Two games I played recently. One I finished, the other one I gave up on.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

This is an interesting little DS game. Basically, you play through a mystery-based story while frequently solving puzzles. The puzzles generally have nothing at all to do with the story. You just talk to someone and they say something like "Hey, I hear you like puzzles. Try this one!". Then you go into a completely separate screen where you're given some sort of logic puzzle to solve. Once you're done, you return to the story.

Many of the puzzles in the game -- especially earlier on -- are simply trick questions. If a puzzle has an obvious answer, that answer is surely wrong, and you need to think about it harder. That much I didn't really like. However, not all the puzzles were like that, and many of them -- particularly later in the game -- were pretty interesting, and in general I had fun with them. In the end, I ended up hunting down and solving every puzzle in the game, including the hidden and bonus puzzles. This was a little annoying at times, as finding many puzzles required going to the right place and tapping the right point on the screen, and I do not like undirected searches, but it turned out I was able to ask Amy exactly where to look for my last few missing puzzles (which she had coincidentally found on her own), so it wasn't so bad.

The story was actually pretty good, too. It was not interactive: the only this the player ever has to do is walk to the next place to continue the story, possibly solving puzzles along the way. However, like any good mystery, they managed to give just enough subtle hints so that if you thought about it hard enough, you could figure out what was going on before all was revealed in the end. Furthermore, the writing was pretty good; I rarely felt like any piece of dialog sounded cheesy or that the characters did not act realistically, unlike with some games ::glances down::.

Overall, a pretty good game. Great for plane rides.

Blue Dragon

I had high hopes for this game, given who worked on it: It was produced by Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series, and it even had Nobuo Uematsu doing the music.

Alas, the writing in this game absolutely sucks. Almost any time there was dialog, I found myself in various states of disgust, from rolling my eyes to cringing to banging my head against the wall. The game really feels like it was written by children. Many aspects of the story seem like they were invented purely at random, and the characters just do not act the way real human beings would, facing the situations they are in.

Furthermore, the gameplay sucks. It's the standard Chrono Trigger system: as you walk around, you see enemies; if you touch them, you enter a standard FF-style turn-based battle. I'm thoroughly bored with this already, but to make matters worse, these battles never, ever presented a challenge. I literally killed most enemies in the first round, often before they even had a chance to make a move. On one hand, this is nice because it made battles less tedious than they would be if I actually had to work for them, but on the other hand it means that vast swaths of the game consisted of repeatedly doing the same thing: entering battles, killing everything in the first round, and then continuing. Even with the battles being so easy, there was often one or two hours of walking around and fighting between any two plot-developing events.

The one thing I can say impressed me about the game was the graphics, but that's probably because I haven't played many X-Box 360 games. The art was very detailed and had an interesting style to it. It wasn't Okami or anything, but it was definitely good. But I don't play games for looks. The music, meanwhile, while clearly being Nobuo -- I can recognize his style -- for the most part did not impress me.

I spent over 30 hours playing this game, quitting somewhere in the middle of disc 2 of 3. So, I think I gave it enough time to get good. It failed.