BoxBoy! is a game that subverts your expectations. The game looks like it belongs on the original Game Boy, but even there it wouldn't seem visually inspired, and the initial puzzles are almost off-puttingly simplistic. However, this black and white platforming game about an anthropomorphic box offers up new challenges in such rapid succession that you quickly progress from smirking condescension over its simplicity to satisfying consternation caused by its more elaborate creations.
The puzzles, particularly in the beginning, can be finished in less than a minute, but this actually works in the game's favor. Like Tetris or any number of other puzzle games, after you finish one round, it always feels like you have time for just one more. That brevity is especially well-suited to a handheld platform like the 3DS, where you have time to solve a few levels while sitting on the bus, or in between TV commercial breaks.
Your goal in each stage is to navigate from point A to point B, generally through narrow, obstacle-filled passages. You run and jump over spikes and pits just like in any other platformer, but what makes your character special is his ability to spawn boxes. The number of simultaneous connected boxes you can create at one time varies with each stage, though you always control how many you want to create at a time. And when you make a new set of boxes, the previous ones disappear. Create one and toss it around for a quick step up, or turn three into an impromptu set of stairs that you push to bridge a hazardous gap. Unlike you, these boxes are not sentient and their only purpose is to help you get around. Instead of neatly detaching yourself from your box bundle, you can also choose to keep it attached and use it like an additional limb. In that role, it can be used to press buttons, lift you out over chasms, or transport you through tight spaces using your ability to reabsorb the squares like grappling hook.
You die often while trying to find the correct box placement to safely traverse a level, but checkpoints are so frequent that it almost feels like there's no punishment for failing. Instead, you're able to plot out a course using focused trial and error without having to repeat puzzles you already know how to do flawlessly. While the game keeps throwing new deadly impediments in your way, you eventually get to the point where you can tell at a glance what blocky shapes you need to chain together to survive. That's when the challenge becomes not just getting to the end, but collecting all of the crowns.
Early on, you run into these optional collectibles as part of making your way normally through each stage; in later levels, the crowns are purposefully placed in a way that requires careful box management. The solution to solving some of the more devious level layouts would only come to me after putting the game away for several hours and coming back with a fresh mind. Suddenly, the answer would stand out as ridiculously obvious, but I not only felt like a genius for figuring out combinations of moving, extending, and retracting boxes, but I also learned valuable lessons for overcoming later stages.
Your basic abilities never change, although you're eventually able to summon more than one set of blocks, and the unlockable costumes you earn by collecting crowns and beating levels are almost purely cosmetic, outside of a lone, late-game bunny costume. But that simplicity is what keeps the game exciting and the puzzles fresh. There are no obstacles that you need to come back to after you unlock a new ability or upgrade; from the moment you start the game, you have everything you need to solve every puzzle: your wits.
BoxBoy! may not make the best first impression, but through the course of my adventure, I began embuing the cute, blocky protagonist with his own personality. To me, he is strong-willed hero willing to brave adversity and overcome any obstacle. He just happens to also be a two-tone square. But going deeper than its simple exterior reveals a game filled with ingenious puzzles and a clever, box-manipulating mechanic. It does what a good puzzle game is supposed to: serve up a challenge and make you feel smarter for figuring out the solution, which was right in front of you all along. When I started BoxBoy!, I thought it would be a game for kids. In the end, it felt like a game especially made for me.
If you chip away at Remnants of Isolation's outer shell--its piano-heavy soundtrack, turn-based combat, and vibrant color palette--you're left with a lifeless love story. This dyadic core leaks into each subsequent layer, from the party system that never expands beyond a twosome to the title screen overpowered by two tightly clutched hands superimposed over a gang of silhouetted fiends unmoved by the romance. The narrative drives the experience, but the ride is neither touching nor inspiring. The bond between hero and heroine is hampered by the female character's lack of a voice, and the inconsistent writing makes it difficult to care when the male lead fumbles his way through conversations. The surrounding elements have their charm, but Remnants of Isolation falls far short of making a believable or memorable emotional connection.
The stage is set with a scene of isolation. Stowed away in a castle is a lilac-skinned girl with eyes of mismatched colors, absent a voice but masterful with an acoustic instrument that she can summon from thin air. She's alone and seems to have been that way for some time, but that changes once she's mysteriously freed from her prison and runs into a brash, out-of-sorts mage, quick to make friends. Unfortunately, the girl cannot speak to the nature of the castle (or speak at all, for that matter), so the couple must explore its many corridors to discover their purpose for being there and, more importantly, how to escape.
The game plays out in a window--and a tiny one at that.
