MEDAL OF HONOR: VANGUARD
Platform: Wii
Publisher: EA

Medal of Honor: Vanguard fails. The Wii controls are clumsy and badly-executed (especially now that Metroid Prime 3 is out), the graphics are lackluster compared even to other Wii games, and the narrative is the same “Rah-rah heroic young men of the Allies off to fight the Axis, and also war is hell” stuff as 99 percent of all World War II dramatizations in every medium.

A lot of this is probably bias on my part, because I remember when the first Medal of Honor game was released and I thought “A WWII first-person shooter? That’ll never catch on!” I’ve since played Doom, Quake, Halo, Half-Life, Metroid Prime, Jedi Knight 2, GoldenEye, Turok, F.E.A.R., and a plethora of other FPS games on both PC and every console since the SNES, and every single one of them was more fun than this.

I understand the desire to evoke historical accuracy. Provide a good World War II FPS and I am confident I could find reasons not to bash it. I am even assured such games exist, and in quantity! Medal of Honor: Vanguard isn’t one of them. It does possess a few qualities that prevent it from sucking totally, but the same could be said for almost every video game ever made, which is why so few review sites give scores below 5 out of 10. Fuzzy Pink Niven’s Law applies: It’s thoroughly mediocre. More better games exist than could be played in a human lifetime. Don’t play it. (PS: This is the Internet. That means I don’t need to explain Fuzzy Pink Niven’s Law.)



BLUE DRAGON
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Microsoft

I think I see what the creators were trying to make with Blue Dragon, and for the most part they made it. But it’s not something I want.

The first monster I fought in Blue Dragon’s dungeon was a poo snake. I thought, “That can’t mean what I think it means.” Then I read the description: A poo snake is a monster that results when a parasite matures within animal poo. It means what I thought it meant. Later on, I killed another monster, which dropped “a small poo.” Searching it, I found some gold.

Blue Dragon is what you’d get if you took a somewhat above-average SNES CRPG with big name creators, left in all the ribald humor that was always taken out of imported Japanese CRPGs, and made it high-definition 3D with voice acting. It’s not on the level of Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger, but I’m guessing that Hironobu Sakaguchi, away from Square Enix, wanted to make the sort of game he used to make before Final Fantasy VII happened. If so, he succeeded. Blue Dragon is not self-important the way Final Fantasy games are, and doesn’t seek to re-define dramatic storytelling or import MMOG combat mechanics to single-player games—it’s just tried-and-true combat and overworld and dungeon exploration married to a generic fantasy CRPG plot set in a generic fantasy CRPG world, with generic character designs by Akira Toriyama and generic fantasy music by Nobuo Uematsu.

I mention those names because Akira Toriyama did Dragon Ball and Nobuo Uematsu did almost all the Final Fantasy music for years. Both are beloved by many fans, and if I just say “generic character designs and generic fantasy music,” I’ll get this email: “How dare you call the music and character designs generic? Don’t you know they’re done by the famous Nobuo Uematsu and Akira Toriyama?” I do know. They’re still generic. Neither man is pushing himself at this point.

Because of the poo thing and the big creator names, and because the villain is an old man with a robot parrot instead of a hawt angsty bishi guy, and because the hero’s sole motivation is “I’ll never give up!” when I started playing Blue Dragon I thought I recognized a deconstruction of the Japanese RPG genre and shonen narratives in general. Wrong. It’s an earnest and reasonably-executed bog-standard example of what I had hoped it satirized. If you’re nostalgic for good-but-not-excellent SNES CRPGs, or if you really liked the original Dragon Ball (not Z) and want something that sort of feels like it, Blue Dragon is for you. Otherwise, enh.

STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD