A mystery is concealed within this review! When hurtling into mystery, mysteries call up more mystery. What is a mystery without mystery when mystery proceeds? Hurtle on toward the ideal of solving all mystery! Open! Catherine! Let's review this game!
Goichi Suda, or Suda51, has always been known for his unique brand of games. I have always liked his style of game. I started with No More Heroes on the wii, loved it, and soon afterwards I borrowed a copy of Killer 7 from a friend of mine and loved it too. Now I have just finished a recent release of his: Flower, Sun, and Rain on the Nintendo DS. Although this game is riddled with repetition, and is somewhat repetitive, and repeats itself too much, it is still a very entertaining adventure game.
In FSR, you play as Sumio Mondo, a "searcher" by trade. Mondo has been hired by a hotel called "Flower Sun and Rain" on a small island to stop a terrorist attack on an airplane. The twist is that due to a magnetic wave of big science words, the hotel goes through the same day over and over, each day ending with a plane blowing up. This groundhog day effect is actually probably a good thing since Mondo is such a pushover that anytime someone asks for his help he does anything they want, meaning he gets stuck helping out everyone he meets.
The game plays with two main parts: walking and solving puzzles, and there is a lot of both. every day, Mondo wakes up in his room and has to walk toward the aiport, getting a little closer every day. This means you have to walk over the same areas over and over and unfortunately, the world is surprisingly large and as such requires alot of walking to get from A to B. You can find yourself walking for up to 5 minutes at a time. the puzzle aspect of the game has mondo using his suitcase hacking computer, named Catherine, to unlock doors, fix devices, and even mix drinks. You find the need to use catherine in both the story events and the bonuses, where you have to find lost items and open the jars that hold them, or at least the tickets representing them, which you bring to the front desk for what did not seem like much of a reward to me.
When you solve puzzles using Catherine, you almost always d go through the same 4 steps. Hear what someone says about the puzzle, find the item to hack into, use the guidebook (a small book with various articles and information about the hotel) to find some number, then use Catherine to input the proper digits into the item you need to hack. the fact that every puzzle uses Catherine in this way means that most puzzles just require you to find numbers in the guidebook, or to do some simple math. either way it gets old.
Maybe Suda wanted players to get the feel of playing the same day over and made everthing so repetitive on purpose, or maybe he just ran out of ideas. Either way, this game just feels so repetitive. But what caught my attention just as much was the pixellated graphics in all of the environments and the poor character geometry. This game is a direct port of a Japan-only PS2 game, so some graphic downfall is expected in the console change, but at the same time I can't help but think that since the story, gameplay, and puzzles are already taken care of, the least the game developers could do is change the graphics up a bit so it doesn't look so bad. the floors look like a big group of oddly shaped squares and the characters look like they are made of lego, or to a lesser extent, mega-blocks. Nonetheless, the game has a bit of a stylish look, even if it is clouded by pixellation.
Despite the obvious flaws, FSR is a mildly entertaining game with an interesting feel and a cool, smart, and often funny storyline. In the end, I can really only recommend this game if you like Suda51's artistic game style and can stand a lot of repetitive gameplay.
6.5/10
Goichi Suda, or Suda51, has always been known for his unique brand of games. I have always liked his style of game. I started with No More Heroes on the wii, loved it, and soon afterwards I borrowed a copy of Killer 7 from a friend of mine and loved it too. Now I have just finished a recent release of his: Flower, Sun, and Rain on the Nintendo DS. Although this game is riddled with repetition, and is somewhat repetitive, and repeats itself too much, it is still a very entertaining adventure game.
In FSR, you play as Sumio Mondo, a "searcher" by trade. Mondo has been hired by a hotel called "Flower Sun and Rain" on a small island to stop a terrorist attack on an airplane. The twist is that due to a magnetic wave of big science words, the hotel goes through the same day over and over, each day ending with a plane blowing up. This groundhog day effect is actually probably a good thing since Mondo is such a pushover that anytime someone asks for his help he does anything they want, meaning he gets stuck helping out everyone he meets.
The game plays with two main parts: walking and solving puzzles, and there is a lot of both. every day, Mondo wakes up in his room and has to walk toward the aiport, getting a little closer every day. This means you have to walk over the same areas over and over and unfortunately, the world is surprisingly large and as such requires alot of walking to get from A to B. You can find yourself walking for up to 5 minutes at a time. the puzzle aspect of the game has mondo using his suitcase hacking computer, named Catherine, to unlock doors, fix devices, and even mix drinks. You find the need to use catherine in both the story events and the bonuses, where you have to find lost items and open the jars that hold them, or at least the tickets representing them, which you bring to the front desk for what did not seem like much of a reward to me.
When you solve puzzles using Catherine, you almost always d go through the same 4 steps. Hear what someone says about the puzzle, find the item to hack into, use the guidebook (a small book with various articles and information about the hotel) to find some number, then use Catherine to input the proper digits into the item you need to hack. the fact that every puzzle uses Catherine in this way means that most puzzles just require you to find numbers in the guidebook, or to do some simple math. either way it gets old.
Maybe Suda wanted players to get the feel of playing the same day over and made everthing so repetitive on purpose, or maybe he just ran out of ideas. Either way, this game just feels so repetitive. But what caught my attention just as much was the pixellated graphics in all of the environments and the poor character geometry. This game is a direct port of a Japan-only PS2 game, so some graphic downfall is expected in the console change, but at the same time I can't help but think that since the story, gameplay, and puzzles are already taken care of, the least the game developers could do is change the graphics up a bit so it doesn't look so bad. the floors look like a big group of oddly shaped squares and the characters look like they are made of lego, or to a lesser extent, mega-blocks. Nonetheless, the game has a bit of a stylish look, even if it is clouded by pixellation.
Despite the obvious flaws, FSR is a mildly entertaining game with an interesting feel and a cool, smart, and often funny storyline. In the end, I can really only recommend this game if you like Suda51's artistic game style and can stand a lot of repetitive gameplay.
6.5/10