Saturday Review #14
Nov. 13th, 2010 01:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jennariaMYSTERY LEGENDS: THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (Collector's Edition), from Big Fish Games.
Tag copy: The ruins of the opera house stand as a tomb to unrequited love. Though long abandoned, an undying ghost still wanders its halls, plotting the return of his heart’s desire. Discover the history that haunts the opera house and face all of its challenges. Confront the man behind the mask and complete the final act in Mystery Legends: Phantom of the Opera, a fantastic Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure game!
First of all, just a clarification: Big Fish Games occasionally offers a Collector's Edition of certain games, a few weeks before the Standard Edition comes out. The Collector's Edition usually includes extra gameplay, a free strategy guide, and shiny things like wallpaper or the game's soundtrack or (in this case) a copy of the original novel on which the game is (loosely) based.
So. Onward!
STORYLINE: Christine, Raoul and their grown daughter Evelina have just spent the evening at an opera performance. (Momentary digression here: I can take the fact that Christine and Raoul don't really look old enough to have a grown daughter - maybe Evelina is actually a teenager, and is just mature for her age! and maybe Christine and Raoul have good genes, aging-wise! - but the fact that all three of them are dressed in what looks like modern evening-wear, not turn-of-the-century Parisian fashions, just irks me. There's plenty enough else pseudo-Victorian in the game, couldn't they have managed it in the dresses as well? Hmph.) As they're discussing the performance, a boy runs up and hands an envelope to Evelina, saying that a gentleman told him to give her that. She opens it, and it's from the Phantom. "My love, I bid you return to the Opera for one final performance." The world fades around her, and suddenly she's in the abandoned, deserted Opera House, being told to retrieve black roses, and in return the Phantom will give her fragments of their mutual history.
...yeah, hello, that's not half creepy. Not but what Phantom of the Opera has always been about Unclear On Personal Boundaries, but there's two extra factors at work here: first of all, the game is somewhat vague whether the Phantom is now an authentic ghost, or if this is a really old guy running around and trying to win back his lost love. The latter is pitiful at best, or would be except for the whole kidnapping thing. The former? The Phantom is thisclose to being all-powerful within the bounds of the Opera House during life. How much more so as an actual ghost without human limitations? And second of all, this isn't Christine. It's her daughter.
The second part doesn't get better, unfortunately. As Evelina goes through the Opera House, solving puzzles and finding hidden objects, she gets hints and flashbacks to bits of the story, but it isn't her story. She reacts badly to the Phantom, the way one would expect from someone who's coming in with no history would do (and we're given every indication that Christine has told her absolutely jack about her time as an opera singer). Finally, Evelina has solved all the puzzles and given back all the roses, and as a result, she gets to stay with the Phantom. And there's a coy little scroll-text at the end, about how Evelina will have to persuade the Phantom to let her go! Or! Maybe she'll fall in love with him, and the Phantom will have his revenge/happily ever after after all! The end.
Look, I am a total Phantom/Christine 'shipper. I have written an entire AU wherein they get together. (Well, arguably multiple AUs, but I'm not counting smut-for-smut's-sake.) And I am still going to tell you that this ending is really kind of bullshit. It's not a happy ending for Evelina, and it's not a happy ending for the Phantom. It's sloppy writing, and the fact that it's traditional sloppy writing (because God knows this is not the first place I've encountered the idea that you can swap in a daughter for the mother and everyone leaves happy) does not excuse it. The much-beloved only daughter of a nobleman is not going to have the same life experience shaping her as the much-beloved only daughter of an itinerant violinist. We don't even know if Evelina can sing! I'm left to hope that the same intelligence that got her through the various puzzles and whatnot is enough to keep the Phantom happy, or at least not murderous, when she finally gets it through his non-corporeal skull that she is not Christine.
GAMEPLAY: Mediocre. It's heavy on the traditional hidden object scenes, and while it's got a generous scattering of puzzles, most of them involve wandering all over the Paris Opera to find certain objects and assemble them together. Worse, the puzzles are not especially linear, which means that not only do you have to keep an eye out for items that you can pick up (because you'll need them later), you wind up carrying around a huge list of inventory items without any clear idea of why you're carrying them. It's not bad, but let's face it, I was playing it because it was pretty and because it was Phantom of the Opera, not for the gameplay.
It is pretty, in a Gothic, 'the designers of this watched the movie version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical twenty times before creating the game, didn't they' sort of way. But honestly, if you're not a Phantom fan? You're better off waiting for the Standard Edition of the game, if you buy it at all.
Tag copy: The ruins of the opera house stand as a tomb to unrequited love. Though long abandoned, an undying ghost still wanders its halls, plotting the return of his heart’s desire. Discover the history that haunts the opera house and face all of its challenges. Confront the man behind the mask and complete the final act in Mystery Legends: Phantom of the Opera, a fantastic Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure game!
