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IGN Review of Metropolismania 2
We generally try our best to stay as open and receptive to games as possible, no matter what they are. Perhaps even more than that, we try and keep our discussion of games professional, and more importantly, polite. It's in this manner that we can approach new games with a fresh, understanding perspective and judge them as fairly as we can, while writing about them in an accurate and educational dynamic. Unfortunately, we're going to have to descend into a dark realm for this review; a haunting and terrible place that pains us to visit. We must become the extremely critical, perhaps even maniacal, reviewer. There is no other option before us; a beast has shown itself in our sacred office, and it must be dealt with using all manner of weaponry and wit.
That beast is Metropolismania 2; a twisted, darkfire abomination spawned from the misery of a thousand agony-filled wretches.
Published by Natsume and developed by Indi Software, Metropolismania 2 is a city-building game that allows you to create a metropolis and interact with its inhabitants. By using a simple control scheme, the purpose of the game is to creatively and practically structure a city, and keep everyone happy by responding to their needs, complaints and eccentricities. And while this may sound okay (it may even sound fun), do not be deceived. There is no fun here. There is no happiness - only a boiling inferno that greedily consumes the hope of the innocent and smashes their dreams upon the rocks of discontent.
You start off by holding a brief conversation with your boss in his poorly rendered office. It'll be soon after this discussion that you'll recognize the raw, demonic power at work in this game, considering the fact that everyone levitates. All the time. We don't know why (other than to give praise to the Demon Lords), but if any character is standing still, they float up and down, merrily. Eerily. You'll get used to it after a while, but we have to wonder what brought about this design decision, since something so obvious couldn't have been a mistake. Anyway, your boss tells you that you're about to build a city, it'll be tough work, etc. Although he gives you some tutorials, and quite a few specifics on city building, he provides you with absolutely no context for your existence. He doesn't tell you why you're building, nor does he tell you anything about the overarching status of the world outside your personal bubble. You simply build. With no reason or motivation. The manual provides little else in terms of this information, so you're on your own. At least in the first Metropolismania, you were given a brief backstory with which you could orient and root your purpose in the game. No such luck here.
With that said, we might as well mention the two positive elements in this game. Yes, only two. The first point is this: the fundamental premise of Metropolismania 2 is functional. Building a city, and then being able to run around in it, is a (theoretically) pleasing notion. But that's it. In practice, it fails in every way. The only other positive comment we can make about this title is that the character creation system, which is lackluster at best, lets you create a girl vaguely resembling our beloved Haruhi, from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. That was pretty rad. And that, friends, ends our kindness towards Metropolismania 2.
Let's unleash the true torrent of our unquenchable hatred.
Playing this game involves a few, aggravatingly restricted, creative systems. You can run around on foot (when you're not levitating) and talk to the inhabitants of your city, and buy things from various restaurants and shops. That's really the only reason you run around. Otherwise, you can lay roads with the Road Construction tool, screen the emails of applicants who wish to live in your city, and then place their buildings somewhere on the field. The buildings will, within a few moments, go through their phases of construction and pop to life, revealing new characters to interact with.
Say, however, you manage to overcome the mind-numbingly cumbersome interface and you lay a few roads and plan a few buildings; then you get to the real problem. You see, the majority of the game is dominated by solving people's complaints. They won't have them right away, of course, but they will. They will. It may start off with requests like "we're too far from the office! Build us an office!" which you can generally solve just by building an office near their neighborhood. But then the mechanics start to show their true nature: they're just about broken.
One of the only ways to solve complaints is to build the particular service or center that they need. But it's not always available for you to build - you need to have someone related to that field apply to your town first. In other words, if your people demand a hospital, you need to hope that a doctor's office sends you an application email, or else you just can't build a hospital. So how do you get those applications? Generally speaking, the citizens who already live in your town can introduce you to the people you need to meet. But that's not always the case. In fact, that's not always the case at all. Sometimes, no matter how many people you desperately ask, even people related to that field (like asking a different doctor for an introduction), you just can't get the introduction you actually want. It's terrible and utterly frustrating. There's simply no fun in running around and talking to mindless people (we'll come back to that in a second), hoping you might randomly acquire the necessary information in order to progress.
Take, for example, a frustrating occurrence that happened to us during the first level. We built a small town and slowly added on to it, being as careful and considerate as possible. However, one family's house started flashing with neon colors (a sign that "something is amiss") so we walked in to investigate. It turns out that they had a child, and that child needed to go to school! They wanted an elementary school, darn it! Well that sounded like a perfectly reasonable complaint to us. So we went to look for a way to build an elementary school. After all, we wanted to keep our citizens happy.
