Those who know about the game will already know enough to not learn anything about the game from this post. Those who don't know, likely won't care. But that's life.
IGN article
The official site
Magic Box images
Essentially, it's a horror title that focuses on an older woman being tormented by a group of cruel teenagers, and the pure surreality that surrounds them all.
This particular snippet from the IGN article interests me:
When they first began making the game, their goal was to show a certain "irkiness" by making people think about the difference between the way children think and the way adults do. Killing a bug may be a normal action for a child, but you rarely see adults taking pleasure in it. We were told that the idea they used as a launching point was the question, "What if children were ordering me around? How would I feel?"
This is one to watch, I think.
Rule of Rose
Official release date for North America: August 2006.
Gamestop says August 29th.
Official word from Atlus: Nothing is going to be cut from the game in terms of content. Hooray!
Gamestop says August 29th.
Official word from Atlus: Nothing is going to be cut from the game in terms of content. Hooray!
Re: Rule of Rose
Here, teenagers don’t waste their time torturing old people, alter all, we have institutions that do that for us, my Grandma is in one.aso wrote:Those who know about the game will already know enough to not learn anything about the game from this post. Those who don't know, likely won't care. But that's life.
IGN article
The official site
Magic Box images
Essentially, it's a horror title that focuses on an older woman being tormented by a group of cruel teenagers, and the pure surreality that surrounds them all.
This particular snippet from the IGN article interests me:
When they first began making the game, their goal was to show a certain "irkiness" by making people think about the difference between the way children think and the way adults do. Killing a bug may be a normal action for a child, but you rarely see adults taking pleasure in it. We were told that the idea they used as a launching point was the question, "What if children were ordering me around? How would I feel?"
This is one to watch, I think.
Here's a quick snippet to describe Rule of Rose: interesting story, shitty and somewhat tired gameplay structure, and a very effective soundtrack.
First of all: much like Killer 7, the one-line descriptive snippet you will see for Rule of Rose will somewhat summarise the basics but will touch nothing on what is actually going on. Much like Killer 7 as well, the general storyline will jump around quite a bit until you can finally figure out what the fuck is going on at the end (if you're lucky). If you're going into this for story, plan to stick around for the long haul to the end.
Second: Apparently much of the budget and creative design went into the story, the CG, and the soundtrack, because the gameplay is fairly blah and a little bit unstable. Essentially, your task is to run around, find items, use said items in necessary locations or to open locked doors, and repeat your task in the room after that.
Along the way, you may run into enemies, which you can deal with with a wide variety of weapons (ranging from a Lumberjack's Axe to, amusingly enough, a Dessert Fork).
Now, stabbing/bashing enemies to death with a variety of pointy tools is nothing new, but RoR somehow makes the whole concept worse. Your character is not always certain on where she should be aiming, which translates into missed hits even when you're facing what looks to be the correct direction. This results in quite a bit of trial and error on facing different directions and taking several false swipes until you can get in a good hit.
The downward stomp (used on floored enemies, supposedly to keep them down longer) was completely ineffective and useless. Each attempted stomp seemed to slip just around the enemy, who would slide just out of reach out of the foot. Continued attempts to stomp would continue to miss the enemy, who would get up by this point and make all of said previous effort a total waste of time. Hooray!
Now, as if to deal with all of this, you receive a character in the form of a dog. This dog can not only sniff out necessary items, but also distract enemies or attack certain others. One could summarise his big issue simply by the fact that he essentially leads you right through the game with minimal sidetrips: set a particular item to 'Find', have him go, arrive at destination, and move on to the next item. There are also numerous items you cannot find without Brown. These range from healing items to cans of film and records. The only certain way to find these items is to search out just about every area and follow any trails items you've picked up along the way might give out. The only issue with finding these is that, first time through the game, you are not sure which level has what.
Each level (or 'Chapter') of the game also has a completely different set of items, so whatever you might miss in one chapter is replaced with something else entirely next turn around. So if you miss an item on a previous level, sucks to be you, time to restart or to catch it next time through. Secret items are meant to be secret, yes, and making the healing items a little harder to find is nothing particularly wrong, but doing it in such an excruciating, drawn out, search-every-single-room-with-a-finetooth-comb way is not fun at all.
Finally: The music. Yutaka Minobe (guy behind OSTs of Panzer Dragoon Saga and Skies of Arcadia) has done some truly compelling stuff here. There's a variety of tunes, ranging from somewhat whimsical to creepy and nerve-grating. The variety and quality of these songs just makes them a pleasure to listen to.
So there you have it. Problems and all, I enjoyed it well enough, and am glad Atlus brought it over to the states.
First of all: much like Killer 7, the one-line descriptive snippet you will see for Rule of Rose will somewhat summarise the basics but will touch nothing on what is actually going on. Much like Killer 7 as well, the general storyline will jump around quite a bit until you can finally figure out what the fuck is going on at the end (if you're lucky). If you're going into this for story, plan to stick around for the long haul to the end.
Second: Apparently much of the budget and creative design went into the story, the CG, and the soundtrack, because the gameplay is fairly blah and a little bit unstable. Essentially, your task is to run around, find items, use said items in necessary locations or to open locked doors, and repeat your task in the room after that.
Along the way, you may run into enemies, which you can deal with with a wide variety of weapons (ranging from a Lumberjack's Axe to, amusingly enough, a Dessert Fork).
Now, stabbing/bashing enemies to death with a variety of pointy tools is nothing new, but RoR somehow makes the whole concept worse. Your character is not always certain on where she should be aiming, which translates into missed hits even when you're facing what looks to be the correct direction. This results in quite a bit of trial and error on facing different directions and taking several false swipes until you can get in a good hit.
The downward stomp (used on floored enemies, supposedly to keep them down longer) was completely ineffective and useless. Each attempted stomp seemed to slip just around the enemy, who would slide just out of reach out of the foot. Continued attempts to stomp would continue to miss the enemy, who would get up by this point and make all of said previous effort a total waste of time. Hooray!
Now, as if to deal with all of this, you receive a character in the form of a dog. This dog can not only sniff out necessary items, but also distract enemies or attack certain others. One could summarise his big issue simply by the fact that he essentially leads you right through the game with minimal sidetrips: set a particular item to 'Find', have him go, arrive at destination, and move on to the next item. There are also numerous items you cannot find without Brown. These range from healing items to cans of film and records. The only certain way to find these items is to search out just about every area and follow any trails items you've picked up along the way might give out. The only issue with finding these is that, first time through the game, you are not sure which level has what.
Each level (or 'Chapter') of the game also has a completely different set of items, so whatever you might miss in one chapter is replaced with something else entirely next turn around. So if you miss an item on a previous level, sucks to be you, time to restart or to catch it next time through. Secret items are meant to be secret, yes, and making the healing items a little harder to find is nothing particularly wrong, but doing it in such an excruciating, drawn out, search-every-single-room-with-a-finetooth-comb way is not fun at all.
Finally: The music. Yutaka Minobe (guy behind OSTs of Panzer Dragoon Saga and Skies of Arcadia) has done some truly compelling stuff here. There's a variety of tunes, ranging from somewhat whimsical to creepy and nerve-grating. The variety and quality of these songs just makes them a pleasure to listen to.
So there you have it. Problems and all, I enjoyed it well enough, and am glad Atlus brought it over to the states.