Wednesday 10 January, 2007

All right, today, I started playing this game at about 1AM and got a pretty good session of play. I have finally achieved a party of 3 (the full amount during battle) and some of them even have some pretty good background stories. So far, Ashley has turned into a demon, and become "the chosen one" by pulling a sword from a stone (kinda cliche, but o well). Brad has come out of prison for something we don't know about. He has an explosive collar around his neck just in case he tries to escape the mercenary group, ARMS. Lilka hasn't shown any real background other than the fact that she is living in her older sister's shadow. I actually do not like this character. Not only is her background blase, but her character design leaves much to be desired. I enjoy the way the game delivers new towns and dungeons. In order to find them, you must be told their location, and then you have to manually find them with a radar-like device while venturing on the world map. I am quite fond of the 3D town and world maps that have been added since the prequel. The rotation of the maps really lets me explore all that each town has to offer. I'm not one to count my chickens before they hatch, but this game could shows a lot of potential to finding a place in my heart.

I'm curious about your reactions to the interplay between dynamics and storyline in the game. Compared to other RPG's you've played, how do you think these two aspects of the game balanced each other? How immersed did you feel? How did the cinematic and story elements of the game add or detract from your feeling of emmersion?

You mentioned you didn't care for Lilka's character design, if you were on the design committee, what changes would you have suggested?

What are your opinions of the game's battle system? Was it's maluability worth the learning curve? Was it too easy? Was the tutorial unnessecarily long?

I'd say, that compared to other RPGs, the balance between dynamics and storyline are fairly good. They're not Final Fantasy status, but they are pretty good. I have to say I am a big fan of the puzzle style dungeons this game entails. That alone makes me biased to its fun value and immersion as I, myself, really get into them. The "cinematics" of the game that I've encountered so far are a little tedious, but these are more like uncontrollable scenes in the story than actual cinematics, and thier greatest flaws are the text moving too slowly.

The thing with Lilka is that her physical appearance isn't anything special. The boring red dress and long brown hair just doesn't give me any enjoyment. The other characters so far either have really cool armor, or interesting color patterns. Maybe I just haven't gotten used to the fact that she uses a damn umbrella as a weapon. I probably would have given her a costume with more color that just red and tan. Maybe give her a different weapon that could hold more potential for intricacies in it's structure. I would definitely give her some sort of elaborate jewelry. I might even make her older than 14 (I'm getting a little tired of the whole youngster character aspect of RPGs). As I have yet to truly get deep into this game, this might just be that I don't know any of her background yet, and I'm just being hard on her. I tend to be a little harder on mages in RPGs, so it's probably that too.

The battle system is easy to understand. I don't even remember any tutorial about fighting. If you don't understand what an option does in any menu, holding triangle brings up a help menu on the top of the screen which gives a short description of each icon/item's/whatever's function. It might just be a little too easy, as I am blasting through each battle very quickly, but I assume this is just because I train quite a bit with these types of games, and it is the beginning of the game (the same thing happened with Wild Arms 1 for me).