I've come out and repeatedly stated that one of, if not the greatest problem in the gaming industry is the fact that most companies nowadays are unwilling to innovate. After all, it's much cheaper to license out someone else's engine and just wrap new art around it than it is to build a new one from scratch. There's an old gaming adage..."Nobody's ever been fired for making the same game." It should probably be, more like, "Nobody's ever been fired for remaking a successful game." but that's not the way it was related to me.
The core of the adage is true, though. Rip off someone else's successful idea, and if your version of it fails, it's not looked upon as the designer's fault...it was just a genre who's time had come. You aren't looked upon as an innovator, but you aren't unemployed, either. If you're the guy that tries to make an ambitious, epic game the likes of which has never been seen before, then you're the one that gets canned if it fails.
Seeing as how the prevailing philosophy in the industry now is to design "balls-in" style, I like to be sure I reward the gung-ho types that try and break the mold...create something new that'll catch my eye. Unfortunately, this generally turns out with one of 2 negative outcomes:
1) A minor gimmick tossed into an otherwise same-as-all-the-others game.
This is bad because the gimmick is apparently intended to be the focus of the game. The designers spent the entire time building the game around the gimmick at the loss of gameplay and everything else fun. A good example of this is Mike Tyson's Heavyweight Boxing. The guys at Codemasters thought their facial damage textures were SO COOL that nobody else would notice how much the rest of the game sucked. Wrong.
2.) An "art project".
You get some designer that figures they're a modern day Picasso using pixels and polygons instead of paint and canvas. They make a game with some utterly retarded idea like, "Ok, we'll give them lots of guns, but penalize them for shooting anything because I want to convey the message that violence never solves anything." Then they spend the entire game pounding the message that their "innovative gameplay" is supposed to convey into your skull.
This makes for a very boring game considering that you probably get the point and grasp the message after like, oh, 15-30 seconds. There's no check-box to turn off the overbearing message, so you get 30-40 hours of schooling in an attempt to teach 30 seconds worth of knowledge. (This is true for an incredible number of "critically acclaimed" movies, pieces of artwork, especially performance art, music, and so forth. It will pass for "culture" when we our generation is all dead and buried.)
As you can imagine, neither of these two scenarios is any fun...but games billed as innovative will generally fall into one of those two categories. In the event that something is innovative without being an example of one of the two above fiascos, it invariably goes on to spawn a new genre i.e., Civilization and empire-building strategy games, Dance Dance Revolution and the rhythm genre, Wolfenstein 3D and FPS games...
So, with that preface, we now come to the subject of this review...Boktai. Innovative, original, unique...were words being thrown about for this game. Other words too, like "Hideo" and "Kojima". I figured I may as well give this a shot. It WAS something new after all...a game that required you to go outside to play. That's certainly not status quo. Plus, I've always regarded Kojima as teetering on that fine balance between "mad with brilliance" and "absolute nutball". I figured if he was going to make a definite transition either way, this game would surely be remembered as one of the turning points.
Behold! The DayStar!
While looking at some other previews for the game, other reviewers were noting how it seemed impossible to trick the light sensor with artificial light...no matter what type of bulb they used. Apparently there was some difference between artificial and natural light.
This really shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who's taken high school physics. There's a reason they tell you to get outside, and that's because artificial light can't replicate all the wavelengths of natural light. Back in the 80's there was this huge push to get rid of incandescent and plain white fluorescent bulbs because they contained a very low amount of the wavelengths present in natural light. (which manifested itself in the color difference between the two.) Old artificial light had something like 70% to 80% of the spectrum, it made kids cranky, it hurt your eyes, etc. The closest available recreation of natural light we have available indoors is called "Full Spectrum Light" and I think it hits something like all but a few of the shorter (faster, higher energy) wavelengths.
In any case, if I know this stuff, then obviously someone designing the game with the concept of forcing you to go outside is ALSO going to know this, and they obviously would have tested for it, with more varieties of light bulbs than you are going to have. So go outside, it's the only way to play...unless you're going to set up a big mess of mirrors and lenses. Maybe you can consider that an "extra" mode for the game.
"Exquisite Dead Guy...Rotating In His Display Case."
The story to Boktai is that you are Django, son of a Vampire Hunter who was apparently killed. The story doesn't go into it much, you just know he’s dead. You get the Gun Del Sol, and you're trying to avenge your father's death by killing the "Lord of Groundsoaking Blood". Along for the ride, you've got some freak sunflower sidekick.
Apparently, Immortals are ruining the balance of life and death, and are using their "Undeadening" powers to destroy the Solar tree that provides the world with...I dunno...solarness. Seriously, this game has some of the worst localization I've ever seen. The level after the prologue has you heading to..."Bloodrust Castle". Bloodrust? You don't say. Didn't know that a liquid could get rust on it...but, if you say so Konami. And "Lord of Groundsoaking Blood"? You mean, as opposed to the "Lord of Spongesoaking Blood" and the "Lord of Putting Blood in His Frosted Flakes(TM) with a Slice of Banana"? If Kojima wants to keep his name associated with quality, he should probably start doing some sort of quality control.
