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Nov 11th, 2012 at 10:35:37 - Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon (PS2) |
Played a ton of short games the last 2 weeks and want to write something about them. Short meaning <10 hours. So here comes a flood of quick and unedited posts about whatever comes to mind at present.
This one I stopped after like 5 or 6. I couldn't take the combat system. I'd been playing Bayonetta, which is a really fast-paced action game, and then I (perhaps poorly) chose to play Devil Summoner 2. It also has an action combat system, but it's unbelievably slow, boring and monotonous. I almost always enjoy turn-based RPGs better than the action variety, but this one didn't do it for me. Another reason it fell flat is probably due to my playing Nocturne a couple months ago, so once I began the demon acquisition process common to all SMT games, I was sort of like, "...again?" I was very much anticipating this game though because I've developed a real liking for SMT games. I never played Devil Summoner 1 because it's always like $80 on ebay. This purchase actually was an accident. I thought it was Devil Summoner 1 for like $25, but I misread and it was actually Devil Summoner 2. Then it sat on my shelf forever while I hoped to find a cheap copy of the first. Unpossible!
So that combat system. It goes like this: o o o o. o o o o o. o o o o . o o o o. triangle. Boring, right? The o button is your basic attack, and you just button mash it to do some combo. That's pretty much it. Triangle is your special attack, which as far as I played, looks like it'll be the same one attack forever. It uses MAG, which is like mana. You can replenish MAG throughout the fight by exploiting enemy weaknesses in typical SMT fashion. Hit 'em while they're down and get more MAG. Now, the name of the game is Devil Summoner, so you can imagine that you summon devils, or demons, also in typical SMT fashion. Except in this game, they run around the battlefield with you. You can switch them in and out during battle or set 2 to be summoned by default once battle starts. You set your demons' skills. You can set one to autorepeat so they'll just do that by default. Then you can bring up the command menu during battle to give them a different command. They'll carry out that one, then go back to the default action. Their special attacks use MAG too, so the more you use powerful attacks exploit enemy weaknesses, the more powerful attacks you can use. It's a neat idea. So besides o and triangle, you run with the left stick, dodge with x + direction, block with r1, and teleport your demons out of harm's way with r2. But again, battles mostly consist of ooooooo. My thumb got a serious workout.
The story is intriguing. You're some kind of supernatural detective (not quite sure about the finer points here) and you set off to find some guy for some daughter of a wealthy politician. You get closer and closer to him until you find a guy who definitely has some ties. Except this guy has mixed himself up in the demon world. He's a gambler, uncannily lucky, draws hopefuls to him, drains their luck, and turns them into his personal demon slaves in the demon world. And some men from a mysterious organization cast a spell on me and I had to fight my way out of some kind of delusional maze within my mind. Weird stuff.
While solving cases, the demons you recruit help you along the way. They have 'races' or whatever like usual (Pyro, Frost, Pagan, etc.) that, in addition to having the usual spread of combat abilities, also have investigation abilities. So the Wind type can use these special jet streams on the map to teleport you to new areas. The Fury type can enrage and break rocks and things in your path. The Pagan (or Pixie, don't remember!) can read NPCs' minds to get extra information. You *must* use your demons in order to solve cases. You need specific demons for specific things, so it's wise to keep one of each type on hand at all times. I didn't like this necessity, since in my short play time, I came up short twice when I arrived somewhere and realized I didn't have the proper demon I needed to continue, so I had to go back and grind to find one to recruit. It was irritating, and I wasn't looking forward to having to keep one of every type in my stash at all times just in case. When you fuse, you merge two demons into a new one. That almost always results in two demon types going bye-bye and the new demon being a redundancy in terms of type. Then you must go grind and replace the types that you just fused...
Also, somehow this game seems more 'kiddie' than other SMT games...I don't know how to explain why. Maybe it has to do with the expanded demon negotiation and the fact that most of the demons look young or talk like children.
Think that's about it. Actually sad to not get more story, but didn't like the combat, which is death for an RPG. I did order Persona 4 off eBay recently, so no more SMT games until that one, and I'll put it way at the bottom of my list to play.
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Nov 7th, 2012 at 07:37:23 - Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II - Chaos Rising (PC) |
Done done done. Another one bites the dust!
