Unskippable: Pandora's Tower - Are We Sure This Isn't Resident Evil?

[Random Wanderer]

This is actually one of my favorite games- in theory. The game would be awesome, if it weren't on the Wii. That statement isn't a "the Wii is dumb" thing, the motion controls are great in this game. It's just that you can really, really tell the game has been scaled back significantly in order to run at a decent framerate on the Wii hardware. So I played it on an emulator at a resolution of 2560x2112 and wow does it look amazing (ignoring the extremely sparring use of textures because the Wii has no RAM). Strongly suggest this game be played emulated on a powerful PC if you can help it (and while I'm suggesting things, I dislike the english dub. I made an "undub" by putting the japanese audio in my US game, in order to have english subtitles).

Every week it seems like I come here to say that I have no idea what's going on in the story. Even Wikipedia isn't much help.

So the princess was singing at the festival and she got cursed in that big explosion, I got that. The guy and creepy old woman brought her to the tower to get some beast flesh to reverse the curse, that's straightforward enough. But why are they running from the army? If she's the princess, I'd imagine you could get a regiment of troops to help you storm the One Tower with Thirteen Spires and grab all the flesh you'd need. The troops don't even need to know why they are getting this stuff, only that the princess says it's important.

She's not a princess, she's just some girl from a local village who can sing. She volunteered to sing at that festival- anyone could have. I don't remember the plot exactly because I played it a long time ago and it's one of those unnecessarily complicated plots the Japanese love to weave, but the army is just after her because she's, well, a monster that attacked the festival and they want to exterminate her. But there's more to it later on- one of the bad ends is she becomes the monster permanently, and the military capture her and Aaron, and they use her in war. Aaron is disgusted with her monster form and she loses herself in her grief, killing whoever the army tells her to kill.

That may sound like a spoiler, but it's not. This game has maybe 6 endings and all but endings A and B are terrible (in the literary sense, just bad writing), and almost completely removed from any actual events in the game. More like bad fanfiction that made it into the game somehow than a spoiler.

Ok, so you made me look this up just to verify that it was possible to get a "happy" ending out of this game. And it is, so... good. Sometimes games like this are "You can choose between a bad ending that totally screws over the world, a bad ending that just screws over your two characters, a bad ending that has everyone die, a bad ending where they both turn into monsters and eat everyone, and a bad ending where it was a trick all along and there never was a cure and the whole process just unleashed a greater evil upon the world (may overlap with the first option)." As if the creators are standing there laughing at you for thinking you could actually save the girl, and are taking delight in your suffering.

 

[Link Satonaka]

This is actually one of my favorite games- in theory. The game would be awesome, if it weren't on the Wii. That statement isn't a "the Wii is dumb" thing, the motion controls are great in this game. It's just that you can really, really tell the game has been scaled back significantly in order to run at a decent framerate on the Wii hardware. So I played it on an emulator at a resolution of 2560x2112 and wow does it look amazing (ignoring the extremely sparring use of textures because the Wii has no RAM). Strongly suggest this game be played emulated on a powerful PC if you can help it (and while I'm suggesting things, I dislike the english dub. I made an "undub" by putting the japanese audio in my US game, in order to have english subtitles).

Every week it seems like I come here to say that I have no idea what's going on in the story. Even Wikipedia isn't much help.

So the princess was singing at the festival and she got cursed in that big explosion, I got that. The guy and creepy old woman brought her to the tower to get some beast flesh to reverse the curse, that's straightforward enough. But why are they running from the army? If she's the princess, I'd imagine you could get a regiment of troops to help you storm the One Tower with Thirteen Spires and grab all the flesh you'd need. The troops don't even need to know why they are getting this stuff, only that the princess says it's important.

She's not a princess, she's just some girl from a local village who can sing. She volunteered to sing at that festival- anyone could have. I don't remember the plot exactly because I played it a long time ago and it's one of those unnecessarily complicated plots the Japanese love to weave, but the army is just after her because she's, well, a monster that attacked the festival and they want to exterminate her. But there's more to it later on- one of the bad ends is she becomes the monster permanently, and the military capture her and Aaron, and they use her in war. Aaron is disgusted with her monster form and she loses herself in her grief, killing whoever the army tells her to kill.

