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Aug 2nd, 2012 at 00:54:01 - Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 (PS2) |
Been playing this since the weekend and loving it. I played the first DDS game years ago, and this one feels familiar. The characters are mostly the same, and I like them all except the same one I hated back in DDS1: Cielo, the mandatory character with the irritating accent. In this case, it's a very poor Jamaican. "Ya mon, dere be monsters in de dungeon, ja!" And he has stupid blue dredlocks.
The most interesting thing to me about this game is that I now have a better understanding of and appreciation for the Shin Megami Tensei series, or Megaten as fans call it. I won't call it Megaten because I don't feel cool enough. I'll say SMT. Back during DDS, I had no idea that SMT was a series. Then a few years later, which was a few years ago, I played SMT: Persona 3. I suppose since it had been a few years, I didn't recognize Persona 3 as from the SMT universe. But fastforward to now and I recognize all the spells and enemies in DDS2 from Persona 3. It's like the Final Fantasy conventions that you recognize game after game. Agi is fire, Bufu ice, Zio electricity...putting Ma- in front of it makes it hit all enemies. Putting -dyne at the end makes it really strong. The enemies are all also the same. I remember Persona 3 very vividly because it was so cool and I spent a lot of time with it, and a lot of the personas or whatever from that game are enemies here, with the same elemental strengths and weaknesses. Like I said, it makes the game more familiar and like you're fighting old enemies.
Besides the SMT universe, DDS2 is a fairly standard turn-based RPG. You run through the levels engaging random battles, fighting bosses along the way, until you get to the end and move the story forward, go to the next dungeon, fight, boss, story, next dungeon, and on and on. The battles are pretty standard. The story sets it up such that your characters can transform into demons, but they're transformed automatically for battle and 'reverting' to human form is basically treated like any other status effect. So in practice, the whole transformation thing doesn't carry much weight. You can use a few nice combo moves if someone is in human form, but that's it. You get one turn per character, but if you score a crit or expose an enemy's weakness, you only use 1/2 a turn. So with 3 characters, by playing weaknesses, you can get 6 turns. All enemies have preset strengths and weaknesses. If you hit a weakness, sometimes the enemy becomes 'frightened' and you can 'devour' them when you're in demon form. Devouring enemies nets you extra AP, which are the points that you use to learn skills. There's a big 'mantra [skill] grid' where you select which spells and abilities characters will learn. You pay money to 'download' the mantra and then that character learns it through earning AP from battle. So devouring enemies just lets you learn mantras faster, which isn't necessarily desirable because they become very expensive to download the more powerful they are, and what I ended up with from constantly consuming was that everyone knew all these cheap mantras since I never saved money to learn the better ones because I learned them so fast because I devoured so much and got so much AP. Confusing sentence.
The story is some kind of post-apocalyptic sci-fi tale. In the first DDS game, you were a tribe in 'the Junkyard' fighting for dominance. Some mystery girl appeared and something something you wake up in a ruined city. In DDS2 it is revealed that you are just AI in a computer program and that the Junkward was a warfare simulation to find the best AI, which is your tribe. But now you're kind of going rogue and assaulting the Karma Society which rules the wasted earth. There's a virus caused by sunlight that turns people to stone, so everyone lives underground, and the Karma Society's project...well, I can't recall what exactly it was for. Anyway...I honestly don't quite understand what I'm doing, but I'm enjoying doing it. The game flows in a very formulaic way that I like, and the dungeons are such that you need to explore every corner for items, and it's very orderly, which I like. I can go through DDS2 being very logical and methodical.
The dungeons themselves are HUGE. The last one took me maybe 4 hours. I can't exactly remember how long because I took a long break in between. In the last one I was in, I got stumped as to how to proceed at one point and had to go to a walkthrough. There were all these gates that you had to find the correct switches to open, and I had it all done except for this one switch that I couldn't find! It was tricky, but you had to do some backtracking to get around a locked door and open something else from behind. So that took a while. The boss battles weren't bad, but I think that's primarily because I'd done some level grinding in the previous dungeon where the final boss had me on the ropes. That's the other time I had to look at a walkthrough because he was kicking my ass. He'd change his strengths and weaknesses throughout the battle and I couldn't figure out a pattern. Turns out there were just 3 phases, and once he goes through all 3 in turn, then it's random phase switches instead of predictable ones. And that battle forced me to use a benched character who was level 19 (my main party was like 26). So I took time there to level grind to like 25 and 30, and I think that helped in this most recent dungeon.
