finalark
SNORLAX
Link to original post: [drupal=1822]Review: Riviera: The Promised Land[/drupal]
Hello, everyone! I'm back from Alaska and I bring with me the review for the game I played through on the trip. Did you miss me? (Probably not)
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So back in 2004 a company called Atlus released a game called Riviera: The Promised Land. And the game got a number of positive reviews from "professional" sites like Gamespot. So it caught my interest, and about a year ago, I found a used copy and picked it up. It didn't actually play it until I went on vacation because that's the only time I play hand held games but whatever. Here's the review:
Have you ever seen one of those animes in which a group of High School girls suddenly decide that one particularly normal guy is suddenly "teh smex" and all start hanging out with him? Well take that premise, throw in a typical JRPG plot about demons trying to take over the world, as well as a bunch of random places from Norse Mythology and you pretty much have the story of Riviera. Other than that, the main character is Ein, a guy with a name I could never figure out how to pronounce (Ai-n?). Ein is a Grim Angel, basically someone who goes out and... um... okay, so that's never very well explained. Ein says that as a Grim Angel it's his duty to pass judgment on evil or something like that. But seeing how at the start of the game you're on a mission to destroy Riviera his duty seems to be to do the gods' dirty work more than it is to pass judgment on evil. Anyway, he completely fails at destroying Riviera and ends up joining up with a bunch of girls in order to save Riviera from a bunch of demons called the Accursed. That's pretty much it, other than a few random and really predictable plot twists they threw in at the end. And this terrible plot isn't helped by the fact that the game is trying to be an anime. And oh God is the game trying to be an anime. I could have sworn that I heard my GBASP screaming due to all of pressure that's being put on it to be an anime. Think of an anime sterotype and I can pretty much garentee that it's in there. Cat girl? Overdone to the point that there's more cat than girl. Also includes hair from every shade of the rainbow, generic character designs left and right, the only thing this game was missing was chibis and random nose bleeds. All of the characters has stereotypical personalities, and this includes you party. Serene is your typical blunt tomboy, Cierra is the "clumsy but kind" girl, Fia is your typical "kind and concerned girl" and Line is the ten-year-old with ADHD who's trying way to hard to be cute. And Ein is your typical anime hero who treats all of the creatures of the world with equal kindness, even the ones that are trying to kill him he's nice to, and he has a sense of unselfish justice so strong that it would make even Superman vomit. And what's with this game and it's obsession with female characters? All of your party members are female, with three exceptions, all of the lead characters are female, most of the townspeople are female, and with very few exceptions all of the humanoid enemies that you fight are female. This lead me to the conclusion that the only capable fighters in Riviera are girls between the ages of ten and seventeen. Which doesn't sound to far fetched seeing how all of your party members have stats that are vastly superior to Ein's, and he's a freaking angel!
So the plot's a joke, but how about game play? Mixed, to say the least. Alright, I'll start by talking about what was good before I execute the rest the game like the Punisher. So Riviera is a dungeon crawler, and if Dark Cloud taught me anything it's that Dungeon Crawlers can be really bad. In most dungeon crawlers you either have a mostly liner path to follow that leads to room after room filled with bad guys and the occasional puzzle. Or you have a huge, non-liner dungeon that calls for exploration but the only thing you run into room after room are more bad guys who want to rip off your legs and beat you to death with them. Riviera falls into the non-liner category and actually does it pretty well. In Riviera you're actually rewarded for going off the beaten path usually with a new weapon, item, ect. And if you examine to right objects you can trigger a conversation with your party members. Even though these conversations kind of fall flat because you're pretty much talking to cardboard cut outs. But on the brighter side, every single JRPG developer in the world should put their projects on hold and play through Riviera so that way they will know how to do mini games correctly. While in most JRPGs mini games come up as annoying little roadblocks that you see once and never play again, Riviera chooses a few mini games and makes you play them multiple times throughout the game, each time getting slightly more difficult or with a new variant on said mini game. But now that I've talking about the only thing I liked in game play town, I will now proceed to burn down the rest of it. Okay, you have one second to name a game in which weapon durability was a good idea. Got anything? I didn't think so. In Riviera you have weapon durability, which is more of a minor annoyance rather than anything else because you pretty much trip over the same weapons every other step. And the game's difficulty is somewhere between pathetic and nonexistent. In Riviera you don't level up the same way you do in most RPGs, here whenever you get a new weapon you have to use it enough times so that you have your skill in that particular weapon maxed out. But this isn't very hard because you can fight any time you want to in a "practice" battle from the menu. And in these battles, you weapons level up, but their durability doesn't go down. And whenever you use an item, it doesn't actually count it as being used. So there's no reason not to just go grind for a bit whenever you get a new weapon. And whenever you lose a battle, you can redo the fight all of the items you used will magically act like you never used them, and your weapons durability will be what they were before the battle. The only difference is that whoever you were fighting starts with less HP than before. Your party has their HP and status restored after every battle, and there's no penalty for death. And while I'm on the topic of battles, the battle system isn't very good either. You choose three party members and four items to use in battle. And you will always choose the three party members who have the weapons with the highest durability, whatever their best weapons are, and some flimsy support item that you'll never use. And if you think this sound like it's a limiting battle system, you're right! Back on the topic of dungeons, after each and every dungeon you return to the same exact town. And it's not like you can go buy new items or anything in the town seeing how you don't get currency in this game, so all you really do is just talk to the elder to find out where you go next. Other game play complains include: an inventory so limited that it makes Alone in the Dark's look like a Costco, the inability to choose your targets in battle, and overpowered and unskippable super attacks.
Riviera is just a run of the mill JRPG with a storyline that wants to be an anime, and boring, repetitious battles. If you're going on vacation and you really want to play an RPG, just skip over this one and go straight to Golden Sun, a much better game.
