It's a sad day on NTSC-UK when a downloadable release called Islands of Wakfu hits one of the major consoles, and not a single person writes anything about it. In a sense, Wakfu pretty much ticks all the boxes for generating a First Play thread. Hand drawn graphics? Check. Vaguely Japanese, but actually French? Check? Strange gameplay with no obvious comparisons? Check. Dragon spit balls? Check.
You might know of the Dofus and Wakfu MMORPGs. They're quite successful in French speaking countries - like adultery and phlegm. Well, this a spin off game developed by a new arm of the company that produced them and is a sort of action RPG. I say sort of, as it's quite odd.
Firstly it looks odd.
It's quite pretty. The screens are static hand drawn affairs, which look painterly and Japanese. Overlaid are sprites that can move only in 4 of the ordinal points, and are animated in a rudimentary fashion. The resulting visuals are pretty, but odd. Like the Scarlett Johansson of the gaming world.
Production values are similarly confised elsewhere. e.g. The world is littered with NPCs who usually interact with you by doing a sort of squeaky "we didn't have enough money to voice track this" noise. You get this a lot on XBLA, but you really get the impression it wasn't a creative descision here.
The central gimmick is the fact that you can play the game in co-op. The closest example I could think of is perhaps something like a Tales game crossed with Eternal Sonata. So, you and a friend (and if you have a friend or partner willing to play this with you, then I'm jealous) can sort of embark on a JRPG lite. Something like Sacred 2 crossed with Odin Sphere. Perhaps. I dunno.
Anyhoo, you wander about as a little girl and a flying dragon (in single player mode you can switch between the two forms by pressing Y) interacting with NPCs, doing quests and hitting things in realtime with a combat system that involves a lot of pressing XXXA or AAAX or XAXAXA. That sort of thing. Light light hard. Hard hard.... light. COMBO. The combat is rubbish.
The plot is unimportant, and involves a thingy about to crash into painterly world, a young girl being important, unaware of her destiny, passing some tests, questing, saving world. Seriously, I almost lost conciousness writing that. But the actual telling of the plot is decidedly weird. The English is sort of flowery and odd, with strange turns of phrase. Almost as if it was written in French, then translated into Japanese and then back into English. Indeed, the entire game is so odd it feels mainly as if it was made by non-gamers and artists. There's no clear idea of objectives. There's a strange wobbly splodge on the screen, the purpose of which I couldn't fathom. The game lets you teleport for no especially good reason, which also makes the combat even worse. Objectives are highlighted by showing you the place you're supposed to go momentarily with no context or direction.
I absolutely didn't enjoy playing it.
It was in turns archaic, confused and trying ever so hard to be liked. But I'm absolutely going to buy it, because as an XBLA release it's as mad as a bucket of aubergines. How this got through approval at either a company or Microsoft level to be put before the XBLA audience is beyond me. It's about as commercially viable as selling a Swiss Army Knife designed for the under 3s. Utterly weird.
Which is why I'm buying it, and so should you. Because NTSC-UK is the only hope these people have. I imagine this took loads of work, and there's lots of shiny faced guys and girls called Pierre and Florence waiting to see if their next paycheque is going to come through so they can buy a baguette come Monday. They fear it isn't. But we can change all that, just by sending them 800 moon points.
Do it today people. Mobilise!
You might know of the Dofus and Wakfu MMORPGs. They're quite successful in French speaking countries - like adultery and phlegm. Well, this a spin off game developed by a new arm of the company that produced them and is a sort of action RPG. I say sort of, as it's quite odd.
Firstly it looks odd.
It's quite pretty. The screens are static hand drawn affairs, which look painterly and Japanese. Overlaid are sprites that can move only in 4 of the ordinal points, and are animated in a rudimentary fashion. The resulting visuals are pretty, but odd. Like the Scarlett Johansson of the gaming world.
Production values are similarly confised elsewhere. e.g. The world is littered with NPCs who usually interact with you by doing a sort of squeaky "we didn't have enough money to voice track this" noise. You get this a lot on XBLA, but you really get the impression it wasn't a creative descision here.
The central gimmick is the fact that you can play the game in co-op. The closest example I could think of is perhaps something like a Tales game crossed with Eternal Sonata. So, you and a friend (and if you have a friend or partner willing to play this with you, then I'm jealous) can sort of embark on a JRPG lite. Something like Sacred 2 crossed with Odin Sphere. Perhaps. I dunno.
Anyhoo, you wander about as a little girl and a flying dragon (in single player mode you can switch between the two forms by pressing Y) interacting with NPCs, doing quests and hitting things in realtime with a combat system that involves a lot of pressing XXXA or AAAX or XAXAXA. That sort of thing. Light light hard. Hard hard.... light. COMBO. The combat is rubbish.
The plot is unimportant, and involves a thingy about to crash into painterly world, a young girl being important, unaware of her destiny, passing some tests, questing, saving world. Seriously, I almost lost conciousness writing that. But the actual telling of the plot is decidedly weird. The English is sort of flowery and odd, with strange turns of phrase. Almost as if it was written in French, then translated into Japanese and then back into English. Indeed, the entire game is so odd it feels mainly as if it was made by non-gamers and artists. There's no clear idea of objectives. There's a strange wobbly splodge on the screen, the purpose of which I couldn't fathom. The game lets you teleport for no especially good reason, which also makes the combat even worse. Objectives are highlighted by showing you the place you're supposed to go momentarily with no context or direction.
I absolutely didn't enjoy playing it.
It was in turns archaic, confused and trying ever so hard to be liked. But I'm absolutely going to buy it, because as an XBLA release it's as mad as a bucket of aubergines. How this got through approval at either a company or Microsoft level to be put before the XBLA audience is beyond me. It's about as commercially viable as selling a Swiss Army Knife designed for the under 3s. Utterly weird.
Which is why I'm buying it, and so should you. Because NTSC-UK is the only hope these people have. I imagine this took loads of work, and there's lots of shiny faced guys and girls called Pierre and Florence waiting to see if their next paycheque is going to come through so they can buy a baguette come Monday. They fear it isn't. But we can change all that, just by sending them 800 moon points.
Do it today people. Mobilise!
There are a few frustrating moments in co-op (certain bosses are clearly designed for 1p only...), but on the whole it was very enjoyable.
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