Okay! ARE YOU READY?

So you get to make your avatar. It’s really neat and I liked it a bit better than the Mass Effect creator (except you don’t get to put cool scars or anything). I had a lot of fun making it (my avatar has white hair and tan skin : D ). But, unfortunately…your avatar doesn’t really do squat in the story. I don’t think they gave it any speaking parts other than the battle stuff (I heard her yell “Leonard!” once in battle…), so the avatar just kinda stands there awkwardly in scenes, mute and…pointless. ALSO, WTF WITH THE SEXISM, LEVEL-5? I hate that stupid frock look that girl avatar clothes have. I was all excited to buy some long chain pants, and what do I get? CHAIN PANTS THAT STOP AT THE HEM OF THE CHAIN MAIL TUNIC, SO THE LEGS ARE STILL SHOWING. D: I haven’t gotten far enough to see if any other pants actually look like pants on girls, but…JEEBUS.

Next, there’s Leonard. He’s your average nobody kid working for a wine…connoisseur? What do you call people who sell wine but don’t make it? Or maybe he makes it? Anyway. So he’s got that typical, laid-back, borderline delinquent attitude going on that JRPG/anime/manga heroes tend to have lately — the kind where he’ll take dangerous risks in tight situations where nobody else dares to. This all goes well with that sword he comes equipped with, because, as you all know, heroes are always swordsmen. He’s also got a funky thing going on with his hair…If you know Tenchi Muyo!, you know how Tenchi’s got that one hair thing at the back of his head? Yeah, Leonard’s got one of those, except longer and thicker.

Then there’s Annoying Girl, and Mysterious Swordsman Guy. Annoying Girl, or Yulie, isn’t super annoying. There was just something about her that bothered me. Mysterious Swordsman Guy (Eldore) is just that. He is also awesome with a sword, I’m assuming. He’s got a cool cape, so that should be a dead giveaway. MSG shows up a bit in the opening scene, acting mysterious (hooded cloak and all) and seems to have some sort of eye power to compel people to do things (Geass?). His voice actor gave him some sort of accent…I can’t tell if he’s trying to sound kinda English-y or what. It’s not bad, anyway. Just something I noticed.

The story! If for some reason you care about the first 2 hours of a game being spoiled, then…skip.

Leonard and voiceless avatar have to go pick up wine for Princess Cisna’s debut ball. You run through a field to get to the town. You pick up Yulie. Run back. Deliver wine. Get crap from guards about how late you are, then brush it off offhandedly. Sneak into the ball. Don’t get kicked out for some reason, even though Yulie is eating food and looking rather like a common person. Big monster attacks. Leonard saves princess from Mysterious Evil Armored Guy. Run to cellar. Bad guys are already there and wandering around. Not sure how they got there, but you fight them and they go away. Run into vault. Find White Knight Ark. MSG pops out of nowhere.

“No, you can’t use that power! Only the worthy can use it!”

“Well, nothing else we can do!”

Fight Phantom. Beat it easily. Apparently it has low standards, because if I wasn’t mistaken, a level 4 kid could survive the sword of a spirit. Maybe heart or resilience has something to do with it, but Phantom makes no mention of it.

Snap out of trance.

Monster!

MONSTER SMASH LEONARD.

JK, monster, Leonard teleported somehow!

YU GI OHHHHH TRANSFORMATION! (It reminded me of duel disks XD)

“What? This boy is worthy?”

AWESOME BUT SLOW ARMOR FIGHT. LAY THE BEATDOWN.

Oh no, princess is kidnapped! Leonard has the Ark, you say? Nothing we can do about it! Well, naturally, we shall send him, his voiceless companion, this random girl, and this random swordsman out to save her! Shut up, Cyrus, your logical protests about sending this random party out to save someone of royal blood don’t belong here! Of course we won’t give him any military assistance! We have a kingdom to rebuild! Evil advisor is evil and turns around, then smirks as he walks away.

And that’s how far I got.

Now for the battle system! It’s like they transplanted FFXI’s battle system to an offline game, tweaked it a bit, and called it a day.  There’s even that scrolling text box thing that tells you what’s happening. “Leonard took 13 dmg! Yulie restored 13 HP! Monster took 20 dmg!” I was kinda expecting someone from a Linkshell community to pop in there and say something amid the battle log. You can see all the enemies on screen and fight them there (you don’t get whisked away to a separate battleground), and you can also move around as you fight. However, there’s a gauge that tells you when you can attack, and you can’t dodge or do anything useful by moving around. If the enemy starts the attack animation and it’s targeting you, you’re gonna get hit unless the system’s math says it misses. It’s effectively an active-time turn-based battle system where you can move around for some reason. I wouldn’t mind it so much if they just made it like FFX-2’s ATB system or something that is more traditionally turn-based, because I hate how it’s presented right now. Just for some perspective, I greatly prefer the action-y combat of the Tales or Kingdom Hearts series over traditional turn-based stuff like Final Fantasy or this. Anywho, you can link up attacks to make combos, and apparently you have to time your button presses to make the combo go, but I’ve tried just mashing X as much as I can when the combo initiates and it goes through fine. Now that I think about it, I think the whole walking-around-pointlessly thing is the thing that’s really keeping me from liking the system…It’s like a charade that tries to hide the fact that it’s really a fixed turn-based system, which wouldn’t really bother me. And when you control the Knight, it moves really slowly and is kinda clunky, so if I didn’t have to deal with moving it, it’d be great.

You can also let the characters learn different skills from different weapon types. It’s pretty neat. A character earns skill points every time he or she levels up, and you use those points to learn weapon skills. Different weapon types can also give you stat boosts you can get with skill points, like boosts to agility for sword types. It reminds me of FFX’s Sphere Grid, except not in grid form and you don’t have to backtrack or teleport into a different path to learn different skills. I decided to go against typical RPG conventions and made Eldore/MSG the Staff Chick (have fun with that TV Tropes link). I’d give Leonard a staff too, but he can’t equip them. My avatar (a girl) has an axe right now. Not sure if I’m gonna change it to a spear later. Haha. Or maybe something else. WHO KNOWS.

Anywho, all in all, at this point I don’t think much of the game, what with the lame story (so far) and the annoying battle system. But I do have hopes that it’ll surprise me later. At first, I hated FFX until I got into it more, and then I was hooked. I’m thinking that there will be a point where I transition from “This game is meh” to “THIS GAME IS SO ADDICTING.” Soooo. I’m optimistic.

I gotta finish No More Heroes 2. Hahaha.

Things I need to do other than sitting here blogging:

• B.A.I.T. Studios website coding. It’s so ready for awesome uploading action, and yet I am so not coding. It’s probably only a night’s worth of coding to get an uploader system working and displaying pages. Well, getting the uploader working, anyway.
• B.A.I.T. Studios layout update. It’s a bit too narrow and a bit too aligned waaay off to the right. It’s a bit disconcerting to some people, I think.
• Wonderment (which is sketched, by the way)
• Intersection

Who here reads this blog? Raise your hands, now. Raise them high.

I’m not sure what to talk about. I’ll get back to you guys once I do.