Adding in pretty pictures later.

Whew. We’re now into the second quarter of the year. Let’s talk Q1~! (as briefly as I can)

Bayonetta – Already covered this. (It’s awesome.)

Mass Effect 2 – Having played the first shortly before the this came out, I was pretty excited to delve in again so quickly. I played Vanguard for both games, and the differences were quite substantial due to the ammo and class revamps (Charge, anyone?). And lucky for me, they decided to let us start the game out on Insanity from the get-go so I didn’t have to play through twice.

Despite collecting characters being most of the game, I still thoroughly enjoyed the game and the difficulty Insanity had to offer. Charging is probably one of the most funnest things in the game, whether it be to blow someone off their feet, smash a husk or a robot into pieces upon impact, or just to create a kinetic barrier out of desperation during a crazy battle. I used my favorite from the the original, Tali, for all of the game along with Grunt until I got Legion. Dual Combat Drones! I can’t imagine how I would have handled those relentless Harbingers on Insanity without Combat Drone distractions.

Combat aside, I liked the new cast of characters. Mordin in particular was my favorite. The story built up nicely here – enough to get me excited for the conclusion in 3.

P.S.  Probe away. Probe launched. Launching probe.

White Knight Chronicles – This is a game I wanted to play ever since I saw the first trailer back in what….’06? Has it really been that long? Japan got it in ’08 and finally NA got it this February. I’m not sure what took the game this long to get to us. It barely got to us before FF13 did, with FF13 being a relatively recent release in Japan. WKC on the other hand, had already been out for about 2 years there. Was it worth the wait? Short answer: not really. The overwhelming problem consists of two things: slowness and lack of variety. Vague, right? However, those two things describe almost every aspect of WKC.

I had a huge detailed rant about the details I hated but I decided to cut it for the sake of brevity. In essence, the game is a worse version of FF12 (graphics aside). There is one thing in the combat system I’d like to comment on though – WKC’s Action Chip and combo system. The two go hand in hand – you need Action Chips to make lengthier combos. The problem is that you don’t gain Chips fast enough for you to use decent combos with relative frequency. Also, the knight combat seriously lacks variety. Is it too much to ask for some Xenogears gears-style action, complete with some sort of Infinity mode? Or maybe have us create some combos for the knight as well? There’s so much wasted potential here.

The online aspect is Monster Hunter-ish which is nice, except in order to advance in ranks you’re forced to repeat the same quests over and over until you rank up to gain access new ones. The lack of variety here is slightly alleviated due to some quests having different outcomes depending on choices/randomness, but it wasn’t enough to keep ranking up from being tedious.

I still kind of enjoyed this, even though the story kinda just ends abruptly because they’re doing the whole direct continuation thing in the next game. I can only hope the sequel is fixing a lot of the problems that kept it from being great.

Bioshock 2 – Better than the first? With the addition of Big Sisters, I think it was certainly more fun/challenging. They’ve also gotten really good at that whole first-person storytelling thing. Not much else to say here!

Final Fantasy XIII – Again, already covered this!

Resonance of Fate – a.k.a. Resonance of Reanbell! Can you tell I’m still a bit irked about the name change? Honestly, Vashyron sounds worse.  Anyways… this was really fun. Leave it to tri-Ace to come up with a pretty engaging and rewarding battle system. The game isn’t without it’s flaws, however. Of note,  the introduction to the mechanics of the game is basically them dumping a huge in-game manual on you and saying “Here, read!”. Luckily you can get actual tutorials in the nearby Arena next to the first town.

Side missions seemed to be the bulk of the game, leaving me wondering just how long the game is if you just skipped all of that. Without the extra money and items from the side stuff though you could be looking at a substantial ramp up in difficulty later on…maybe.  I did get through the majority of the game without blowing all of my money on customization so maybe you could still get through the game if you were smart with your special ammo.

Thinking about it now, there were two things that never got old for me in this game. One of them was buying clothes for Reanbell and dressing her up. She’s too cute to resist! The second was the combat! Not just because every attack is pretty much a John Woo-ish action movie sequence, but because there’s a surprising amount of strategy involved for some of the tougher fights – especially if you want to say…maintain a high Bezel count while simultaneously building your Resonance meter and still keep yourself alive and in a prime position for activating that tri-Attack (I’m not even gonna try to explain any of that, if you played you should know). Probably the only thing that sucked about combat is if you ever went into Critical Condition, which most of the time is just completely unrecoverable from. The only solution is to not suck so you never enter Critical Condition in the first place, but sometimes attacks don’t go as planned or the enemy does something you weren’t expecting so it’ll happen.

Anyways, pretty darn enjoyable once you get into the battle system. There actually isn’t that much else to the game, even story-wise. I can only imagine what kind of game it would be if they improved on everything else.

Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening: Provides some new and rather interesting information into the world of Dragon Age. Unfortunately since this is just an expansion, it keeps the same mechanics as the original game. As a result, there isn’t much of a challenge in terms of difficulty. Can I get a setting a notch or two above Nightmare, Bioware? I also much preferred the original cast. All we get here is Oghren. Blech.

I’m definitely missing something here, but I’ve run out of time. After Dragon Age, we’ve hit a bit of a break which was covered with some StarCraft 2 and awesome shooters like Mushihime-sama Futari and Espgaluda 2, we hit a bombshell of a game – Monster Hunter Tri. Which comes out today! Not sure if I’ll be streaming or not, but Scin and I are already online.