The Nintendo DS has proven itself to be quite the repository for “old fashioned” turn-based JRPGs.  From remakes of old Final Fantasies to entirely new creations, a strong library has built up over the years, giving fans plenty to choose from.  With my DS as my trusty companion on my daily commute every day, I have ample time to play through such involved affairs, and I’ve sampled a pretty wide swath of those that are out there.

When I wrapped up Bowser’s Inside Story several weeks back, I sat down to take a look at what to tackle next.  Poking through Amazon’s DS listings, I spotted an upcoming title called Nostalgia.  The game was named such, as the marketing materials told me, both because of its setting and because of its “return” to old-fashioned JRPGs of days gone by.

Unfortunately, the only nostalgia that Nostalgia evokes is for the time before you started playing it.

AS YOU MIGHT INFER

That’s right: I’m not a big fan of Nostalgia.  I can say this with confidence, having played far more of it than I should.  I did this because this was my final game purchase before the holiday season, so I can’t in good conscience buy something to replace it with until after the holidays.  As such, I’ve grited my teeth and barreled through it, long since passing a much more appropriate quitting point.

The main problem with Nostalgia is that it manages to do everything in completely mediocre fashion; the game lacks any critical low points, but it also lacks any exciting high points.  Playing through the game is a static experience, with nothing ever reaching out to grab the player and really pull them in.

AND THEN THAT HAPPENED

The most telling part of Nostaliga‘s failings is with its story; I am often able to forgive a game some other shortcomings if it can weave a tale to entrance me.  Nostalgia does not so much weave a tale as it does slap down a pile of threads and then slip out for lunch.

The game begins in media res (exciting!), with mysterious men in black cloaks trying to force a woman in white to unseal a golden chunk of something from an ancient pedestal.  Just as she is about to give in, bold adventurer Gilbert Brown (think British Indiana Jones) comes bursting in to rescue the girl, thwart the bad guys, and make his escape on his private airship.  Unfortunately for Gilbert, he messes that last bit up and seemingly plunges to his death, with the mysterious girl flying off alone towards the horizon.

At this point, the action shifts back to London, where young Eddie Brown, Gilbert’s son, is informed that his father has gone missing.  Eddie decides this is the time for him to man up and become an adventurer himself, so he kisses his dear mother goodbye, takes up his sword, and rushes out into the world to immediately find a sewer and kill some rats.

Now, I think we can all agree that rat killing in RPGs has moved well beyond the cliche point, with most games now taking a wink-wink nudge-nudge isn’t this ironic view of it.  Well, my advice to designers: stop it.  It’s not funny anymore, it’s just embarrassing (I’m looking at you, too, Dragon Age).

Anyway, beyond rat-based adventuring, you soon meet your first companion, Pad, a tough street kid with a penchant for pining about his long-lost mother.  He immediately joins you on your adventures around the world because, well, why not?  That seems to be the driving motivation of pretty much everything that happens in Nostalgia – just because.  Companions join you, people develop important relationships out of nowhere, and random people are more than willing to divulge crucial information to strangers.  Yes, I understand the designers were trying to evoke a simpler time in RPG history, but simple doesn’t mean that it has to lack any depth whatsoever.  The player will find themselves hard-pressed to care about any of the characters, and even at 80% or so through the game, any explanation as to what’s actually going on remains amazingly elusive.  I simply go from place to place, told to check out a new dungeon and get a new golden widget.  I do this simply so the bad guys can’t have them.  And, to top it off, later on you find out the good guys are also bad guys, which anyone paying even the scantest bit of attention would’ve called from the moment they are introduced.

Shocking, indeed.

AMAZING INNOVATIONS IN THE STATUS QUO

As if not content to show a dogged lack of inspiration in just the plot, the designers of Nostalgia made sure to carry over that flat feeling into all aspects of the gameplay.

The game takes place in a top-down 3D view instantly familiar to anyone who has played any of the recent DS Final Fantasy re-releases, using identical controls and even an identical map system.  Battles, as well, play out with pretty much an identical look to the FF style, but with addition of a turn-order meter to show what order everyone will be acting in (ala FF Tactics).

Again, there isn’t anything here that anyone who’s played a JRPG during the last 20 years hasn’t seen.  Four characters, each with special attacks earned through gathering Skill Points from defeated enemies, hacking away at the same set of three or four enemies throughout each dungeon.  Now, obviously, this is a combat system that has worked before, but it is obviously one that has grown somewhat stale over the years.  On its own, this might not be unforgivable, but coupled with the overall blandness of the game in general, it just becomes all the more crippling a failure.  To make it even worse, the battles are all incredibly easy.  After I assembling my full party, I have gone through the rest of the game without even considering the possibility that I might lose a boss battle, let alone a random encounter (well, one boss battle stopped me up, but that was because I hadn’t bothered to buy healing items for about 5 hours since everything else had been so simple!).  When you face the same, easy, battle situations over and over again, there is just no way a player can possibly maintain interest.  The only time combat proved difficult was in the airship battles, which take place outside of dungeons.

