1553: Fight On: A Music Post

I wanted an excuse to share this excellent piece of battle music from Demon Gaze, which I’m still playing through for review, so I figured, what the hey, why not just do a battle music post?

All right. Without further ado, first up, and in no particular order after that:

Demon Gaze (PS Vita) – Blue Eyes Hunter

This track from the dungeon crawler is the battle theme that plays when you fight against the enemies that pop out when you toss a gem into one of the many Demon Circles that adorn each of the game’s levels. This is a core game mechanic that allows you to acquire new equipment without having to pay for it; you can subsequently either equip it if it’s better than what you’ve got, break it down for Ether to use in upgrading existing equipment, or sell it for profit.

Demon Gaze’s soundtrack is consistently excellent and unusual. The fact there’s a heavy Vocaloid component to most of the tracks gives them a very distinctive feel, and this track is a good example. There’s a pretty wide selection of music throughout the game, and partway through your adventure the default battle theme changes — something that I always like to hear happen in an RPG, as it’s an obvious signal that you’ve made significant progress.

Final Fantasy XIV (PC, PS3, PS4) – Fallen Angel

This track from one of the toughest battles in Final Fantasy XIV’s main story (but one of the more straightforward battles from the endgame) is one of the best pieces of music in the whole game. It accompanies the battle against Garuda, one of the gigantic Primals who are threatening the land of Eorzea after being summoned by the beastmen tribes who worship them.

Garuda, or the Lady of the Vortex as she’s also known, is a nasty piece of work, and her fight really gives a strong feeling of clinging on for dear life against powerful winds lashing against your face. The music’s frantic energy helps complement that, too, making this an incredibly exciting confrontation.

Menace (Atari ST, Amiga) – Boss Fight Theme

This isn’t an RPG battle theme; instead it’s a boss battle theme from the Psygnosis side-scrolling shooter Menace — a surprisingly competent game that stood up reasonably well to its console equivalents of the same period.

This track by David Whittaker may be repetitive and simple, but it helped get the idea across that battling bosses was serious business. I vividly recall finding it almost impossible to beat the first boss on Menace when I was a kid. I wonder how difficult I’d find it now?

Time and Eternity (PS3) – Towa Battle Theme

Time and Eternity was critically panned when it was released by pretty much everyone except me — I rather liked it, and looking back on last year it’s actually one of the games I feel like I enjoyed most even though I will freely admit it was not, by any means, the best game I’ve ever played.

Two big contributing factors to my enjoyment of the game were its beautiful HD anime art style — the game used hand-drawn anime cels for sprites rather than the more common polygons seen in many of today’s games — and Yuzo Koshiro’s astonishing soundtrack. Koshiro, if you’re unfamiliar, is the guy behind one of the finest soundtracks of the 16-bit era, the Streets of Rage 2 score. This particular track is one of the normal battle themes for the game — there are two; one for each of the two main characters, Toki and Towa. This is Towa’s.

Baldur’s Gate (PC) – Attacked by Assassins

I’m generally not so much of a fan of Western-style RPG soundtracks because they tend to be more “cinematic” in nature; in other words, in contrast to the catchy, singable tunes of Eastern games, Western games tend to have music more as something going on in the background. This is fine, of course — it’s worked for a lot of movies and TV shows over the years — but I’ve never been a huge fan because it makes the soundtracks less memorable overall for me.

There are exceptions, though, and this track by Michael Hoenig for the original Baldur’s Gate is one of them. One of the first battle themes you hear in the game, this track just has a wonderfully aggressive, pounding energy to it that makes you want to keep on fighting. (Of course, at the time you first hear this track, all your characters are level 1 and consequently are very likely to get killed by a small rat breathing anywhere near them, but that shouldn’t stop you from feeling like a hero while you still have a few HP.)

TFX (PC) – Defence Suppression

Oh man, I’ve been wanting to hear this track again for years now, and good old YouTube delivered the goods. YAY. Ahem. Anyway.