This first expansion improved on the original. The missions have more varied objectives and are better designed. It isn't just 'run through this tiny map in a pretty straight line and kill that thing,' but you get to use tanks in the final mission, run with AI squads, complete multiple objectives in a map, more secondary optional objectives. The maps are bigger and a little more complex. Good things. You also get one new unit, who is the most fun, the Librarian. He's like a spellcaster and I micromanaged him like crazy, shooting fireballs and healing. The story is also more interesting, and the corruption system was more fun to deal with than the Tyranid invasion system. The idea for this expansion was that there is corruption in the ranks of the space marines. You yourself and your squad can become corrupted too through doing evil-ish actions or wearing corrupted armor. When you start going down the corruption path, you lose, or transform, a major ability, but then start gaining a ton more. Many benefits to be had by becoming more corrupted. I started off trying to stay pure, which was pretty easy in theory - just don't equip corrupt stuff. However, the major downside to this expansion, or perhaps the whole game and I just haven't noticed yet, is the random loot drops. For whatever ungodly reason, when I started this expansion, the game destroyed like half my items, and pretty much all the good ones. So I was crippled in the beginning, and very frustrated from having to retry the first and second missions more than a few times just to get gear to replace the crap I started with. Then it was smooth sailing, except all the good stuff I found seemed to be corrupted equipment. So I finally just started wearing it. By the end I had most everyone back down to 0 corruption because I felt better about myself not being evil. Last boss was a pain. Watched YouTube videos to see all the various endings. Waiting a spell to play Retribution, which I hope changes up the gameplay some. Again, fun but not terribly exciting with Chaos Rising.
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Nov 4th, 2012 at 03:19:32 - Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (PC) |
This one let me down. I really liked Dawn of War and was expecting bigger and better and newer for DoW 2. DoW 2 was different, further distinguishing itself from the Company of Heroes style RTS that DoW 1 was. It was actually some kind of RTS-action RPG hybrid. This was neat most of the time. There is no base-building, no resource gathering, no control point holding, etc. You have 7 squads by the end of the game that function as hero units DotA-style. There's you, the Commander. There's Tarkus, the assault marines ; Cyrus the scout ; [name] the devastator ; [name] the dreadnaught, and whatever others. Each have different specialties. They gain experience and level up. Each has 4 skill tree paths to put points into. You'll never fill them all up and unlock all their abilities, so you plan ahead and specialize how you like. There are loot drops, so each character can be equipped with weapons, armor, and accessories. Customizing characters was probably my favorite part.
So all this is nifty and innovative. But the downside is that the story sucks, the characters are forgettable, the voice actors are boring, the gameplay and missions get repetitive, and it's too short. Basically, all these cool things are in place, but the game itself just isn't that exciting. You get these badass characters with fun abilities to use throughout the campaign, but you don't care about them as characters. Their roles are all that mattered to me. In fact I never used the scout unless I had to. The scout stealths around. But this is Warhammer 40k! There is no subtlety! So I benched him almost as soon as I got him. Characters you don't use must get 1/2 xp at the end of missions or something because he fell far behind. Then of course something happened in the story and I was forced to use him for a couple missions. He spent them more often dead than alive because he was weak.
Also there are several very odd UI choices. You can't just assign hotkeys to groups. They are in an order on the right-hand side of the screen (Commander is 1 ; Cyrus is 2 ; Dreadnaught is 3...or whatever) and you can't change their order except in between missions. Then if you change the hotkeys (ctl+1 ; ctl +2 ; the standard RTS way) their order on the screen doesn't change, so it's really confusing when the top character is 3, the one below him is 1, the one below that is 4...the order is all wrong! And you can't assign all your squads together to one hotkey! Like I wanted so bad to just push 5 and select all my squads at once. But if you try to assign your entire army to 5, it instead wipes all their hotkeys. You should be able to have groups 1, 2, 3, 4, and then 5 selects all. Like in every other RTS. It's stupid to not allow me to do that. So you have to constantly drag the box around the units on the field to select them all.
Also there is no button map to look at. You can't assign hotkeys to anything besides groups, and you can't even look at what the buttons do. In fact there is no help menu or anything within the game. No reference whatsoever. Stoooopid. As soon as I beat the game this afternoon, I fired up the first expansion pack, Chaos Rising, and saw that they added a help feature. So now I will go read and see what all I didn't know in the last game that would have helped!
