There's a real danger of overstating and over-praising a game like Nier because of the erratic reviews it's received from major publications - and there's always the temptation to criticise universally received titles just to get attention. However cool it might be to act the contrarian you've always got to back up your opinion with some form of evidence or reason. With Nier I feel the positive emotional experience far outweighed the technical issues and the awkward dialogue moments it had.

This leads me on to Super Mario Galaxy 2. A game I wasn't expecting to write about under the Soulful Gamer banner until I was asked to. I had, coincidentally been playing the first Galaxy with my son for the past few months and really enjoying most aspects of it. It's been a perfect 30 minute filler before dinner time and the one aspect that I've really enjoyed is the hub-world and all the Rosalina story-time parts.

It's probably a very odd thing to say but the whole narrative of the first Galaxy was enchanting and full of personality and character that gave all that awesome platforming a point other than the exceptional gameplay. I can't say the same about Galaxy 2 and everything that made the first one special feels like its been thrown out to just add more levels. It feels more like an utterly awesome expansion pack that unfortunately contains none of the charm outside of those levels the first game had.

Before I return to Nier I also want to clarify the Alan Wake review that's currently on the Soulful Gamer section on Gamepeople. Being a website that has some diverse sections rather than specific writers it means that there's a generous amount of guest/ghost writing across sections. Which means that the Canabalt and Alan Wake reviews were both penned by other reviewers. I'm not saying this 'cos I believe the reviews to be crap or anything, far from it, I just want to be clear that those views on Alan Wake aren't mine. Why I'm sounding all snotty and trite about it is because I've just started the game and really don't feel it's up to snuff... yet. By the gods, I just love being the contrarian at the moment eh? God-damn opinions.

But back to Nier and I really wanted to highlight a couple of points I never had the room to put into my review. Firstly, the music is exception. It's full of highly produced songs and themes that give each character and place a distinct sound. Some of the tracks, especially those for Emil or Yonah, melt the heart with their beautiful melodies. Some of the tracks are a little chant-heavy that work well within the game but sound excessively odd when I listen with headphones. Maybe I'm just not LARPing well enough for those but the rest of the tracks make up one of the best soundtracks I've heard for a while. And yes, I am a videogame music nerd. Go on, point and laugh if you must.

Finally, I have to flag up a negative about the game in order to not sound like the religious fanatic that would see me deported. I recently began a new game + which puts you back into the game about halfway through the plot. It seems the four endings you can get require four playthroughs, which is fine, and each of them focuses on the main characters in turn, which is more than fine. However, the second playthrough seems to be conveying the backstory of Kaine with page after page of text rather than offering any gameplay differences or alternative cut-scenes. It's disappointing that they have to resort to a wall of prose rather than offering something a little more compelling, but I guess if you're as invested in the game as I've been then you're probably going to lap up the hermaphrodites backstory with glee. Lap up, urgh.

Unlike Darksiders (which I did not like at all) Nier feels much more coherent and meaningful to me. The cornerstone of the entire game is the protagonist's driven desire to cure his daughter's fatal illness. The nature of this and the history of the post-apocalyptic future is yet to be fully explained even after seven hours but instead of feeling directionless, it helps Nier to brings its characters forward.

The main guy himself is immensely likable, and comes across as a gentle father who will do everything to save his daughter and help others along the way. He never feels like a wishy-washy Paragon Jedi and the gruff voice acting is a perfect foil for the generous acts and gentles dialogue he can deliver. In the process of saving your daughter from an early threat the game introduces Grimoire Veiss (sounding like a camp Alan Rickman, if that's possible) - a talking book that gives you the magic powers that make combat vaguely more interesting than just slashing your sword.

Inanimate objects always need strong personalities to bring them to life and Weiss is wonderfully sardonic, pithy, arrogant and yet also shows more humanity than many other videogame characters you'll likely to comes across. There's a great rapport between these two characters and it’s a testament to the translation team's talent that they make a relationship between a human and a book feel remotely believable and funny.