This is from the distinctly “arcadey” (for want of a better word) flight sim TFX from 1993, a spectacular-for-the-time game that I always really wanted to play 1) to hear this music (which was included as Redbook CD audio, so you could listen to it on a CD player) during gameplay and 2) to switch between the internal and external views a few times just to see the G-LOC-style “zoom” animation where the camera zipped back and forth dynamically rather than just switching like other boring flight sims.

Unfortunately, I could never get the copy we owned running, and thus to this day I’ve still never played TFX. I somehow doubt it will stand up quite so well today, but this is still a cool (if distinctly ’90s cheesy) piece of music.

Ar Tonelico Qoga (PS3) – EXEC_COSMOFLIPS

Ar Tonelico Qoga was not the strongest installment in the Ar Tonelico series — that honour belongs to Ar Tonelico 2 — but it has one of the finest soundtracks. In fact, with the amazing music in all three Ar Tonelico games, it’s nigh-impossible to pick one favourite soundtrack.

It is less difficult, however, to pick a favourite individual song; this one, from Ar Tonelico Qoga, is simply wonderful. Just listening to it will hopefully give you an idea of its majesty to a certain extent, but taken in context of what is going on in the story at this point, it’s just magnificent.

Final Fantasy Tactics (PS1) – Trisection

Final Fantasy Tactics had a few good tunes, but on the whole I thought it was a relatively weak soundtrack, especially when compared to the rest of the Final Fantasy series which, at this point, was still dominated almost exclusively by Nobuo Uematsu. (Tactics, meanwhile, was composed by Masaharu Iwata and Hitoshi Sakimoto.)

This track, though, is one that I’ll always remember. Accompanying the very first battle in the game, it was the absolute perfect way to stir up the emotions and encourage you to do your best — which is why I was disappointed it wasn’t used more often over the course of the rest of the game. I always wanted major battles to be accompanied by this tune, and every time the “story” music faded out in preparation for the battle to begin, I found myself hoping and hoping that I’d hear those distinctive opening rising passages again.

Trauma Team (Wii) – Be the One

The Trauma Center series has consistently fantastic music throughout, thanks largely to the involvement of Persona composer Shoji Meguro for part of the run, but this track here is a particular highlight that I believe I’ve drawn attention to on this blog before.

This track is from the culmination of the entire game’s storyline; the final operation to stamp out the disease that has been running rampant throughout the population once and for all. (I won’t spoil any further circumstances, as additional narrative aspects make this an incredibly nerve-wracking scene overall.) It’s a track that says “don’t fuck this up; everything is depending on this”, and the track that comes immediately after it was enough to get me sitting forward in my seat pretty much holding my breath as I attempting to bring the game to its conclusion. Amazing stuff.

Well, at nearly 1,500 words that’s probably enough for a “throwaway” post on battle themes from video games. If you have any favourites of your own, feel free to share in the comments. Include a YouTube link if there is one!

1353: Criminology

I watched my first ever episode of CSI today. Or CSI: Miami, to be exact, since the original CSI isn’t on Netflix as far as I can make out.

I enjoyed it! It reminds me how much I do enjoy police procedurals and crime thrillers — yes, even the cheesy, stupid, unrealistic ones — when I watch them, yet it’s pretty rare I’ll actually seek them out. It’s one of those things that I forget I like, if that makes sense, and I’ll just occasionally stumble across the, and remember all over again.

As with many forms of non-interactive media, I find myself thinking that there should be more procedural games. Trauma Team on Wii was a great example — particularly from the crime scene investigation angle — plus the Ace Attorney series has always provided a neat combination of private detective-style investigation and courtroom drama. I’d like to see more of that kind of thing.

There’s the Police Quest series, of course, which I’m still yet to try, though those have the dubious distinction of being Sierra adventures (i.e. already brutally difficult, and not necessarily in a fair way) that are notoriously finicky about you actually following police procedure to the letter. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course — how many other “police sims” are there out there? — but it doesn’t necessarily push exactly the same buttons as a police procedural drama on TV.

