Carey Martell The RPG Fanatic

I've added a new section to the website, a Fan Mail page.

This page won't include all the letters I receive, just some of the most notable or ones that answer questions I get asked a lot.

In this video I talk about what makes someone a good game reviewer and what makes someone a bad game reviewer.

In summary, making good game reviews comes down to learning game design, reading books about narrative structure and being able to articulate your thoughts in a way that is constructive for the target audience of the game.

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Website:
http://www.rpgfanatic.net

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-RPG...

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First RPG Fanatic review for the year! Enjoy!

Ever wondered what games the RPG Fanatic wants and which ones he already has? Well wonder no more!

http://www.rpgfanatic.net/game-wish-list

This list will be updated periodically.

There is now a TV Tropes Page for The RPG Fanatic!

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheRPGFanatic

I'm a big fan of TV Tropes. If you pay close attention to some of my videos, I name drop a few of their trope namers into the dialogue of my scripts.

If you're much of a site user and find yourself a little bored, why not help flesh out the RPG Fanatic TV Trope page with some of the tropes the show incorporates? I'd love to see what you guys come up with!

Also known as 'Dragon Quest Characters: Torneko's Great Adventure 2 - Mystery Dungeon' (Torneko no Daibōken 2 - Fushigi no Dungeon) is a PS1 game by Chunsoft and published by Enix. The game is a computer roleplaying game rogue-like with narrative elements, featuring the popular character Torneko (Taloon) from Dragon Quest 4.

This retro review discusses the gameplay of the game, and of course, there is occasional humor and funny jokes! This episode can be considered the Christmas special.
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Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-RPG...

Twitter: http://twitter.com/therpgfanatic

Another RPG Fanatic review!

This is a review for the tactical roleplaying videogame Valkyria Chronicles 2 by SEGA for the Playstation Portable.

From the developer: "Two years have passed since Squad 7 defeated Maximillian in Gallia during the Second Europan War. A rebel group made up of dissatisfied aristocrats and like-minded soldiers and citizens calling themselves the Gallian Revolutionary Army begins a civil war to wage an ethnic cleansing campaign against Gallians of Darcsen descent.[5] However, with the intense fight against the Empire having left Gallia's regular army in an exhausted state, there is initially little to stop the insurrection from gaining momentum. Laws preventing the formation of a national militia to fight fellow Gallians force the government to deploy military academy cadets to the front lines in order to combat and defeat the GRA forces.

Among the students sent out on the field is 17-year-old Avan Hardins, a young man who enrolled in Lanseal Military Academy after the death of his older brother, Leon."

The game has anime cutscenes, military simulation combat, visual novel elements and a great soundtrack.

This review discusses the gameplay of the game, and of course, there is occasional humor and funny jokes!

Another retro gaming review! Willow for the Nintendo Entertainment System is an action rpg based on the cult classic 80's fantasy film of the same name. In my opinion the movie was great but the game is one of the better action rpgs on the system... but it sure has its weird points! The game is a combination of elements from the Ys and Legend of Zelda series but it has some original ideas, too.

Z.H.P.: Unlosing Ranger Vs. Darkdeath Evilman is the newest title from Nippon Ichi Software. The basic premise of this game is that a fortune teller predicted a Super Baby would be born who would one day save the world and make everyone happy. However, once the baby was born, the Demon General Darkdeath Evilman kidnaps her. The hero Absolute Victory Unlosing Ranger rushes off to save her...but gets hit by a car and dies. You play a random person who happened to witness the accident and the Unlosing Ranger gave you his morphing belt before he died, allowing you to become the new Unlosing Ranger. You set off to go defeat Darkdeath Evilman but totally get your butt kicked so hard the World Hero Society teleports you to a place called Bizarro Earth to train. The objective of the game is to become strong enough to save Super Baby.

Are you still with me? I hope so. Like most Nippon Ichi titles, the game’s plot is surrounded in absurdity and this time it’s focused on making fun of superheroes, especially tokusatsu heroes like Super Sentai and Masked Rider, known in the USA as Power Rangers and Kamen Rider.


Many of Nippon Ichi's previous titles have been strategy rpgs, but this is a rogue-like game with its own special take on the genre. The Unlosing Ranger is called "Unlosing" because whenever he dies he revives at level 1, stronger than he was before. In a nutshell, all the levels you acquired before death add a stat bonus that is carried over to your level 1 character, much like reincarnation in the Disgaea games. However you will lose items that your character had on them, so you must choose your deaths tactically!

Also like in Disgaea games, there is tactical use of throwing monsters but now you can also throw items at enemies, and the items have various effects such as inflicting sleep and poison.
The Unlosing Ranger can equip a wide variety of items found in the randomly generated dungeon floors. A lot of the items cause a dramatic visual change in the hero as well as giving him special abilities.

The game also has a subsystem called Shadowgram, which is a kind of license board where you slot items to add perm stat bonuses to your character. Different items will give different bonuses and their proper use is key to becoming strong enough to beat the final boss. The higher your total level is, the more Shadowgram slots you unlock.

There are also a number other subsystems in the game but to discuss them in minute detail would make this way too long. To sum it up, this game, like others from NIS, is very complicated. However, unlike some past titles you don't need to purchase a thick strategy guide to understand the game; the game has built in tutorials for all of the subsystems and the character gradually learns about these subsystems as they become available. Therefore, I personally think the systems are better explained here than in any previous NIS title.