On the world map, the player travels purely by airship.  Flying around, the player can choose to navigate at either low, medium, or high altitude.  Low altitudes let you see the most detail, and have weaker enemies, but restrict travel due to obstacles like mountains and storm clouds.  At high altitude, the airship travels fastest, and can’t be stopped by anything, but exposes the player to the toughest enemies.

Now, part of the reason I picked up this game was because the back of the box promised “Exciting, Tactical Airship Combat!”  This sounded like a fascinating idea, and I was looking forward to give it a try.  In practice, it turns out that the “exciting” combat is exactly the same as regular combat, except that enemies will either be in front of the player, or to the left or right.  In practice, this has absolutely no effect other than that some of your weapons are stronger attacking in certain directions.  You might think that some interesting tactical decision might come in play with this, allowing you to position yourself to do maximum damage, and that thought would make you smarter than the designers, apparently.  Once enemies appear, there is absolutely no way for the player to alter their configuration.  Sometimes enemies will switch position on their own, but that’s about the extent of change that takes place during the battle.  If two enemies appear on your side, and you are decked out with weapons that are strongest attack the front, well, tough luck.  Your crew never took the training on how to turn, it seems.

The other thing about airship battles that causes them to drag the down even further is that they are generally quite difficult, feeling far tougher than any dungeon battles.  Part of this stems from the fact that you only have the single ship HP meter instead of four separate characters, and if that drops to zero, it’s game over.  Beyond that, though, the enemies in the sky hit a heck of a lot harder, and seem to have tens of times more HP compared to other enemies in the game.  Most of the player’s money early in the game will be spent buying endless repair kits to try and survive long enough in the sky to make it to the next city to buy tougher airship parts.  Even later in the game, with a fully decked out airship and free roam of the world, the enemies in the upper elevations still make for some mighty slug fests.

A SIDE ORDER OF POINTLESS

If you tire of the tedious combat and dragging main story, fear not!  The designers have taken this into consideration and provided a series of equally as uninteresting side quests to occupy your time.

First and foremost are the Adventurer’s Guild missions, which are available in every major city in the world.  By strolling into the guild, the player can pick up a mission from the list of those available at their rank, then head off into the world to complete it.  Completing these missions, which mostly consists of going back to previous dungeons and finding lost items, gives the player Adventurer points and money.  The game also promises that some missions will give you special items, but after advancing through three ranks of missions, I have yet to get a single one.  So, basically, you run these missions to grind out extra EXP and money, both of which are in ample supply if you simply play through the main game anyway.  On top of that, most of the missions tell you to go to a specific city and see a specific person in a specific place, but some neglect to give you a place, and require you to run around town in circles talking to every NPC you see until you find the right one.  As fun as this may sound, it isn’t.

Speaking of vague instructions, the second series of bonus missions consist of tracking down “World Treasures.”  When speaking to NPCs, occasionally one will tell you about some special ruins, monuments, or the like, and then give you a vague area where you might find them (“west of New York,” for instance).  Here, the player must take their airship and head to the area and question, flying around until they see the sparkle of light that announces they’ve found the mystery location.  At this point, nothing happens.  You don’t get to explore the ruins, or get any special treasures.  You just fly back to London and tell a guy that you found one.  I am going to assume that, perhaps after finding all of them, the player does get some kind of special reward.  This is the sort of task designed for mindless completionists, and has absolutely no motivating factor for the player to indicate why they should bother looking for any of them.

OVERALL

Nostalgia strikes me as the kind of game that could’ve been produced by a computer, instructed to analyze a handful of other JRPGs and to create a new distillation.  Yes, it certainly manages to evoke the mechanics and feel of old-school JRPGs, but it completely fails to evoke any of the charm.  This is the kind of game that, if it came out in the days of the SNES, probably would’ve been considered a fun romp, but when looked back at ten years later, would never have stood the test of time.  That being the case, why bother creating it now so it can fail the test of time immediately?  Bringing back the real nostalgia for those days gone by requires more than simply copying and pasting a set of gameplay tropes and throwing a hackneyed plot on the top.  Look at the aforementioned remakes of the older Final Fantasies – with only a bit of graphical spit and polish, those games still hold their own against more modern titles, because they had the fundamentals to stand strong.

Nostalgia, while probably not actually crafted by a computer, was more likely assembled by a roomful of uninspired designers told to try and cash in the DS’s strong JRPG fan userbase.  Sadly, with that lack of inspiration leeching into every aspect of the game, there is little here to keep a player entertained or engaged, let alone to justify purchasing this title.  Save your money and find a better JRPG to occupy your time; there are plenty out there.