I’m surprised that over the years we haven’t seen more games branching out into popular TV genres. We’ve done sci-fi and fantasy to death, obviously, because both of those are eminently compatible with the most common means through which we interact with a game world: attacking it. We’ve also seen crime drama through the eyes of the criminals a lot thanks to titles like Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row. But what we haven’t seen a lot of is a game about being a doctor, or a policeman, or a lawyer, or a journalist. I remember having a conversation with fellow Squadron of Shame members a while back about how cool it would be to play a war-themed game in which you weren’t one of the American soldiers on the scene, but instead an embedded war reporter tasked with covering the conflict from the front lines. Plenty of scope for interesting storytelling there, plus gameplay that doesn’t involve shooting people with a different skin colour to your character.

We could even expand that, though. Sci-fi and fantasy games don’t have to be about killing, either; how about a sci-fi “future police” game? Or a “future medicine” game? (I guess that’s Trauma Center, but still.) Or a game where you play a member of the Watch in a typical fantasy city? Plenty of scope for interesting things, and yet — at least in the mainstream — we still rely on the same old stuff.

Ah well. The times are a-changin’, and we are starting to get more and more interesting thematic content in our games that isn’t just about stabbing and shooting. I just wish there was a bit more.

1170: Easy Listening, Part 1

I am, as you probably know, a big fan of video game soundtracks. They’ve come on a very long way since the bleep-bleep-bloop of yore, and in many cases these days are eminently worth listening to in their own right.

Over the next few posts I’d like to take a mildly self-indulgent tour around some of my favourite tracks from some of my favourite soundtrack albums. YouTube-heavy post ahead… you have been warned.

Trauma Team

Let’s start with something that’s fresh in my memory. The Trauma Center series as a whole has pretty consistently great soundtracks, largely composed by Atlus mainstays Shoji Meguro and Atsushi Kitajoh. Both of them have a very distinctive (and quite similar) sound to their compositions, and this is very much in evidence throughout the Trauma Team soundtrack.

What’s most striking about the Trauma Team soundtrack, though, is how well the various pieces of music reflect the different characters. For example, for the cool “ice maiden” that is forensic investigator Dr Naomi Kimishima, we have this wonderfully chilled-out number called, appropriately enough, Cool Beauty:

Dr Naomi’s segments, as it happens, have some of the best music in the game. For the uninitiated (or those of you who haven’t read my enthusing at length about this wonderful game), Dr Naomi’s levels are adventure game-style puzzles in which you must unravel the mystery of what happened to one or more corpses using various forensic investigation techniques. As you progress through them, the truth gradually gets closer and closer until finally everything clicks into place and you understand exactly what happened to the poor person lying on the slab in your examination room.

That gradual uncovering of the truth is something beautifully captured by this piece, imaginatively titled Uncover the Truth, which starts out simple and gradually builds up in complexity as it progresses through. Accompanying this piece on screen is Dr Naomi piecing together all the case’s various pieces — with a little help from you, of course — and coming to a firm conclusion about what happened. It’s pretty great — and surprisingly powerful in context:

Dr Naomi is just one of six different doctors who star in Trauma Team, however, and each of them has their own distinctive “sound” throughout. For example, nameless surgeon “CR-S01″‘s pieces are all rather electronic-rock in nature and wouldn’t sound out of place in a Shin Megami Tensei game — unsurprising, considering the composers:

Meanwhile, Dr Hank Freebird’s pieces focus a lot more on gradually-building tension, such as this piece, which in-game builds itself up as your “combo” of moves made without mistakes (or taking a break) grows:

Dr Cunningham the diagnostician, meanwhile, is a much more laid-back sort of dude for the most part:

Except when things get serious, of course.

Trauma Team’s story is split into two distinct segments. The first half sees the six doctors working largely independently from one another, following their own parallel storylines that do nonetheless make a coherent narrative if played in the correct order. However, the really interesting stuff starts happening in the second half, which is completely linear, and follows the entire team’s attempts to battle against a disease known as the Rosalia virus.

This part of the game makes use of one of my favourite compositional techniques for soundtracks, which is to take one theme and gradually evolve and adapt it over the course of the story. Rosalia’s theme goes through a number of changes throughout the second half of Trauma Team, culminating in something pretty spectacular.