The only character that stands out for the wrong reasons is Raine. Not for her dialogue, which is brash and offensive in all the right ways, but the fact that her voice simply doesn't match the visual character model. It's the same problem I had with Splinter Cell: Conviction and it makes a striking difference to how legitimate she feels as a character.

Objectifying women isn’t the exclusive domain of Japanese developed games but Nier’s Eastern origins are pretty obvious with Raine dress-sense. The game even draws attention to this issue with a few disparaging comment from Veiss about Raine wandering around in her underwear. I often wonder if this gratuitous self-awareness is put in as an excuse for putting some young girls butt-crack on display, or whether they’re just taking the piss out of their own audience.

Regardless, I’m enjoying Nier far more than I thought I would considering my rocky past with most action-RPGs. It’s moments where the gameplay changes from a typical sword & sorcery setup into a twin-stick shooter or bullethell level seamlessly makes me believe this could be something special.

With bad things happened to good people within the story I have a feeling that Nier has a lot more depth hidden away during its latter parts. I can only hope my pun-generator can get produce something of mediocre value the next time I write about it or I’ll Nier hear the last of it. Ugh.

The only great thing about going on holiday with a self imposed ban on all “new” games and game systems means I’m forced to experience some RPG called Mother 3. Yes, it’s that time in every ‘I want to write meaningfully about videogames bloggers life’ to scrawl something about this un-translated work. Un-translated by official means that is. I won’t try to pull a righteous than thou attitude and say I bought the original cartridge or some shit – I torrented the ROM and downloaded the fan-made patch just like 99.8% of the player base.

After only three hours I can’t really say much about the story only that its first chapter does everything you’d want a sprite-based RPG to do. Children, family, happiness and light turning to death and despair, strange stuff going on, feelings that the world is changing – all essential RPG primer for a potentially epic tale.

What I love so far are the character sprites. There’s something so basic yet beautifully expressive about the way all the characters have been drawn in this game. And this is just the NPCs we’re talking about. Every one of them is so unique and individual that it puts every other sprite-based RPG to shame.

As good as these look on my crappy Game King screen (complete with three dead pixels ithankyou) it’s the manner with which they’re animated that makes them come alive. When Flint gets his bad news the stop motion animation makes it so easy to see exactly what he’s doing and what he’s feeling.

One of the most bizarre moments of the first few hours which proves you can still do epic on a handheld is the appearance of the massive character just outside of town. At the moment he’s seems to serve no purpose and only lifts his hat courteously when approached. But just seeing this tall man, four times the size of every other character scared the life out of me for some reason. It’s an odd inclusion that may or may not become clear later, but it’s a quirky bullet point that ticks the right box for me.

What I’m a little unsure of is the translation and the dialogue. By Thorin’s left testicle I’ve no idea how fans managed to take the raw Japanese and translate this entire game – and patch it back up to work. It’s a feat that transgresses the limits of my pitiful mind quite easily. Yet I’m not sure if the game itself was actually trying to be that dippy or if the translation team were. For the most part it seems to work fine but on other occasions, the moment when Flint receives his good news/bad news for instance, it feels a little cold and out of place. It’ll become clear after dozen hours and I could be ignoring a massive style of the Mother games due to my criminal ignorance. Yeah, it’s probably the latter. I guess I’ll shut up.



But that's quite enough of the negative because I played a game this evening that really surprised me. This time in a good way and Fragile Dreams on the Wii has come completely out of the blue. I've heard nothing about it and knew even less until I started playing it this evening. From what I can gather it's a survival horror adventure set after a apocalypse-like event that's left most of the Earth's population dead or missing. This clichéd setting doesn't feel clichéd at all and that's probably due to the stunning visuals on offer and its quintessential Japanese style.

