Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving! As for me, it’s always a wonderful holiday season when this comes in the mail.

This’ll probably be the last post of the year. If you don’t want to read spoilers about Skyward Sword, I wouldn’t suggest scrolling down past the Type-0 rant.

Getting back immediately to what I was talking about before with Final Fantasy Type-0… Mmm… there were two major annoyances. The first is the camera. Type-0 features a camera similar to The 3rd Birthday, following you around in 3rd person.  I’ll be honest; this is quite nitpicky because the camera actually works fine the majority of the time. When it doesn’t though, it really, really hurts. Cameras getting stuck on walls in close quarters combat with some deadly mobs can spell the end of you. Some of the random battlefields have small monsters combined with tall grass, leading to zero vision when you lock onto anything.

The second annoyance is the items, or rather the difficulty of using anything that you don’t have on your single item hotkey while in combat. The game doesn’t pause what’s going on when you load up the item menu, so what you’re left with is selecting what you want as quick as you can while also trying to discern where to move (assuming you’re trying to run away from something) with the opaque item screen blocking your way. This is still a bit nitpicky, because if you’re doing okay you really won’t touch the menu at all, but it wouldn’t hurt to try to give us more item hotkeys somehow. I can still guarantee that there will be a few missions where you’ll want to use an Ether or something but all you have hotkeyed are Hi-Potions.

Sigh…the original post I had written up about this was a lot more negative but I toned it down a lot since. The game is actually pretty amazingly fun overall. The Kill Sight system was really refreshing, although for bosses it really favored ranged attacks. The soundtrack is also a such a treat… I’m a sucker for great battle themes and Type-0 really brings it with tracks like Weapons of White and Echo of the Dreadnoughts.

It’s rare for me to play a game with so many playable character choices and actually end up liking all of them, both personality and gameplay-wise. Of course I did have my favorites (Cinque, Deuce, and Rem) but everybody in Class Zero is pretty fun to play once you get the hang of their styles.  It’s kind of a shame that the game doesn’t share experience between everyone in Class Zero though. You’ll find that the people you favor the most will gradually outlevel everyone and then there will be no point in bringing anyone other than your first three since they’ll just die immediately. I guess that’s what the Arena is for, but it’s still a pain in the ass to go out of your way to get the rest of Class Zero up to par.

Without spoiling too much, I can say that I liked the story and I would highly recommend a second playthrough immediately after the first. Yeah. I think that’s all I can say about that.

I’ve no idea when this is coming out overseas, but according to recent news it IS being worked on for an overseas release, so I guess be patient!

Next up was Skyrim, but I really don’t think I need to say much. Amazingly huge. Amazingly buggy. I haven’t finished it, and I’m taking a break from it for quite a while due to broken quests.

And finally we have The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

Ugh. I don’t know what I can write up about this that sounds decent. The second half of the game is so chalk full of fillers it’s kind of sickening. These are the same things happening in every recent Zelda, yet somehow worse because it happens in reused areas. Flying lost its charm very quickly; the sky is actually quite barren and tedious to travel back and forth across. The game needs to stop telling me what X item is when I just picked one up five minutes ago.

Why do six of the twelve bosses in the entire game consist of Ghirahim and The Imprisoned and their rehashes? Why was the final boss such a bore? And why would he create a realm to fight in that would actually HELP Link? Since Ghirahim was capable of a more human form, why didn’t we see Fi’s? Why does the game torture me with reminders about my low battery or hearts?

Maybe I’m just totally jaded on Zelda games now, but honestly so many of these problems have been around for ages that people seem to think it should be how standard Zelda is. It shouldn’t be. I’m actually shocked at how many sites gave Skyward a 10/10. Some actually admit to only playing it for a few hours, which actually makes sense, because the first half is actually good. They’re lying to themselves and to potential purchasers if they think the entire game is like that though.

This month still has Frontier Gate left, something I didn’t remember while I was writing my last post. Chances are I won’t be able to give impressions until the end of the month/early January though, so don’t expect anything for a bit.

Oof. I really should have started to work on this post well before Skyrim; I certainly had the time. This’ll definitely be shorter than I wanted it to be, and by the time I have time to add more I’ll probably forget the little things here and there that I wanted to mention.

Final Fantasy Type-0. Pretty good! Not without a number of faults, but  I had lots of fun with it. The rest of this post (when I get time to add to it) will probably reflect on that pretty poorly however, because I’ll probably be focusing on the faults more than anything.

In other news, new goodies arrived a few days ago!