Here we have Spread of Rosalia, a piece that plays during the endoscopy sequences of the game while battling against the Rosalia virus. The recognisable chord sequence and strings backing of the Rosalia theme is present and correct here, with a nervous, tense, slow-moving melody overlaid over the top of it. Treating Rosalia is something that requires care, precision and nerves of steel; this piece of music reflects that rather nicely.

Encounter Rosalia during Maria’s First Response missions, meanwhile, and you get treated to this wonderfully intense number that really gets the pulse pounding. Just the thing you need while you’re running back and forth between five different patients trying not to let any of them die, huh?

This piece of music, meanwhile, plays during Dr Hank Freebird’s orthopaedic surgery missions where he comes across Rosalia. Hank’s missions aren’t as time-sensitive as many of the other operations throughout Trauma Team, but the high level of accuracy required in them makes them some of the most tense, most physically-exhausting levels you’ll be challenged with:

This track, on the other hand, plays while discussing Rosalia and how best to treat it. It’s less intense than the other Rosalia pieces, but has a certain air of desperation about it, while at the same time offering a sense of hope… before exploding in intensity towards the end.

Finally, spoilers I guess, our final showdown with Rosalia comes pre-packed with this rockin’ piece of music — beautifully fitting for an intense surgical battle against a thoroughly unpleasant illness. Will our heroes make it through…? Well, that’s up to you, really…

More tomorrow.

1154: Operation Successful

I beat Trauma Team this evening, and I am very happy with the way it all played out. Despite having a touch of that recognisable Atlus craziness about it, the team did kind of keep to their promise of providing a more “realistic” experience that veered less into the realms of sci-fi and more into the realms of vaguely plausible… I don’t know what you’d call it, really. Disease horror?

Of course, that realism doesn’t extend to the operation sequences being in any way “authentic” — the Trauma Center series has always been about being quick and skilful rather than accurately simulating real-life surgical procedures — but it really doesn’t matter too much. The six different styles of gameplay all complement each other very well, and the pace of the narrative is such that you never really get bogged down in a single discipline for too long — unless of course you choose to do so in the non-linear first half of the game.

As I predicted even before I played the game, I think the Dr Naomi forensics sequences were my favourite aspect. These combined some lightweight adventure game-style gameplay with a lot of lateral, logical thinking and some great character development. There was a wonderful sense of piecing together a narrative in these cases, even though you didn’t directly see any of it unfold until you’d “solved” it all. Instead, Dr Naomi’s habit of thinking out loud fulfils the same narrative function as things like Phoenix Wright’s internal monologues in the Ace Attorney series, of the narration text in a more traditional visual novel. You have to use your imagination a fair bit, but somehow this doesn’t diminish from the emotional impact of some of the tales told. The very nature of Dr Naomi’s specialism means that there was always going to be a degree of darkness about her cases, but I was quite surprised how far they went in a few cases.

Trauma Team manages to be so emotionally engaging throughout thanks to its strong cast of characters. The focus is very much on them instead of the patients — indeed, in the surgery sequences, patients are always represented as abstract mannequin-like figures — and the game has a strong character-led story as a result. If we were getting bogged down in the individual tales of each and every patient these doctors came into contact with, the impact of the game’s “true” story (which unlocks after you’ve completed all the individual episodes for each of the six doctors) would be somewhat diminished. Instead, each of the doctors’ episodes is to do with their own sense of personal growth and coming to understand something about themselves, or about life, or about each other. By the end of the game, it’s very clear that they’re all better people in one way or another.

I think this point above is why I like the Trauma Center series so much. I was initially drawn to it by the fact that games about surgery are something you don’t see very often, but it quickly became apparent that these aren’t really games that are overly concerned with providing a realistic depiction of life in a busy hospital — though Trauma Team does a much better job of that than its predecessors. No, instead, they’re games about the characters, and about the overarching plot, which is usually fairly ridiculous in nature but somehow seems perfectly reasonable in context.

Atlus’ skill at storytelling — achieved through its excellent character artists, talented music team and skilled writers (and localisers, for that matter) — has pretty much earned them a “free pass” from me for anything they put out in the future. Between strong offerings like the Trauma Center and Persona series plus quirky one-offs like Catherine, they’re easily one of my favourite developers, and I hope they continue to make great games for years to come.

