I forget if you were gone a bit when I played and beat Vagrant Story earlier this year, but uh yeah it sadly took me ~10 hours to realize that I shouldn't have been chaining every single attack.
Good to hear you enjoyed VS. I'm probably going to give it another shot eventually, there's obviously a lot to like about it. Don't think my problem was that I was chaining too many attacks as I was pretty bad at that. I got frustrated against a certain boss because my weapon wasn't the right type and I was doing 0 damage to it.
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The 3rd Birthday [2010] for the PSP
The only reason The 3rd Birthday isn't called Parasite Eve 3 is because Square Enix lost the rights to the book author and they could only use original characters from their previous games - so I'd be calling it that for clarity. PE3 was co-developed by SE and HexaDrive. It was directed by Hajime Tabata (Crisis Core, FFXV), although I suspect it really is the brainchild of Tetsuya Nomura who not only returned to do the character design, but also got credited as the 'Creative Producer'. PE3 was originally meant to be an episodic mobile game, but was later turned into a PSP title as SE hoped for a repeat of Crisis Core's successful release. Yoko Shimomura wasn't particularly involved with the game this time around and most of the soundtrack comes from different composers.
The game's once again set in New York on Xmas Eve because remember Parasite Eve? That game set in NY on Christmas's Eve? Remember the
battle theme from PE? Yeah, we
remixed it, but it's
almost exactly the same. In fact, the remixed tracks are the only ones that stood out to me, the rest of the soundtrack goes from serviceable to competent at best - not that memorable. I'll say the 'falling boss' theme was moderately cool:
As for the gameplay, PE3 is a third person shooter with RPG elements. I was expecting it to be loosely RE4-style like Dirge of Cerberus, but it really isn't. If anything, PE3 reminded me more of Bullet Witch as they share the same 'female character with super powers fighting alongside regular soldiers' theme. However, the latter is more of an acrobatic shooter, while PE3 is mostly a cover shooter with light tactical elements to it. Gone are the magic mitochondria powers from the previous games - nobody even mentions mitochondria in this game anymore - instead she's got 'Overdive'. Overdive allows her to dive into and impersonate her fellow soldiers - think of Agent Smith from The Matrix, it's the same thing.
Overdive is particularly useful against tough enemies, because you want your soldiers to spread out and take cover behind some barricade - stuff the AI should actually take care of by itself, but you often have to micromanage it yourself. When your soldiers are taking cover, they can also focus fire on a single target, dealing extra damage. Weakened enemies can also be 'Overdived into', inflicting a lot of damage and earning a chance to obtain a 'DNA strain'. DNA strains can then be crossed to upgrade or unlock new passive or active abilities - a cool customization option. Firearms can also be upgraded by buying parts and you eventually unlock better and newer weapon types. The game features automatic aiming - except when you're wielding sniper rifles or other special weapons.
This is all well and good, but while the gameplay is interesting and mostly fine, it isn't without his flaws. A couple of enemy bosses are quite a pain to deal with seeing as they can unleash cheap one-shot attacks that can decimate your squad in seconds - regardless of cover. Whether they unleash such attacks seemed to be entirely up to chance. As you lose your people, the game slowly resupplies you with new team members, so it becomes a war of attrition - can you manage to deplete the boss ridiculous health bar(s) before you run out of bodies to dive into? The line between 'fun' and 'tedious' is really thin there.
As for the elephant in the room: the story and characters. If PE3 was just any video game, they would be bad. As the closest thing to a third PE game, they are a disgrace. The story and writing is how you can really tell this is Tetsuya Nomura's game first and foremost. The story is both amazingly convoluted and absolutely boring - meaning that, yes, almost nobody can decipher it but, most importantly, almost nobody would care to do so. The dialog feels stilted and unnatural. It's as if it was first written in an alien language, then translated to Japanese and finally English. You know what games this reminded me of? The Kingdom Hearts series.
So, Tetsuya Nomura isn't a great writer - he's got all of the bad Kojima is known for without any of the good. But hey, Nomura was a character designer, right? What about the character design? Well, Aya always wore pretty sober clothes throughout the series. Except for her black dress at the opera - which while revealing was absolutely justified - she wore regular jeans, a white T-shirt and a jacket for the entire game. Same for PE2. Alright, she keeps her hair untied, but she basically wears the kind of clothing you expect a cop to wear when she's not in uniform. Unfortunately, Nomura decided that in PE3 Aya would change her attire to 'baby's first punk rock clothes'. Ripped jeans and a skimpy black corset. That'd be fine if she were still herself, but she has the personality of a weak-willed Japanese teenager. What's that? There are 'story reasons' for that? I don't care - if the game tells you can play as Aya and then you get a completely different person, I really don't care.
