Nostalgia
I was going to wait until I finished Nostalgia to review it, but fuck it. I would rather eat this game than finish it.
Actually, Nostalgia is a rare treat for me. It is exceptionally difficult to have a pure experience with a video game these days: one where the game reveals itself at its own pace, untainted by months of advertising, magazine previews, and trailers. I had never even heard of Nostalgia when I picked it up and all I knew was what I saw in the first few pages of the strategy guide. A guy with a sword and a girl mage were flying around in an airship in a game called Nostalgia. That's all I needed to know to be convinced that this would be worth the money.
Hell, I didn't even flip the box over to see if it was 2D or 3D. This was going to be pretty great.
If any of you start talking about purifying crystals I'm crashing this thing into the nearest mountain
The Good Parts of Nostalgia
1) The World of Nostalgia is Earth
I am entirely in favor of this. Some details in the geography and especially the topography are a bit creative, but otherwise the layout is pretty familiar. When the townsfolk start dropping hints about how maybe you should check out New York, it's pretty easy to know exactly where to go next. None of this wondering around like a tard looking for some made up town.
2) All Overworld Travel is in an Airship
After like twenty years of coming up with dumb reasons for preventing you from having an airship, Nostalgia just gives you one right away and makes it the only way to travel between towns and dungeons. You don't even have to pay for it or do a quest for a leering pedophile airship captain. You just get one. It's genius.
3) Mage Weapons Actually Do Physical Damage
The black mage uses blunt weapons like clubs and hammers and the white mage's staves tend to have sharp edges. This keeps the white mage from being relegated to a rechargable herb dispenser, and allows for some longer dungeon runs since the black mage doesn't have to choose between using MP and wasting a turn.
The Bad Parts of Nostalgia
This is the most generic RPG anyone has ever bothered to let someone else think up for them. The young hero, sword in hand, goes to the sewers to gut some rats because the adventure guild told him to. There he meets the loner thief with a sketchy past and they sail the skies in search of more sewers with bigger rats or something. And then they encounter the strong-willed black mage girl who has a strong will and develops an abusive relationship with the loner pretty much right away. Then they meet the white mage with amnesia and I had to put the DS down for a little while. Since the title of the game is Nostalgia and the characters are so flagrantly reminiscent of any number of other RPGs, I thought certainly the developers would be having some fun with the cliches and we could all enjoy ourselves.
Instead, they completely embraced the cliches and regurgitated them with absolute seriousness. It's like they don't even know that Final Fantasy, Wild Arms, Skies of Arcadia, et others were widely available and played by other people. If they had gone the tongue-in-cheek homage route, they could have rewarded everyone for having played these games, but they would much rather punish us with their hopelessly boring shit.
The white mage is a mysterious girl with amnesia for god's sake. And she is able to interact with the ancient artifacts no one else can touch. Seven artifacts. Oh my god what if she is a princess from the fucking mythical land of happiness fairies and bears an amulet that activates the lost technologies!! Oh my god what if?!
Ooh and she and the main character could fall in wuv and have cutscenes together.
Shit, but she could actually serve a dark purpose!!! Maybe she is the harbinger of our doom and will one day have to fulfill her destiny but then at the last second choose not to even though she has been brainwashed by the mysterious cult!
That would blow my mind completely raw.
Unfortunately, I'll never know how Nostalgia ends, because it had fifteen hours to reach a conclusion and it flatly refused to. Patience over, get out.
12 comments:
Is it possible that the tongue is, in fact, in the cheek but you are not correctly discerning the location of the tongue?
That is possible.
Nostalgia could have been eating an asshole the entire time.
But really, if this game wants to go meta in the last act, then I'm really disappointed in how willing they think I'll be in putting up with everything else.
This kind of thing is based on trust. I need to trust that the game is capable of subtext or that there is some kind of hidden meaning. All it takes is a little gold dust in the dirt to get me digging, but Nostalgia is pretty much like digging in your back yard. It's familiar and pointless.
ugg
This makes me wonder what a game has to do to make itself compelling. Are we talking novelty of story or interesting mechanic or something?
Presumably, with a name like Nostalgia, they are banking on some appeal to the understanding one of have of the genre as it is. So...maybe that was the point?
Very weird.
Don't you trick me into finishing this game!
I'm taking Nostalgia to refer to possibly that the world in the game is an alternate past, or maybe that the main character's father was an adventurer, too, and he's following in his footsteps. The mysterious girl with amnesia is recovering her memories, too.
Of course then there's the whole deal with the game being a repackaged old style RPG. Hard to feel too nostalgic about what amounts to an average game, though.
As for the compelling thing...Nostalgia probably would qualify if it had a hook that wasn't already the hook from some other game. The battle system is ok, but not especially engaging. The skill advancement system is nice enough with spending skill points to upgrade and sometimes unlock new abilities, but even if there were some cool moves, they'd be stuck in a boring battle system.
The characters are pretty much off-the-shelf, and the plot is so well-worn you should be able to put any other RPG into your DS and start a New Game+ from the get go.
All of this can be ok if the artwork is in some way nice to look at, but the engine is pretty much right out of the 3D Final Fantasy III and the design is sort of like Lupin era-Miyazaki but sketchy and not very pleasant to look at.
Not much to offer.
Incidentally, the image I posted is the best looking piece of official art I remember seeing. The intro to the game shows some more, and it all leads me to believe that there is a very grateful and untalented deviantart user credited somewhere.
Adam, you're missing how meta the game IS.
It's a game called Nostalgia.. that apes all the cliches of the genre. Faithfully.
and it's clearly a bit of a budget/back library title. Which means when it was translated? It was most likely FULL of knowing jokes.
Frankly, Nostalgia might be too in on it's own joke to admit it.
Going to see a Led Zeppelin tribute band makes sense because Led Zeppelin is pretty rad and you really can't just go out and see the real thing any more.
Nostalgia is a tribute band for a group that still tours regularly and they both hit all the same venues and ticket prices are exactly the same. What's the point?
If they claim that they're meta or a joke while they perform their none-for-note covers then they're just delusional. I'm willing to believe that the localization team completely missed an entire game's worth of in-jokes, but somehow I doubt it.
Actually, I think the name Nostalgia just pisses me off. It draws attention to how derivative the game is whereas without the title it would probably just be ignored like any other waste-of-time, me-too RPG.
I'm thinking also of that Spore outrage a couple of years ago where some fundamentalist Christians blew anger chunks all over the internet. Then it turned out to be a joke and the whole thing just proved that when you pretend to be exactly like a real-life crazy dickhead, it's impossible for anyone to tell the difference.
So, the lesson to learn is that Nostalgia is a shitty cover band?
Shitty, by way of devotion without charm, I believe.
Unlike Torchlight which appears to be a D2 coverband that occasionally goes gonzo.
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