Now, let’s have a new Trauma Center game for Wii U, hmm?

1150: Further Enthusing Regarding Trauma Team

It’s not an exaggeration to say that I have been eagerly anticipating the ability to play Trauma Team ever since it was first announced, and I have been inordinately frustrated until recently at Atlus’ complete lack of a regular European distributor meaning that it never got an official release on this side of the pond. Now that I am happily playing my North American copy on my hacked Wii, you’ll hopefully forgive me if I perhaps dedicate a few posts to the awesome things about this game I’ve been waiting to play for a very long time — because judging by the bit I played tonight (I know I said I wouldn’t, but I am weak) there are going to be a lot of them.

I specifically wanted to talk about the Forensics missions today, because they’re one of the reasons I was so interested to play this game. A friend of mine described the presence of these missions as “you got Ace Attorney in my Trauma Center” — and if you know me well, you’ll know that that sounds like a match made in heaven for me. I’m pleased to note that these missions very much lived up to their promise.

In a Forensics mission, you take on the role of Dr Naomi Kimishima, a character who occasionally showed up in Trauma Center: Second Opinion. Naomi is a forensics specialist with a curious (and secret) talent — when she enters a crime scene, she can hear the victim’s dying words on her phone. Exactly why this is the case hasn’t been explained yet, but given that we’re dealing with a game in which an orthopaedic surgeon is also a superhero and the hospital’s resident endoscopy specialist comes from a long line of ninjas, I’m not entirely surprised by this turn of events.

Anyway. Gameplay in a Forensics mission involves nipping back and forth between Naomi’s office, the evidence room that houses the corpse and their personal effects, and the crime scene itself. By examining various items and pointing out abnormalities, Naomi collects “cards” that represent items of evidence or thoughts about the situation. By combining these cards together or sending them off for analysis to her FBI partner “Little Guy” (rather charmingly represented as a Mii avatar on her computer — this is a Wii game after all) she can inch them closer to being “solid evidence”. When all the cards she has in her possession are “solid evidence,” the case is solved, and you have to point out the relevant cards as she does her police procedural-style “wrap up” of the end of the case.

It’s not quite that simple, though. You effectively have to “show your working” as you deduce various things about the situation by answering multiple-choice questions. These generally ask what you, the player, have deduced from the items of evidence you’ve observed or combined. Most of the time, thinking logically through them will get you through, but there have already been a few headscratchers and pieces of misdirection along the way — plus you have to make sure you remember plenty of details about the case as you go along. You can’t just try every answer until you get it right, either — make too many mistakes and you’ll fail the mission.

The whole thing was brilliantly presented with some atmospheric music, excellent visuals and decent voice acting, and it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d like to see more of in the console space. Essentially, it was nothing more than a kind of point and click adventure, but it was hugely fun and massively engaging. I’m looking forward to seeing more of Naomi — and of seeing how her story ties in with that of the other doctors, as so far she’s been largely separate from the rest of them. Trauma Team has a very interesting narrative structure, but that’s something I’ll save talking about until a later time when I’m a bit further on.

This sort of experience is exactly why I love Atlus, and why I love the Trauma Center series in particular. I’m doing things in this game that I have never done in any other game before — not just in Naomi’s forensics section, but also in the diagnostic and surgery components, too. The game is also a fantastic use of the Wii’s distinctive control scheme, making brilliant use of all the Wii Remote and Nunchuk’s features, ranging from their accelerometers to the pointer function and even the speaker in the handset. It’s a game that really couldn’t be done in the same way on any other platform — perhaps PlayStation Move, though making a Move-exclusive title is pretty much commercial suicide — and a fantastic experience that I would very much like to jam in the face of anyone who complains that the Wii doesn’t have any good games.

