2514: Ghost Train

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A short while ago, Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 was considerably reduced in price on the PlayStation Store, so I grabbed a copy. I’m a big fan of the previous Pac-Man Championship Edition games — particularly Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, which is one of the finest arcade games ever created — but had heard mixed reviews about Championship Edition 2. Still, I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

The first thing I’ll say about Championship Edition 2 is that its big new structural addition — a so-called “adventure mode” — is total garbage. It consists entirely of time attack phases in which you have to eat sufficient dots to make a piece of fruit appear — very rarely is this the entire maze worth of dots — and repeat until you have eaten sufficient fruit to clear the stage. At the end of every block of near-identical levels is a supposed “boss fight” in which you do exactly the same thing, only with a giant ghost bashing into the background every so often.

“Total garbage” may be an exaggeration in retrospect, as these challenges are mildly diverting, but they miss the entire point of Pac-Man Championship Edition, which is to score as many points as possible against a strict time limit.

Fortunately, the Score Attack mode is a lot of fun, and Championship Edition 2 is a different beast from its predecessors in a number of ways.

Firstly and most significantly, bumping into a ghost no longer immediately kills Pac-Man, unlike all the previous incarnations of the game including the previous Championship Edition installments. Instead, Pac-Man bounces off the ghost, though bumping into one several times (or once on Expert mode) causes the ghost to become “angry”, which makes it speed up, chase Pac-Man and become fatal to the touch. However, sometimes it is desirable to do this, since making a ghost angry causes it to fly up in the air and out of the way for a couple of seconds, so you can deliberately provoke a ghost in order to clear a path for yourself.

Secondly, the “ghost trains” introduced in Championship Edition DX work a little differently. There are several modes of play — the first has four ghosts wandering around, but only one of them forms a train when Pac-Man passes by a sleeping minion ghost, while the other two form up to four trains in total, one for each ghost. Unlike Championship Edition DX, minion ghosts don’t join a train by a ghost passing them; they immediately wake up when Pac-Man passes by them and automatically attach themselves to one of the trains, even if it’s nowhere near where the minion was. This allows you to create huge ghost trains by planning your route carefully rather than having to manipulate the ghosts AI.

Eating a power pill works a little differently, too. Power pills only spawn on certain mazes after you’ve eaten a certain number of dots, and consuming one causes the ghosts and their trains to turn blue in the traditional manner. However, in Championship Edition 2 they move on set routes that are specifically marked on the maze, allowing you to predict where they are likely to go and head them off easily. Said routes tend to branch in several places in the harder mazes, so it’s not as easy as it sounds, but by learning the routes and the way the ghost trains attempt to avoid Pac-Man, you can become more and more efficient.

Oh, and ghost trains have to be consumed from their head now rather than from any point. This can be surprisingly challenging, though chomping your way through all four ghost trains in the maze, which causes both the train and Pac-Man to go flying through the air in a ridiculously overblown display of acrobatics, is immensely satisfying.

Bombs work differently, too. Rather than blasting the ghosts up in the air for a moment as in the previous installment, bombs now send Pac-Man back to the starting point of the maze, which can be a quick means of retrieving the fruit if it’s spawned and you’re a long way from it. However, bombs are worth quite a few points at the end of your allotted time, so it’s worth holding on to them as much as possible; more can be acquired by consuming every dot in a maze rather than just the amount required to spawn the fruit needed to progress.

Extra lives also show up at predictable moments — every 1 million points — as collectible items in the maze, and these are worth huge points at the end of a game, so it’s in your interest to collect them before progressing to the next maze. They’re easily missed, so the mark of a true pro Championship Edition 2 player is going to be planning their scoring effectively so that they hit a multiple of a million points at a suitable moment to grab the extra life without inconveniencing them — and not, say, crossing the million boundary on the changeover between levels, which causes you to miss out on the opportunity to collect the extra life altogether.

