Ubisoft's Child of Light

Since I've been spending a lot of time on game design, I figured I should be using some of that time to play and analyze some games, mainly RPGs, from my backlog. This one is from Ubisoft, a company which came into fruition with its hit game Rayman, which never did much for me despite being the most prominent title for the 3DO.

Child of Light is a side-scrolling, turn-based RPG in which you control a little red-haired princess named Aurora. The side-scrolling aspect is especially fun, because you can fly. It's the perfect game for those who like to explore beautiful worlds. And beautiful it is, this world called Lemuria, hand-painted with watercolors with papery texture to boot.

So there's a lot of style in this title, but not as a means to compensate for low quality gameplay. That's not to say the gameplay is especially profound. While the exploring is fun, and the world is filled with little puzzles and a ton of loot, most of the loot has little impact on your method of play. Healing items are good for boss fights, but most of them go unused. You have a firefly friend who can illuminate different areas of the map, allowing you to find more treasures.

There's no shopping in this game, and your only equipment comes in the form of gems called Oculi, which can be crafted and combined from their different varieties. After each level-up, your characters get to choose different upgrades, which is cool, but your characters are all going to have their general strengths and weaknesses, even with permanent stat-boosters. Characters also pool experience, so the fun exploration often gets halted so you can stop and choose upgrades for these characters you never use, but might need... maybe.

The characters themselves aren't very interesting, but I didn't look too deeply into it. Why not? Well, there's something about this game I really can't stand. The developers decided to make every single line of dialogue rhyme. And the rhyming is bad. Almost every sentence reads like it was spoken by Yoda, causing most of the text to come out in a jumble of terrible sentence structure. I figure on every block, there's a kid rapper who could have done a better job.

The battle system for this game is pretty good. It's much like Grandia, in the way that all fighters share a time bar. Each action takes a certain amount of time to execute, which gives you and your enemies space to interrupt each other. This is all swell, but a lot of enemies counter attack when you interrupt them, others counter when you use physical, magical, or elemental attacks. Each enemy has its own mode, which you need to keep in mind. This is fun, but there are no quick battles. They all require a certain level of focus, causing you to, after upgrading your characters, forget where you're going.

Looping back to the subject of elemental magic, I'm not really a fan of it, especially when you don't have all the elements at your disposal. Most RPG games have the tree levels, where everything's weak to fire, then the fire world, then the water world, and so forth, in an order you're never aware of. And this works fine (albeit uninventive), so long as you're not forced to use elemental magic, and don't have to gamble on which magic to learn.

The music in this game is all right, fitting, but there are only about four songs in it. But even that's fine, since it only took me twelve hours to finish this game. Despite it's flaws, I think Child of Light is a good game. It doesn't make you do boring things, like talk to every single person in town before getting to it. The gameplay is immersive, with the perfect amount of complexity. Some of the battles are also pretty hard, which scratches an itch. It would have been better if they'd included some impossible fights that, in spite of your perfect strategy, require you to come back later.

Child of Light's pretty good, but not really my kind of RPG. It's magical and whimsical, and more for the 90s born fairy tale fans instead of us who grew up worshipping Japanese games. I've watched Brandon Sanderson's lectures on Fantasy writing, and many of his concepts apply to all forms of media. Every story opens with a promise about what kind of experience the consumer is going to have. And if that promise isn't fulfilled, the readers (or players) will be unsatisfied. Despite its challenges, I think Child of Light is too short. It puts a lot of systems in play that are never used to their remote capacity. There are some touching moments to its story, but its resolution is flacid and crowded with one-note party members.

Style: 4/5 - Substance: 2/5 - Music: 3/5 - Fun: 4/5