100% done with Final Fantasy XIII-2 – 160 Fragments/Secret Ending and the Platinum Trophy. The more I think about how hilarious and outrageous the main ending is (and quite a few of the Paradox Endings) the more I realize that I really, really like this game. The music was such a step down from the original though. Some pieces were downright terrible (red chocobo song).

I’ll get into it a bit more later this month.

Before I start up on the Frontier Gate rant, I’d like to get a little Falcom love out there. I was able to watch the Sora no Kiseki The Animation Vol.2 Event stream they had at LOFT/PLUS ONE! In addition to about three hours of discussion, they also showed the first 20 minutes of the volume 2. They posted the first 7 minutes online already, but somewhere beyond that you’ll see this:

Can you make out the title of the book? =)

If you don’t know what this screenshot is all about, you obviously haven’t played SC. Although I haven’t seen the rest of volume 2, I can say that Falcom and Kinema Citrus have done a great job bringing the series to animated life, and I’m really sad to see it end at two volumes. I hope the anime does well enough that they would consider doing a full season show for any of Falcom’s series. Maybe something with Zero/Ao…? A lot of cool things happened for Falcom’s 30th Anniversary, and most of it was Kiseki-related, but 2012 is the 25th anniversary of Ys so I hope to see some great things planned for the celebration alongside Celceta’s Vita release.

This game gave me a headache. I really wanted to like it, and I had so much faith in tri-Ace after the brilliant battle and customization systems in Resonance of Fate.  However, no matter how much I think about it, I just can’t understand the design decisions by tri-Ace here in Frontier Gate. Let’s go through some of the major ones, shall we?

Multiple battle partners, each with their own Frontier Level: Conflicting design. Naturally, having the choice for multiple battle partners is great. Each of them has their own personality, storyline, and different weapons only they can use, giving them strengths and weaknesses that you should take into account when choosing one. However when you switch between partners your Frontier Level is not kept, because it’s something built between you and that particular partner.

What is Frontier Level and why is this so terrible, you ask? Well, Frontier Level is something similar to Hunter Ranks in Monster Hunter. It determines whether or not you can access higher ranked areas. It also determines how much max AP you can have, which significantly changes how effective you can be in battle. The blow would be lessened a little bit if every partner was available from the start, but the game staggers the introduction of new partners so this isn’t the case.

Imagine this scenario: You are Frontier Level 8 with your trusty partner who has been with you since the beginning. You just gained access to the highest ranked areas. The game introduces a new partner to you at this time and you decide to give them a shot, because you feel bad for not trying out the numerous other partners they’ve introduced along the way to Frontier Level 8.  They’re the same level as you and are well-equipped for the highest ranked areas, but guess what? You can’t go there. You can’t go there because you and your new partner are Frontier Level 1, relegating you to Noobtown until you guys get to know each other better.

The game tries to encourage you to team up with everyone but who in their right mind would actually do so knowing they’d have to work from scratch just to get their new partner access to the higher ranks? Again, if every partner was available from the start, you can test everything while you’re still Level 1 and not feel like you’re wasting your time. Note that it might have made it sound like once you switch, you can’t switch back, or you lose all your Levels gained with your old partner – this is not the case. You can always switch between available partners, and Levels are retained for each one.

 The Loot System: This one deserves more of a rant but I’ll keep it short. It’s simple enough – it sucks. They designed loot to be dropped at random while you’re attacking the monster. No loot is gained after you kill it. You can exploit item drop bonuses on certain types of attacks to try to increase the chances of a drop, but things are still fairly rare. To make it worse, only the person who was attacking when something drops gets the item. If you’re going to design a game similar to Monster Hunter where you need materials from monsters to craft upgrades, it shouldn’t be possible to fight a monster for ten minutes and receive absolutely nothing for your trouble… and trust me, it’ll happen often. In their defense, items and upgrades don’t require quite as many items as MH but in return, getting some simple upgrades felt like hunting for multiple Azure Dragongems at times.

 Other random things:

• Money is pretty scarce. I’m aware there are sales events where you can make enormous profits should you invest enough capital, but if you play through the game normally you’ll find that things get expensive fast. I enjoyed getting to a point where I didn’t have to worry about money in MH because we farmed monster drops for so long that we were millionaires before we even hit HR missions. Not the case in Frontier, where if you keep up on upgrades you will find yourself broke before you can even complete a full equipment upgrade later on.

• One person leads the charge on multiplayer. That is, the person who starts the multiplayer session is the leader, and only they can accept quests. Multiplayer sessions in other games tend to rotate quests between people if you’re just playing with randoms – they’ve gone ahead and made it a pain in the ass here, since you have to disconnect and start a new session any time you want to rotate.

• The Gossip Quest system. At first I thought it was neat, but the fact that there are monsters unique to them that you will absolutely need for endgame upgrades, and that you have to beat X number of trash monsters before they appear each time makes it absolutely terrible for farming.

Sigh. Anyways… today Final Fantasy 13-2 comes Stateside. When I first heard the initial announcement, I just thought it was an emergency plan for SE since it was just coming off the heels of the total failure of FFXIV. Now that I’ve seen a ton of previews and impressions and whatnot, I’m more of the mind that SE wanted to show its fans that they’ve heard the feedback loud and clearly and this is the result. Or at least I’m desperately hoping this is the case.

Next month is Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki. It’s no Suikoden VI, but beggars can’t be choosers. For some reason I can’t find any information on who is composing this time.  I hope it isn’t someone new though.

‘Till February!

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.