Third and final day of E3. I woke up to sadly find myself still sore from the day before, but not much helping that. I got to the convention early, as expected, only to find out that they increased the number of spots they set aside for valet parking, forcing me to park another two rows farther back than I had before, though oddly enough, I managed to get the closest space to the lobby in the parking garage that was not in valet parking. I'm not sure how these other people who were there ahead of me missed it, but I guess it was better than being even farther back. At this rate, next year I won't even be able to park in this particualr parking garage. It'll just be valet everywhere.
I had morning shift, but I met a lot of friends from different companies so that made the time pass more quickly. One of my coworkers, knowing that I was trapped at the booth for the morning, got me a ticket to the Square Enix theater for later in the afternoon. I also knew that being the final day I would have to make the most of what time I had available. I might not have succeeded, but I gave it a fair shot.
After lunch I grabbed a bag to carry stuff in and headed over to the Natsume booth so I could turn in my ticket to play the Sprite Casino game and try to win a prize. I love the animals in Harvest Moon, and so far I have the plush cow and the plush dog. This year they were giving away plush sheep. They had been given away as Harvest Moon: Magical Melody pre-order bonuses, but I didn't know about them at the time so I didn't pre-order. I figured this would be my only chance to get one outside of eBay. I met up with another Harvest Moon fan from work and the two of us stood in line together while commiserating about how much we wanted the cute plush sheep. Fortunately, according to the guy standing in line behind us, Natsume was more inclined to give away prizes today than the other two days. Originally it was very hard to win because people had to go through two games to win anything other than a magnet. Now the first game would just be a formality. Our guess was that being the last day, Natsume probably had too many leftover prizes and was trying to clear them out.
So we played the first game which involved throwing gigantic fuzzy dice. Rolling higher than the Harvest Sprite (one of the Natsume employees wearing a sprite hat) would allow one to continue to the second game. I rolled a one, but the Harvest Sprite took pity on me and kicked the die so it was a six. ^^; My co-worker behind me at first tied the sprite and then won in the roll-off. So we moved on to the second game.
The second game was a memory game (like Old Maid), with nine magnets on a whiteboard. Turning over a magnet would reveal a possible prize. Matching one magnet's prize with another would allow one to win that prize. The first magnet I turned over revealed a magnet, which I found extremely disheartening. No one in line ahead of me had turned over a magnet prize and the magnet is the defautl prize anyway, so getting that was a waste. Then I turned over my second magnet, which was a plush sheep. At this point the two magnets were turned "face down" again and I was allowed to pick two for my second try (only two tries allowed). Also at this point, the people who didn't know better would do something like pick the one they already knew was a sheep first and go for the unknown second, which is a silly idea. If you know two magnets are say a t-shirt and a plush sheep, you'd want to pick your unknown first, so if it was a shirt or a sheep you could pick your second magnet to match the first with the certainty of getting a prize other than the booby prize.
On a hunch I picked one of the unknowns for the first magnet of my second try. Much to my delight, it was a plush sheep! So I matched it with the sheep I found on my previous try and got my plush. It's entirely too cute and I consider it the best thing I picked up the entire show.
The only thing is my coworker behind me ended up getting her second t-shirt (she'd played earlier during the convention) so I'm probably going to have to watch my back when I get back to work on Monday or I may find myself sheepless.
After parading the sheep to my other coworkers still stuck at the booth (I had to let everyone know I got the one piece of swag I wanted more than anything else this show
), I went over to the Square Enix booth. I still had some time before I was supposed to show up for the theater so I played Children of Mana. I am not familiar with the Mana series at all, so I can't really say much about it one way or the other. It's very bright and colorful, and right off the bat I was given one of three characters to start playing with, so it looks like there's some variety. There was no story to the demo though, so I don't know anything about these characters or what they are trying to accomplish. The game mechanics were very similar to the Shining Soul games as far as I could tell, except that I could switch between different weapons by using different buttons.