1149: Let’s Begin the Operation

I really love the Trauma Center games, and have done ever since I first picked up Under the Knife on a whim early in the lifetime of my Nintendo DS. (As a matter of fact, it was a combination of Under the Knife and Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney that convinced me to pick up a DS in the first place, thereby proving that there most definitely is a market of at least one person for games based around relatively “mundane” things.) I loyally picked up all the subsequent entries that made it to the UK, these being the Wii remake of Under the Knife (known as Second Opinion) and the official sequel (on Wii again) New Blood. To my knowledge, Under the Knife 2 for DS never made it other here, and neither did Trauma Team. It’s the latter I’d like to talk about today, as I’ve had a brief play with it for the first time this evening.

The early Trauma Center games, lest you’re unfamiliar, were curious beasts, somewhere between medical procedural drama, simulation, visual novel, arcade game and batshit crazy sci-fi extravaganza. Essentially they unfolded with lots of talking head scenes between the main characters and others who were involved in the story, and were frequently punctuated with frankly terrifying surgery sequences in which you had to perform various lifesaving procedures with a considerable degree of gusto. Time limits were tight, vital signs were constantly dropping and the dramatic music didn’t help matters. To date, I’ve never played any games that set me so delightfully on edge.

The format didn’t change a huge amount between the three games that made it to the UK. Sure, it jumped from the touchscreen interface of the DS to the “pointer” control of the Wii (which I actually preferred, I think) but for the most part, you were doing fairly similar procedures. In a sense, this was a strength of the series’ gameplay — by learning how to do these relatively straightforward procedures (and learning to recognise when you needed to perform each one) you could eventually end up as some sort of lightning-fast surgery god by the end of each game. It was immensely satisfying to, say, complete a heart operation within the space of about 30 seconds while any astonished onlookers gaze, bewildered, at your frantically-wiggling hands. And by golly, did you need those skills by the end of each game. Each Trauma Center’s final boss (yes, they had final bosses — I told you they were batshit sci-fi crazy) was an immensely challenging piece of game design that forced you to use all the techniques you’d learned as quickly and efficiently as possible, and it felt good when you finally took them down.

A common criticism of the early games was their drift away from recognisable (if “arcadified”) medical procedures and a reliance on made-up diseases that were best treated by playing Space Invaders inside someone’s lungs. (I exaggerate. But you get my drift.) Trauma Team was set to be a rethink of the series, though. To quote Atlus themselves:

“Trauma Team is a subtle departure from the standard Trauma Center game experience. By moving the experience away from a sci-fi concept and making the situations more realistic, our new focus is on the characters and the sense of accomplishment that stems from having saved a life instead of simply beating a stage. It’s our intention to provide you with a medical drama more immersive and fulfilling than any you’ve ever experienced.”

Of course, two pages later in the manual we have this:

“This young surgeon was apparently involved in a biochemical attack on Cumberland University that killed several people, during which he lost his memory but not his impressive surgical skills. While serving a 250-year sentence for the atrocity he can’t remember committing, he was approached by the government with an unusual offer…”

…but then it just wouldn’t be Atlus if there wasn’t a touch of crazy in there. (See also: the orthopaedic surgeon who is also a superhero.)

Trauma Team takes the focus off the surgery (although that’s still present) and adds a bunch of different specialisms that you can flip back and forth between at will. In total, you’ll find yourself indulging in “regular” surgery (hah), first response (improvised surgery with limited tools and multiple patients), endoscopy (first-person perspective bowel ulcer-blasting), orthopaedic surgery (banging nails into things?), diagnosis and forensics. This evening, I tried a touch of the endoscopy and diagnosis, and both were pleasingly distinctive experiences.

In endoscopy, you take control of an endoscope and must carefully thread it through the patient by fine-tuning its angle with the Nunchuk stick and pushing it forward by holding buttons and pushing the Wii Remote towards the TV. Along the way, you’ll run into various symptoms that need to be treated — blood pools need to be drained, ulcers need medicine injecting into them, injuries need haemostatic forceps applying to them. While doing all this, you need to make sure you don’t bang into any walls, and on occasion you’ll find yourself having to thrust your endoscope through various pulsating sphincters without getting caught. The introductory mission wasn’t too tough, but I can see this being good old Trauma Center edge-of-the-seat stuff later on.

