Post by LuccaTheNerd on May 10, 2011 9:28:59 GMT -5
This is really long, so I have to split it into a couple posts. Please be patient while I reformat everything (can we get HTML support in here please?)
Also, you can find the prettier version of this review and many others on Awesome Sauce. Please visit and support our work; we're doing the best we can to become popular!
DISCLAIMER:
As a critic, I will not write these reviews unbiased. I will also spoil things for you. Consider yourself warned.
Welcome to the Genre Battle! This once a month treat takes two games (or movies) from the same genre and delves into their similarities and differences to name an ultimate superior. Here’s how this thing’s gonna go down:
This month’s Genre Battle is between two fantastic RPGs: Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG. Both are incredible games on their own, but a winner must be picked! Let’s dive right in, shall we?
BREAKDOWN
PLOT[/b]
Chrono Trigger
Both Genre Battle contestants were developed by Square Co., Ltd. (now Square Enix Co., Ltd.) for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (you might know it better as the SNES, or as I called it, my life).
You know you want it.
Chrono Trigger was published by Square in 1995 and man, was it cool. Not only was it a traditional Japanese-style RPG with all the awesome sprites, music and a guaranteed awesome storyline, but it also had pre-release fame because the world and characters were all designed by Akira Toriyama, the same man who wrote and drew the Dragon Ball series (which at the time had already been gaining popularity for eleven years).
The basic storyline of Chrono Trigger is as follows: your main hero, Crono, lives in the year 1000 A.D. He goes to a special millennial fair that’s being held in his village and meets a beautiful princess (though at the time he doesn’t know she’s a princess). They spend the day together, check out an invention that one of Crono’s friends made, and the princess goes missing. Crono must then go after her, and the game becomes a “run back and forth between time periods” type deal. Ultimately you discover that there is an alien entity named Lavos that has been slowly leeching energy from the planet for millions of years, and that’s who you gotta take down to save everyone and bring peace back to the world. Obviously there’s a lot more going on in the game’s story than that, including a sidequest for each playable character and a ton of backstory, but the gist is there’s a big baddie that’s threatening your world and you have to defeat it.
Mario RPG
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars was a unique case. It was Nintendo’s characters in a game published by Nintendo, but developed by Square. Released in 1996 as the last game for the SNES (you could probably tell by the slight shift to three dimensional sprites), it stars Nintendo’s infamous icon, Mario, along with the princess and bad guy (if I have to name them, there’s something wrong with you. Go get help). Nintendo does what its good at and keeps its story simple: everyone’s wishes travel along the Star Road. Something fell out of the sky, however, and broke the Star Road into seven Star Pieces. With the Star Road out of commission, no one’s wishes will come true, so it’s up to you and your party to locate and claim the missing Star Pieces to repair the Star Road and bring peace and happiness back into the world. It won’t be easy, though! Smithy, the one responsible for breaking the Star Road in the first place, has his goons out to capture the Star Pieces and keep wishes from being granted ever again, and they’ll be in your way to stop you!
CHARACTERS
Chrono Trigger[/i]
In CT, you have all your classic, generic Japanese cartoon characters. You have your hero, your princess, your nerd, your dark badass, your tomboy (or in this case, cavewoman), your old epic swordsman, and the robot (for those playing the home game, that would be Crono, Nadia, Lucca, Janus, Ayla, Glenn and R-66Y).
Janus not shown. Go figure.
Aside from the fact that these were painfully generic, stereotypical characters, however, they had enormous personalities and development once you got further in the game.
Princess Nadia (she claims the name Marle in the game until you discover her identity, but I always preferred her real name) is a rough and tumble tomboy who feels like she’s being chained down by her father, the king of Guardia. Upon joining your party, she immediately takes the position of pep talker and sometimes annoying girl. She’ll always be the one to suggest fighting instead of running, taking charge, not being a pansy, those types of things. As much as she appears to be annoying, eye candy, and sometimes just plain useless on the surface, closer to the end of the game she actually becomes a likeable character. One of the sidequests has to do with her making amends with her father, who was wrongfully accused of killing her mother when she was very young. It all has to do with her being her own person, denying what’s politically correct for a princess and teaching her father that sometimes in order to do what’s right in the world, you have to be a little unorthodox.
