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Wednesday 5 March, 2008
GAMEPLAY
I played on for another hour and a half expecting more but there isn't anything. It's totally possible that this game is nothing more than tactics and combat but I'm really surprised there isn't anything more than fighting and cut-scenes so far. Everything is getting old fast at this rate. I'm losing a lot to random circumstances and having to redo battles 2-4 times before either winning or getting tired of it and coming back later.
The characters are very shallow and once in a rare while you can find a line that was written in Engrish. The storyline is all obvious and has no redeeming value to it. The scripted conversations spoken by characters during combat makes no sense usually and consists of little more than "I'm glad you're alive" and "Me too!".
Combat is horribly rigged and the system doesn't allow for dead characters to be revived. This wouldn't be so much of an issue if they computer didn't intentionally gang up a (gameplay wise) unfair number of enemies against them. While they do usually make up for their weakness, they also don't survive a round of combat and thus are noted as useless. Seeing as how the core of this game is nothing but combat, you would think that it would work better.
DESIGN
The game has a few odd design traits that make it unique, but not all of them are necessarily good. First off is the way weapons break. Every weapon in the game, no matter how powerful, can only be used a limited number of times. This wouldn't be an issue and is often found in games like this except that the items cannot be repaired and often times vendors don't carry up-to-date weapons, leaving your characters with sub-par weaponry and unavoidable disadvantages. If that wasn't enough, the cost to purchase customizable weapons is insane based on the minor advantages they grant.
Because of how the AI is built, tactics are of the utmost importance in this game. Many times I found myself trying to predict the computers next move (not really hard by any standards) and then coming up with complex counter attack measures. This seems to have been created by the computers obsession with attacking weaker allies.
The game introduces extraordinarily tough characters into your team quite often. Normally I wouldn't gripe about this, especially since they're on par or better than the enemies thrown at you. The problem is that this leads to a high bias against characters you've started with. Not only did they start weak, but they tend to remain just behind the curve a majority of the time, making them liabilities on the battlefield.
The things I have learned even before finishing this game is amazing and unfortunately they are mostly things that I will remember to avoid for the duration of my game production career. The items on this list include the introduction of powerful characters to the players team, the need for an uncomplicated battle system unless the game is designed for it's complexity, to never use items that break which can't be repaired, and that no game is good enough to be comprised of pure combat.
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