Goombd Played! - Gungnir

The saying goes that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. In Gungnir's case, Atlus' newest grid based J-RPG, being beautiful only takes it so far. 

Unlike the usual Japanese role playing game, Gungnir doesn't sport a particularly convoluted plot. Two factions are at each other's throats, one being the lower class, suffering in the slums and in poverty, while the other, the rich folks. Guess which side the heroic Esperanza guerrilla group stands and you've got yourself into Gungnir's story in a nutshell.

Similarly to INS' hugely popular RPG series Disgaea, Gungnir's combat system is entirely grid-based, with the same options of equipping characters and somewhat customizing their abilities to your taste. If you've played any tactical game released in the last fifteen years, among them greats like Tactics Ogre and the newer Joan D'Arc, you will know what to expect. While not close to being boring in this regard, Gungnir does little to set itself apart. Battles play out as you'd expect and very rarely stray out of the realm of the 'rock-paper-scissors' formula of planning out attack turns. Even on boss fights.

As I briefly touched earlier on, this game's plot is a little uninspired and boring. Unlike previous attempts at tactical RPGs that were mentioned before, there are hardly any redeeming points in this tale of the plight of poverty, and what's even worse, the little there are in attempts at development fall flat. All thanks to the limited scope of dialogue choices that very rarely go past the clichéd and tired stoic "dying for what it's right" stance, all throughout the game. There's not even a drop of the much expected animé humor thrown in and granted, that's a huge cliché in this sort of game but hey... it would've helped in this case.

On the other hand, I can't help but applaud Gungnir's visual design. At a certain point during my playthrough, I decided to pay more attention to the colorful art than anything else. Gungnir is absolutely gorgeous. Its mix of beautifuly textured polygonal environments and detailed sprite work is easily this game's most distinguinshing feature.

There is a handful of tactical RPGs out there already that do what Gungnir tries to do with much better results, not only story-wise, but in gameplay. That's not to say Gungnir is completely awful and if you manage to turn yourself off from the pinky toe level shallowness of its plot and focus on just winning battles, it works. But that's what holds it back, potential players having better options already available on the same portable system. Gungnir does little to nothing to set itself apart from the bunch and that's what kills it. |6

Goombd Played! - Eufloria

If you're anything like me, you're awful at real-time strategy games, the RTS, like all the cool kids like to call them. Maybe it's due to the unrelenting nature of having to make split second decisions, the stress of having thousands of virtual lives in your hands at all times. I'm just bad at them. I take too long to do the right thing at the right time. When it's time to attack, I'm still building my base, carefully placing my units around the base and when it's time to turtle up, hey, I'm mounting a thousand marine death-to-the-scourge single file attack force.

Regardless of what type of RTS player you are, you ought to give Eufloria a go. I might be wrong when I call this game a RTS, but it's the closest comparison I could muster. It's on a league of its own, in more than a single aspect, really.



You're not in control of armies of orcs or anything that you might associate with war. Helping along a plant empire colonize asteroids is Eufloria's push for a story. Starting out with little seedlings, you're tasked with exploring space and finding patches in which to sink the roots of your civilization in, quite literally. Early into your journey, though, you discover that not all is quite as it seems when opposing seeds races start competing for fertile ground.

Despite its incredibly simple art style and gameplay, Eufloria packs a lot of depth. It slowly takes you through the core elements of getting a game going, like planting a tree so more seeds are produced. From there, after a few slowly paced missions, you're in control of hundreds of units. Unlike other games that have you micromanaging lots of things at once, though, Eufloria's simple and extremely effective control options make it easy to keep track of just about everything. All it takes for an order to go through is a click or prolonged drag of a mouse (or in my case a single or extended PlayStation 3 button press) and off a group of seeds goes or a tree gets planted.


Due to the easy going but at the same time fast nature of Eufloria, even when I failed I never got frustrated and felt the urge to give up. It's incredibly quick to get things going again, rebuild an "army" and try to take on a challenge again. And if you don't think things are moving fast enough, a speedier game option is just a menu away too.

Aside from the story mode, you have the option to dive into special challenge levels that work like tests for everything you learned. These rank you in a variety of ways, not just for how many points you score, but for how fast you finish the stage and how efficiently you've done so, counting how many units you've built and lost.


There isn't an option to play this online, though, so you're locked with dealing against a moderately calm and pacifist computer controlled enemy. The A.I. won't completely destroy you by attacking as soon as you discover an opposing asteroid but it's not a pushover either. Maybe it's due to how bad I am in this sort of game, but I found myself having just the 'right' amount of challenge with Euflori and for that I'm thankful. I can appreciate a huge hardcore RTS game like SHOGUN2 that offers so many options, tactics and the whatnot, where I can just about finish the earliest of portions in a campaign mode before getting overwhelmed.

I'm just happy to claim that I have a RTS game I can enjoy without getting stressed over the many aspects of managing an army. I can simply click away and point my little friends towards an objective, hoping that they'll be successful. In the middle of all the explosions, deaths, blood and gore that we're so used to seeing with games nowadays, a "little" and simple" game like Eufloria has a reserved spot in my list of favorites any day. |8