Lucca takes the stereotypical role of the main character’s homely-but-genius best friend. On the outside, she makes sure that everyone sees her as a strong, intelligent, no-nonsense woman, but she is secretly carrying a lot of grief about an event that happened in the past. During her sidequest, you learn that Lucca’sTaban (Lucca’s father)’s inventions. Lucca (as a child) was not able to stop the machine because she hated science and inventions since it took time away from her and Taban. The sidequest gives you a second chance however, and present-day Lucca goes back to that day and can successfully (if you imput the command correctly) stop the machine and save her mother’s legs. After that, you can find young Lucca’s journals around the house speaking of her newfound motivation to study machines and science. Aside from her secret past, Lucca doesn’t have much else to her personality besides the brains part. She has an interesting relationship with Robo, but that’s pretty much the extent to her empathy.
Glenn (the game wants you to call him Frog, but I prefer his real name) is my absolute favourite character in this game. There is no question that he was the most developed character, had the most complex personality, and actually had goals for himself that drove him through his life. If my blog were exploding (knock on wood) and I had to sum up Glenn right this very minute, I would say that he is a man of honor. Glenn is the knightly type character. Like Lucca though, he carries an amount of grief and actually confuses himself at some points with the concept of vengeance versus revenge. Glenn had a very good friend named Cyrus, who was a renowned knight in the kingdom of Guardia (600 A.D.). Glenn was very admiring of Cyrus and strove to be just as skilled a knight as he was. When Glenn was still young, Magus and Ozzie appeared and attacked him and Cyrus. Cyrus was killed and Magus transformed Glenn into a frog. Any time Magus appears in the game and Glenn is in your party, things get very tense between the two. Glenn spends the majority of the game trying to “avenge” Cyrus, and his ultimate goal is to defeat Magus in order to serve this false vengeance. Glenn truly loved and looked up to Cyrus, and even during his sidequest, you get to see a quite sad scene with him and Cyrus’ ghost.
Robo (whose serial number is R66-Y; I always just named him that) is a robot from the year 2300 A.D. who empathizes with humans. It is later found out that he is part of a series under the command of Mother Brain that was meant to destroy humans for an ultimate world run by robots. I can’t really say too much about him since I threw him out of my party as soon as I had the chance, but he is sweet and caring and helpful, and has quite the loving relationship with Lucca, who restored his broken body. Robo’s real name given to him by Mother Brain is Prometheus.
Ayla is the beautiful, busty cavewoman from 65,000,000 B.C. who joins your party to help defeat the Reptites, dinosaur type primitives who are trying to destroy all the humans for a beast-ruled world. She doesn’t have many goals or much of a developed personality because, well, she’s from prehistory, but she recognizes that Crono and his friends are strong, and strong people are good, and she does have a romantic relationship with another caveman, Kino. It’s rather cute if you get the Playstation version of the game and watch the ending cutscene, in which Ayla forcefully puts a ring on Kino’s finger to announce their engagement. Ayla is of the Guardia royal line, and is Nadia’s ancestor.
Magus (his real name is Janus, which I prefer) is a powerful wizard originally hailing from 12,000 B.C. His true identity is Janus, a prince in the royal family of Zeal, son of Queen Zeal and brother to Schala, whom he adored and held very dear to his heart. Before the fall of the kingdom of Zeal, when Queen Zeal summoned Lavos, a rip in time opened and sent Janus to the year 600 A.D., where he was met and taken in by Ozzie. Janus then spent his life plotting revenge against Lavos for separating him and Schala, whom he is unable to locate after the Ocean Palace and Queen Zeal are destroyed. Upon your first encounter with him, the party assumes that Janus is the one who created Lavos to destroy the world, when he was in fact only summoning him to get revenge for himself. Janus isn’t exactly what I would call a complex character; he keeps himself in solitude to protect his feelings for his sister and withold his dark past from the rest of the world.