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Oct 29th, 2012 at 06:25:25 - Grandia III (PS2) |
Had a 3-day holiday weekend and my roommate left for the time, so I figured I'd have a nice gaming marathon. That ended in me not so much playing and beating Grandia 3, but letting it run on auto-pilot while I did most of my readings for the week, and got a lot of other odds and ends done on my computer and around the house. Never played a Grandia game before, but it seemed a pretty standard hi-production value JRPG. Nothing too too special going on, and my life would have been fine had I never played it. But it was fun enough.
The coolest thing about Grandia 3 is the battle system. It's a kind of action/turn-based hybrid where space, timing, and targeting matter. Battles take place on a field. You can't move with the joystick at will, but if you defend you can choose where to run. And your characters do actually run to engage enemies, and enemies run around. There's also knockback and you can launch enemies in the air to chain combo attacks. So, executing an attack isn't automatic. They have to run to the enemy first, which is where the timing and spatial awareness come in to play. On the way to an enemy, or while charging a spell or something, you can be attacked, which will slow you down. There is one basic combo type attack, one critical attack (for knocking enemies in the air to begin an aerial combo and for canceling enemy abilities), then there are special moves (inherent to the characters) and magic (which you equip).
In the upper left hand corner of the screen is what is called (I think) the IP dial, which is divided into 3 parts: wait, command, and action. Every character is represented on the dial. Characters' icons move clockwise around it through the wait section. At the beginning of the command section, you give your command. Enemies will give commands at any point, but no one begins carrying out moves until they pass through the command section to the action section. If you choose a regular combo attack or the enemy chooses a normal attack, you quickly move through the command section to the action section. So you will probably act before a character who gets a magic or special move command. They move through the command section at a slower speed. There's some nice risk and reward at work. This is where interrupting comes in. You can time criticals or special moves to interrupt enemies who have been given a magic command or something and send them back into the wait section. Strategy for fighting really involves staying alert as to what enemies are doing, canceling their moves, and knocking them back to the wait section. Once they reach the act section, they carry out their action, then back to the wait section. It's neat, and battles are very fluid.
So earlier when I set I let the game go on auto-pilot, what I mean is that i took advantage of the friendly AI settings. You can set your party (0-4 characters) to run on a couple different scripts. They will be 'rational' which is trying to choose the best strategies for the situation using all their tools, or they will be 'fair' which is only using regular attacks and criticals (no specials or magic), or they will be 'wild,' which is they will go all out. I quickly realized that the AI battles more efficiently than me and battles take about 1/2 the time it takes me. So by an hour or so into the game, I just let the AI take over all the battles. I'd just navigate the maps and did other things during battles, like read for class or pay my bills or clean my room or whatever. I just listened for the victory music. This worked like a charm for like 95% of the game, even with boss fights, up until near the end when my AI crutch couldn't handle some of the tougher enemies and started making really dumb decisions. So by the end I was monitoring more closely or doing some fighting on my own. But what a way to 'play' a game!
As far as the rest of the game goes, it's really nothing special. It's very pretty, especially the scenery, and some of the big monsters and the Guardians look awesome. The sound is quite good, and the music was excellent, especially the sad passages. There is a particular violin part that kept giving me goosebumps. The voice acting was good enough. Lots of emotion. The game itself followed a decent story, rebirth of an old god, yada yada, and had a really irritating focus on the power of love. Granted it was handled alright, but I was over RPGs being obsessed with love and friendship before I ever played one. The beginning especially was this cheeseball intro about the main character wanting to fly. The more lame bits are spread out and easy enough to look past. It's still an emotional game at times. The part where the son leaves his mom really worked for me because it explored the tension she felt between wanting him to go run off with a girl and wanting him to stay at home with her. The villains were not done very well. I'm not exactly sure why the bad guy was bad. And there are a lot of just unexplained villains who exist for no purpose that I could figure out. There's this mysterious guy throughout the whole story and he does nothing at all, hardly even talks, until he betrays another bad guy and then gets killed by the reborn god. Okay. What was the point of him? Anyway, I could go on about loose ends and things that weren't explained very well.
Finally, the game is completely linear. Like y=ax+b. It's weird playing an RPG with 0 exploration elements or side quests. I literally found nothing off the path to do. And you even have a plane to fly! But there is simply nowhere to go! Really bizarre. With a name like Grandia, I expected it to be, I don't know, more grand. Even if this wasn't the best or most thought-provoking game ever, it was still enjoyable and entertaining, and I got a lot done while playing/monitoring it.
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