There has always been one thing about the traditional game review outlets that bothered me: they often have more qualitative information than quantitative information. I’ve more often found statements like “combat is tedious” as opposed to what the combat system actually allows (or doesn’t allow) the player to do that makes it tedious. The reason I bring this up is because I only recently heard about the Mystery Dungeon series, and I was looking for some hard facts on the roguelike mechanics behind the recently released DS version of “Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer.” The traditional reviews, while saying things about how frustratingly difficult the game is and how upgrading equipment was key to success, don’t include enough specifics to satisfy my curiosity. What do you actually do in combat? What kind of upgrades are available? What are the upgrade costs? What kind of bonuses are conferred? This isn’t the first time I’ve been annoyed by the difficulty of finding these details somewhere other than GameFAQs, where I’d likely run into all sorts of story spoilers and winning strategies (which I’d rather try to determine for myself). I can’t really say I blame the reviewers – going into too much detail is likely to bore the majority of readers that just want the impressions. And their job is, quite frankly, to review.
So I figured I’d start posting game mechanics “dissections”, in which I’ll describe in detail (and, hopefully, in a mostly unbiased way) the unique mechanics behind the more complex games and systems. I’ll probably avoid getting into number-crunching and formulas – just enough detail so you can decide for yourself whether you’d like to give the game a go.
I think I’ll kick the series off shortly with a look at “Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3″, but it’ll probably be at least a couple of weeks before I get to it – I’ve got a few other articles I’d like to write beforehand. Sorry for the dearth of posts lately – work has been keeping me busy, and when I get home after a long day, I more frequently find myself preferring to play the games rather than write about them.