We asked around for anyone who could introduce us to a school-related individual. After a few minutes of asking, we had no success. Time marched on as we wearily searched with continuous failure. And then other houses started flashing. More people wanted an elementary school. Our "complaints list" expanded and began to flood with messages. And yet even as half the city was in an uproar from this lack of an elementary school, we still received applications from other random tenants. Our inbox was full. Our boss was calling us, and asking us to clear our inbox since he had important information to send us. Things were going to Hell. Our boss called again, but our inbox was still full. And even though we tried to place as many buildings as possible to empty our list of applications, more came. And as all this madness escalated into a frenzied orchestra of frustration and angry NPCs, our tenants started ditching the town. They just tore down their houses and left, leaving us broken and battered. Then our boss finally called us back, as the dust settled peacefully to the ravaged earth: Hey, I sent you an application for an elementary school. You can build them now!
Damn.
Moments like these are horrifically frequent. And the reason, as we mentioned above, that this game is so impossibly not fun, is because every NPC is completely brain dead. The dialogue is not only translated in the worst possible way, but it's randomly generated. That's right. So the game actually puts random dialogue lines together to form the conversation, so you end up seeing the same few lines over and over again, without fail. While your character never actually has any lines, it doesn't matter. These NPCs just spew utter nonsense at all hours of the day. For example, let's demonstrate the dialogue flow of one particular character. This is a word for word quotation that a single NPC gave us:
"Nice to meet you.
Nice to finally meet you.
I'm Lorant Harrison.
It's really sunny, isn't it? Look how shiny my forehead is."
Brilliant. It doesn't end there, though. Often times, when trying to "converse" with these lumbering, polygonal cyber-clowns, they'll ask you a completely irrelevant question just to make conversation. Usually, they're questions about what your preference is, and they give you two options to choose from. Some of our favorites include having to decide between "earring" or "pierced earring," "group date" or "picking up," and our favorite: "bank deposit" or "Credit Union savings." Wow. Those are some special questions. And we can assure you that those questions were given no context whatsoever.
Besides these few malevolent flaws, there's also the fact that this game looks and sounds horrendous. Terrible, repetitive music accompanies some of the worst visuals we've seen on the PlayStation 2 in quite some time. In all seriousness, even some of the launch titles looked infinitely better than this, so what went wrong here? We do appreciate the cute anime style, but we all know that the PS2 is capable of much greater, much grander things. There's even pop-in on this title, and the backdrops are just painted on. It's a shame that such an embarrassing title needs to suffer more than it already has.
©2007-09-07, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
That beast is Metropolismania 2; a twisted, darkfire abomination spawned from the misery of a thousand agony-filled wretches.
Published by Natsume and developed by Indi Software, Metropolismania 2 is a city-building game that allows you to create a metropolis and interact with its inhabitants. By using a simple control scheme, the purpose of the game is to creatively and practically structure a city, and keep everyone happy by responding to their needs, complaints and eccentricities. And while this may sound okay (it may even sound fun), do not be deceived. There is no fun here. There is no happiness - only a boiling inferno that greedily consumes the hope of the innocent and smashes their dreams upon the rocks of discontent.
You start off by holding a brief conversation with your boss in his poorly rendered office. It'll be soon after this discussion that you'll recognize the raw, demonic power at work in this game, considering the fact that everyone levitates. All the time. We don't know why (other than to give praise to the Demon Lords), but if any character is standing still, they float up and down, merrily. Eerily. You'll get used to it after a while, but we have to wonder what brought about this design decision, since something so obvious couldn't have been a mistake. Anyway, your boss tells you that you're about to build a city, it'll be tough work, etc. Although he gives you some tutorials, and quite a few specifics on city building, he provides you with absolutely no context for your existence. He doesn't tell you why you're building, nor does he tell you anything about the overarching status of the world outside your personal bubble. You simply build. With no reason or motivation. The manual provides little else in terms of this information, so you're on your own. At least in the first Metropolismania, you were given a brief backstory with which you could orient and root your purpose in the game. No such luck here.
With that said, we might as well mention the two positive elements in this game. Yes, only two. The first point is this: the fundamental premise of Metropolismania 2 is functional. Building a city, and then being able to run around in it, is a (theoretically) pleasing notion. But that's it. In practice, it fails in every way. The only other positive comment we can make about this title is that the character creation system, which is lackluster at best, lets you create a girl vaguely resembling our beloved Haruhi, from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. That was pretty rad. And that, friends, ends our kindness towards Metropolismania 2.