The other characters aren't any better and even returning characters like Maeda only worsen the situation. Maeda was a somewhat awkward Japanese scientist in the first game - now he's a stuttering creep who probably wouldn't leave his house without his life size Aya pillow. As for the clothing damage mechanic - as Aya gets hit, her clothes get shredded - it's kinda sleazy and a bit of a bizarre choice as this isn't Onechanbara, but whatever. You can ignore all that stuff, but since the story makes so little sense, you never really know what's going on, what's at stake, what are the villain's motivations and that hurts the game as a whole.
Still, the gameplay is decent fun for the most part and the visuals are stunning for the PSP. So I wouldn't say PE3 is a bad game, but an alright 3rd person shooter with abysmal writing and characters.
Dino Crisis 2 [2000] for the PS1
The good news is that Dino Crisis 2 is better than its predecessor, the bad news is that I still don't like it all that much. This time Shinji Mikami didn't direct it, instead the game was helmed by Shu Takumi. He mostly went on to direct a handful of Ace Attorney titles. The game abandons the full 3D graphics from the original Dino Crisis and replaces them with 2D backdrops. And it's all the better for it - Dino Crisis wasn't a bad looking game by any means, but DC2 is one of the best looking games of its kind.
The game lets you reprise the role of US special forces operative Regina as well as of a new character named Dylan. The game's set on a small archipelago with strong Jurassic Park-vibes. The scientists working there essentially tried to bring back dinosaurs through time travel as opposed to DNA tampering and it obviously all went horribly wrong. The game has a strong arcade-y action component to it at the expense of puzzles and tension. Not much was lost, seeing as the original Dino Crisis didn't really have tension and the puzzles were both soporific and monotonous.
The game now awards you with 'Extinction Points' each time you kill a dinosaur. The highest kill 'combo' you obtain, the more points you receive. After you leave a combat area, the game shows you your highest combo and points earned. You need the points to buy pretty much anything: better weapons, ammo, healing items, armor, etc. In fact, you also need the points to buy items you absolutely need to complete the game, so it's not like earning points is optional. Since you'd be fighting a lot, it's worth pointing out that the firearms feel and sound much better than they did in the previous game. The shotgun, flame thrower, heavy machine gun, etc. None of them are wack, in fact, they're usually pretty good.
The problem is that fixed camera angles and tank controls... are not really that great for such a combat intensive game. It doesn't help that dinosaurs spawn all around you each time the camera switches angle and you'll definitely get torn apart by some velociraptor you didn't even see because it spawned behind you - off-screen - and you were already too busy shooting at its two buddies in front of you. It doesn't help that dinosaurs respawn seemingly endlessly each time the camera switches angles - no matter if you first leave the area or not. I say
seemingly endlessly, because their numbers are actually finite, but there's like 50 of them for each area.
Eventually, I realized that the best strategy was farming points in the area nearest to a save point. Get in, kill at least 5 dinosaurs without getting hit in order to trigger the No Damage bonus, immediately get out of there. Rinse and repeat. In the early game, the No Damage bonus actually gives you many more points than any of the dinosaur kills. Other than that, play the game as a survival horror and try to run past as many enemies as possible. It's a pretty jarring gaming experience. Maybe I'm weird, but I think a traditional RE-like experience would've better served Dino Crisis 2 - it's not that Dino Crisis was bad because it was a RE clone, it's that it wasn't a good RE clone.
The game lets you play as both Regina and Dylan during the campaign. Regina is a more interesting characters and her weapons are more fun to use. Dylan's shotgun is better than Regina's handgun in the early game, but then it becomes obsolete. Its rate of fire is bad and its spread not wide enough. Later on, he can buy an Antitank Rifle, which is just a stronger shotgun that suffers from the exact same problems. The game also features several turret sections: a rather annoying one on your boat and then a better one on a jeep as you get chased by Triceratops. You also get to pilot a tank while getting chased by a T-Rex - imagine that, piloting a tank... with tank controls.
All in all, Dino Crisis 2 has better combat, no boring puzzles and a much faster, cinematic pacing than its predecessor. On the other hand, it doesn't know whether it wants to be a survival horror or an arcade-y action game. Unfortunately, fixed camera angles and old-school tank controls are just subpar for the latter. This is a lower mid-tier game as far as I'm concerned: same as Fear Effect 2, inferior to Fear Effect or RE3. Incidentally, I could see a RE4-like over the shoulder camera and better controls being game changers for DC2.
EDIT: Spoilers, I guess, but this 'I'll save you bro!' scene made me laugh hard:
EDIT 2: Coincidentally, The Sphere Hunter just made a
video review about The 3rd Birthday. I find it funny that she mentions how it's kinda like Other M for Parasite Eve fans, since I also thought of that.