There’s quite a lot to Championship Edition 2, then. Fundamentally, it’s still based around Pac-Man, but it’s pleasingly distinct from its predecessors and fun in its own right. It has a couple of irritating factors — most notably a lengthy, non-skippable and rather unnecessary tutorial sequence before you can play Score Attack or Adventure mode, and, of course, Adventure mode itself, which is a waste of time — but on the whole, once you get stuck in to chasing the high scores, it’s a lot of fun. And, like its predecessors, it’s a game you can easily spend several hours enjoying when you really have more important and interesting things to do with your life.

2037: I Killed a Volcano

Another Sword Art Online Re:Hollow Fragment post, I’m afraid, but, well, deal with it; it’s good, I’m enjoying it, and I want to talk more about it.

I was describing the game to a friend earlier and the thing that struck me is how utterly different from your typical JRPG it is. It’s extremely non-linear at heart — that is to say, there are a number of parallel linear objectives to follow at any given moment, but it’s always entirely up to you which one you pursue at any given moment, or even whether you pursue them at all or just decide to grind out a few levels fighting powerful enemies.

So far the “main” quests I’ve encountered include the ascent of Aincrad, which is the way you “beat” the game; the storyline that unfolds as you unlock access to each part of the Hollow Area; the “Grand Quest” which mysteriously appears on one trip to the Administration Area; and a line of waifu-specific objectives that demand you go into the Hollow Area with a specific companion and complete a particular kind of Hollow Mission, the exact details of which are usually given in fairly vague terms, so you have to figure out exactly which missions will fulfil their criteria for yourself.

In my relatively brief session on the game earlier, I chose to forego the waifu quests I had previously been working on (largely because I couldn’t find a Hollow Mission that involved fighting kobolds or goblins to progress Silica’s questline) and instead continue with the Grand Quest. This part of the game — which I believe was added in a free update post-release on the original Vita version — involves entering a mysterious new part of the already mysterious Hollow Area, known as the Abandoned Area, and promises the reward of powerful new Sword Skills that you can’t get anywhere else.

The Abandoned Area is introduced to you with a beautiful garden, one end of which is dominated by an enormous pair of doors — doors which are, of course, locked. However, since Sword Art Online is well and truly aware that it is a game, it very much follows the rules of a game, and consequently there are two obvious depressions in the door where “something” most certainly fits. And, wouldn’t you know it, there are two pathways out of the garden, each of which leads to a different “dungeon” area — one in some fiery caves, another in the mountains. And oh! It just so happens that your map indicates that there’s a powerful Area Boss waiting in the furthest reaches of each of these areas. Guess what you have to do to progress the Grand Quest?

It’s not just as simple as wandering in and smacking the boss about a bit, though, not least of which because the bosses are challenging encounters with plenty of mechanics to figure out. In order to even get at the boss of the fiery cave area, you need to complete a number of different Hollow Missions that reveal some interesting facts about the local fauna — most notably the explosive bugs that become petrified when they die, and which conveniently explode with sufficient force to knock down walls when triggered by the correct catalyst. Once you’ve discovered this useful piece of information, you then have to scour the area for other instances of these petrified bugs, blow them up and see if they reveal a convenient pathway through to the boss.

The mountain area is similar in execution, though it is set up in such a way as to prevent you from progressing too far without completing the fiery caves first — you need a key item to melt open a door that is frozen shut. In this area, however, you quickly encounter the Area Boss without too much difficulty, who promptly screeches at you with a noise so terrible you’re forced to retreat. The challenge here, then, is to uncover a means of protecting yourself against his powerful sonic attacks. I’m yet to discover exactly what that means is, but it will almost certainly involve a convenient Key Item somewhere, because that’s how games work and, as previously noted, Sword Art Online is very much aware that it is a game.

The fiery cave area boss — dramatically known as Gaiard the Volcano — is a great fight that is far more than simple hack and slash. It’s a fight where you’ll have to pay attention to what moves are coming up — they are telegraphed in various ways — move carefully to avoid them, order your companion around (assuming you brought one with you) and take every opportunity you have to get in your most powerful attacks. It’s an intense fight that really doesn’t let up for a moment; opportunities to attack are short and easy to miss if you’re not paying attention, and you need to keep a close eye on your partner’s condition, too; letting them die is as instant a Game Over as if you died yourself. It’s extremely satisfying when you finally clear it, however; it took me a good few attempts, but like the very best boss fights, it never felt like I was being smacked around by cheap, unfair moves — I learned something every time and progressed a little further, until eventually I was able to counter almost all his earth-shaking attacks and take full advantage of the openings that were presented throughout the battle.