You might have noticed I didn’t talk at all about Crono’s personality. That’s because he never speaks during the game (save for one secret ending). He is basically the “blank template” character that is player-controlled to make decisions. I really liked this, because half the time when a main character talks, I automatically dislike them. Mute Crono gave me a great opportunity to write him how I wanted to him to act, and thus it was much more enjoyable.
Mario RPG
Super Mario RPG had a bit of a simpler cast. Mario, Toadstool and Bowser, and then two new characters, Mallow and Geno.
You don’t actually get to use Yoshi… I don’t know why he’s in the picture.
Like Crono, Mario is one of those characters who just doesn’t ever talk. Again, I find this makes him a lot more likeable. He doesn’t need to talk; he’s Mario! He doesn’t have some complex history or relation to characters that would call for an elaborately thought out personality. He jumps on stuff and beats on baddies to rescue the princess. Plain and simple, and people have liked it that way for twenty-six years now.
Princess Toadstool (SMRPG was the last game before she was officially known as “Peach”) is the classic damsel in distress. There’s not really much else to her. She’s kind and loving and likes to hit things with parasols and frying pans. She always entices Mario to come rescue her with promises of cake and kisses, but I secretly wonder if she actually ever gives a hoot about the poor guy.
Bowser is by far my favourite character in the Mario universe. He’s just cool. He was always evil, conniving, bad, kidnapped princesses for their “cake”; he was just a cool guy with a bad attitude and a great looking design. SMRPG, however, kind of made me dislike him a bit. The game wrote Bowser to have inside issues with himself regarding compensation. When Exor took over his castle, Bowser pretty much became an emotional wreck for the rest of the game. They would show scenes of him crying over his castle, and how all his minions left him (they didn’t, actually), and how he was gaining a bad reputation and Mario would think less of him. Then when your party would show up he would put on his tough guy attitude and try to be all cool… it was much more a kid’s show type deal. Bad guy has something bad happen to him, feels terrible, good guy makes friends with bad guy and everyone is happy. Suffice to say, I didn’t like it. I like the Bowser in Super Mario 64. That guy was evil. Actually, make that Giga Bowser.
Gawd, that’s hot.
Mallow was… weird. Initially, when he joined your party, he claimed to be a tadpole living in Tadpole Pond with his grandfather, Frogfucius. Mallow was a character with extremely low self esteem but packed some pretty powerful magic. He was a crybaby, though, and a bit of a ditz. Later on in the game when you reach Nimbus Land, Mallow sees that the area is cluttered with people who look exactly like him, and he still doesn’t get it. It takes him going to the Star Road and finding both his parents’ and Frogfucius wishes for Mallow to understand that he is not a tadpole, and will not grow up into a frog. It was also rather humorous to hear his “tadpole shame” of not being able to jump high. He does show a great admiration for Mario and his jumping ability though, and throughout the game gains more confidence in himself. Now that I think more about it, he was more neat than weird. Kudos to Nintendo, you made a character that had some development.
Geno was everyone’s favourite in SMRPG, and I never got why. Sure, he was one of the most powerful characters in the game and had cool moves, but as far as being a character, he didn’t have much going for him. He was a star that moved into the body of a child’s toy in order to have a moveable, working body to help Mario on his quest. Not a whole lot else was said about him. He was there to explain what was going on and to help get things done. Any Geno fans out there please, if there’s anything you liked about him besides “he was cool and powerful”, tell me! It’s something I never understood. That being said, he did have the most powerful special move in the game, that if it was done right with a Timed Hit, did quad 9 damage.
