On a scale of F to A++, where an A is damned good and an A++ is a shining beacon of blissful gaming...I give LIP a C+. In short, there's nothing about it that is completely awful, but there's also nothing about it that's particularly good. If you asked me to compliment something about the game that's actually in the game, I'm not even sure what I would say.
Beginning with the story and gameplay, the two things at the core of any Action RPG, LIP is mediocre from almost every angle. The story quite literally has you wandering from town to nearly-identical town in an exceptionally strict pattern, each and every time ridding the town of monsters, getting thanked, and battling your way to the next one to repeat the cycle. The characters are drab anime/RPG archetypes to a T, the townspeople and monsters basically all say the same things, and the story-arc is generic, predictable, and no more charming or graceful than any other assembly-line RPG you can find.
The gameplay is more of a mixed bag. It's clear that the people designing LIP wanted to do something on the unusual side, and I will happily give them credit for that. Combat-sequences are restricted to special story-event battles that happen only one time each as you progress through the game. When those aren't happening, you're left completely alone to move about freely, with no threats to your HP and not so much as even a single platform to worry about landing on.
First of all, this leaves us with the problem of the game being totally unstimulating anytime you're not fighting or wander-chatting in towns (which happens to be a lot of the time). I guess I'll admit that it's nice not to have to deal with threats and obstacles while you're getting ready for your next battle, but LIP often lets this slide to the point of dullness.
The real problem with the gameplay is that the combat-sequences themselves are terribly repetitive and simplistic. Imagine a 2D vs. fighter where you only have 2 attack moves, plus block and jump. Now imagine that instead of fighting one strong and versatile opponent per battle, you instead fight a series of weak and clumsy opponents who literally line up to take a beating from you one at a time. It's not far off from what you might imagine in an Atari 2600 game. Every opponent has a pattern, and once you figure it out, you simply exploit it to hit them over and over without taking any hits yourself. In it's best moments, there's a certain rhythm and groove to it; mostly, though, it's just rote work. Some of the battles go on for 15+ minutes as well, with what seems like dozens of enemies in a single long, tedious line.
The intro and ending anime videos are well done. It's too bad that we didn't get proper videos in between chapters, though. Speaking of which, those in-between parts were rather static and half-assed.
The music? A couple of catchy moments, but nothing really memorable. YMMV.
Finally, the graphics. I was definitely looking forward to this before I started playing. Without a doubt, some of the backdrops in LIP were very well conceived. The trouble is that with some exceptions, the execution itself is always fairly boring. It's quite a disappointment, because this part was so close to being great, you can taste it. Every time I saw a new area, I thought to myself that it looked nice, but it would have been so much better if they had just upped the ante a little bit. Another true parallax layer, some more old-school slate-parallax, animated tiles, palette cycling - a few simple tweaks like this would have made LIP shine. Maybe it's silly to pick on this kind of thing, but when you're using a generic graphical style, which is certainly true of LIP, pushing the special effects can really help your game look nice. Remember, LIP came out on a 32-bit system in March of 1997. To put it mildly, the game as it is would have just about looked ordinary on the SNES in 1993.
Actually, I think a good description of LIP (along with many other PC-FX games) is that it's basically a 16-bit era game with a tiny bit of prettied up colors and a very low-end production. All kinds of little rough spots show how the designers probably had very limited resources to work with and must have been rushing. To name a few: certain cloud tiles clearly and awkwardly look like squares, the positions of doors and the lengths of rooms were not optimized for ease of play, there are a few typos in the script, story events don't have a lot of staging and action with the sprites, art assets are copied all over the place, and the list goes on. I'd say this is a good example of a game where another 6 weeks in the oven would have helped it out a hell of a lot... or at least it could have raised it to a more respectable B+.
What else can I say? It was an OK experience, but there are so many games that are better than this one, it feels like a waste of time to play it. Sorry FX fans, but I wouldn't call this one a feather in the system's cap.
Topic: Continuing exploration of the PC-FX library (Read 843 times)