If you’re the sort of person who enjoys setting their own objectives and pursuing things in whatever order they like, then, Sword Art Online Re:Hollow Fragment is something that will very much appeal. Plus I was delighted to see today that it appears to be a top-seller on PSN right now, which means that it’s a game that is getting noticed, played, enjoyed and promoted by people who like it. That makes me really happy; while it is far from the most technically proficient game in the world — the upscaled PSP graphics and somewhat inconsistent frame rate will be a culture shock for many — it’s a beautifully designed, enormously addictive and extremely playable game that I can see myself spending a very long time with before I move on to something else.

2034: The Hollow Area

Been playing some more Sword Art Online Re:Hollow Fragment for the past few days, and I’m thoroughly enamoured with it. It’s quite unlike any RPG I’ve played before, though I must say, it does a pretty good job with the whole “simulated MMO” deal, particularly as you can even play it in cooperative multiplayer.

I’ve mostly been exploring the “Hollow Area” part of the game, which is the vast new section originally added in the Vita version of the game; the original PSP version only covered the last 25 floors of Aincrad up to the final boss on Floor 100. Aincrad is a mostly linear experience; the Hollow Area, meanwhile, though gated by story progression in a few places, is much more non-linear in nature since you can freely move between regions, take on any “Hollow Missions” you choose or simply explore, fight monsters and seek treasure.

Interestingly, this aspect of the game is the one area where Re:Hollow Fragment differs from a real MMO: while the first time you enter a new zone in an MMO you’ll probably take some time to explore and map it fully, most MMOs design their areas in such a way as to be easily navigable by large groups of people, and once you’ve been everywhere, you’ve been everywhere; no further exploration needed. When it comes to dungeons, any kind of exploration is usually discouraged entirely in favour of a linear sequence of encounters culminating in one or more highly scripted boss fights. There’s nothing wrong with this; when it comes to herding a group of players towards their objective together — particularly when they might not be able to communicate with one another due to issues such as the language barrier, console players not having a keyboard to hand or people simply being unwilling to talk — it’s best to keep things as simple as possible so no-one gets lost, everyone can have a good time and work their way through efficiently.

Since Re:Hollow Fragment doesn’t have to worry about “real” players (for the most part — multiplayer assumes you’re already familiar with how the basic game works) it’s free to be a bit more interesting with its areas. So we have mazes, networks of caves, perilous clifftops (that you can fall off and die instantly) and dungeons with multiple routes and secret passages, many of which you’ll need to pay return visits to at a higher level to get the most out of. It’s an absolute pleasure to explore, and all the more rewarding when you come across a powerful monster to fight or a treasure chest containing an awesome treasure item.

The “powerful monster” aspect is worthy of some note. I’d heard a few people compare this game to Monster Hunter when it first came out; I haven’t played Monster Hunter myself so can’t comment with a huge amount of authority, but it never struck me as a particularly obvious comparison to make. That is, until I started ranking up some of the regions in the Hollow Area and coming across the “NM” (Named Monster) and “HNM” (Hyper Named Monster… I think?) encounters, which pit you against powerful, boss-tier enemies that demand a little more than just hack and slash. Now I kind of Get It… that moment when you think “That thing looks awesome… let’s kill it!”

That said, the game isn’t particularly hack and slash even with its trash mobs, anyway; it has an interesting combat system based around a combination of carefully timed button presses (Phantasy Star Online-style) and skills with cooldowns a la traditional MMOs. While Kirito starts a fair distance down the Dual Wielding path he’s depicted following in the anime, you’re free to change to any other weapon type whenever you like, and in fact if you want to farm Skill Points to learn new abilities, you’re going to need to do that, since Skill Points are earned most reliably by levelling up weapon proficiencies. What’s nice is that each weapon type has its own unique set of skills to learn along with its own unique animations and timings for “Exact Attacks”. Branching off each weapon type are support skills, too, ranging from healing and buffing to passive abilities that improve your overall position in battle.