Learning both characters' connections to the castle can be interesting, but Remnants of Isolation runs just shy of three hours. That gives these two strangers a remarkably short window to get to know each other, let alone foster any sort of tender relationship. Additionally--and I'll continue to press this issue--the female lead is mute. Maybe it's her prolonged confinement that's kept her silent, but robbing such a substantial character of opinions, personality, and any opportunity to connect with the player at a deeper level is a missed opportunity. The text boxes are dominated by the hero, Melchior, who alternates between exposition-heavy blurbs and uncomfortable romantic gestures that he often retracts in embarrassment. The scattered notes that provide context for your environment tend to be well-written and mostly interesting, but the dialogue leads to more eyes rolled than hearts warmed.
The link that the duo shares during battle is much more substantive. Along with a standard physical attack, each character can launch either an "innate" ability or a spell. Using your fire, ice, or lightning magic on its own doles out significant damage, but leading with one character's innate ability and following with the other's spell produces a combination attack that might do double damage, hit multiple targets, or cause myriad status effects. As you gain levels and acquire new abilities, your arsenal of offensive and defensive maneuvers expands, and you often need to experiment mid-battle to come up with combos that hit the hardest.
For a two-character, turn-based system, there's plenty of strategy here. Both players start each battle with just three MP--gaining two additional points per turn--so it's critical to balance your attacks and not lean too heavily on a single spell or character, lest you run your MP dry. The enemies you run into don't go down easy, either, and the creatures you encounter don't often respawn after being defeated. Grinding out levels and currency isn't a viable option, so Remnants of Isolation trusts you to fight the fights presented and choose well-timed techniques over brute force.
Made from Forgiveness Wax, presumably.
Creating new gear and optimizing your characters is rewarding, but the game's linearity and brief runtime don't allow for much variability in how you outfit your party. You earn souls from each battle, and this currency is used to create weapons, armor, and items. If there were a deeper weapons cache--multiple status effects tied to specific items or armor that heavily favored magic defense over physical defense--this system might be more interesting. There's an optimal permutation for each character, and as long as you engage in most battles and smartly spend your souls, you'll easily maximize your gear before the final encounter.
The most emotionally resonant aspect of Remnants of Isolation might just be its sound design. The sweet, soft soundtrack is expertly accented by the satisfying pings and hums associated with even the most ordinary actions. Opening chests and surfing through menus just sounds good, but the visual counterpart does little to complement the sound. Remnants of Isolation was crafted in RPG Maker, so its familiar assets and a run-of-the-mill fantasy aesthetic make for an uneven visual package, and being forced to play in windowed mode doesn't exactly benefit the experience, either.
It just doesn't strike as many chords or hit as many notes as it should. Remnants of Isolation is a truncated RPG that never allows its story or progression system to properly develop, and while the focus on a pair instead of a full party pays off in combat, the woefully undercooked bond between the protagonists never does enough to make you care about any of the three possible endings. It can be sweet, but Remnants of Isolation has far too many potholes to be worth its notably short ride.
Some of the best games for each console come out just as the systems are on their deathbed, cursed to be overlooked as people abandon the old to embrace new systems. Such was the case with Devil Survivor 2, a wonderful Nintendo DS strategic role-playing game that released in early 2012, just in time for shiny new 3DS offerings to overshadow its release. It's taken its sweet time, but Devil Survivor 2 has now come to 3DS with a host of enhancements in tow. And by "enhancements," I mean a lot more than just some 3D retroactively applied to an old game--Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker is essentially two games in a single package, both of which are terrific games in their own right.
The Devil Survivor games are strategy RPGs with a twist. Like many games of this sort, you move characters around a grid-based map, carefully utilizing turns and positioning to gain a tactical advantage over your foes. However, Devil Survivor adds another layer to this. Instead of just controlling a squad of individual units, each unit represents a team of three characters. When combat is initiated, the view switches to a battle screen where you choose commands for all of your characters. By cleverly exploiting enemy weaknesses and targeting vital parts of teams, you can earn extra combat turns to perform additional actions. But the enemies can also do the same to you, which can be devastating when you encounter hordes of fiercer foes.
Careful decision-making is a must at all times. Do you target the weaknesses of the flanking troops to get extra turns or go for the tougher leader to take down the whole squad at once? Will attacking an easy mark put you in range of something more dangerous? Should you substitute in weaker demon companions to earn bonuses like added range and movement? There's a tremendous amount of depth to the combat, and it's put to the test in some of the best boss fights of the genre. In these battles, you're faced with terrifying, all-powerful beings who possess attacks that can absolutely decimate you--fierce long-range fire cannons, repeated multi-hitting strikes, multiple parts that regenerate after a set amount of turns--and you truly have to use your wits to figure out just how to take them down. Fortunately, you can use an infinite number of free battles to strengthen your team, along with access to an auction site for demon contracts and a function to fuse demons into even stronger forms. You need to make heavy use of these to succeed.
