Kids these days think they
invented graffiti? Here's someone kickin' it oldschool style -- roughly hewn from the living stone!
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We don't need twee rhymes and alliteration to pander to your minuscule attention span! No catchy slogans! Instead, we will just sway you with the sheer epic, uh, epic-ness of it all. Look upon my brand, ye mighty, and weep!
Westwood Studios was known for lush production values and those took them far to differentiate them from competitors. FTL's Dungeon Master solidified its genre but you could have bowled me over with a feather the first time I saw and heard the intro to Eye of the Beholder -- a feeling only extended in their own Lands of Lore. Maybe there were one or two RTS games before Westwood's Dune 2, but looking and sounding as good as it did, it made the argument far more compellingly. If it hadn't looked or sounded as good as it did, the Legend of Kyrandia would have been a sub-Roberta Williams graphical adventure game, full of an unlikeable combination of randomness, arbitrariness and walking dead-ness. Instead it's a fond memory of a likeable but flawed attempt -- likeable enough to parlay out into a trilogy!
Most of their success was on home computers. They did branch out, occasionally, to home consoles as they do here (and on their heartbreaking final title, where you can practically count EA's tread marks on their face), but the results weren't always, to paraphrase another company's name, PF Magic. Still, better an interesting failure than a boring success, and if you end up with a zero-for-two boring failure it can at least be a handsome one. Sometimes it can almost fool you. (And rest assured be failure here I just mean "fails to distinguish itself and rise above the competition" -- it's not a fatally flawed work, the SNES just had a large library.)
I don't think I was even aware that this game existed, and given my knowledge of SNES RPGs, that is kind of strange.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like a good execution of an adventure/RPG formula, which indeed would give it a lot of competition.
It's really an outlier from their established formula(e), one of those weird exceptions that only turns up after some extensive research into a company's back catalogue. Otherwise put, the fruit of a game-playing career that strayed into a game-studying career... trying to figure out why the kinds of games I always loved weren't made anymore.
DeleteKind of like Squaresoft's racing games?
ReplyDeleteEhh, when you consider they were doing it was far back as Rad Racer for the NES, it's no surprise this strain surfaced in Chocobo Racing and that notorious hot-rod segment of Chrono Trigger. If the game you're making is not the kind of game you want to make, you will subconsciously take steps in that direction. It's like how you drive toward a point you look at.
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