Like most NIS titles, expect to run the same dungeon levels again and again to build your character up. There is a lot of grinding in this game. However the random nature of the dungeon layouts and item spawns help keep things interesting. It's always fun to randomly run into a treasure room, a dungeon store or come across a rare item that gives your character absurd abilities!

The designers seem to be taking a page from Frontierville. They have supporting characters pop up to tell you how good it is to get items or other little info about the game, reinforcing the behavior as positive. I really like this feature; the things the characters say change up enough to prevent them from becoming too annoying.

Something worth mentioning is that there are unlockable dungeons based on popular manga from Monthly Comic Dengeki Daio. Clearing these dungeons will allow you to change your character to look like characters from these titles.

I feel confident in saying, this is a great game. Will it appeal to everyone? No, this is definitely for people who enjoy roguelikes such as Azure Dreams and the Mystery Dungeon series. If you like those types of games, Unlosing Ranger will provide you with hours of grindy, wacky humor-filled enjoyment.

 

There are a lot of game reviewers who have talked about the Castlevania series before but I think the best reviews are done by people who actually played the games when they first came out. Since I happen to be one of those people, hopefully this review will be as informative as ones done by others but focusing more on what I like to call The Great Castlevania Shift of 1997.


With the exception of Castlevania II, all games in the franchise fell into the same mold; 2d platformer action adventure games where you walked from one side of the screen to the other. The hardest thing about these games was the controls; the games were notorious not for shitty controls, but for limited controls. The gameplay was all about timing and it punished you severely if you were off by even a millisecond. And while some might say they are Nintendo-Hard, Castlevania games were difficult on purpose, not because the game had quality control issues with the controls.


It was a different age where a lot of games today have controls that allow the player a lot of breathing room for mistakes. If you really pay attention to a lot of action adventure games made recently, the collision detection for character attacks extend beyond the boundaries of the attack's art and enemy attacks may even have collision detection inside the artwork, so it can look like your character was actually hit by an attack but the game doesn't register damage.


Anyway, enough of my rambling. SOTN marked a turning point in the Castlevania series because for the first time the controls were extremely forgiving. Alucard is graceful with every movement he makes, he can spam attacks, and he can jump much higher than any prior Castlevania protagonist could dream of. SOTN is also an action rpg, so you can kill weak enemies over and over again to level up and increase Alucard's stats, so if you have difficulties you can powerlevel your way through them.


As much as I love the game, the honest truth is that SOTN is a very different creature than previous Castlevania games and this upset many die-hard fans of the franchise.


This is not to say the game doesn't have its challenge; Alucard starts out insanely weak and until you get access to powerful items, if you don't pay attention you can easily die. You can also enter a code to make Alucard weaker than normal, which I can only assume is there to let fans of the old school gameplay still have something to punish themselves on.

It seems old news now but Alucard was the first Castlevania hero to become an unstoppable god. Some of you may think Soma was powerful in his games but check this shit out. Behold the power of Alucard's Shield of Unblockable Death! Everything dies in seconds with this thing, even Dracula can't do shit against it. It's freakin ridiculous!  Seriously, after you get the Shield Rod and Alucard Shield there is no reason to use any other weapon, ever, and even before that one need only the Shield Rod and Iron Shield to dominate.

Even at the start of the game, Alucard has access to a whole bunch of spells that make the game easy. The only difficult thing is trying to get them to actually work; to use spells you need to enter a fighting game style button sequence-- and some of them are pretty long. I don't recall it being too difficult to do them with a Playstation controller but I'm having a hard time getting the sequences right using the PSP.

Castlevania: SOTN is a direct sequel to Castlevania: Rondo of Blood. Basically, Richter Belmont has gone missing and Dracula's Castle has risen in his absence, so Alucard, the son of Dracula from Castlevania 3, awakens from his self-imposed slumber to see what the hell is going on.

I won't ruin them for you if you haven't played the game, but I'll let you know the game has four possible endings, and after you beat the game you have the option to play through it again as Richter Belmont and, depending on the version you have, Maria Renard.

In my opinion, SOTN has one of the best storylines in the franchise because it didn't contradict any other game made before it. If anything, it united them together. It also explained Dracula's motivation for hating humans as well as giving a reason for why Dracula's castle looked different in each game. The same can't be said for other titles, as many of the other games make you ask more questions than they answer.


Castlevania: SOTN is my favorite game in the franchise and when I try to think about why that is, I find it a little hard. The plot is better than prior Castlevania games, but it's not exceptional. The gameplay is fun, but overall the game is too easy once you understand how to use overpowered items like the Shield Rod, so it's not that the game is challenging. I think what endears me to the game is the presentation; this is one of the prettiest 2D games on the Playstation and the game soundtrack is one of the best of any Castlevania. The sound design is also really good, too. And I suppose the game environments do have enough variety to keep things mixed up. Still, this isn't a game that can entertain me for more than a weekend.

If you've never played SOTN but you enjoy some of the more recent Castlevania titles, I'd encourage you to try SOTN for yourself. The game was a major turning point for the franchise and I think it stands the test of time better than some of the other titles.