That may sound like a spoiler, but it's not. This game has maybe 6 endings and all but endings A and B are terrible (in the literary sense, just bad writing), and almost completely removed from any actual events in the game. More like bad fanfiction that made it into the game somehow than a spoiler.

Ok, so you made me look this up just to verify that it was possible to get a "happy" ending out of this game. And it is, so... good. Sometimes games like this are "You can choose between a bad ending that totally screws over the world, a bad ending that just screws over your two characters, a bad ending that has everyone die, a bad ending where they both turn into monsters and eat everyone, and a bad ending where it was a trick all along and there never was a cure and the whole process just unleashed a greater evil upon the world (may overlap with the first option)." As if the creators are standing there laughing at you for thinking you could actually save the girl, and are taking delight in your suffering.

haha yeah, ending A is a happy ending, ending B is bittersweet, both are equally good imo. The rest are just various degrees of bad writing and depressing content.

I thought the mechanics of the game were really clever- the game is basically 50% zelda style dungeon, 50% dating sim. How much attention you pay to Elena over the course of the game directly correlates with which ending you get: all the endings are spun out of interpreting your care/neglect as how much the main character himself actually loves her. If you care about her a lot and demonstrated this by spending time with her, and valuable resources on gifts for her, and if you take care to give her the temporary cure before she starts turning*, you get the "true love conquers all" happy type of ending. If you completely ignore her,

Spoiler

about halfway through the game she begs you to kill her. She puts your gun thing up to her chest and holds it there, the music is dwarfed by the sound of a deep, deafening heart beat, and the only action available is "press B to shoot". No matter how much you wait, there is no other option.

;_; That really got to me.

There's not quite enough content in the 'dating sim', though. You'll repeat a lot of conversations, see the same cutscene several times, etc while you grind her up to the best ending (that.... came out wrong). Plenty of stuff for just ending B though, if I recall correctly.


*This is a time based game, while you are away you have X minutes before she completely turns into a monster and it's game over. She remains completely human for about 1/3 of the timer, from there on various parts of her body start changing and she will become despondent and depressed if this happens. You can get ordinary beast flesh to temporarily cure her from most monsters. As far as I know there is one extra cutscene halfway through the game as a reward for not letting her turn at all, but you will not be prevented from getting the best end if you mess up. I initially reasoned it would be better for her sanity to eat as little raw disgusting monster flesh as possible so I never cured her until just before the timer ran out. I felt really bad when I learned I chose the greater of two evils...

 

[kgagne]

The riffs this week sounded a bit... echoey?

 

[dubious_wolf]

uggh. I'm actually a little uncomfortable...

 

[Link Satonaka]

Obviously I picked my most damning screenshots, but here's an example of why this game should not have been on the Wii. All these screenshots are taken from an emulator- and the emulator can't do anything about those textures (unless someone took the time to retexture the game)

This book

That candle

--------------

But compare this screenshot (rendered at 4-5x Wii internal resolution, scaled to 1080p

To a prerendered cutscene screenshot

To the footage in the unskippable video. The emulator makes quite the difference. Here's an album of more so I don't spam up the page. http://imgur.com/a/bc0nH

 

[awdrifter]

Every week it seems like I come here to say that I have no idea what's going on in the story. Even Wikipedia isn't much help.

So the princess was singing at the festival and she got cursed in that big explosion, I got that. The guy and creepy old woman brought her to the tower to get some beast flesh to reverse the curse, that's straightforward enough. But why are they running from the army? If she's the princess, I'd imagine you could get a regiment of troops to help you storm the One Tower with Thirteen Spires and grab all the flesh you'd need. The troops don't even need to know why they are getting this stuff, only that the princess says it's important.

It's on the Wii, it can't render all the troops at once. But seriously though, they probably do have some excuse on why the army is not helping her. Maybe whoever cursed her also mind controlled the army.