The gameplay fixates on dialogue and nebulous moral choices to shape your character and progression, rather than combat and picking the good, neutral or evil path. You awaken on a mortuary embalming table as the game begins, and soon discover that your character is blessed with immortality (possibly by dying) but cursed with forgetting his past lives. Planescape: Torment is set in the traditional Dungeons and Dragons Universe, but far away from any elves, dwarves and magical +2 swords, in the shifting dimensional-gateway city of Sigil a home to some truly some freaky-deaky stuff, including a hidden blood war between armies of demons spanning thousands of years and an ancient hideously scarred man known as the Nameless One, who you play as.
Serious RPG nerds like to call this game avant-garde fantasy instead of high-fantasy because they enjoy using semantics to show theyre smarter than you. So does this approach constitute a franchise? Well let you argue it out in the comments.
Theyve instead opted to let their masterpieces stand alone but near each other so that they can move on to new things (note to almost every other developer: try this once in a while), and were damned excited to see whats coming next (Ueda has said that their unnamed, upcoming PS3 game is rather close to Ico).
In this case, were glad they havent sucked the veins of their previous successes dry. Instead, theyre taking the slow, steady, do-it-once-and-do-it-right approach. While probably compromising their vision, they could have released ICO 2, and Shadow of the Colossus 2, and 3, and 4, and we probably would have loved them all. Fumito Ueda and Team ICO brilliantly pair artsy experimentation with sturdy gameplay and obscene elegance, creating experiences which are both intelligent and fun. ICO and its spiritual successor, Shadow of the Colossus, are two of the most unique and impressive games ever designed. This idea, set in an alternate 1960s, could support plenty of games, just as Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea have done for years. Nothing like this at the time, and nothing since. Every shell mattered and your support teams needed to be on point and chosen carefully. It was intensely fun to play, primarily because of the time invested in each shot fired. But, they come in so many shapes and sizes, and have so many different attributes that you start to get an idea of just how difficult and impractical mech battles would be. They take forever to set up one shot, have to brace before each blast and need a whole team of people to repair and rearm in between rounds. Theyre huge and unwieldy, loud as hell and powered by noisy, smoke-churning engines.
But not the typical mechs you see in countless games-theyre mechs as they might appear if they were actually built and deployed in real-world battles. What was so special about this long-forgotten one-off? Mechs. By mid-2001 though, Ring of Red was able to not just distance itself from the other me too games of the day, but also cement its place as one of the systems most unique and tense strategy RPGs. Most of the launch-window titles were lackluster, PSone-caliber games with moderately improved visuals.
br> It wasnt hard to stand out in the early days of the PS2.