The game is split into two scenarios: the Septentriones and the Triangulum. You choose the scenario you want when you start the game. The Septentriones scenario is essentially the entire original game, tasking you and your friends in Tokyo with surviving and quelling a world-rending disaster with the aid of a mysterious demon-summoning phone app. The Triangulum scenario picks up after the end of the Septentriones story, restarting the cycle of destruction, despair, and chaos with a new set of cosmic invaders in a world that's been transformed in some very significant ways. What is the meaning of the almighty beings and the all-consuming forces attacking mankind? Can the seemingly endless cycle of destruction ever be halted? You must answer those questions during these two quests.
Because the original game is more than three years old at this point, you'll probably want to jump into the Septentriones scenario first if you haven't played it for a while--or at all. Veterans will immediately see some significant changes here. The first is the difficulty selection, which offers you both easy ("Blessed") and hard ("Apocalypse") settings. (The original game only had a single difficulty setting, which roughly corresponds with Record Breaker's Apocalypse setting.) You can switch difficulty levels on the fly, which is a nice touch--this allows you to do things like grind easy optional battles to build up your demon army's skills while saving the big challenges for the crucial story fights. The other major addition is full voice-over for nearly every line in the game that's not spoken by the lead (whose words you always control via a menu during conversations). Devil Survivor 2 may have the most voicework I've yet heard in a 3DS game, and it's very impressive, with some standout performances for characters like the hero's awkward, uneasy BFF Daichi and egalitarian organizer Ronaldo.
The Septentriones scenario itself is lengthy, taking around 50 hours to complete--and that doesn't take into account the four different endings you can acquire by making different choices and taking sides with certain characters. It's familiar territory if you've played Devil Survivor before, but the big draw in Record Breaker--the Triangulum scenario--is not just a tacked-on afterstory. Taking place after the "true ending" of Devil Survivor 2, it's both a direct follow-up and an alternate universe story to the Septentriones plotline (given what happens at the end of that particular scenario). The cast of heroes reunites to face an all-new threat in a world that is both the same and very different: characters have different backgrounds, someone very important is missing, and a strange new person has taken their place. On top of that, your companions have recurring nightmares about pasts they don't quite remember and visions of strange things happening to the hero's body. While it's not quite as long as the original quest, it's still quite lengthy--I clocked in at about 35 hours on my Triangulum playthrough. Much like the Septentriones quest, there are also three possible endings, so you'll be playing for a while if you want to see everything.
There's a tremendous amount of depth to the combat, and it's put to the test in some of the best boss fights of the genre.
The addition of the Triangulum story elevates Record Breaker from the rest of the intergeneration re-releases that have become popular in the market as of late. While most games are content to offer just an HD (or, in this case, a 3D) upscale, the developers of Record Breaker created what's essentially an entire second game for this package. While that's impressive and commendable, it's brought down a bit by the fact that there's not really much new in terms of gameplay in the second half--you're controlling (mostly) the same cast with the same traits, fusing similar demons to what you had before, and fighting similar enemies. There are a few new bosses, which offer some exceptionally challenging and satisfying fights, but for the most part, it's just more Devil Survivor 2. That's not a terrible thing, given that the core game is so solid, but it's still a smidge disappointing given just how much went into creating a whole new story for the game.
The other major issue is that the requirements for getting the "true endings" are too obtuse in both scenarios. While a few very clear paths lead to obvious conclusions, just getting the option to see the "best" endings requires you to make a lot of correct choices and talk to the right people at the right times. If you mess up just once, sorry buddy, better luck next time. The presence of only five save slots doesn't really help either, especially if you want to run both scenarios. By the time I understood the requirements for getting the true ending in the Triangulum story, every save I had was at a point where it was impossible to go back.
When it comes down to it, though, these complaints seem relatively minor. Devil Survivor 2, in both the original and Record Breaker incarnations, is a great strategy RPG, delivering a potent mix of intense, brilliantly designed combat and a fantastic, endearing cast of fellow survivors. If you missed out the first time around, you should absolutely hop on board for this extended trip to the Apocalypse. If you're coming back for seconds, you'll have a terrific time welcoming our new Triangulum overlords with Megido blasts right to their stupid geometric faces.
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