misadventures of tron bonne update
i've had this for like five years, and i'm only now getting around to it! part of that was because i could only play it on my psp when it launched on the playstation network and the control scheme was garbage. when i finally did get a ps vita (with customizable button-mapping (nintendo!! what the hell are you doing!!)) i was too distracted with persona 4 and danganronpa and, yes, my millionth first-five-hours of vagrant story. so this collected dust. i picked up mega man legends 1 and 2 over the years, boot them up, felt the jank of the controls, and kinda just.. went back to whatever.
i think part of this has to do with the price of things—i'm more likely to complete something i spend more money on because i feel the weight of that cost when i engage with the given thing. when i pick up 4+ games on a ridiculous steam sale (and the psn has some pretty wild, low prices these days!) those games get shot into a weird oblivion, where the fun was the scandal of obtaining the games for such a cheap price—who knows when i'll have the time to play them...
anyway, this is part of why i made this blog, so i'll get into some stuff i've thought about as i'm just shy of three hours on this play-through of tron bonne.
stuff i'm digging:
- first of all: the voice acting is unbelievably good. did you watch anime in the 90's? did you watch dubbed anime in the 90's? then you know how tron bonne sounds. it's something of a comfort food for me. when i have tons of mindless busywork that i need to accomplish around the house, i'll turn on english dubs of trigun, yu yu hakusho, or even tenchi muyo if i'm feeling particularly lonely, and let them drone on in the background. there's something about that not-quite professional voice acting quality that really puts me at ease. i also love castle in the sky's notoriously whatever dub. anyway, yeah, the voice acting is great in this game.
- the character portraits are also very good. i love it when a game can straddle a 3d environment and still manage to make a 2d overlay that commands just as much character. the character design is very expressive and super fun.
- this game oozes charm and whimsy, and a lot of that is due to the art direction being so clearly inspired by studio ghibli's house style. jeremy parrish did a great write-up on this back in the 1up.com days. [i would have inserted the article here, but apparently there are no archives from that site, which boils my blood because of all the hard work that that crew did is out the window...]
- speaking of studio ghibli's influence, some day i'll write my gigantic piece on how future-boy conan is 100% the source material for legend of zelda: wind waker, from the post cataclysmic water-world scenario, to sidling along a forbidden fortress's sheer walls to save a young girl that seagulls flock to... god, uh, i gotta stay on track here. please hold me to this, readers.
- there's no lighting in this game, (which may sound weird and technical) so the team opted to make detailed textures that created the illusion of.. well.. texture, as well as lighting, which creates a really striking package! faces can be more detailed because they are not limited to the polygonal surfaces they're imposed on (just because the tech was available for that doesn't mean it actually looked good back then. see: most early 3d games.). and the faces in this game.. i'm tellin' ya. it's good stuff. i'm starting to understand why the loss of mega man legends 3 hit so many so hard.
stuff i'm puzzling over:
- i love love love the servbots (the little lego men that you control), but starting the game with over 40 to manage without a concrete concept of how they work within the system of the game itself is a bit overwhelming (i'm guessing the majority of the game is me navigating between 4 kinds of “minigames” to scrounge up dough?). i'm hoping that this starts to open up more and that i can interact with them in meaningful ways that justifies there being 40 of them.. but we shall see.
- i'm having a hard time sitting with the game for more than an hour at a time, and i think that's largely due to the gameplay itself. the game is (right now) broken up into 4 sections: platform-y run-and-gun (that i'm assuming is similar to the mega man legends formula, and is my favorite of the four (and reminds me of solatorobo!)), a box-puzzle game (because there are always box-puzzle games in ps1 games, apparently), a first-person dungeon-crawler, and a free-roam collectathon gauntlet that has mercilessly obliterated me time and time again (and my poor thumb, dealing with the vita's d-pad (which is good.. but.. not good for an hour of frantic “thumb”-ing)). each one of these games lasts about ~15 minutes, and with the overarching goal of making 10 million zenny off of these minigames, it doesn't do a lot for me insofar as keeping my interest for longer than a couple games at a time. i'm hoping this changes, because i so so so love the world and its characters in a way that i had never expected to—this is my first megaman game and that world has just never really interested me until now.