Gameplay
Gameplay is very simple. You have a gun powered by the sun. You use it to shoot baddies. Your ultimate goal for each level is to find the "Immortal" in any of the main dunegeons you happen to encounter, you fight a boss fight attach a chain to his coffin, then drag it out to the "Pile Driver", a series of mirrors that will fry that sucker to a never-to-reincarnate crisp that your plain ol' magnifying glass just can't quite match.
In order for the Pile Driver and your gun to work in the game, you need to power it with actual sunlight. You then recharage the gun by standing in in-game sunlight and holding down the A Button. You will eventually get weaponry that does less damage without the light of day, and solar collectors can help you store sunlight for your gun, but the fact of the matter is, you will not be able to pass the Prologue without taking the game out into the sun.
Along the way you'll pick up different frames and lenses for your gun so you can mix and match them to have different effects, as well as level up your lenses so they're more effective at doing their thing.
Puzzle Me This...
Aside from the mundane shooting, the only other thing there is to Boktai is a whole lot of crappy "Shove the Boxes Around", and "Put Something Heavy on this Switch" puzzles. This is the main reason I stopped playing Vagrant Story halfway through. I just got sick of having to move all those stupid boxes around. Now they've made a dramatic, equally insipid comeback. For the most part, these puzzles are laughably easy to solve. They just take time. Move box X, Y, and Z here...voila, bridge. Whoopty doo.
Graphics
It stands to reason that if you knew a game you were designing was on a system where you couldn't make the graphics that sharp, that you wouldn't have extreme close-ups of things because they'd look bad. Your sidekick sunflower thing, Otenko constantly goes in for an EXTREME CLOSE-UP! and looks hideous.
The rest of the game looks all right...for a GBA game. This is far from the best looking GBA game, but it's also far from the worst. Weapon effects are fairly plain, but not awful looking, and there's a lot of repetition/palette swaps for the enemies and items.
Sound
To my surprise, Konami went with some voice-overs on the game. The main character will yell out something like "Taiyoooo!" when recharging his gun, and Otenko will say "Otenko" and "Taiyoooo!" and awful lot, too. (I don't know what 'Taiyo' means except that there was a pop group named "Taiyo to Ciscomoon" in Japan that broke up 3-4 years back.) I was completely surprised by this. The only other GBA game that had this much vocal work was Naruto...and there wasn't much else to that game at all.
Overall
This is an incredibly simple and shallow game for all the buzz it was being given. Bottom Line: This game is for kids only. No adult I know has time to do anything in the early morning hours aside from work, and supposedly attend class/walk off the hangover. The puzzles are easy, the game gives you more health power-ups than you will ever use, and there isn't a single enemy that's remotely challenging after you pick up the second gun frame in the Prologue.
All the "innovation" that this game was supposed to entail amounts to nothing but a big pile of Company Dinner-Fed, Marketing Grade manure. It's like Metal Gear Solid Advance Light. Minor stealth elements with a side of pushing boxes onto switches doesn't make your gimmick a game. In fact, this whole thing smells to me like one of Kojima's wacky Sociological experiments. "Can you get gamers to go outside and play?" Or maybe this game was marketed to parents. "Get your kids to go OUTSIDE and play!" This is almost worse than the idea he had to make a game that would destroy itself when you got killed. Fortunately for him, he never made that one happen.
Once you do get outside and play, you notice it's really buggy...outside. There's nothing I need less in a video game experience then to become painfully aware that some black ant has decided that a particular square millimeter of my back would be the PERFECT place to clamp his jaws for a second. I get up and go outside plenty. But when I'm there, I'm moving around, playing Basketball, or Ultimate Frisbee, or Paintball. Anything but making myself some big sedentary pile of food for all of Nature's Undesirables.
If MGS3: Snake Eater turns out bad, you heard it here first. I'm throwing my vote in to the "Kojima's joined the Nutball Alliance" pile. Doesn't mean he can't make something great, prove me wrong, and turn me right back around...I'm just saying that's what I think right now. For me, Boktai will go down as a cross between Bad Innovation Fiascos 1 and 2. A boring, gimmicky art project that still isn't really any fun to play. If you're an adult with a life and or job (I stumbled into a day off after walking in to work today.) take that overall score down 3 points, because that's how disappointed you're going to feel when you discover that you sacrificed other parts of your life to play this instead. You will find that this is a very, very easy put down, walk away from, and pop up on Ebay. Since you can't really rent GBA games from anywhere, that's only way I'd recommend buying this game...for your kid.