Then there’s the Implementation system, which works alongside the skill system. While the skill system is presented as being part of the Sword Art Online game Kirito and his friends are trapped in, the Implementation system is the game’s equivalent of turning on Google Labs in GMail; it tasks you with “researching” various things during Hollow Missions (and only during Hollow Missions) and then rewards you with experimental game adjustments — anything from stat buffs to the ability to receive new item drops from NMs and HNMs — and even entire new game systems, such as the Original Sword Skill system, which essentially allows you to record a “macro” of your favourite skills and chain them together at will. The challenges you’ll be tasked with completing range from the simple (defeat 20 enemies) to the infuriating and time consuming (land 200 perfectly timed Exact Attacks) but the rewards are very much worth it, and this array of challenges — there are well over a hundred of them in total, I believe — give the game a great deal of variety as it becomes less about simply hacking your way through monsters as quickly as possible, and more about defeating them in specific ways in order to efficiently complete these research objectives.

Perhaps one of the most interesting things about Re:Hollow Fragment is the fact that all this stuff is technically optional. All you have to do to finish the game is climb to floor 100 of Aincrad, beat the last boss and hooray, you win. Any RPG player worth their salt knows that making a beeline straight for the final boss is rarely a good idea, though; sure, you might clear the game quickly, but you’ll also miss out on potentially some of its coolest aspects. As such, I’m unsurprised to have found myself well and truly captivated by exploring the Hollow Area, while my progress on Aincrad has stalled after just two floors. The Assault Team don’t seem to mind, though, and the game’s generous complement of waifus are more than happy to accompany me on my various adventures, so all’s well.

I can see myself spending a long time with this game, and I’m actually keen to play some more multiplayer (particularly as two trophies relate to multiplayer sessions — though you can play “solo multiplayer” in a party with your characters from single player) — it’s been a very pleasant, enjoyable surprise so far, and I’m looking forward to continuing to explore its hidden depths. And then jumping right into Lost Song when it comes out in a few months!

2026: Hollow Fragment

The next “big game” of the moment for me is Sword Art Online: Re: Hollow Fragment, a PlayStation 4 rerelease of an earlier Vita game, which itself was an expanded version of an even earlier PSP game. The Vita version had a notoriously dreadful translation, but I’m pleased to report that the PlayStation 4 version is at least readable — though the conversation system is still bafflingly nonsensical at first.

Sword Art Online, for those not into the animes, was a popular show a couple of years back. It was one of those “mainstream” shows that became really popular and which everyone subsequently decided they hated for one reason or another. I never quite understood the hate; sure, it was cheesy as fuck in places, but it was an enjoyable, beautifully presented show with an amazing soundtrack and a concept I’ve always loved ever since I played .hack for the first time: the MMO that is trying to kill you.

The Sword Art Online anime concerns Kirito, a protagonist who is a blatant self-insert for the writer, but I won’t hold that against anyone, since self-inserts can be a wonderful means of escapism. Kirito becomes trapped in the new virtual reality MMO Sword Art Online after the game launches out of beta and the “logout” button is removed by its designer, capturing all 10,000 launch day players in the virtual world. To make matters worse, said designer — the villain of the piece — informs the players of a little tweak to the rules of the game: if they are forcibly removed from their VR equipment, or if they run out of HP and “die” in the game, then their VR equipment will fry their brain with microwaves, killing them instantly.

There’s a get-out clause, though; if the game is cleared by someone defeating the final boss on the 100th “floor”, everyone who survived will be allowed to escape. After two years of the game, it becomes apparent that this goal is still a long way off, and player numbers are dwindling as more and more people either fall victim to carelessness or despair along the way. Ultimately, the first arc of the anime concludes with Kirito and his friends defeating Sword Art Online’s designer and freeing themselves from the virtual world of Aincrad, only to find themselves in numerous subsequent adventures in other virtual worlds. You’d think they’d learn.