Also, you can find the prettier version of this review and many others on Awesome Sauce. Please visit and support our work; we're doing the best we can to become popular!
DISCLAIMER:
As a critic, I will not write these reviews unbiased. I will also spoil things for you. Consider yourself warned.
Welcome to the Genre Battle! This once a month treat takes two games (or movies) from the same genre and delves into their similarities and differences to name an ultimate superior. Here’s how this thing’s gonna go down:
- I will name the two challengers
- I will then break them down individually by category.
- After discussing them separately, a list will be compiled of their comparative and contrasting traits.
- I will then announce the final verdict and winner!
This month’s Genre Battle is between two fantastic RPGs: Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG. Both are incredible games on their own, but a winner must be picked! Let’s dive right in, shall we?
BREAKDOWN
PLOT[/b]
Chrono Trigger
Both Genre Battle contestants were developed by Square Co., Ltd. (now Square Enix Co., Ltd.) for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (you might know it better as the SNES, or as I called it, my life).
You know you want it.
Chrono Trigger was published by Square in 1995 and man, was it cool. Not only was it a traditional Japanese-style RPG with all the awesome sprites, music and a guaranteed awesome storyline, but it also had pre-release fame because the world and characters were all designed by Akira Toriyama, the same man who wrote and drew the Dragon Ball series (which at the time had already been gaining popularity for eleven years).
The basic storyline of Chrono Trigger is as follows: your main hero, Crono, lives in the year 1000 A.D. He goes to a special millennial fair that’s being held in his village and meets a beautiful princess (though at the time he doesn’t know she’s a princess). They spend the day together, check out an invention that one of Crono’s friends made, and the princess goes missing. Crono must then go after her, and the game becomes a “run back and forth between time periods” type deal. Ultimately you discover that there is an alien entity named Lavos that has been slowly leeching energy from the planet for millions of years, and that’s who you gotta take down to save everyone and bring peace back to the world. Obviously there’s a lot more going on in the game’s story than that, including a sidequest for each playable character and a ton of backstory, but the gist is there’s a big baddie that’s threatening your world and you have to defeat it.
Mario RPG
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars was a unique case. It was Nintendo’s characters in a game published by Nintendo, but developed by Square. Released in 1996 as the last game for the SNES (you could probably tell by the slight shift to three dimensional sprites), it stars Nintendo’s infamous icon, Mario, along with the princess and bad guy (if I have to name them, there’s something wrong with you. Go get help). Nintendo does what its good at and keeps its story simple: everyone’s wishes travel along the Star Road. Something fell out of the sky, however, and broke the Star Road into seven Star Pieces. With the Star Road out of commission, no one’s wishes will come true, so it’s up to you and your party to locate and claim the missing Star Pieces to repair the Star Road and bring peace and happiness back into the world. It won’t be easy, though! Smithy, the one responsible for breaking the Star Road in the first place, has his goons out to capture the Star Pieces and keep wishes from being granted ever again, and they’ll be in your way to stop you!
CHARACTERS
Chrono Trigger[/i]
In CT, you have all your classic, generic Japanese cartoon characters. You have your hero, your princess, your nerd, your dark badass, your tomboy (or in this case, cavewoman), your old epic swordsman, and the robot (for those playing the home game, that would be Crono, Nadia, Lucca, Janus, Ayla, Glenn and R-66Y).
Janus not shown. Go figure.
Aside from the fact that these were painfully generic, stereotypical characters, however, they had enormous personalities and development once you got further in the game.
Princess Nadia (she claims the name Marle in the game until you discover her identity, but I always preferred her real name) is a rough and tumble tomboy who feels like she’s being chained down by her father, the king of Guardia. Upon joining your party, she immediately takes the position of pep talker and sometimes annoying girl. She’ll always be the one to suggest fighting instead of running, taking charge, not being a pansy, those types of things. As much as she appears to be annoying, eye candy, and sometimes just plain useless on the surface, closer to the end of the game she actually becomes a likeable character. One of the sidequests has to do with her making amends with her father, who was wrongfully accused of killing her mother when she was very young. It all has to do with her being her own person, denying what’s politically correct for a princess and teaching her father that sometimes in order to do what’s right in the world, you have to be a little unorthodox.