A-n-y-w-a-y. Good times. Maybe I can kill it this weekend and move on to the next thing. There's this website called howlongtobeat.com that has evolved a lot since I first signed up for it over a year ago. But one thing it lets users do it backlog their games, and then it adds up how long your backlog will take to complete based on everyone's submitted completion times. I sat down the other day out of curiosity and entered every game I own but had never played, and the number it spat out...70+ DAYS. I have 70 DAYS worth of unplayed video games. It's hard to express how futile this makes it feel, haha.
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Jul 27th, 2012 at 03:18:29 - Odin Sphere (PS2) |
I'm really sad to have to put down Odin Sphere. It's an amazing RPG through and through, but it's got horrible fun-killing game-stopping framerate issues. Also there frequent lengthy load times. I'm able to look past the load times, and I was able to look past the framerate stuttering up to a point. Last night I sat down to finish Valkyrie's epilogue, and the boss fight there just brought my PS2 to its knees. You fight Odette, Queen of the Underworld or something, and she just summons so many enemies and there is so much stuff going on on the screen and the action slows SO MUCH that she is unbeatable as far as I can tell. I guess the main problem with the slowdown is that buttons are unresponsive or have major lag between the time you hit X and Valkyrie actually jumps. If you can't jump precisely, you get hit all the time. If Odette's actions are really slowed down, you can't tell what she's doing because the animations skip, so you don't know that she's about to cast this or that until she does it. She has some move that hits for more than 1/2 my HP where she disappears and reappears wherever you are to hit you. Well if the game is so laggy that you don't really see her disappear and you don't see her begin to reappear, how are you supposed to know when to move out of the way or where she is appearing? I thought about going back and grinding levels and stocking completely full of health potions, but the slowdown is so lame that I won't do it on principle. There are a whole lot of other areas where the game slows down like this, whenever there are a lot of enemies on screen, which is every 4-5 star level so far. But you could always still beat the normal enemies like this. Another thing is that Odette heals herself, so when I make some progress, she'll heal back up eventually. Because it takes me so long to attack her, she heals most of my damage back up and I can't get ahead.
Anyway, there's my rant. And it's too bad because besides these issues, I was loving this game. The animation was phenomenal, great voice work, dialogue very good, story and storytelling were fascinating. The game is set up so you play this one story from 5 intertwining perspectives. You can always go back and view the story events in sequence. This part where I got stuck is at the end of Valkyrie's section, which is the first character you play with. Maybe I can go on Youtube or something and just watch the entire storyline.
The game is segmented into 3 types of events. There's the drama, the battle, and the home. Drama events are cut scenes where the main story unfolds. Battle events take place across locations in the world map. Home events are when you can walk around a safe spot, in a castle or somewhere, and talk with NPCs and buy and sell and that kind of thing. There's not much else to say about the drama events, besides to reiterate how awesome the art style is since this is where you can put the controller down and gaze at it.
The battle events take place from the world map. There are several locations which correspond to this or that kingdom. You select the level where you need to go and then you enter that location. This is the cool part. There are a bunch of stages in each level. Each stage has a difficulty rank, and is connected to at least one other stage. Each stage is also a sphere (Odin Sphere..?). They're 2-d spaces and if you run one direction, you'll eventually come full circle. So the stages are 1-5 stars in difficulty, shops, mini-bosses, or main bosses. You beat the whole level if you kill the main boss. You don't always know where you're going. There are exits from each stage and each exit goes to another stage that is connected in that direction. If you find a map, the whole level will become known and you can move more purposefully from stage to stage to go to the boss or the shop or that 5-star stage with a sweet reward, or whatever. Each stage has a reward, so once you get the map you can see the reward for each stage and chase after specific coins or food or alchemy materials or whatever. I really liked the design here.
