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jp's Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade (PSP)
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| [March 2, 2008 02:50:25 PM]
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So I finally finished this in an ending that was as anti-climactic as most of the game. I thought it was quite amusing that at the end of the game you are treated to a slow text crawl (with grammar mistakes and all) which is essentially a super-summary of the whole game. It definitely helped me to understand what the plot of the game was and what it was that I was doing...but it is quite telling that someone felt that it was important to end the game in this way.
Curiously, once you've finished the game there are a few more side-quests you can choose to engage in. It seems that having saved the world isn't enough for some of the townsfolk who seemed compelled to request your services even further. Can't a hero get some rest?
Fortunately, and this speaks well of my experience with the game so far, it is really easy to travel around with plenty of options that let you (from a dungeon) teleport back to town, return to where you were, and so on. On the downside, about halfway through the game I decided to stop doing the following, because it simply wasn't worth the effort:
* opening treasure chests
* picking up treasure dropped by monsters
* selling stuff at the store
* fighting each and every monster I saw
* exploring all the areas
The game is easy enough for you to simply run all the way through as fast as possible.
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| [February 17, 2008 07:28:49 PM]
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In a fantasy game, when you enter an area called "the abyss" to find the big evil monster, you presume that you are pretty close to the end. Like, real close. Like, woohoo, it's time for the final battle close.
Well, not so for this game. Which has me really frustrated because I want to finish it (gamer's honor?) but I also want to move on to something else.
So far the sequence of events was:
1. Enter the abyss! (woohoo!)
2. Obtain 5 parts of a key to open something or other
3. Only 4 are available, the 5th is destroyed...but no matter
4. Go back to the abyss.
5. Fight nasty monster.
6. It's not the last fight! (awwww!) Story twist?
7. Big bad monster escapes the abyss heading back to raze the city! (oh no!)
(apparently I unwittingly, but needfully, broke its ancient prison and it's escaped)
8. Go to location blah. Big baddie isn't there anymore...
9. Go to location blahbla...Bid baddie is there!
10. Fight (and dispatch) big baddie.
(I might have forgotten some steps)
11. Wait, that wasn't it?
12. Go back to town and receive NEW missions. Must collect 4 urns from 4 different places that are far from each other.
Sigh.
I thought I was getting close to done with this game and I have no idea what's going on.
Sigh.
...and then the game crashed on me and I hadn't saved in a long time. Grrrr.
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| [February 5, 2008 01:18:40 PM]
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I just took a look at a map which shows all (most?) of the areas in this game. There are empty spaces for the ones you haven't visited or seen yet. The sheer amount of empty spaces filled me with despair. I really thought that I was making some progress but it seems like there is a lot, lot more to do yet before I can wrap it up with this game.
I have to consider whether or not I really want to finish this game. :-(
On the mini-rant side of things, this game lets you rotate the map around (ie, the camera). This is a good thing. The bad thing is that whenever you enter an area, the map is rotated to some apparently random angle. It is never the same rotation it had when I was last in that area! This is really annoying when I enter and exit the same location since it takes me a few seconds to rotate the map back and get my bearings again.
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| [January 29, 2008 03:33:52 PM]
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I guess this entry will be something of a rant...so my apologies for that. However, I do think that it's a fair rant against some game design issues that keep on appearing and are so rarely dealt with. Surely, in this day and age we should be able to solve these, right?
1. Immunity until it's time to fight.
A few of the dungeon bosses in this game have something "important" to say. It's so important that, although you can see the boss and can fire missile weapons at the boss you can do no damage to the boss until it has said whatever it needs to say. In order to trigger it's speech, you also have to get close to the boss which kind of gets in the way of the strategic option of staying out of range of the enemy and pelting it with missile weapons.
2. Missions that make no sense with respect to what you do in the game.
I recently completed a mission with a very "complicated" story. Basically, it involved raiding enemy camp 1, killing the leader, planting false evidence that would incirminate enemy camp 2. Thus, enemies 1 and 2 would fight each other instead of attacking the town. That's a pretty neat mission, if you ignore the fact that all you do in this game is slaughter anything that moves. In order to "plant the evidence" I basically wiped out the entire enemy camp 1. There is no way to be subtle in this game, so the missions might as well own up to that. Why the subterfuge when I literally massacred both enemy camps?
3. Finish mission before it's assigned.
It's really annoying to have to go back to an area you've cleared and defeat all the monsters again just because you did something that hadn't yet been assigned to you as a mission. In game design terms you have two options: (1) recognize that I already did the mission and reward/chastise the player, or (2) don't let me do the mission. It makes things really confusing...
That's all for now. I suspect I will finish this game purely out of gamer honor. (must finish games I start)
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| [January 28, 2008 08:03:45 PM]
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I guess that this games real redeeming feature must be the multiplayer aspect. Unfortunately I probably won't be able to try it out. Apart from that, this game is pretty mindless, not terribly interesting, and very, very run-of the mill.
Having finished Dungeon Siege on the PSP not that long ago, I guess I was preempted to not be very impressed by this game. Sure, the graphics are fine and I like some of the art but...
1. Loading times are terrible
2. The game has virtually no difficulty whatsoever
I decided to pick a Druid (I don't know why, probably for the healing magic) and was urged to have a good dexterity score so that I would be proficient with ranged weapons. It turns out there is no need whatsoever for this. I just wade in, kill monsters and get loot.
Even the loot is pretty lame. Pick the weapon that does the most damage and move on. For armor, pick the one that protects the most, and move along. There is stuff you can't use (wrong class) and that's about it.
If I had to summarize this game in one line it would be:
Wander around and easily kill monsters for meaningless loot and treasure.
Oh, the ONE thing that I've found marginally interesting AND that has helped me change my habits for these kinds of games is the "combination" system. Basically, you can find items that you can apply to weapons or armor to give you different bonuses. For example, a rune that will give you +10 strength if you add to to some armor or raise your chance of getting a critical if you add it to a weapon. Normally, I'm really, really stingy about using these items because I'm always thinking that I should save them for later. I started this game with that mentality but then realized that these special items sold for virtually nothing at the item store, so I figured I would use them instead. And so, thanks to cheap prices at the store, I've become un-cheap in the game. Heh!
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jp's Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade (PSP)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Sunday 13 January, 2008
GameLog closed on: Sunday 2 March, 2008 |
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jp's opinion and rating for this game |
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By the numbers hack 'n slash. Nothing really new here at all which is a shame.
Rating (out of 5): |
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| other GameLogs for this Game |
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This is the only GameLog for Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade. |
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