Lucca takes the stereotypical role of the main character’s homely-but-genius best friend. On the outside, she makes sure that everyone sees her as a strong, intelligent, no-nonsense woman, but she is secretly carrying a lot of grief about an event that happened in the past. During her sidequest, you learn that Lucca’sTaban (Lucca’s father)’s inventions. Lucca (as a child) was not able to stop the machine because she hated science and inventions since it took time away from her and Taban. The sidequest gives you a second chance however, and present-day Lucca goes back to that day and can successfully (if you imput the command correctly) stop the machine and save her mother’s legs. After that, you can find young Lucca’s journals around the house speaking of her newfound motivation to study machines and science. Aside from her secret past, Lucca doesn’t have much else to her personality besides the brains part. She has an interesting relationship with Robo, but that’s pretty much the extent to her empathy.
Glenn (the game wants you to call him Frog, but I prefer his real name) is my absolute favourite character in this game. There is no question that he was the most developed character, had the most complex personality, and actually had goals for himself that drove him through his life. If my blog were exploding (knock on wood) and I had to sum up Glenn right this very minute, I would say that he is a man of honor. Glenn is the knightly type character. Like Lucca though, he carries an amount of grief and actually confuses himself at some points with the concept of vengeance versus revenge. Glenn had a very good friend named Cyrus, who was a renowned knight in the kingdom of Guardia (600 A.D.). Glenn was very admiring of Cyrus and strove to be just as skilled a knight as he was. When Glenn was still young, Magus and Ozzie appeared and attacked him and Cyrus. Cyrus was killed and Magus transformed Glenn into a frog. Any time Magus appears in the game and Glenn is in your party, things get very tense between the two. Glenn spends the majority of the game trying to “avenge” Cyrus, and his ultimate goal is to defeat Magus in order to serve this false vengeance. Glenn truly loved and looked up to Cyrus, and even during his sidequest, you get to see a quite sad scene with him and Cyrus’ ghost.
Robo (whose serial number is R66-Y; I always just named him that) is a robot from the year 2300 A.D. who empathizes with humans. It is later found out that he is part of a series under the command of Mother Brain that was meant to destroy humans for an ultimate world run by robots. I can’t really say too much about him since I threw him out of my party as soon as I had the chance, but he is sweet and caring and helpful, and has quite the loving relationship with Lucca, who restored his broken body. Robo’s real name given to him by Mother Brain is Prometheus.
Ayla is the beautiful, busty cavewoman from 65,000,000 B.C. who joins your party to help defeat the Reptites, dinosaur type primitives who are trying to destroy all the humans for a beast-ruled world. She doesn’t have many goals or much of a developed personality because, well, she’s from prehistory, but she recognizes that Crono and his friends are strong, and strong people are good, and she does have a romantic relationship with another caveman, Kino. It’s rather cute if you get the Playstation version of the game and watch the ending cutscene, in which Ayla forcefully puts a ring on Kino’s finger to announce their engagement. Ayla is of the Guardia royal line, and is Nadia’s ancestor.
Magus (his real name is Janus, which I prefer) is a powerful wizard originally hailing from 12,000 B.C. His true identity is Janus, a prince in the royal family of Zeal, son of Queen Zeal and brother to Schala, whom he adored and held very dear to his heart. Before the fall of the kingdom of Zeal, when Queen Zeal summoned Lavos, a rip in time opened and sent Janus to the year 600 A.D., where he was met and taken in by Ozzie. Janus then spent his life plotting revenge against Lavos for separating him and Schala, whom he is unable to locate after the Ocean Palace and Queen Zeal are destroyed. Upon your first encounter with him, the party assumes that Janus is the one who created Lavos to destroy the world, when he was in fact only summoning him to get revenge for himself. Janus isn’t exactly what I would call a complex character; he keeps himself in solitude to protect his feelings for his sister and withold his dark past from the rest of the world.