Like many RPGs, Odin Sphere has a food system and an alchemy system. The food system is tied in to the neat leveling system. So in Odin Sphere you have two levels, a Psypher level and an HP level. Psypher level is your attack strength and how many special moves you have/can perform. You increase this by collecting phozons, little particles that emit from dead enemies mostly. You can also use phozons to feed seeds, which sprout food. Food restores HP and gives you HP experience. Get an HP level up and your max HP increases. So you need both, but it's up to you to figure out a balance. I just kept them close to one another, but it takes some managing. If you collect all the phozons, your attack will be higher than HP. If you let seeds absorb all the phozons, your HP will be higher than your attack. So there are various types of seeds and they take xyz number of phozons to sprout food, more phozons for seeds that give food with higher HP recovery or HP experience. I found it fun to manage growing food during battle, harvesting it, and eating it strategically for levels during battle, and also for getting the right foods to bring to the cafe or restaurant to have the chefs make me the really awesome HP leveling food. You find recipes throughout the game that teach the chefs how to make you really really kickass food if you bring them the right combinations of ingredients and coins. It's somewhat in-depth, and was something different for me.
The fighting seems pretty basic action-RPG stuff, with the food and phozons and alchemy for added depth. Alchemy by the way lets you make various healing and damage and status effect potions with materials and these little mandragoras you find in the stages. Nothing too exciting there. X jumps, square attacks, circle opens your bags, and triangle brings up your psypher abilities. according to the instruction manual, each character has a unique move or two. Valkyrie has a shield to block with by holding square. I never used it, but maybe some of the other characters' abilities would be cooler. You get hit a lot in battle. I'd usually either try to power through enemies by button-mashing X, or I'd double-jump and do an aerial attack because it was safer. Oh, they don't let you button-mash too much because there's a power gauge that depletes as you button-mash. It was a bit constraining, but I felt it was nice in a way because it forces you to run away to refill the power gauge. While you're on the other side of the sphere, it kind of forces time for you to plant a seed or make a potion. I actually found this irritating at first like it broke up the action, but later on I found it more useful because you do need to grow fruit and make potions.
So yeah, very cool stuff. When I was looking online to get information on the framerate issue, I found out that there's an HD version for PS3 that doesn't have the issues. Also, they released a European PS2 version that doesn't have the issues. Apparently just the NTSC release has the framerate issues. There are also videos of people who hacked it on a PS2 emulator playing it on PC. But whatever. On to the next thing.
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Jul 22nd, 2012 at 19:50:28 - Child of Eden (360) |
Once I realized how to properly play this game (shoot in time with the beat), I went back to attempt the Kinect controls again, and man was it a different experience! I take back what I said earlier about disliking the Kinect controls. Now that I have a rhythm to what I'm doing, the controls feel very fluid and responsive. Could still be better of course, but I'm impressed. I tore up level 3 and 4 with the Kinect and have been stuck on the last level ever since. I tried it with the controller and didn't do any better. I'm writing from memory at the moment and don't recall if I made it to the boss, though I did get to a portion where I have to defeat some older bosses. I'll have a few more goes soon and pass the game back to N.
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Jul 22nd, 2012 at 19:40:31 - Gemini Rue (PC) |
Gemini Rue...a dystopian future where the government hooks citizens on drugs then 'cleans up the streets,' abducting the addicts for rehabilitation, or more likely for memory-wiping and reprogramming to become assassins, government-sponsored criminals, or other agents of deceit. It's a thrilling premise to be sure, and I'm into the Memento-influenced story. ("I have this condition...") An adventure game that I really liked! It's not braindead easy, but not maddeningly difficult. Things make sense and you can always find the answer if you think about it and look for it.
Alas, Gemini Rue has bugs, bugs, buuuuugs. Let me count the ways I couldn't play - sometimes the right half of the screen gets fuzzy, the rainbow pixels when cable stations go off air overnight; a picture analysis sequence that I couldn't exit except by ctl-alt-deleting the game; Giselle not talking to me about the machine; and finally the killer, once I reloaded a few times and she finally did talk to me about the machine, she she won't recognize the machine code and/or I can't knock the gun from the pipes. And thus, I cannot continue the game. I'm 100% sure I did it right. I even looked up a walkthrough to figure out what I was doing wrong. Answer: nothing. I even redid the entire gun-through-the-ventilation-system part from scratch and redid the machine code like 5 times, but Giselle and/or the machine won't recognize the code and I can't knock the gun from the pipe. It's a terrible disappearing trick. My character stands under the drain pipe on top of the crate, and I use the lead pipe to swing at the drain pipe. "I can reach it but I have no reason to do that now." Yes you do, you most certainly do, you see, because I guided the gun down the correct shaft several times and it definitely should be there and WHY won't you just TRY to hit the pipe, stupid computer-man?!
Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.
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