I’ve been pretty scared to open either of them because I’ve been dealing with a cold lately, but they’re fantastic from what I peeked at. Compared to the Atelier Artbook, the Falcom Chronicle uses much thinner paper so it wasn’t quite as thick a book  as I expected, but it’s still pretty hefty.

Here’s where I usually post in bold what I’m playing next month, but I actually don’t know. Maybe that’ll be the month to get some Kiseki done.

Hah… I am insanely behind aren’t I?

I haven’t had a large enough chunk of free time to dedicate the time games like Zero and Ao no Kiseki actually deserve, so I’ve been putting those off. It doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy these Nendoroids, though!

First things first, Blizzcon was a blast. 99% of what I did there was just watch Starcraft 2 games, and it was totally worth it. Especially the GSL finals, experiencing that firsthand (with front row seats!) was unbelievable. The fans there with me were awesome and I’m pretty sure we showed the GSL crew that coming over here was worth the trip, so hopefully we’ll see another finals at the next Blizzcon.

In regards to all the announcements that happened there… What? Mists of Pandaria is real?! I honestly never took anything Blizzard did with Pandaren seriously, because everything they did with them up to that point was never serious. Even if I did, I think the real problem I have with them is the transition. We’re going from taking down Deathwing the Destroyer… into Pandas. PANDAS. Sure, we’re gonna have a big war to fight, Theramore will get destroyed, blah blah blah.  It’s still a step down. I suppose we’ll just have to wait to see what they have in store for the raids there to see where they want to take that though.

I lied about more posts about Grand Knights History. I think I’ve said what I needed to say about it. It’s being localized now, so soon you guys can see for yourselves!

I also lied about doing an El Shaddai post, but I’ll give you the gist of it here. Not worth it. Pretty? Yes, sometimes. I’ll maybe even go so far as to call it rarely pretty. Everything else is just a total mess, from the gameplay to the story. Moving on…

Dark Souls. It was half of everything I wanted out of it. What was the half I didn’t like? The multiplayer system, of course. Whether or not multiplayer in Demon’s worked like they intended experience-wise, it set a precedent for it’s successor, and not having it work the way it did upset the hell out of a lot of people. Still, everything else was great, but now it’s plagued with game-breaking bugs that From has been pretty slow to fix.

Regarding other complaints… yeah, there is definite slowdown/lag in certain areas of the game – totally valid. The camera… I never had problems with it. People need to learn when the right times to lock on and off are. It was the same with Demon’s. Nobody should be complaining about the gameplay itself. You know what you’re getting into, especially if you played Demon’s. Yet, somehow I see people who have played and beaten Demon’s complain about things like being too slow to recover (from wearing heavier armor) … It boggles my mind. I don’t think I can say anything else that hasn’t been said about this game, so let’s move on.

I should have been diving into Persona 2 after Xillia, but I ended up being too curious about Jude’s side and I ended up playing that instead before Dark Souls arrived. NG+ made even Unknown a joke though, so getting to where the stories split was just tedious. If you ask me, Milla’s side was the best, but I think playing Jude first might have a better feel to it overall.

Overall, I think Xillia might have been a little bit on the easy side. My first playthrough was on Hard, but  I felt like I was being pretty sloppy with my play throughout the entire thing. With the exception of the final boss and extra dungeon boss, nothing really hit hard enough to make me feel scared. Even when you reach that point, it’s hard to be scared when you have someone as overpowered as Leia with her insane abilities (Item Everyone and Speed Item). The game is still pretty damn fun though. I never got tired of doing Link Artes; they should really add more things like that to future battle systems.

A note to all those Tales fans who want Tales of Xillia to be localized as soon as possible: You know what you have to do. Graces f is coming, and its incredible – so buy it and show them that you want more Tales games.

I almost forgot. I was able to watch the The Legend of Heroes: Sora no Kiseki The Animation ~Anniversary Festival~ earlier this month… such a treat for Kiseki fans. I can’t wait for the second volume! I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but I really, really want to see a certain one-on-one fight get animated. Those scenes gave me nerd chills even though I was watching two little 3D sprites go at it. Even though I was watching through the stream I could really tell the animation quality was great, even during the fight scenes which were pretty fast. I really hope they sell a lot so maybe they can create a Zero anime like they mentioned in the panel.

Mm…what else… there won’t be any streaming for quite a while. I’m not really sure what’ll be up next that I feel like streaming in the first place. We’ll see! I’ve got my hands on Final Fantasy Type-0 right now so that’ll be up for next month’s post along with Skyward Sword and Skyrim.