First of all, just a clarification: Big Fish Games occasionally offers a Collector's Edition of certain games, a few weeks before the Standard Edition comes out. The Collector's Edition usually includes extra gameplay, a free strategy guide, and shiny things like wallpaper or the game's soundtrack or (in this case) a copy of the original novel on which the game is (loosely) based.
So. Onward!
STORYLINE: Christine, Raoul and their grown daughter Evelina have just spent the evening at an opera performance. (Momentary digression here: I can take the fact that Christine and Raoul don't really look old enough to have a grown daughter - maybe Evelina is actually a teenager, and is just mature for her age! and maybe Christine and Raoul have good genes, aging-wise! - but the fact that all three of them are dressed in what looks like modern evening-wear, not turn-of-the-century Parisian fashions, just irks me. There's plenty enough else pseudo-Victorian in the game, couldn't they have managed it in the dresses as well? Hmph.) As they're discussing the performance, a boy runs up and hands an envelope to Evelina, saying that a gentleman told him to give her that. She opens it, and it's from the Phantom. "My love, I bid you return to the Opera for one final performance." The world fades around her, and suddenly she's in the abandoned, deserted Opera House, being told to retrieve black roses, and in return the Phantom will give her fragments of their mutual history.
...yeah, hello, that's not half creepy. Not but what Phantom of the Opera has always been about Unclear On Personal Boundaries, but there's two extra factors at work here: first of all, the game is somewhat vague whether the Phantom is now an authentic ghost, or if this is a really old guy running around and trying to win back his lost love. The latter is pitiful at best, or would be except for the whole kidnapping thing. The former? The Phantom is thisclose to being all-powerful within the bounds of the Opera House during life. How much more so as an actual ghost without human limitations? And second of all, this isn't Christine. It's her daughter.
The second part doesn't get better, unfortunately. As Evelina goes through the Opera House, solving puzzles and finding hidden objects, she gets hints and flashbacks to bits of the story, but it isn't her story. She reacts badly to the Phantom, the way one would expect from someone who's coming in with no history would do (and we're given every indication that Christine has told her absolutely jack about her time as an opera singer). Finally, Evelina has solved all the puzzles and given back all the roses, and as a result, she gets to stay with the Phantom. And there's a coy little scroll-text at the end, about how Evelina will have to persuade the Phantom to let her go! Or! Maybe she'll fall in love with him, and the Phantom will have his revenge/happily ever after after all! The end.
Look, I am a total Phantom/Christine 'shipper. I have written an entire AU wherein they get together. (Well, arguably multiple AUs, but I'm not counting smut-for-smut's-sake.) And I am still going to tell you that this ending is really kind of bullshit. It's not a happy ending for Evelina, and it's not a happy ending for the Phantom. It's sloppy writing, and the fact that it's traditional sloppy writing (because God knows this is not the first place I've encountered the idea that you can swap in a daughter for the mother and everyone leaves happy) does not excuse it. The much-beloved only daughter of a nobleman is not going to have the same life experience shaping her as the much-beloved only daughter of an itinerant violinist. We don't even know if Evelina can sing! I'm left to hope that the same intelligence that got her through the various puzzles and whatnot is enough to keep the Phantom happy, or at least not murderous, when she finally gets it through his non-corporeal skull that she is not Christine.
GAMEPLAY: Mediocre. It's heavy on the traditional hidden object scenes, and while it's got a generous scattering of puzzles, most of them involve wandering all over the Paris Opera to find certain objects and assemble them together. Worse, the puzzles are not especially linear, which means that not only do you have to keep an eye out for items that you can pick up (because you'll need them later), you wind up carrying around a huge list of inventory items without any clear idea of why you're carrying them. It's not bad, but let's face it, I was playing it because it was pretty and because it was Phantom of the Opera, not for the gameplay.
It is pretty, in a Gothic, 'the designers of this watched the movie version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical twenty times before creating the game, didn't they' sort of way. But honestly, if you're not a Phantom fan? You're better off waiting for the Standard Edition of the game, if you buy it at all.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-11-15 08:47 pm (UTC)O_o
Well, I think I probably won't buy this one. The gameplay wasn't nearly good enough and that's a rather squicky/problematic ending. (What IS with the mother/daughter swap thing in fiction, too? It's so bizarre!)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-11-16 02:11 am (UTC)(I don't know! I mean, it's bad enough when I encounter something similar in Reincarnation fic - 'oh, hey, you didn't get the girl in your last life, so here she is in this one!' But swapping in the daughter just has all kinds of even skeevier undertones.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-11-16 04:37 am (UTC)*sigh*
But swapping in the daughter just has all kinds of even skeevier undertones.
Also it's weird? Because how many daughters really resemble their mothers much at all, physically or otherwise?