The first couple of hours are spent in a crumbling subway station but when you emerge from the tunnel into the open air, the visuals of the dawn sky are pretty moving. It also has an unsettling feel with typical Japanese enemies of abstract matter appearing in front of you. It even made me jump when I found writhing arms coming out of the walls and it shares more than a passing similarity with both classic Silent Hill and the recent Shattered Memories.

What sold it to me more than anything else was its indirect storytelling. I have no idea how the earth ended up like it has but by collecting certain items you can listen to memories of events in the past by your campfire. The first instance of this involves a mother and her daughter to whom a promise is made that she won;t leave her. There are shades of Bioshock's audio diaries here but more accurate would be the memories in Lost Odyssey as they seem to have the potential to be just as moving. Then of course I met the girl from the memories, now a ghost and demanding to play a game of "hide and go-seek" in order to obtain a key off her (some game design doesn't change!) After I successfully locating her there was a brief but moving reunion with her dead mother before they turned to light and rose up into the sky.

In just two hours I felt Fragile Dreams had done what Heavy Rain couldn't manage with the PS3's power and eight hours of my time. It's not a fair comparison but I know which I've enjoyed playing the most so far and I 'm truly intrigued to see what direction this unknown Wii game is going to take. I just wish I wasn't such a wuss when it comes to horror games.

After 30 hours of play I am supposedly hitting the 'good' part of Final Fantasy XIII this week. As usual I'm finding the internet a mixture of lies and deceit when it comes to Square Enix's long running franchise. I've made no secret on Twitter that I'm enjoying the streamlined nature of FFXIII and I constantly find myself wondering what other players want this game to be. Reaching Chapter 11 this week has shown that FFXIII doesn't really do open-world stuff very well - at least not to me! The plains of blahdiggety-blah-blah look impressive (even on the 360) but going back and forth, running errands for long-dead l'Cie strikes me as, er, dull.

Of course, this is where the FF vets will grab their gunblades and tell me that this open-world, non-linear struture is A Good Thing™. I'm not averse to that type of gameplay in the slightest, but having a really good narrow experience for thirty hours and then breaking it open like this feels like bad pacing to me. Beleive it or not, I'm really interested in these characters, the world and the story that's going on around them and would rather push ahead than spend four hours grinding up levels just to access the next chapter.

It strikes me that the developers made a concious effort to make a very different and accessible Final Fantasy and then got cold feet about the whole business and opened it up again. Through the osmosis of the internet I know this is only a passing moment, but it still feels oddly thrown in to appease the kind pf players who would have thrown FFXIII in the bin by now.

Enough of the Final Fantasying. Also this week I've got my hands on... *adopts Japanese shouty voice* SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI STRANGE JOURNEY!! It's a DS game I've been looking forward to for months and one that seems destined to be ignored by most of the UK - mainly because Atlus has no plans to release it here. (Sad face).

After three hours I can confidently say that its a very SMT-like experience with traditional turn-based combat and its demon-adopting/taming/fusing awesomeness. It's way too early to pass judgement but when Jeremy Parish of 1Up infamy calls it the best RPG release in March it gets me all tingly for what's to come.
Don't laugh. Please.
On the opposite side of the spectrum I've finsihed ploughing through my copy of Rune Factory and a review should be hitting the GamePeople servers very shortly. Those Harvest Moon folks really do make games that are easy to slate from an enthuisiast videogamer standpoint but there's something amazingly additive about sowing crops, catching monsters and wooing Japanese ladies. Soulful? Well that remains to be seen and many of these games rely on the player to use their imagination for the best experience. Something I'm not averse to using every now and then.

On a similar note I've also been doing the same on my iPhone - a device I actively refuse to play games on normally - and raking hours into the free-to-play We Rule. Expect a post about that very soon also.

What I won't be writing about any time soon is Yakuza 3 which is sitting forlornly on my shelf why I try and get through Final Fantasy before the end of the month. That and Heavy Rain (the game that seems to have 'Soulful Gamer Will Cry!' written all over it) are just going to have to wait until I get Lightning and her crew to their finale.