So I spent my week off from omgNintendo and things online visiting KouAidou in Tokyo. It was a fun trip and while I did plenty of things Nintendo-related (as you'll be seeing tomorrow), I spent most of time just doing the usual tourist stuff. Tokyo Tower, shrines and parks, Shibuya and even a trip to Yokohama.
Of course, something you fail to appreciate when you're planning your trip as a tourist is that Tokyo is actually very big. Getting to and from tourist destinations is almost always going to call for a ride on either Japan's famous Yamanote line or some other subway. If it's during a rush period of the day, you'll spend it standing up and trying not to jostle people too much with your bags. If it's during a more relaxed time of day, well... then settle down on a nice heated seat and start gaming. It's what everyone else on the train will be doing (who's not reading books or comics or just sleeping).
I saw dozens of PSPs and a slightly smaller number of DSes on my trips, and for a longer trip you can get a lot of gaming done. Factor in my time spent on the trains with the time I spent on my flights in and out of the country and, well, that's a lot of time to spend playing the heck out of Puzzle Quest Galactrix. In the game's favor, it does so much right that I could play nothing but it for a week and feel totally satisfied with my purchase. On the other hand, Galactrix is in many ways a game that became just too ambitious for its own good.
If you just want a run down of the basics of the game, go read Tae K. Kim's pretty excellent review of Galactrix for DS at GamePro to get acquainted with them. If you're too impatient for even that: good game, super-addicting, building up a character and ships is great fun, the DS presentation is kind of Spartan, and the inexplicable load times when going to the menu screen are incredibly annoying. Still I think the GamePro review is a good read since it's honestly the reaction I expect any reasonable person would have to the game for their first twenty-thirty hours of play.
What this post is about is when you go beyond that first dip into the game, working toward clearing all the missions, optimizing your ships, and generally mucking around above and beyond the standard player experience. The original Puzzle Quest was a remarkably resilient game on this level, despite a broken equipment system that usually meant you were ridiculously overpowered by the end of the game. You could still have lots of fun, playing through in different classes and seeing what made them tick.
The average Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlord player probably didn't spend even half the time screwing around with the optional game systems that the designers wanted. Getting magic from captives, having a mount, forging equipment... you could do great things with those mechanics, but most classes became functionally invincible once you could afford to buy an Ultimate Troll Ring. There was just no reason to bother.
Galactrix has removed constant regen as an obtainable ability and instituted the shield mechanic instead, so in theory it was more balanced. Some old irritations are still around, though, including even more ways to take away an opponent's turns and even more abilities that let you do catastrophic damage to an enemy provided you get the first turn. Still, to really take advantage of these tactics, you have to build your entire ship around it and there are plenty of good counter-measures.
So with ships and equipment more balanced than equipment in Challenge of the Warlords, there's more reason to screw around with the optional mechanics, right? Well, sort of. Galactrix has tons of optional mechanics, ranging from gathering rumors to haggling to mining, that are all very profitable if you choose to invest in them. Rumors grant big gobs of essentially free XP while haggling and mining can let you make tons of money fast (which you'll need). Crafting is still in and nothing you can craft is so busted you can start ignoring items sold in shops.
The problem comes to the game's final "optional" mechanic, which is actually not optional and is in fact a huge game-ruining pain in the butt in some ways, even moreso than the load times that strike whenever you want to enter or exit the menu: hacking warpgates. See, in Challenge of the Warlords, you opened up new locations by advancing the plot. This artifically throttled when you could take given missions or craft particular items. Galactrix goes in a very different direction by making the entire world map available to you from the start of the game... if you're willing to open up routes by hacking open leapgates.
Successfully hacking a leapgate involves eliminating a series of specified tile colors within a time limit. You can't use your ship or equipment while hacking leapgates, which means you're essentially playing plain old Match 3 on a timer. There's also no reward for success besides getting to move forward. If you're good at this, the mechanic is repetitive and dull because of how often you'll have to do it (and an opened leapgate has a chance of closing later in the game).
If you're not good at hacking leapgates, the game is pretty much going to be unplayable to you, because you won't be able to open up new locations required to progress in the story. This is a major flaw in some respects, since you didn't have to good at doing anything quickly to succeed in Challenge of the Warlords, and you didn't even have to be very good at playing Match 3 if you were good at playing RPGs. It gets worse when you consider that fulfilling some missions-- ones for the story, no less-- can involve hacking as many as half-a-dozen gates in sequence.
There's no way that Infinite Interactive didn't realize, as the game got close to launch, that hacking leapgates was boring. There are aspects of the game design that actually seem to rely on players being disinterested in hacking tons of leapgates. For instance, consider the Faction system, which to a large extent regulates when and which ships force random encounters if you're traveling around. The only way to avoid these encounters is to spend Psi on evasion, and to acquire Psi you have to do a serious of optional quests.
The last quest in the Psi tree if an ability that, essentially, shuts off all random encounters permanently. They won't trigger even if you cut through the space of a faction that is extremely hostile to you, or if you're carrying Contraband through friendly space. Once you have this power, the tedium of hacking leapgates is the only thing that even slows you down slightly when it comes to traveling all over the map... and also the game's complex Faction system, loaded with rivalries between different races, immediately stops mattering very much.
Now, maybe if I hadn't been playing Galactrix through two ridiculously long plane flights and a week of the Japanese subway system, I wouldn't have attacked leapgates so aggressively. But I did, and did every sidequest as soon as it appeared, and the result was that my ship became ridiculously overpowered as I discovered the best places to mine and where the best weapons were long, long before I was probably supposed to. Meanwhile, I have friends on the verge of giving the game back because they're no good at hacking leapgates.
Galactrix's huge galactic map and the promise of traveling wherever you wanted from the get-go were two things that got me interested in the sequel early on, but I get the feeling that Infinite Interactive didn't fully think the implementation of either feature through. I'm sure there'll be another Puzzle Quest on the horizon for 2010 or 2011, and in that one... well, let hacking leapgates fall by the wayside the way the ridiculous regeneration abilities of Challenge of the Warlords did. An RPG where just getting around becomes so unavoidably tedious is almost, by definition, not a good one.
