My gaming week will consist of two weeks again on Friday as I am entertaining a wild Robby from the USA who is visiting my glorious United Kingdom. I have wanted to make this post for a few weeks now, but the timing hasn't been right I think. I have needed to let the topics amble around in my head & gain a flavour with which to purvey. I am going to touch on five games in this post; I suppose they are a sort of semi-review & yet not quite. First of all, my graphics card on the computer has decided to fuck itself up so I haven't been able to play any computer games for more than five minutes, then my card artificates the entire screen & I have to hard reset. Any road... this is not what I was posting about!
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The first game I want to touch on is Lost Odyssey. Bought at the same time as Last Remnant, this game sat on my DVD shelf for eight months as I had shed-loads of other games I needed to get through. After giving it 70+ hours already, I can honestly say I am god-damn addicted to this game. I haven't beat it yet as there are so many side-quests & mini-games in this game that I have been running off on quest tangents to finish them all. My Immortals are nearing 80 right now & 50 was recommended for the 'final dungeon' so I think it might be a nice breeze to beat the game when I eventually get there. I am actually near the end of the game now though & will save most of the rest for New Game+. There will be a better review when I do beat it, which should be soon. A few comments now though. The graphics are very nice; not your top of the line FFXIII or Dante's Inferno sexy, but they are pretty epic considering it was a 2008 game ( I think? ). The music is by Nobuo Uematsu which should, in itself, give you an idea as to the quality.
The story is fantastic, the combat is very flowing & almost identical to FFX which is NOT a bad thing. I could go as far as to say if FFXI was not an Online game, Lost Odyssey would be a perfect FFXI. It's truly like a successor to X & again, this is NOT a bad thing. I don't mind that it's so incredibly similar, in fact, I love it more for that.
By far my biggest draw in this game is the writing. There are Dreams which you can discover & read through-out the game & I have to say that I became quite emotional when reading them. I don't get this way & the writing on these dreams touched me deeply. It's like nothing I have read in a game, ever. There is nothing to compare it to. The best writing I have seen in a game is certainly the writing in the Dreams.
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The second game I want to chatter about is Last Remnant. As previously stated, I got this game at the same time as Lost Odyssey & it, also, remained on my DVD shelf for eight months until I had a free space in my schedule to play it. Now I heard a lot of bad things about the game involving graphical glitching & extreme lag, but I'm here to tell you that something like 95% of that is no longer an issue if you install it to the HDD. Having said that, I have not encountered any lag or graphical problems, indeed NO problems at all, in this game ( installed to HDD ). I have about 30 hours of the game now & I have to say that I am surprised at how much I like this game. I'm not sure what it is, but it's so addicting.
The combat is something a lot of people hated for some reason, but I love it! Creating balanced unions to fight in these huge multi encounter battles is just so much fun. Graphically, the game could be better, but again, it's a 2008 ( I think ) game, so it's not going to be on par with what we've been fed, graphically, as of late. The music is nothing spectacular, but the battle music is really great, though when you're in battle that are 10+ minutes in length & the battle music changes two or three times, it's a little disconcerting.
The story is a little weird & I wasn't getting a lot of what was said, not to mention that the writing is very strange at times & the voice acting seems detached in the way that it sounds like you're talking to a serial killer about casual genocide. It's just... a little off, but that sort of fits, as weird as that sounds. There was a point where I got so frustrated at the actual dialogue, I went to the wiki of the game & read the story synopsis. After that, suddenly, everything made sense & I am now enjoying the game so much better. Surprisingly, it didn't ruin anything for me, but now the anticipation of the progression of the storyline, knowing how it will go, is thrilling to me. It's very strange yes, & doesn't make much sense, but hey, it made the game better for me.
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The third game I will touch on, in this post at least, is Resonance of Fate. I only just got this game a few days ago as Rob decided to be the nicest guy on earth & grabbed it for £20 from GAME. Holy gods all mighty this game is tough. But It's tough in a good way. Another great game by tri-Ace that's for sure, but man it takes concentration & getting used to. The game is many kinds of fun, the graphics are really nice & I always love a game you can switch between English & Japanese voices in. One of the features in the game is that you can find/buy clothes for your chars to wear & I had a blast finding a set of clothes/shades for Zephyr to make him look like Gackt. This might not be amusing to you, but I find it hilarious to see 'Gackt' jumping around my screen Woo style, firing off a sub-machine gun.
The writing is acceptable so far, I'm really not too much into the game yet, I think only four or five hours as I have many other games which I am working on at the moment. The music is well good the first time I heard it. The second time was nice & the third OK & that's about where it's evening out. The music is good, but nothing mind-blowing.
This is another game which a load of my friends decided was shit, but I'm convinced that they just ran into a difficult situation & decided it was balls because it was too hard for them or they didn't understand combat. I'll admit, the combat is pretty tough to master. I had to go through all the Arena tutorials three or four times & I might even go back for some more practise, but I don't mind because this type of combat is innovative & I enjoy running the combos off & learning it. I'm willing to give it a fair shake & it's turning out worth it.
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Games four & five are two games which I had to have Rob buy for me in the USA & bring over here when he visited because we haven't got them yet in the UK, & I'm fairly convinced that we won't get them. They are both Shin Megami Tensei games; Devil Survivor & Strange Journey. I started them both around the same time & I am having serious issues determining which I will play at any given time. As with all MegaTen games I run into, I am already addicted in a bad way lol. The familiar spells, demons, & terminology bring a lulling sense of glory to my game play. Being DS games, I can't say the graphics are OMGawesome, but then again, for a DS game, they are good graphics & the music is, as always, incredible.
Devil Survivor surprised me in a way, actually. It's a lot like FFTactics in the combat way, lending another leg to this phenomena which I encountered when I first played FFTactics. Those types of games, I never liked at all, but the Tactics games I always loved & now it seems that MegaTen using that same style will hook me as well. To test if maybe I just started liking these types of games, I tried another, unnamed, one in the same style of combat & it was shit. There's something about MegaTen & FF that will addict me to whatever genre of combat or game it brings to the table.
Strange Journey moves around like the first Personas & earlier, as one did in Bard's Tale or some of the Might & Magic games. I really do like this style of game, though I heard many others loathe it. Maybe it's just my old school self coming through... I just love a dungeon crawl O_O The story seems genuine in the MegaTen theme, dealing with adult themes &, if you can believe it, even more scantily glad demon ladies than before. I seem to remember, confirmed as I have checked, Angel having a little scarf twirling, & indeed hiding, her lower lady parts in other games, but in Strange Journey, her legs are moved around in just the right way to only barely hide the treasure... no scarf any more!
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Well this post is long enough & I have DDS sitting here, on pause, waiting for me to get back to it. Off I go!
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