Contact - EarthboundNOT

[Dracos]

Contact came out in late 2006, somewhat under the radar but highly anticipated by certain niche crowds.  It had some fair balls with it's advertising campaigns, first hinting itself as a replacement to earthbound and then advertising itself as breaking the mold and bringing RPGs out of the early nineties.  Developed by the Killer7 crew and brought here by Atlus, it offered a wacky package with a neat thematic post-modern style over it.  In the end, it was all flash in the pan with nothing left to carry it past there.

Admittingly, I got a bad drift of it early.  I didn't buy into the whole "We're earthbound in spirit" deal and felt that was kind of lame of them to pitch, moreso after playing the game and recognizing they could've entirely pitched on their own merit.  I also read reviews comparing it to FFXII, which wasn't a winner.  It was really whimsy I got this at all.

First, the good parts:

It's interaction model rocked.  Sure, it's menus could've been better designed (40-50 items to a page?  Bleh) and sometimes the interface got in the way, but by and large, this is how to make a DS rpg in terms of interface.  There was rarely a reason to want to switch between stylus play and directional pad play and both were generally sufficient to do anything you wanted to do in the game universe.  Sure, the secret passageways were more appropriate to finding with the directional pad and the general design more intended for the stylus, but it was entirely possibly to play for ten hours on end without switching using either method.  In fact the only interaction that wasn't equally mapped on both control schemes was using decals (Which was mostly a gimmick anyways and only necessary about 5-10 times in the entire game).  Decals pretty much required the stylus.  Other than that though, you were good to go whether you wanted to play with the directional pad or the stylus.  Way to go, grasshopper.

It's graphic style was kind of nice.  Not as crisp as it probably should've been, but it was nice and I enjoyed it for the most part.  It mostly served the narrative and despite wildly fluxating animation quality (There are downsides to shoving in highly animated scenes that look in engine otherwise) it was pleasant for the course of the game and kept a sort of drawn feel to it all that I rather liked.

It had a nice thematic style to it.  The whole postmodern 'you are playing yourself, controlling this guy through your advanced ds device' was cute.  So was several of the blatant earthbound ripoffs. They could've done a lot more with it and the original did it better than they did, but it was cute and kind of different.

I found the fact that you could get a harem in the game pretty badass.  Sure it had no in game purpose, was a giant set of fetch quests and poorly declared goals, and didn't have much meaning, but I found it amusing having a set of digital gals hanging out on the ship begging for the main character's attention.

Okay, those are the pretty clear cut wins for it.  It'll go downhill from here.

The translation was pretty witty.  I appreciated that.  Mostly.  I could've done with more attention being paid to quests being correctly translated then seeing the latest internet meme show up in the dialogue.  Especially when said memes often hinted at things that really weren't possible in the game structure, such as hitting weak points and all.  Actually, that's being snippy, I really didn't mind those anywhere near as much as I minded quest parts being mistranslated, particularly instructions.  Not matching the item name I'm supposed to fetch with the item name I'm told to fetch is confusing.  Having mistranslated instructions marked red and in caps as important is annoying.  The sidequests in the game were obfuscated enough without the additional headache of wondering what the rare directional dialogue actually meant.  That kind of stuff got old fast and I suspect would've totally cut off sidequests for other people.  I know I ended up checking a faq at one point to find I already had the item I was searching for under a different name.

Additionally, the game really felt like an eighties style mess with it's quests in general.  Aside from the main one, it was absolutely a pain in the neck to keep track of them and often to find them.  Having quest start points behind a hidden chamber inside of another hidden chamber pushes my tolerance a bit, especially when it's important quests to unlock entire sections of gameplay and not just 'get niftier weapon'.  In general, the game had a lot of fetch quests and a lot of unclear quests.  Calling them fetch quests is probably a bit nice.  More like grocery list quests as they'd often involve as many as six items.  I started ignoring them after I had a few instances of 4-5 out of six collected with no idea how to find the remaining couple.  Given that these were most of the game's 'depth', it left a lot to be desired.

