Well… I was planning on making a post sometime closer to New Years, but things got busy and I eventually forgot. So here we are! I hope everyone had a nice holiday season.

Initially I had planned to be playing Ar Tonelico 2 EN around this time (which I have waiting on hand right now) but I decided to try out Fragile for a little bit after realizing Namco will probably never bring this over to the States. I’m about 2 hours in, and I have to say I’ve taken a huge liking to it so far – the reason being primarily because of the protagonist’s sidekick/backpack/AI thing. The exchanges between them are just great.

Even though I’m only two hours in, I have found a significant flaw – the inventory system. What you can have on hand with you is very limited – it resembles the backpack in the Diablo series except much, much smaller. There is, however, a bag which you can store the items you picked up. It is much more spacious, but for some reason you can’t put the things you have on hand into your backpack while on the move – you have to find a save point first, then access your inventory from there. I really don’t know the reason it’s like this. I could be very wrong and there is some way to bypass finding a save point in order to organize your inventory… I just can’t seem to find it. I suppose it’s a way to get you to identify mystery items frequently (sitting down at a save point acts as a “Deckard Cain” of sorts for recently acquired items). In their defense, they do have a LOT of save points scattered about.

Anyways, that’s been about the only thing to bitch about so far. The music and presentation have been wonderful, and I’m loving the little stories behind the random items you find. Did I mention really nice music?

More to come, maybe…

UPDATE 01/27: What the… so apparently a short teaser for a new unnamed Tales on the Wii was shown sometime back in December. I guess you can add that to the very short list of games to look forward to there. Not that I’m not happy, but after playing 100+ hours of Vesperia I would rather see more of that HD quality rather than the Wii. ALSO, CAN I HAVE MY COLLECTOR’S EDITION GIFT NOW NAMCO?! Seriously, how long has it been now? Just make some Overdrive Princess plushes and be done with it.