Diagnosis was really interesting, though. Rather than being “actiony” like the various surgery sequences, diagnostic sequences are much more adventure gamey. In the episode I played this evening, a teenage girl came in complaining of shortness of breath and it was up to me to determine what was wrong with her. Coming to a diagnosis is achieved through a pleasingly authentic-feeling procedure in which you must question the patient, point out statements that include abnormalities, perform an examination with a stethoscope, review CT, MRI and another type of scan I’ve forgotten the name of results and finally determine what the hell is wrong with the person. There’s even a fun House-style deduction minigame in which your computerised assistant presents you with a bunch of possible diseases, and you have to match the symptoms you’ve found with the various descriptions to whittle it down to a definitive diagnosis.

I’m yet to try the other specialisms, but I can already tell I’m going to like this game a lot. The past games had interesting characters and fun (if insane) stories, and I’m looking forward to seeing where they go with this one. Plus the Trauma Center team is one of the few series where I’ve found myself actively wanting to go back and improve my scores/ratings.

Before I play any further, though, I should probably complete something else. I’m coming up on the end of Kira Kira, so once that’s done I’ll be able to play Trauma Team without guilt alonside Ar Tonelico 2 and SimCity!

#oneaday, Day 276: Age of the Crossover

The Internet was left reeling yesterday with the news that Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright were to star in a game together, news which left me in a state of semi-orgasmic shock, and yet slightly disappointed that they hadn’t also included Trauma Team and Hotel Dusk in the mix. But no matter; as my Jaffa Cake-loving friend Jasmine Maleficent Rea pointed out, the idea of Edgeworth and Layton sitting down together and discussing tea is too awesome for words.

So it seems we’re in the Age of the Crossover. We’ve had the odd crossover title before, of course, Marvel vs Capcom being one that springs immediately to mind, as well as Square Enix’s bizarre 3D fighting game Ehrgeiz that featured a number of characters from the Final Fantasy series. And Kingdom Hearts, of course, which almost ignores the fact that floppy-haired J-protagonists are interacting with Disney characters presented in a completely different art style and is all the better for it.

But what else would work well as a crossover? Well, a short while back I suggested that a Call of Duty and Call of Cthulhu crossover might be a good idea. I still think that would be awesome. Particularly as there’s already been a first-person Call of Cthulhu game that was pretty good, if a bit buggy in places. In fact, I’d be more than happy with a multiplayer FPS version of awesome co-op board game Arkham Horror, although we’re kind of getting a bit off the crossover point there. Drop in the, erm, memorable Call of Duty characters, maybe?

But what else? As I suggest in today’s comic, doing interesting things with cars is always a good thing. Split/Second proves that you can make a cinematic, exciting driving game that uses a dynamic movie-like soundtrack rather than a boring licensed one. So why not take that to the next level and combine the already-epic-and-explosive action of Split/Second with the utter nonsense that is a JRPG boss battle? Let’s have racing around giant Shadow of the Colossus-style enemies, setting off environmental effects to attempt to take them down whilst they do their very best to throw the player off course. All the while accompanied by a full orchestral score and a choir of people singing loudly in Latin, naturally. (Incidentally, if you’ve never played any driving game with a custom orchestral soundtrack that involves a choir of people singing loudly in Latin then I can highly recommend it. It makes the whole experience considerably more exciting. Try the soundtracks from Castlevania Lords of Shadow or The Matrix Revolutions.)

Or you could go completely wild. Rockstar already seem pretty determined to do very odd things to Red Dead Redemption what with the zombie DLC and whatnot, so why not go the whole hog and do a Firefly crossover? It would be stylistically appropriate, after all (more so than bloody zombies) and provide an interesting twist on the Western formula, something which Firefly already does rather ably. Not to mention the fact that Nathan Fillion and the gang have already pretty much reprised their Firefly roles in Halo ODST. Shiny.

There’s plenty of scope for all manner of nonsense if you start pushing different franchises together in the name of entertainment. And I’m not talking about Alien vs Predator here. Let’s see more of these big names in gaming coming together to produce something beautiful.

So what would you like to see?