Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher
Game: Record of Agarest War
Platform: XBOX 360
Played For: 12 hrs
Over the past few years Scum[McPhil] has sent me a vast array of games to review based on his recommendations or my requests. As he’s gotten used to my likes and dislikes, McPhil has decided that I am overly fond of mature-rated games. Glancing over my previous reviews I can’t completely disagree with his assertion. But until now, I’ve never reviewed a game whose central marketing premise was titillation. So, strictly in the interest of scientific advancement and including outliers in my sample set I present a review of Record of Agarest War: The Really Naughty Limited Edition. The only game I know that comes packaged with a mouse pad with boobs.
Yes, it is a mouse pad in the shape of an anime girl’s upper torso, with strategically placed mounds on which to rest your wrist. My wife found the whole thing quite amusing when I opened the box and discovered this particular artifact of modern culture, along with an alarmingly pink and purple pillow case that would almost fit in with a child’s Disney Princess room decorations if not for the slightly sultry clothing, poise and facial expression of the princess depicted. Thus we have the first difficult challenge that Agarest War presents when you purchase it… just what to do with the stuff that comes along with it. Not Really Naughty enough to sell on Ebay per se, but a little too tasteless to put into regular use, the Agarest War extras will likely be consigned to the back of the closet where other failed gifts, ugly lamps and old free sample copies of Maxim tend to accumulate.
So how about the actual game? It turns out that Record of Agarest War is a tactical miniatures strategy RPG. You begin the adventure with “Golden Leo”, a military commander of the country of Gridamas. In the first five minutes of the game, Leo decides he doesn’t like his orders, so he defects, throwing away his entire career and country to save an elf child from his country’s soldiers. He is immediately killed as a traitor, at which point he mortgages both his soul and the souls of all of his future descendents to some scantily-clad goddess in exchange for being brought back to life. Leo, in short, is stupid, selfish, impulsive and very naughty indeed. Unfortunately for anyone who believed the hype for this game, the naughtiness seems to end for quite a while after this bit of bad decision making.
Agarest War is structured as a long series of encounter points, in each of which you play a little miniatures game with your warband versus a random assortment of monsters. Each turn consists of a movement phase and a combat phase, and standing your characters in the right positions relative to each other allows you to gain advantages in the turn order. While a little weird in its mechanics, the combat is fun, but it takes a while. A single encounter can last a good ten minutes or more… and between you and any tiny advancement in story you can expect three to six very self-similar battles of this type. Encounters generally involve a few static slides of character pictures conversing with each other, and very occasionally a choice of paths for the player to select.
By about three or four hours into the game, I was beginning to wonder where all the naughtiness had gone. As it happens, the game is really about the miniatures… you will play it for hours and hours with little reward, only to finally unlock a PG-13 picture of a girl erotically eating a hot dog or a misty image of a girl in a bath with nothing really visible through the steam. Worse, many of these pictures can only be unlocked if you make the appropriate choices during the dialogue scenes… but the choices are wholly arbitrary. The first choice you make in the game is whether to go north or south around a mountain… going one way rather than the other makes the elf girl you are traveling with like you better, for no predictable reason. I guess you could see this as some kind of biting satire on the arbitrary nature of relationships in the real world, but something tells me social commentary really wasn’t on the agenda with this one.
Theoretically, the main character is eventually given a choice of wooing one of three potential wives (I am 12 hours into the game and have only met one of the three so far.) From what I’ve heard, the wooing process is as unpredictable as the choice described above, but you’ll have to ask someone who has played the game farther to really know. As a dating sim Agarest War does not appear to be very exciting… stick to Persona 3 for that sort of thing. According to the manual, the characters have a kid down the road whose attributes are determined by their own abilities, and a second generation story begins with that kid selecting one of three potential wives… and so on. I’ve heard rumors that there are three or five generations to play through in Record of Agarest War, but since you have to beat unending waves of identical and lengthy combats to get anywhere, I suspect few reviewers outside Japan actually know how long this game is from personal experience. You are certainly getting time value for your dollar if you really like this sort of game play.
There are other things to do in the game like gather rare items, craft new gear at the local armory, fulfill various goals and gain titles at the adventurer’s guild, and recruit monsters to fight for your team. But this all remains a hard sell in the face of the unending, boring repetitive fights on the same ugly fight screen over and over again. Couldn’t the game have built in a little more variety of terrain or obstacles or something to make the battles more engaging? Did the developers really think it would be fun to fight the same ten minute battle versus bandits four times in a row?
The game also makes the cardinal sin of including long dungeon sequences during which you can’t save, and ending with boss battles that have the potential of forcing you to start the whole thing all over again. The first such sequence pits you against the “Jumbo Cock”… yes, a giant chicken (you have to wonder if the double-entendres were there in the Japanese original, or if the American localizers were just trying really hard to make the game seem naughtier.) I happened to beat him on the first try, but it was a bit touch and go for a while, and a loss would have meant repeating an hour of previous battles from scratch. That, to me, is not fun. Perhaps this kind of thing is done on purpose, to encourage people to buy one of the many DLC power-ups that have suddenly appeared on XBOX Live. Having trouble with your Jumbo Cock? Why not try an extra package of Healing Weed for $2.00 or whatever it costs. Or even better, why not throw the game out the window and go to the Mall instead.
Last week I faced that exact unfortunate circumstance… I had to pay the Mall a visit. Not just a bastion of soulless materialism, blaring advertisement and crowds of people I don’t understand, the Mall has an extra danger for teachers in the constant threat of running into students who are all very curious about what you might be shopping for. Walking around, I couldn’t help but notice that there were far more depictions of scantily clad women in the stores, on TV screens and in mall posters than I had encountered in playing Record of Agarest War. To be fair, most of Really Naughty ladies of the Mall did not fall into the anime Moe category, but even this preference was overly-represented in the video store, in magazines, and in books.
I managed to execute my purchases without incident, and was just about to leave when I noticed a new store that I didn’t recognize sitting next to the video game shop… I think it was called Spencer’s. A cursory exploration revealed it to be something of a sex shop, but I guess it is mall-appropriate because it looks like Hot Topic and thus no adult of the moral majority would ever venture in there and find this out. Obviously, it wasn’t a place I would like to be caught in either, so I made a hasty retreat… but not before noticing more boobified mouse pads on a nearby display rack. It seems that purchasing a copy of Agarest War is not the only way for you, too, to be a proud owner of this classy item. That should save you 40 bucks if you are so inclined.