Hollow Fragment, meanwhile, takes place in a reality where Kirito’s defeat of Heathcliff at the end of the first arc was not the end of Sword Art Online, and the players find themselves still trapped within the game. Moreover, they discover that once they pass the 75th floor — the floor where Kirito defeated Heathcliff — they are unable to return to the lower floors, and many of their skills and items become “corrupted”, mere shadows of their former selves. The game, then, continues; it looks as if the only way to escape really will be to defeat the boss on the 100th floor.

Except that’s not all, because clearing out 25 floors of dungeon would be far too easy a task. In the opening of the game, Kirito finds himself transported to the “Hollow Area”, an unexplored part of the Sword Art Online world where strange things happen and rare, high-level monsters and items abound. Acting as a sort of “testing area”, the Hollow Area allows Kirito to uncover a number of mysteries surrounding the virtual world of Aincrad as well as beef up his own character’s power significantly through various research trees. The flow of the game then becomes a journey back and forth between three distinct components, then: Aincrad, the Hollow Area, and what I like to refer to as Waifutown.

Aincrad is pretty straightforward. Upon arriving on a new floor, you’re shown a big tower off in the distance and informed the boss is waiting for you at the top of it. Between you and said tower are several overworld areas populated by enemies, so you’ll need to fight your way up to the boss room in order to challenge it. Along the way you’ll also need to gather intelligence on the boss by completing quests and defeating specific named monsters (NMs) as well as helping your fellow “players” to level up enough to take on the challenges ahead. Each “floor” is pretty linear in its design, though the dungeon at the end of it is more maze-like and unfolds across several levels, and you’ll be doing a fair amount of backtracking to complete quests.

The Hollow Area works a little differently. Rather than a linear sequence of areas leading to a dungeon maze, the Hollow Area is an interconnected network of zones more akin to a regular RPG or even MMO map. The Hollow Area is split into several different regions, each of which you’ll need to build up points in by completing “Hollow Missions” that appear and disappear in real-time as you play. While completing Hollow Missions, you can take on research tasks, which give you specific objectives to complete; once these are completed, you can then implement the research into Kirito’s character to improve it. You have to content with bosses here, too, though in the Hollow Area they guard region transitions rather than separate floors.

Waifutown, meanwhile, is what you do when you’re not adventuring. The town on the 76th floor that acts as your adventuring home base is home to most of the characters who got their own episode in the original Sword Art Online anime arc, along with a couple from the later arcs (Leafa and Sinon) who have been shoehorned in for the sake of having a few more waifus to pursue. In town, you can shop, upgrade weapons and hang out with your fellow adventurers. This latter aspect is important; by hanging out with your prospective adventuring partners, you can increase your relationship with them (up to and including sleeping with them) which subsequently helps them perform better in battle. By building up your relationship as well as “training” their AI by praising it when it does well, you can tailor each of the companion characters to your own liking. Or you can pick a waifu and spend the whole game with them if you so desire.

Sword Art Online is an enormous and surprisingly complex game. There are a lot of different systems at play — it’s going all-out with the “simulated MMO” aspect in this regard — and, while it’s daunting to begin with, the many different ways in which it’s possible to progress in the game make it feel like you’re always achieving something, and that there’s always a choice of things to do at any given moment. While its graphics look like butt outside of the beautiful 2D artwork — its PSP roots are very apparent — it really doesn’t matter all that much; it plays satisfyingly well, feeling quite like a high-speed Phantasy Star Online at times, and there’s a wonderful, constant sense of discovery and exploration as you work your way around this strange and wonderful virtual world. (And yes, I’ll probably make a video about this at some point so you can actually see how it plays.)

Also you can bed Lisbeth. 10/10

1897: Ruins of the Moon

It occurs to me that I never gave some final thoughts on Fragile Dreams after I finished it the other day, so I shall do my best to rectify that right now. There will be spoilers ahead!

