development team led by the little-known designer Fumito Ueda launched ICO upon an unsuspecting industry. This PS2 title quickly became both a critical success and a cult hit – although never quite garnering the corresponding commercial success that it deserved – with its beautifully minimalist art style and story. Yet ICO’s concept was seemingly built around the age-old gaming cliche of two mis-matched characters helping each other through a series of increasingly intricate environments.  What made it so different from the Banjo-Kazooies and Head Over Heels’ of gaming history?

Somehow, amidst the bloom lighting and the illegible subtitles, the shadow beasts and the desolate cliff-bound castle, ICO made you care. And Ueda and his team went back to work on crafting their next intricate masterpiece. The gaming world waited with bated breath to see whether Team ICO could do it again.

When Shadow of the Colossus opens, the damsel in distress is already dead and slung across the back of the hero’s horse, Agro.  Carrying over the minimalism of exposition which made ICO such an understated joy to play, the reasons for Mono’s death are never made fully clear, nor are Wander’s motivations for doing whatever it takes to bring her back.

Carrying his love – for that much is apparent – into the Forbidden Land, Wander encounters the disembodied spirit Dormin, whose essence has been sealed into sixteen great colossi across the land.  Destroy the colossi, and Dormin will return Mono to life.  Spurring Agro down the steps of the temple that dominates the centre of the land, Wander prepares to do what he must, no matter the cost.

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The original idea was that I was going to start writing the occasional mini-review of backward-compatible games from past generations of hardware. Then the PS3 removed PS2 backwards compatibility altogether, and I realised that most of the Xbox games I was thinking of covering were on the 360′s list of non-compatible games. So bollocks to it, I’ll review them anyway, and mention whether or not they’re available on the current generation at the end.

Considering how much of an escapist medium gaming is, it often surprises me how seldom games actually succeed in making me feel like an all-powerful badass.  Perhaps it’s an issue of balance, perhaps it’s simply the difficulty of finding ways to challenge an exceedingly powerful character.  Otogi is one of those few games that gets the balance just right, and the result – though unnecessarily flawed in certain aspects – is an exhilarating flurry of destruction.

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