Prince of Persia is My Favorite Thing

Release Date: 2008
Developer: Ubisoft
Genre: Action-Adventure, Platformer
# of Players: 1

The game starts out with your main character, a nameless adventurer, looking for his donkey in the desert. The game is based on an area of Persia and around the  Zoroastrianism religion. While the main protagonist is looking for his donkey, he comes across an Ahura named Elika. The Ahura people have forsaken the god of light, Ormazd, and tried to release the god of darkness, Ahriman. Upon his escape, Ahriman wants to take over the entire universe.

After the two main characters meet, they must work together to send Ahriman back to the Tree of Life. Elika informs the protagonist that they must return the areas of the land back to their former state. Now you must travel to the different areas of the land while fighting off the four main bad guys The Hunter, The Warrior, The Alchemist, and The Concubine. You must defeat each of these characters four times and then you have a final three part battle against each of them. After you have healed all the areas, you must go back to the temple and defeat Ahriman himself.

The game was alright, but I do have some issues with it. The game should have come up with more original characters. You have to fight each character of total of five times and only The Warrior's battles change more than just the surrounding. Another thing that bothered me was that the final showdown with Ahriman was just a simple sidescrolling platform level. Another issue is the length of the game. When I get a game I like to see what achievements there are for the game. There is an achievement for beating the game in under twelve hours. My initial thought is that you can only get this achievement if you know exactly where you are going and have played the game before. When I finally beat the game, I got the achievement. I am pretty sure that I even let the game sit for a while when I made a meal or had to go and do something. I am glad that I only ended up paying three dollars for this game due to its shortness.

Now for my biggest issue with the game. I will warn you that this contains spoilers about the ending. You spend all this time trying to heal the lands and throughout getting to know Elika, you learn that she died and her father gave Ahriman the land in order for her to be brought back to life. Elika keeps telling the main protagonist the importance of bringing the lands back together and healing them. After you go through the trouble of defeating Ahriman, Elika dies. The credits roll and it shows you taking Elika out of the temple and placing her on an altar. You then go to the four trees of light and destroy them, thus giving the land back to Ahriman so that Elika can live again. Therefore, the last twelve hours are pointless and everything is back to where it was at the beginning of the game.

Overall, I enjoyed the game for what it is. I am glad that it was only three dollars. I would not want to pay more than ten for this game due to how short it is. I will say that there is downloadable content, but I never played it. I do know that it is an epilogue to the game, so it may address the crappy ending. Also I would have liked a reuniting with his donkey, Farah at the end, but that is just being nit-picky.

Blue Dragon is My Favorite Thing

Today for my post on a video game I am going to be using a format from Five Penny Reviews (you can find the link in my blog list on the righthand side). Five Penny Reviews is written by my friend from college, Lucas. You should definitely check it out!

Release Date: 2007

Developer: Mistwalker, Artoon

Genre: Role-playing game

Platform: Xbox 360

# of Players: 1

What sets this game apart?

This is a typical JRPG (for non-gamers, that is a Japanese Role Playing Game). Just like most games of this genre, it has a turn-based combat system. In this case, the order that the characters can do an action is determined by their speed stat. What makes this game different than other JRPGs is that you also have shadows on your side. Each shadow has its own upgrades and type of class it benefits the best. You can change the shadow's class at anytime other than when you are in combat. The shadow will gain ranks in a particular class and be able to do new skills depending on the class. There are five types of shadows. They are dragon, phoenix, bat, minotaur, or a saber-toothed-tiger.

What is the difficulty factor?

I actually found this game to have a pretty easy difficulty. I played through the normal difficulty and did not have too much of a problem. I am a person who does not care how hard the game is as long as the story can captivate me. This game's story is not the greatest, but you will find out why it is on my list at the bottom of the review. Towards the end of the game there is a steep difficulty curve in my opinion. When I was playing, I easily went through the entire game until I came to the final boss and was quickly defeated. This was easily remedied by going and defeating some of the optional bosses. I went back to the boss and eventually beat him.

Does it use media effectively?

This game came out during the early days of the Xbox 360. Therefore, you will not get the stunning visuals that you get on games that are coming out currently. I think the game does a good job at sticking to its particular art style. Since this game was developed in Japan, you get a lot of the Japanese animation style, which explains why this game was later adapted into an anime and manga. It definitely is not the greatest graphics on the Xbox 360, but in my opinion, a game does not have to have amazing graphics to be considered a good game.

Best moment in the Game?

It has been a while since I have played this game, but there is one moment that sticks in my mind from when I played this game for the first time. The epic boss battle music! The music comes as a huge surprise. All the other scores in the game do not have words and are your typical JRPG music styles. When you fight the first boss that all changes. The song that is played is called "Eternity" by Ian Gillan. Here is a video of the music:

Who needs to play this game?

I think that if you are a fan of JRPGs you will enjoy this game. Also if you love the games where you can completely customize your character's classes you will also enjoy this game. I will admit that this is not the best RPG around. The story is typical (evil bad guy wants to take over the world) and I will admit that it is not very captivating. The main reason I decided to start off a video game post was so that I could mention the amazing boss battle music. I think using this music was risky and there are definitely people who love it and people who hate it. I am one of those who love it.