Depth was an issue.  This game was very much flash in the pan style and while I wanted depth to occur... it only did for about five seconds.  Which to me, doesn't cut it.  I was really cheering for the game about an hour in up until five or six hours.  I liked it's style, I was impressed by its interface, and while the framing quest was a fetch quest, I was fine with that provided there was more there.  What did appear was awkward and largely stemmed from them trying to keep a postmodern vibe going, to their own detriment.  The enemies were awkward pseudo-terrorists who couldn't really expose their stuff well at all.  No dramatic monologues indeed.  They could've done with actually having a solid plan that felt like it had a point.  Effectively it felt like they had 3 levels worth of story that they stretched over six.  The whole intergalactic angle of it felt kind of underutilized and just an excuse to have space ships in the ending.  The ending particularly was extremely lame, using a set of turn abouts that made little sense and damaged the already weak plot.  It transformed my opinion of the events from disappointing in their scope to just plain lame and showed a serious lack of deciding what story they were going to tell.  Having us have a running narrative of the professor's worries doesn't work with an 'oh my, but he's really just using you'.

Instruction was something that was given little attention and needed a lot more of it.  It was unclear for some skills how they actually leveled up.  Requirements for certain things were vague and skill gain points felt arbitrarily placed.  It was entirely possible to miss vocational quests and there was no feature to keep track of what you had learned (Recipes could've really used this) for some stuff.  What stuff meant was often left to guessing ("Can cook level 1 food"?  What's level 1 food?  Heck, what's level 2 food?  Is there level 3 food?) and this contributed to a sense of constant grinding in the game.  I still am not sure what fame is dependent on, having finished the game and gotten some thirtyish levels in it.  I don't know what stamina is or does as I apparently suffer no ill effects from not having it (I'm not even sure where the bar is for it) but it's important enough to list on every food item.  I ended up reading the manual to try and figure out how fishing worked and even now found it kind of unintuitive.  The manual felt more like a sales brochure than a manual.  Much like the translation, it was witty and stylish while lacking a fair deal of the core substance I wanted when bothering to open the thing up.  I congratulate it for naming characters that you meet way towards the end while not naming ones you meet early on and brushing over core mechanics in a whimsical and vague fashion.

Grinding and game balance were huge issues.  Every stage tended to give enemies huge leaps in damage dealing and rarely did the relevant outfit for strategy feel like it did any better than any other outfit.  Because of this, there was a tendancy to overlevel.  The fact that every skill had it's own level setup was very tiresome and the game made this worse through obfuscation, weak balancing of need for abilities, and poor starts.  Everything started at level 5.  Even when you got an outfit and everything else was at level 30-50.  You had to build it up from five.  Very tiresome.  Worse, all the 'really good' grind points are post game and the 'good enough' ones often involve unintuitive behavior and system raping (Utilizing ridiculously strong storyline enemies and glitching their AI to slowly whack them down one hp at a time).  The only faq on gamefaqs mirror'ed my own strategy for the last half of the game: 'grind where you can, carry 30+ potions anyway as it won't really matter by the next level'.  The last level was pretty much designed so that you had to potion through it unless you'd been grinding insanely.  No other item gave enough recovery and even clever equipping would only get your stats into the low 70s, ensuring that 10-50 damage would be taken each of the hundred fights in the last level.  By making all abilities dependent on how much you grinded, they pretty much made grinding the big focus of the game, a decision I felt was kind of sad.