Let's unleash the true torrent of our unquenchable hatred.
Playing this game involves a few, aggravatingly restricted, creative systems. You can run around on foot (when you're not levitating) and talk to the inhabitants of your city, and buy things from various restaurants and shops. That's really the only reason you run around. Otherwise, you can lay roads with the Road Construction tool, screen the emails of applicants who wish to live in your city, and then place their buildings somewhere on the field. The buildings will, within a few moments, go through their phases of construction and pop to life, revealing new characters to interact with.
Say, however, you manage to overcome the mind-numbingly cumbersome interface and you lay a few roads and plan a few buildings; then you get to the real problem. You see, the majority of the game is dominated by solving people's complaints. They won't have them right away, of course, but they will. They will. It may start off with requests like "we're too far from the office! Build us an office!" which you can generally solve just by building an office near their neighborhood. But then the mechanics start to show their true nature: they're just about broken.
One of the only ways to solve complaints is to build the particular service or center that they need. But it's not always available for you to build - you need to have someone related to that field apply to your town first. In other words, if your people demand a hospital, you need to hope that a doctor's office sends you an application email, or else you just can't build a hospital. So how do you get those applications? Generally speaking, the citizens who already live in your town can introduce you to the people you need to meet. But that's not always the case. In fact, that's not always the case at all. Sometimes, no matter how many people you desperately ask, even people related to that field (like asking a different doctor for an introduction), you just can't get the introduction you actually want. It's terrible and utterly frustrating. There's simply no fun in running around and talking to mindless people (we'll come back to that in a second), hoping you might randomly acquire the necessary information in order to progress.
Take, for example, a frustrating occurrence that happened to us during the first level. We built a small town and slowly added on to it, being as careful and considerate as possible. However, one family's house started flashing with neon colors (a sign that "something is amiss") so we walked in to investigate. It turns out that they had a child, and that child needed to go to school! They wanted an elementary school, darn it! Well that sounded like a perfectly reasonable complaint to us. So we went to look for a way to build an elementary school. After all, we wanted to keep our citizens happy.
We asked around for anyone who could introduce us to a school-related individual. After a few minutes of asking, we had no success. Time marched on as we wearily searched with continuous failure. And then other houses started flashing. More people wanted an elementary school. Our "complaints list" expanded and began to flood with messages. And yet even as half the city was in an uproar from this lack of an elementary school, we still received applications from other random tenants. Our inbox was full. Our boss was calling us, and asking us to clear our inbox since he had important information to send us. Things were going to Hell. Our boss called again, but our inbox was still full. And even though we tried to place as many buildings as possible to empty our list of applications, more came. And as all this madness escalated into a frenzied orchestra of frustration and angry NPCs, our tenants started ditching the town. They just tore down their houses and left, leaving us broken and battered. Then our boss finally called us back, as the dust settled peacefully to the ravaged earth: Hey, I sent you an application for an elementary school. You can build them now!
Damn.
Moments like these are horrifically frequent. And the reason, as we mentioned above, that this game is so impossibly not fun, is because every NPC is completely brain dead. The dialogue is not only translated in the worst possible way, but it's randomly generated. That's right. So the game actually puts random dialogue lines together to form the conversation, so you end up seeing the same few lines over and over again, without fail. While your character never actually has any lines, it doesn't matter. These NPCs just spew utter nonsense at all hours of the day. For example, let's demonstrate the dialogue flow of one particular character. This is a word for word quotation that a single NPC gave us:
"Nice to meet you.
Nice to finally meet you.
I'm Lorant Harrison.
It's really sunny, isn't it? Look how shiny my forehead is."
Brilliant. It doesn't end there, though. Often times, when trying to "converse" with these lumbering, polygonal cyber-clowns, they'll ask you a completely irrelevant question just to make conversation. Usually, they're questions about what your preference is, and they give you two options to choose from. Some of our favorites include having to decide between "earring" or "pierced earring," "group date" or "picking up," and our favorite: "bank deposit" or "Credit Union savings." Wow. Those are some special questions. And we can assure you that those questions were given no context whatsoever.
Besides these few malevolent flaws, there's also the fact that this game looks and sounds horrendous. Terrible, repetitive music accompanies some of the worst visuals we've seen on the PlayStation 2 in quite some time. In all seriousness, even some of the launch titles looked infinitely better than this, so what went wrong here? We do appreciate the cute anime style, but we all know that the PS2 is capable of much greater, much grander things. There's even pop-in on this title, and the backdrops are just painted on. It's a shame that such an embarrassing title needs to suffer more than it already has.
©2007-09-07, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved