Druff

I see that Don Bluth is credited with directing Dragon's Lair, but the person who actually came up with the idea for the game gets no credit here. The man who was really behind Dragon's Lair was Rick Dyer. In the 70s he created a prototype for a game which used hand drawn artwork and text on an adding machine ribbon (rather than animation and sound on a laser disk.) The user would hit certain keys to make choices, and the machine would automatically roll the ribbon to the next appropriate scene. It was Dyer who pitched the idea for Dragon's Lair to several animation companies, and it happened to be Don Bluth's company who agreed to animate the game. While Don Bluth's animation in Dragon's Lair is excellent, he doesn't deserve the credit for creating the game itself.

Almost everything about Vagrant Story is par excel-lance. The story, the script, the characters, the graphics, the soundtrack... The English translation is especially spectacular, due to its masterful coloring with "Olde English" which adds so much to the tone and atmosphere. This is one of the ultra rare cases where the English translation is arguable far superior to the original Japanese script. Unfortunately, all of these shining examples of fine craft and "video game design as true art" is all for naught because of one single fatal flaw: The game simply isn't fun to play.

Where the game ultimately fails is in the game play. The battle system in and of itself is fine. It's an interesting hybrid cross between standard real time action combat and traditional RPG turn based combat. The problem is, at the very heart of the battle system is an abysmally UN-fun weapon and armor system. There are several (eight?) classes of enemies in the game- Beast, Human, Dragon, Undead, Phantom, etc. The enemy classes are paired off into diametric oppositions. e.g. Using your weapon against a human enemy will make it stronger against humans, but weaker against phantoms. (sic) On top of that, there are specific weakness ratings. An enemy might be weak against blunt weapons, but almost totally impervious to edged weapons or piercing weapons. And then there are the usual elementals as well- fire, ice, earth and so on. Finally, each of your weapons has its own "wear" rating. The lower the rating, the more worn out the weapon, the less damage it does. You must repair your weapons in workshops, which are few and far between in the game. Another thing you can do in workshops is disassemble your weapons and reassemble the parts to make new weapons. Whether the new weapon will be better or worse than the weapons you sacrificed to make them involves much trial and error. The end effect of all of this is that as you play the game, you are literally constantly changing weapons. Yet the creators of the game didn't bother to implement any sort of quick menu for weapon switching, a la Secret of Mana. You have no choice but to spend 45% of your game time opening the main menu, opening the weapon menu, finding the right weapon, opening the accessory menu, changing the elemental jewels on the weapon, etc. etc. etc. All they had to do was come up with some sort of quick menu for changing weapons, as Seiken Densetsu 2 did seven years earlier. As it stands, Vagrant Story is a micro-management nightmare. To call the game tedious is an understatement of epic proportions.

As is always the case, no matter how flawed something, there will be a small niche group of vocal supporters who will insist that the thing in question is the greatest creation in history, and that people who don't like it just don't "get it." Beware of misguided fanatics.

Please note that the preceding includes some ridiculous things like 'excel-lance' and 'UN-fun' because of IMDb's incredibly retarded "error checking" system. IMDb: Please get rid of that broken piece of garbage.

I bought the entire NieA_7 series in one shot (DVD box-set) because I'm a fan of Serial Experiments Lain and Haibane Renmei, and NieA was made by some of the same creators. After all, I bought Haibane Renmei solely because it was by the same people who made Lain, and I was rewarded with a truly excellent anime. Last night I finished the first volume of NieA, and let me say that at this point my faith has been shaken.

Based on the first four episodes, I'm struck by the close similarity to another anime called FLCL (a.k.a. Furi Kuri or Fooly Cool y, depending on your personal level of anime fan-hood/elitism.) I believe both shows debuted in Japan in 2000, so I doubt that either one is an intentional rip-off of the other. On paper, the basic premises are almost identical; A young girl leads a relatively mundane life in a very quiet town. The one thing that prevents her life from being completely ho-hum is the fact that she lives with a free-spirited female alien (named NieA) who is usually a source of trouble to the girl. All I'd have to do is change the young girl to a young boy and I'd be describing FLCL. It's the same drill. Events are seemingly random, with only a loose sense of any plot. Wacky, zany and bizarre are apt adjectives for the episodes I've seen. The NieA character is annoying, and the lead character never fails to overreact to the alien's shenanigans. One problem is that they've made NieA -too- annoying. So far she's entirely one dimensional. Her single minded obsession with food invariably causes her to be a selfish, obnoxious pest. She isn't funny or cool, unlike FLCL's Haruko. I'm sure as I get further into the show there will be some character development and I'll see the characters in a different light. As it stands now, I wish the NieA character would just go away. I'm an easy going guy. For a character to get on my nerves to this degree in only four episodes indicates to me that something is wrong. I'll continue to watch NieA_7 only out of a stubborn sense of duty. Not enjoyment. I finish this series even it if it kills me. For now I hope I like Texhnolyze more than this.

Note to IMDb staff: Your automated "follow the rules" script for these submissions really needs some tweaking and bug-fixing. It wouldn't permit me to title this comment "FLCL Jr." because it considered that to be "shouting". It wouldn't let me use "F.L.C.L." either, because it regarded that as shouting as well. Finally, it wouldn't let me title it "Fooly Cool y Jr." either. No matter how I try to change it, it automatically changes Cool y to Coolly. In fact, I've had to put a space between the l and y just to tell you this.

It would seem that even when I'm not watching the show, NieA is still finding ways to annoy me. ~_^