Fragile Dreams wasn’t a particularly outstanding game from a mechanical perspective — its use of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk combo made combat in particular extremely cumbersome, a fact not helped by the extremely limited repertoire of moves available for each weapon and the seeming inability to dodge quickly — but it nonetheless proved to be a consistently compelling experience from start to finish.

Fragile Dreams also didn’t quite match up to its own ambition in storytelling: the final hours descend somewhat into your fairly typical “madman wants to destroy the world” (in this case, destroy the world again) scenario, and the overall plot itself is riddled with holes and inconsistencies. But again, this certainly didn’t diminish from the overall experience.

Fragile Dreams was an oddly beautiful game. Despite being a low-resolution Wii title, it looked good. It had a distinctive aesthetic all of its own, and immediately set itself apart from other post-apocalyptic adventures by the simple use of colour and contrast throughout. There’s a fair amount of crawling around in the dark by torchlight, but the game sensibly breaks this up with some colourful segments. Escape from a subway system earlier in the game and you’re treated to the gorgeous, rich colours of dawn in the sky. Pick your way through a forest to a secluded hotel and you’re surrounded by lush greenery. It’s a far cry from the greys and browns that usually come with the post-apocalyptic territory, and it made the game less of a chore to play than the trudging through endless wastelands of something like the Fallout series.

There were some interesting characters, too. Much of the story is about protagonist Seto’s desire to find someone with whom he can share his experiences — to laugh, to cry, to point out how beautiful something is. The characters he does run into throughout the course of the story all provide him with a certain degree of companionship, but none are quite the same as actual human company.

First he runs into what appears to be a piece of military hardware called “Personal Frame” or “PF”, which has its own artificial intelligence and personality. PF provides good company for Seto for a few hours as he explores, and it’s clear that Seto starts thinking of “her” (for although she looks like a backpack-mounted radio, she has a female voice) as a friend. This friendship is cut short, however, when PF’s battery runs out and she “dies”, leaving Seto all alone once again.

Then he runs into Crow, a somewhat androgynous-looking boy who appears to have cats’ eyes and fangs. Crow initially antagonises Seto by stealing his locket — which is full of precious memories, including a screw he took from PF’s “body” — and this results in a chase all over the abandoned theme park Crow calls home. Crow eventually admits defeat after taking a nasty fall from the park’s Ferris wheel; seemingly against all odds, he survives, and claims to accept Seto as a friend, even going so far as to steal his first kiss because “that’s what friends do” — something which Seto is somewhat surprised by, but which he doesn’t reject outright. It becomes clear that all is not quite right with Crow, however, as many of the things he says are direct quotations from a children’s storybook Seto finds a little earlier; indeed, Crow’s true nature is revealed later when Seto discovers him slumped in a room with hundreds of discarded robotic bodies: Crow is indeed a robot, and their budding friendship is once again cut short as his batteries expire, leaving him, like PF, as an empty shell devoid of life and consciousness.

Seto’s next encounter is with Sai, the ghost of a young woman who appears to have committed suicide or at least succumbed to a drug addiction; this isn’t made outright explicit, but can be easily inferred from the pills scattered around her dead body and the syringes, tourniquets and other paraphernalia littering the room. Sai doesn’t mention this and Seto clearly doesn’t understand it, so nothing more is said; the two develop a close and honest friendship as a result, with Sai accompanying Seto for most of the rest of the game from this point onwards. Again, though, although Sai and Seto become fast friends, it’s not quite the same as real human company for Seto; in a heartfelt speech to Sai, Seto admits that he just wants to share his experiences with someone else, to feel their warmth, to feel like he isn’t alone, and for that, a ghost just isn’t going to cut it, hence his game-long search for the mysterious silver-haired girl Ren.

The characters are all interesting, unconventional and have plenty left open to interpretation, and this is something of a pattern for the game as a whole. One of the strongest pieces of narrative design in the game comes through the use of “memory items”; bits and pieces of junk that Seto comes across in his journey that have the last memories of the dying world’s inhabitants infused into them somehow. Some of these are mundane, some of them are profound, some of them form part of a larger story, some of them hint at the truth behind the situation in which the world finds itself. There’s a sequences of recollections between a young woman whose legs became paralysed when she was a little girl and her botany-obsessed childhood sweetheart Mao that is particularly heartbreaking, for example.

