I finished Bravely Default not too long ago. Needless to say, I don't want to see anything like Chapters 5-8 in a video game ever again (the repetition in particular, the concept is neat). Other than that, I really enjoyed it. Just the kind of RPG I was looking for, but never found!
A re-imagining (aka white-washing + dumbing-down) of the PS2 original. Creators intended for it to be a Hollywood-ish remake, and they succeeded.
A great game on its own, a must-play for fans of the dying survival horror genre. Improvements on gameplay made it much more playable than its unforgiving predecessor, but imo they failed to strike a balance. You can't be too scared to play when you can whack your pursuers with random musical instruments can you?
Soundtrack is also good, but it's mostly general spooky music as opposed to being effectively unsettling like in the original. The main theme even sounds sultry. Like belly-dancing music. Not bad but absolutely.. confusing. Kudos to fantastic trolling by having this track play during the scariest part of the game, though
Apart from issues about the plot and characters, I absolutely loved this gem.
I just finished The Walking Dead: Season One and 400 Days for PS4.
Much feels, much anguish, much TEAR MY HEART OUT NOW.
On the other hand,
I was genuinely surprised I managed to get the entire group from 400 Days to go with Tavia. I think only Russell didn't the other times I played through, think Tavia's responses were probably a deciding factor this time around ("there might be people you know" or something along the lines of that).
Just finished The Walking Dead Season 2 for PS4. The Wolf Among Us is next up.
I did things differently this time. I stayed with Kenny. I let him kill Jane and I stayed with him, despite the offer of Wellington. MY Clementine would trust him with her life and there was no way I could leave him.
Too many feels again, yeah. So season 3 will still be interesting to work out, with all the different outcomes of the final episode.
Last night I finished Tales of Xillia. As I said in another thread, it's the only Tales game I've ever played but I really really enjoyed it. The combat system was very fast and engaging and definitely involved strategy. I will say, though, that while it isn't complex, it's tough to remember all the "Linked Artes" you have available with with your current party setup and which artes you have equipped. It's fine when you only have one 4 person party. But once you have six characters and start to accumulate a ton of moves, it became hard to remember and I found myself just leaning on the few I was confident in.
The different take on the shop system was also interesting. You upgrade the shop either through investing cash or handing over supplies that make the lion's share of all the loot you find. This means you could grind the shop to carrying the best equipment very early on if you were so inclined. I was not and simply upgraded as I progressed through the story and seemed to do fine. Before the final dungeon I dumped all my supplies into them and got the best things I could afford.
The music is good and incredibly varied, but there isn't quite enough of it. I had tired of each area theme by the time we moved on to another.
I also really enjoyed the story, the writing is very sharp. While the game both looks and feels very "anime," there were numerous occasions where I was certain about what was going to happen next and it wasn't what happened at all. During the games' several "false endings," I knew something had to go wrong as it wasn't the end of the game and was set up to be annoyed by the cliched way the heroes were going to screw it up for themselves. While something did indeed go wrong so the game could continue, it was never what I was expecting and it was always a much more organic and less contrived event.
For a specific, not terribly spoilery example (I will still tag it though): an event involved Milla, the female lead, who is the incarnation of the "Lord of Spirits" and is on a critically important mission. When the party is captured fairly early in the game, the bad guys are trying to get the location of a device from her.
They threaten to kill the anime requisite ~10 year old girl party member if she does not tell them. Here I expect every protagonist, anime or otherwise, to capitulate. But she DOESN'T. Not only is she calling their bluff because doing so will rob them of their leverage, she straight up says her mission is for the sake of human- and spirit-kind and more important than any one person's life. Badass.
The characters are all very genre savvy, as jazzflower would say, repeatedly expressing concern that something was a trap mere moments after I thought we were dealing with another OBVIOUS trap that you must fall into to continue the plot. And the characters devise a plan to outfox the trappers. This went a long way to making me like the characters. Especially Milla and Jude, the main protagonists.
One other interesting thing about them, at the very beginning of the game, you choose which of those two you would like to be the main character. You can choose to control in combat and can program the party with AI as you see fit regardless, but dialogue differs, as well as cutscenes and entire dungeons when the two are separated by the plot. This is done very well, it doesn't feel like just a cheap gimmick to pad out the game by forcing you to play again. There are surprising twists I encountered as Milla that Jude was already aware of, and there were things I (as Milla) had seen that were a shock to Jude later. The story flows naturally either way, just differently.