Hello, everyone! I'm back from Alaska and I bring with me the review for the game I played through on the trip. Did you miss me? (Probably not)
--------------------------------------------------------------
So back in 2004 a company called Atlus released a game called Riviera: The Promised Land. And the game got a number of positive reviews from "professional" sites like Gamespot. So it caught my interest, and about a year ago, I found a used copy and picked it up. It didn't actually play it until I went on vacation because that's the only time I play hand held games but whatever. Here's the review:
Have you ever seen one of those animes in which a group of High School girls suddenly decide that one particularly normal guy is suddenly "teh smex" and all start hanging out with him? Well take that premise, throw in a typical JRPG plot about demons trying to take over the world, as well as a bunch of random places from Norse Mythology and you pretty much have the story of Riviera. Other than that, the main character is Ein, a guy with a name I could never figure out how to pronounce (Ai-n?). Ein is a Grim Angel, basically someone who goes out and... um... okay, so that's never very well explained. Ein says that as a Grim Angel it's his duty to pass judgment on evil or something like that. But seeing how at the start of the game you're on a mission to destroy Riviera his duty seems to be to do the gods' dirty work more than it is to pass judgment on evil. Anyway, he completely fails at destroying Riviera and ends up joining up with a bunch of girls in order to save Riviera from a bunch of demons called the Accursed. That's pretty much it, other than a few random and really predictable plot twists they threw in at the end. And this terrible plot isn't helped by the fact that the game is trying to be an anime. And oh God is the game trying to be an anime. I could have sworn that I heard my GBASP screaming due to all of pressure that's being put on it to be an anime. Think of an anime sterotype and I can pretty much garentee that it's in there. Cat girl? Overdone to the point that there's more cat than girl. Also includes hair from every shade of the rainbow, generic character designs left and right, the only thing this game was missing was chibis and random nose bleeds. All of the characters has stereotypical personalities, and this includes you party. Serene is your typical blunt tomboy, Cierra is the "clumsy but kind" girl, Fia is your typical "kind and concerned girl" and Line is the ten-year-old with ADHD who's trying way to hard to be cute. And Ein is your typical anime hero who treats all of the creatures of the world with equal kindness, even the ones that are trying to kill him he's nice to, and he has a sense of unselfish justice so strong that it would make even Superman vomit. And what's with this game and it's obsession with female characters? All of your party members are female, with three exceptions, all of the lead characters are female, most of the townspeople are female, and with very few exceptions all of the humanoid enemies that you fight are female. This lead me to the conclusion that the only capable fighters in Riviera are girls between the ages of ten and seventeen. Which doesn't sound to far fetched seeing how all of your party members have stats that are vastly superior to Ein's, and he's a freaking angel!
So the plot's a joke, but how about game play? Mixed, to say the least. Alright, I'll start by talking about what was good before I execute the rest the game like the Punisher. So Riviera is a dungeon crawler, and if Dark Cloud taught me anything it's that Dungeon Crawlers can be really bad. In most dungeon crawlers you either have a mostly liner path to follow that leads to room after room filled with bad guys and the occasional puzzle. Or you have a huge, non-liner dungeon that calls for exploration but the only thing you run into room after room are more bad guys who want to rip off your legs and beat you to death with them. Riviera falls into the non-liner category and actually does it pretty well. In Riviera you're actually rewarded for going off the beaten path usually with a new weapon, item, ect. And if you examine to right objects you can trigger a conversation with your party members. Even though these conversations kind of fall flat because you're pretty much talking to cardboard cut outs. But on the brighter side, every single JRPG developer in the world should put their projects on hold and play through Riviera so that way they will know how to do mini games correctly. While in most JRPGs mini games come up as annoying little roadblocks that you see once and never play again, Riviera chooses a few mini games and makes you play them multiple times throughout the game, each time getting slightly more difficult or with a new variant on said mini game. But now that I've talking about the only thing I liked in game play town, I will now proceed to burn down the rest of it. Okay, you have one second to name a game in which weapon durability was a good idea. Got anything? I didn't think so. In Riviera you have weapon durability, which is more of a minor annoyance rather than anything else because you pretty much trip over the same weapons every other step. And the game's difficulty is somewhere between pathetic and nonexistent. In Riviera you don't level up the same way you do in most RPGs, here whenever you get a new weapon you have to use it enough times so that you have your skill in that particular weapon maxed out. But this isn't very hard because you can fight any time you want to in a "practice" battle from the menu. And in these battles, you weapons level up, but their durability doesn't go down. And whenever you use an item, it doesn't actually count it as being used. So there's no reason not to just go grind for a bit whenever you get a new weapon. And whenever you lose a battle, you can redo the fight all of the items you used will magically act like you never used them, and your weapons durability will be what they were before the battle. The only difference is that whoever you were fighting starts with less HP than before. Your party has their HP and status restored after every battle, and there's no penalty for death. And while I'm on the topic of battles, the battle system isn't very good either. You choose three party members and four items to use in battle. And you will always choose the three party members who have the weapons with the highest durability, whatever their best weapons are, and some flimsy support item that you'll never use. And if you think this sound like it's a limiting battle system, you're right! Back on the topic of dungeons, after each and every dungeon you return to the same exact town. And it's not like you can go buy new items or anything in the town seeing how you don't get currency in this game, so all you really do is just talk to the elder to find out where you go next. Other game play complains include: an inventory so limited that it makes Alone in the Dark's look like a Costco, the inability to choose your targets in battle, and overpowered and unskippable super attacks.
Riviera is just a run of the mill JRPG with a storyline that wants to be an anime, and boring, repetitious battles. If you're going on vacation and you really want to play an RPG, just skip over this one and go straight to Golden Sun, a much better game.