After a while, then, you start to build up a very vivid mental picture of the game world both as it exists now and as it existed prior to the disaster that wiped everyone out. It’s pretty bleak and lonely, but also fascinating to explore, and one of the most interesting things about the experience is how many unanswered questions it leaves at the end. Whether this is intentional or simply due to the writers not having thought about it — a bit of both, I feel, if an interview I read a few days ago is anything to go by — doesn’t really matter in the end, since it’s this thought-provoking nature that will keep you thinking about Fragile Dreams long after you’ve finished it.

1891: Fragile Dreams

I fancied playing something a bit… different tonight, so I went to my shelves, bulging with backlog bounty, and looked at a few possible titles to give a go to. I didn’t feel like starting a traditional RPG just yet, so quite a few things were out, but my eye eventually stopped on a Wii title I knew nothing about but owned a copy of: Namco Bandai’s Fragile Dreams.

You may wonder why I own a copy of a game I know nothing about. Well, it was from a while back, when UK retail chain Game was in a bunch of trouble and looked like it might be folding; they were selling off a ton of their stock at ridiculously low prices, so I took the opportunity to grab lots of things that looked even a little bit interesting with a mind to eventually playing them at some point in the future. Fragile Dreams was one of them.

So how is it? Well, pretty damn cool so far. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting, but I don’t think it was a feels-heavy action-RPG survival horror adventure game featuring the same “your Wii Remote is a torch” mechanic that worked so well in Silent Hill Shattered Memories. There’s actually a touch of Silent Hill in the game’s atmosphere, though in the case of Fragile Dreams it’s not so much about psychological horror as an ever-present sense of loneliness and abandonment.

At the outset of the game, the old man whom protagonist Seto has been living with dies, leaving him all alone in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic landscape. We don’t know anything about what has happened to humanity as the game begins, but little bits and pieces are revealed as you make your way through the game, both through elements of the environment that can be examined and “memory items” that allow you to hear the final thoughts of the world’s former inhabitants when you take a rest to restore your HP and save.

Seto isn’t completely alone in the world, despite initial appearances. Very early on, he encounters a silver-haired girl and proceeds to spend the next few hours (and, I’m guessing, going by my experiences so far, most of the game) chasing after her in an attempt to find out who she might be. Along the way he encounters some sort of sentient computerised backpack with mild self-esteem issues called PF, a not-quite-human person called Crow, a dead little girl with a penchant for cheating at hide-and-seek… and I don’t doubt there will be more strange and wonderful characters to encounter before the story has reached its conclusion.

It’s been a really interesting ride so far. The combat kind of sucks, but it’s a relatively minor part of the game, and the “survival horror” elements of having limited inventory space and weapons that have finite usage before they break add a bit of tension to the experience. It’s not been particularly scary so far, despite the presence of ghosts and whatnot, but it has been thought-provoking and emotional, even just four or so hours in. The emphasis appears to be more on the general atmosphere and feelings of loneliness than on outright trying to scare and disturb the player, and I’m fine with that.

There’s a lot of subtle charm to the game, too. Seto is just a kid forced to find his own way in the world well before he would have normally had to, and while he handles his task with a certain degree of maturity that you might not expect from someone whose voice hasn’t broken yet, his childlike qualities come through in game elements such as the automap which, rather than being a bland, clinical but clear affair, is presented as childish scribblings, complete with notes and doodles about scary and awesome things you’ve come across in your travels. Likewise, the baffling inclusion of lots of cats around the game world who can be tempted to come and play with you through the use of a cat toy makes for a welcome break from hitting ghosts with improvised weaponry, or trying to track down that one key you really need right now.

There’s clearly a lot about Fragile Dreams I don’t yet understand. But I’m very glad I chose to take a chance on it and see what it was all about; it’s shaping up to be a fascinating, deeply memorable experience. I hope it manages to keep this up until the end.