Game Review: The Last Story (Wii)

Tags

adventure, Calista, Dagran, fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi, JRPG, Lowell, Mirania, Mistwalker, Nintendo, Operation Rainfall, Syrenne, The Last Story, Wii, Yurick, Zael

I’m rebooting my approach to game reviews starting now. I will no longer be rating games for Presentation and Difficulty because I think the quality of a game’s presentation is covered well enough by Design, Graphics and Sound and because the challenge a game offers does not necessarily reflect its quality. I’ve also decided to be a bit harsher with overall scores as I think I have a tendency to undervalue games that previously scored over 8.0. The first game to be reviewed under the new scheme is The Last Story for the Wii.

Game Review: Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)

Tags

adventure, fantasy, JRPG, Monado, Monolith Soft, Nintendo, Operation Rainfall, Reyn, RPG, Sharla, Shulk, Tetsuya Takahashi, Wii, Xenoblade Chronicles

The last eighteen months of software releases on Nintendo’s ailing Wii haven’t exactly been loaded with must-haves, a fact that has made what few major new titles have arrived all the more significant. If Skyward Sword was the biggest Wii game of last year (and it was) then Xenoblade Chronicles was a fairly close second. The game is the first of three originally cited for a Japan only existence that Operation Rainfall lobbied to be given a western release (the other two being The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower) and hit European shores last August with the American release coming early in April. But the hype surrounding this game before launch extended to more than its significance as a Wii game. The entire Japanese RPG genre has been in poor health for years, struggling under the weight of tired storytelling and gameplay clichés with western creations going from strength to strength, even the almighty Final Fantasy has seemingly lost its way. With near universal-acclaim from critics who have cited it as the best JRPG in the last five, many even ten years, Xenoblade Chronicles is arguably one of the most important Japanese video games of the current console generation.