Then I played Dirge of Cerberus, which is probably my biggest disappointment of the show. Oddly enough, it was also one of those I was most excited about at the show, even after being disappointed with the demo, but that's getting ahead of myself. What was possibility my biggest problem with the demo was that I couldn't figure out how it worked. For a so-called gun-RPG, I never once managed to fire my gun. I could get into something that looked like a sniper mode with the targetting reticle on screen, but I couldn't get the aiming down, and even if I could, I couldn't figure out to fire! And, well, if firing a gun is that complicated I don't know how I could possibly play through the game. It did not help that the demo was tutorial light. The demo opens with Vincent doing spying of some sort and some guys sneak up behind him and start shooting. I tried to fire back, but eventually gave up and tried running, which it seems I was supposed to do from the very beginning since after I started running I actually picked up some bullets, which might explain why I wasn't able to fire on those guys when I first spotted them. It would have been nice to know that before I wasted two-thirds my life trying to fight them. However, even after picking up the bullets I still couldn't figure out how to use my well enough that it made ranged attacks preferably to melee. My Vincent took everybody out with his claw. But because the game is not designed for melee, I ended up dying before I could really get anywhere in the game. Oh, and the default camera is pretty stupid in places. You can move the camera manually, and that will probably be necessary because there were a lot of camera angles where I couldn't see where I was going. Basically, if this was not a game starring Vincent Valentine (with Reeve in what appears to be a strong supporting role), I would not bother with it. I will probably buy it eventually, but it could've been a much better game.
So I got in line for the Square Enix theater, which according to my ticket was showing a 45 minute long presentation. In the meantime I watched the trailers running on the big screen above their information desk. The Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime animated trailer is obscenely cute by the way, and if you want to see something happy and light-hearted, it's worth a good chuckle. The other trailers were for the two Valkyrie profile games, Dawn of Mana, FFXII, Dirge of Cerberus, FFVII: Advent Children (even though it's already in stores), and their mobile games. (By the way, the Final Fantasy I on mobile looks amazingly crisp and easy to read, even though the text is sooooo tiny!)
Finally, I got in the theater where they showcased primarily upcoming Final Fantasy properties (as well as the new Dragon Quest spin-off for Wii). The Final Fantasy XII was rather boring to me, having seen too much of the game already, though there were a lot of cut scenes included that I hadn't seen before. The Compilation of Final Fantasy VII was better though. It included yet more Advent Children promotion (for those few who haven't already seen it) and then moved on to the other games in the compilation. Despite having just played and been disappointed with Dirge of Cerberus, Square managed to re-sell the game to me all over again with their stunning DoC trailer set to one of the songs by the J-pop star Gackt (who I believe actually appears in the game in addition to performing music for it). It somewhat reminded me that even if a game sucks, if it has a good story I'll often suffer through it, and I liked Vincent and Reeve more than the rest of the cast of FFVII. Putting them both in the same game helps. The cut scene graphics are top notch as well, looking like it's using the same models as Advent Children.
Before Crisis had a very small anime intro to the game, but very little actual gameplay to be seen, given that it's for cell phones. I almost want to get a top of the line cell phone just to play this, which is very odd since it's probably the only thing I'd ever use a top of the line cell phone for.
The next item in the compilation shown was Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII for the PSP. This one follows the story of Zack (who was dead before FFVII even started). There are some new characters introduced and it's kinda cool to see Sephiroth before he went crazy, but I didn't see anything resembling a combat system. It was all story stuff. I think Cloud was in the trailer, just as a normal undistinguishable looking guy though, since that's what he was at the time. It looks interesting just from a backstory perspective, but I wouldn't buy a PSP for it.
Having finished with FFVII, the theater then moved on to the Final Fantasy XIII series of games, which are largely just teaser. FFXIII (with no side name) featured a FFX-2 Yuna-ish girl running around attacking enemies with a sword and a gun. The graphics are very nice, but it looked like all cut-scene to me. Even when various buttons and menu commands came on screen, they did not seem to make sense to me, because what was happening on screen looked like what would normally be a cut scene out of the player's control. I think what we saw might have been a mock-up of what they hope the combat system will be rather than what it is. Truthfully, I was rather bored with it. I like the idea of having a female main character (if she actually is the main character), but the trailer itself just looked like a graphic showcase to me; all flash and no substance.
Final Fantasy Agito XIII is another mobile phone game. It seems to revolve around a school or something. Being a cell phone game there wasn't a lot of time spent on it.