What accented this was their aggressive sabotage of what was the most fun part of their game: Using abilities.  They did quite a bit to ruin making decisions with abilities.  The first and foremost ruin to it was that everything that involved a decision took at least one ability point to use and you only had five at a time.  Sure you could recover by fighting monsters but this meant that you couldn't be using abilities every battle.  They were flash on what had to be a solid ability to beat enemies to death through their automatic hit system.  Thus instead of a system where you regularly made useful decisions and saw neat abilities play out, I found the system tended to encourage me hoarding them and then lashing out to empty my stash in one quick go.  Even when I could use them strategically, they'd inevitably run out faster than the enemies did.  The second was tying them to ridiculous ability scores.  Often to get them, you had to become strong enough for them not to really matter?  I beat the game with stats in the 20s to 50s.  Most in the 30s.   What were they thinking at putting over half the abilities above that point?  "Durr, we decided to spread it over 100 and make it take forever to gain a level after 15!"

This follows on that, but the costume system accented the grind too.  Several stats were only buildable in one costume.  In fact, most the stats were.  There was also no way to change costume outside of going back to home base, which meant if a costume was needed for a puzzle, you'd wear that costume the whole level most likely (I generally did as it was too much of a bother to go back).  The most gregarious mockery of this was a puzzle that required changing into each of the elemental costumes.  Sure, it did a good job of requiring you to get them all by that point and rewarded with 5 levels in each of their stats, but did I really need to walk back and forth 4 times between said puzzle room and the changing room?  I think not.  In the end, I could've done without the whole costume system.  They really didn't use it well enough for it to become endearing and except for limiting the elemental skills, most of it felt kind of pointless.  "Oh joy, I have to walk back to the ship and change to cook the fish I just caught."

The sound programming was atrocious.  Truly, whoever decided that they'd restart the current theme every time you left battle mode was an idiot.  I got so sick of the starts of various tunes and really came to appreciate none of them in light of the fact I almost never heard their middle or endings but instead constantly heard their beginnings.  This was especially notably on some of the levels that had very busy beginnings, which I flat out turned off my sound on after a while.  The lack of multiple battle themes was a downer with how much time I spent in battle grinding and how often the time between battles was like three seconds.  Really, the beginning of the battle music got very old as well.

I'll take issue as well with the fact that despite their advertising, this felt way more primitive in a lot of mechanics then most recent showings.  For all they obnoxiously took issue with the progression of RPGs, it seemed like they just thumbed their noses at it, rather than honestly considered the greater picture and taking any of the wise solutions to many of their own problems that have been invented since the early nineties.  Normally, this wouldn't be a mark either for or against, but when the back of the box is entirely spent bashing the way RPGs are done, the designer better have that stuff owned and not feel like I'm playing a primitive Romancing Saga game.

The villains sucked.  Sure, it wasn't an angsty long haired pretty boy, but that's like saying because a gopher isn't emo, it's a good villain.  Actually, a gopher would've been a better villain.  These guys were wussy cosmoNOTs, some variety of lame terrorist that repeatedly considered it a win if they got their asses kicked but managed to 'delay' the hero.  Man, what standards these days.  And what a shitty way to shortchange almost every fight with them too; "Aha, you won but let me call in, and aha, this works with our plan."  Show some anger!  I just smashed your face in with a pair of brass knuckles.  And man, what a bunch of 'boy you're lucky this isn't a cutscene punk' garbage.  Every time there was a cutscene, they could totally toss you around like you were nothing, no matter how much they were supposed to have their asses kicked in the battles.  Their 'cover' also kind of stank.  They were supposed to be a rock band to hide themselves, but that shows up once in the game with no prior (or future) reference to it.  It kind of fits with how the story was told in general, events tossed out without regard for how they fit into a sequence.

Overall, the game experience left me with a foul taste in my mouth.  I kept wanting it to get better, and after a point, all it got was worse.  I know, via word of mouth, it has post game content.  I can't be bothered to go scout every dungeon in the game again for the extra boss they stuck there, especially when they can't be bothered to make my post game save start somewhere different so I can tell that it is post game, rather than right before beating the last boss.  I don't recommend this to anyone as it really is just a grind at heart and it'd be better to wait for it's neat interface to show up on a better game.

Dracos