One last thing on story and writing - the game got me to laugh out loud, which is always something I laud since the start of voice acted RPGs, as it's much harder to do. (Also, I think the English voice acting is perfectly fine, I especially like that the girls aren't screechy. But apparently I'm just more lenient on voice acting than everyone else, judging from my conversations around TLS.)
So last weekend I finished Tales of Xillia 2. Guys, you have to play these games. Again, I'm not otherwise familiar with the Tales series, so I don't know if they're all this good. Lex, I know you're busy with other very time consuming games, but we seem to have pretty similar tastes in our video games, so I really think you should give these a shot.
In terms of gameplay, Xillia 2 is mostly the same the game. There are a couple refinements to the combat, you get a dedicated button for an attack that will knock enemies in the air. The new protagonist also has three sets of weapons that you can switch between on the fly (dual swords, dual pistols, and a war hammer). That hardly alleviates the issue of there being an overwhelming number of moves, as you can have 16 set for each of them.
It no longer has the shop upgrade system, which is a bit of a shame, as that was fun. Now you use the components to get special equipment at shops, but that is less of a use for them.
The experience system went from an inferior sphere grid knockoff to a more linear system where you just choose what line each character follows and and how fast they move along it based on another piece of equipment. I'm not super crazy about either experience system, but I'm not sure which I prefer.
The writing is sharp as ever though. The plot is quite a bit darker in subject matter, the heroes are forced to do some pretty morally ambiguous stuff, and they're every bit as genre aware as before. Like I said it really goes a long way to making the characters likable and believable, despite the anime aesthetic. I continued to be impressed by the voice acting.
My one complaint with the story, without spoiling anything, is that I hate when games that have multiple endings treat one as the obvious "true" ending. As opposed to, say, ME3, the games endings are very distinct from one another. But the options are all very legitimate - a credit again to the strong writing - but only one ending gets the epilogue and the theme song in the credits and everything and it's kind of annoying when you could make a very solid argument for why one of the other endings are "better." It's not like there's going to be another sequel, so there's no need to establish a "canon" ending, so just treat them all as valid.
But I think that's a fairly minor complaint that only exists because the writing is so strong. So, again, highly recommended. If any of you guys can tear yourselves away from Dragon Age for a bit, check Xillia out, you can get it pretty cheaply. (Also you can play local multiplayer in the combat )
Lex, I know you're busy with other very time consuming games, but we seem to have pretty similar tastes in our video games, so I really think you should give these a shot.
I might be sold. I finished Inquisition a few days ago and I'm looking for another game to fill the void, and a friend of mine gave me a very generous birthday gift (£50 PSN voucher) so if it's on PSN for a reasonable price I'll grab it.
Just finished the Tomb Raider reboot. Enjoyed it well enough, occasionally the voice acting was bad enough to make me laugh at scenes that weren't aiming for laughter. Still, solid game, lifts a lot from other games, but does so well.
The New Telltale Game of Thrones' first chapter. Already bought the whole series for 30 bucks and I'm iffy on it. It's all about conversation choices but they haven't affected much of anything. You have an inventory but you don't seem to use for anything yet. No puzzels it seems. And the inaccuracies in the setting drive me nuts. It's like they were trying to get as much facts wrong as they could!
Eh, I'm inclined to think it's just another shitty attempt to cash in on the game, . They should hand the license over to Bethesda, IMHO. As long as they don't turn it into an MMO,
I don't get the fangasms about Bethesda. They build these fantastic huge worlds which are cool, but then they fill them with pointless quests and empty stories that don't carry any weight or emotion. It's just not for me.
I feel the same way about Blizzard if I'm honest. Hooray nine million fetch quests and camping and systems and look how original all of our ideas are.... not ever.
I'd rather play a short game which leaves me feeling something than a 3000 hour experience which is only that long because it takes 20 hours to gather the pieces required to craft the jewel which will fit on the handle of a sword which only increases your strength stat by 1. And in the next patch: a BLUE JEWEL which takes 30 hours to craft which also increases your magic stat! by 0.25
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