Finally came Final Fantasy Versus XIII, which is being put together by the team behind Kingdom Hearts and FFX-2. This trailer was shorter than the straight version of FFXIII, but I liked the atmosphere better. It shows a lone young man sitting in a deserted room on a desolate throne. Eventually he gets up and walks outside, where bodies line the stairs down to a throng of soldiers below. The soldiers see him, raise their guns, and fire, but their bullets deflect harmlessly off a barrier in front of the young man, who eventually creates a series of magic swords when he reaches the bottom of the stairs. I presume he then attacks and hell rains down on his enemies, but the teaser ends at that point. But what I liked about it is that the trailer made me want to know who this man is and what happened to him. Is he some kind of king? Where those his servants dead on the stairs? Is he the main character? (Usually the heroes don't get the cool buller-deflecting barriers.) If he's the villain, why is his story so important that he's the first thing Square wants us to see of this game?
Of course, it could just be a terrifically well down trailer and the game will be nothing special. I guess we'll see in a couple years or so. There was no date tied to the FFXIII games, but given that the Final Fantasies have never been launch titles we probably won't see them until late 2007 at best; more likely 2008.
After the Final Fantasy parade, I wen to Capcom's booth and playing Okami, which I enjoyed a lot. Of all the demos I played at the show, this was one of the best, mainly because it convinced me that I really want to play this game. As a silent Amaterasu (the Japanese sun goddess in the form of a wolf), accompanied by a nature spirit, the player goes around trying to help people. There are very mundane ways of doing this, such as jumping and head-bashing enemies, but there's something called brush magic that lets Amaterasu perform magic and find her way around obstacles. The river of stars seems to be dried up, so she can paint in a new river, which she can then cross to the other side. Or she might discover an old statue with a broken sword, and by using brush magic to paint in a new blade, she can awaken a spirit that had been locked away in the sword. It's unconventional, part puzzler, part action, and I like it. The art style is very unique and the story very much at home with Japanese mythology; all of which make this one of the more distinctive titles at the show.
Finally, to wrap up the show, I went back to the Atlus booth. I played Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner, and chose the combat demo (the town demo would have been pointless given my limited Japanese) to see if I would like the real-time combat. I do like it better than Rogue Galaxy, which I played on Wednesday, since it didn't have the stupid auto-targeting making me attack monsters I wasn't facing and wasn't even near. It's disappointing to only have one support demon in my party after having a full group in Nocturne, but I guess being real time it would be harder to manage multiples of them. I'm not sure if the one demon I had with me was even doing anything, but that might have been because I was so focused on learning the controls. Despite my efforts, I did not survive the battle, though it involved what looked like a boss creature so I didn't feel too bad about dying.
Also at the Atlus booth I played Deep Labyrinth for the DS, which starts out with an anime-styled intro, which quickly melds with CG. In an odd twist, the 2D anime seems to represent the real world and the CG is the fantasy. Deep Labyrinth starts with a modern day kid riding in a car with his parents and his dog. The car appears to break down (I'm not really sure since E3 was too noisy for me to hear any of the dialogue) and the kid's dog starts growling at the weird house their car stopped behind. Naturally the dog runs off, the kid chases after the dog, right up to the creepy house, and when he opens the door to the house (which is CG), he seems to fall into another dimension. From then on, the game changes to a first person point of view and the world is CG. The boy is then warned by a traveling creature resembling a pink elephant that he is trespassing and he should probably leave before someone gets hostile towards him. He can't though, not without finding his dog and his parents. (The game switched to text at this point so I could follow the story. I'm not clear one whether or not his parents went to the house first or not.) It turns out this strange world he's in is a sort of place for lost memories that people no longer need; memories like what you might have eaten for lunch two weeks ago. Except it's also populated with talking mice who teach this boy the art of combat with a sword, and there are some basic slime enemies to practice on. Combat is done entirely in first person using the stylus. There's no reason to ever use the X, Y, A, and B buttons while playing the game. Just use the d-pad to steer and the stylus/touch screen will take care of everything else. Attacking is done by tapping the enemy, which will cause the player to lock on to them (unlocking an enemy is as simple as tapping the button called Lock Off), and then tapping them again for each swrod swing. Smarter enemies will move off the screen so you need to press the d-pad to turn and face them again, but it's really simple to do. I got stuck trying to find some shrine, so I didn't get very far, but I probably would've done better if I wasn't playing a demo on limited time. When I heard this was a first-person RPG for DS I was a little skeptical, but I like what I've seen so far so I think I'll pick this one up.
After that, I locked my stuff away in my car and prepared for tear-down as yet another year of E3 ended. It was quite a busy year this year too. Normally I manage a fair amount of dozing in my car to recover sleep, but not this time. I think I'm going to be out for a fair amount of time tomorrow morning. Actually... look at the time... I guess it will be THIS morning.