You might have noticed I didn’t talk at all about Crono’s personality. That’s because he never speaks during the game (save for one secret ending). He is basically the “blank template” character that is player-controlled to make decisions. I really liked this, because half the time when a main character talks, I automatically dislike them. Mute Crono gave me a great opportunity to write him how I wanted to him to act, and thus it was much more enjoyable.
Mario RPG
Super Mario RPG had a bit of a simpler cast. Mario, Toadstool and Bowser, and then two new characters, Mallow and Geno.
You don’t actually get to use Yoshi… I don’t know why he’s in the picture.
Like Crono, Mario is one of those characters who just doesn’t ever talk. Again, I find this makes him a lot more likeable. He doesn’t need to talk; he’s Mario! He doesn’t have some complex history or relation to characters that would call for an elaborately thought out personality. He jumps on stuff and beats on baddies to rescue the princess. Plain and simple, and people have liked it that way for twenty-six years now.
Princess Toadstool (SMRPG was the last game before she was officially known as “Peach”) is the classic damsel in distress. There’s not really much else to her. She’s kind and loving and likes to hit things with parasols and frying pans. She always entices Mario to come rescue her with promises of cake and kisses, but I secretly wonder if she actually ever gives a hoot about the poor guy.
Bowser is by far my favourite character in the Mario universe. He’s just cool. He was always evil, conniving, bad, kidnapped princesses for their “cake”; he was just a cool guy with a bad attitude and a great looking design. SMRPG, however, kind of made me dislike him a bit. The game wrote Bowser to have inside issues with himself regarding compensation. When Exor took over his castle, Bowser pretty much became an emotional wreck for the rest of the game. They would show scenes of him crying over his castle, and how all his minions left him (they didn’t, actually), and how he was gaining a bad reputation and Mario would think less of him. Then when your party would show up he would put on his tough guy attitude and try to be all cool… it was much more a kid’s show type deal. Bad guy has something bad happen to him, feels terrible, good guy makes friends with bad guy and everyone is happy. Suffice to say, I didn’t like it. I like the Bowser in Super Mario 64. That guy was evil. Actually, make that Giga Bowser.
Gawd, that’s hot.
Mallow was… weird. Initially, when he joined your party, he claimed to be a tadpole living in Tadpole Pond with his grandfather, Frogfucius. Mallow was a character with extremely low self esteem but packed some pretty powerful magic. He was a crybaby, though, and a bit of a ditz. Later on in the game when you reach Nimbus Land, Mallow sees that the area is cluttered with people who look exactly like him, and he still doesn’t get it. It takes him going to the Star Road and finding both his parents’ and Frogfucius wishes for Mallow to understand that he is not a tadpole, and will not grow up into a frog. It was also rather humorous to hear his “tadpole shame” of not being able to jump high. He does show a great admiration for Mario and his jumping ability though, and throughout the game gains more confidence in himself. Now that I think more about it, he was more neat than weird. Kudos to Nintendo, you made a character that had some development.
Geno was everyone’s favourite in SMRPG, and I never got why. Sure, he was one of the most powerful characters in the game and had cool moves, but as far as being a character, he didn’t have much going for him. He was a star that moved into the body of a child’s toy in order to have a moveable, working body to help Mario on his quest. Not a whole lot else was said about him. He was there to explain what was going on and to help get things done. Any Geno fans out there please, if there’s anything you liked about him besides “he was cool and powerful”, tell me! It’s something I never understood. That being said, he did have the most powerful special move in the game, that if it was done right with a Timed Hit, did quad 9 damage.
Keep em comin!
