Yeah.

I should have posted something about it earlier, but I’ve really taken a liking  to Ciel nosurge. The story is pretty promising, and the music is as great as expected. Judging from the things they’ve included in the  Agent Pack, there’s going to be some really crazy stuff later. Can’t wait! I’ve also really gotten into the whole Sharl thing, mainly trying to figure out how exactly the barcodes work and what numbers generate what features and such. The whole Love Plus’ish (or so I hear, haven’t played Love Plus) simulation thing is okay, I guess? I dunno, I’m not exactly a good judge of that sort of thing, being female and all.  She can be cute/funny though, so I guess that’s all that matters to me.

Anyways, you guys know what I’ll be up to this month. Late next month is Atelier Ayesha… I’m blanking if there’s anything else I should be getting. Persona 4 Golden import is a possibility. Maybe.

I finished Mass Effect 3 a couple of days ago on Insanity, it was an absolute blast. Biotic Charge + Nova spam is so fun and overpowered. I’m glad I kept with the console I originally started the series on so that I could import my saves because it was totally worth it, even though I dislike having to switch discs every now and then. Considering what I know about the outcomes of some missions if you don’t import, I’m pretty sure I would have had much less fun if I didn’t. The returning characters and the best outcomes just make it so worthwhile.

Everyone is making a big fuss about the ending, but I really won’t get into that here. Completely understandable, but some of those people complaining are just… well, they’re crazy. Keep it civil, guys. Is cursing out Bioware  going to magically change the ending for you?  Not to mention half of the people I see complaining aren’t actually complaining about the big issues (those of you in the know should know the ‘big issues’). Rather, they seem to have screwed up their ending either through War Assets, bad choices, or insufficient Paragon/Renegade, or they got a bad ending because they absolutely refuse to play multiplayer. I have no sympathy for those people.

Anyways, this was intended to be a short post, and I don’t really have much else to say that you can’t find anywhere else about ME3, so I’ll leave it at this. I hope everyone who waited patiently is finally enjoying Tales of Graces f – it’s well worth your money if you’re a JRPG fan. That, and you better damn well be showing your support for this game if you want Xillia to come here, or any other JRPG for that matter. XSEED, as brilliant as they are, can’t pick up everything.

Next month is… hmm. I don’t know if there’s anything I’ll be picking up next month, but I’m sure I’ll figure out something to post about. Until then!

Jumping right off from the last post, Final Fantasy XIII-2 was a nice surprise. I was a person who was completely against the whole idea of another direct sequel from the get-go. It’s not like my bias was completely groundless though. Remember X-2? While X-2′s battle and job system was enjoyable, everything else about it (like the soundtrack or the almost complete lack of story) just fell flat with me. With it’s announcement coming fresh off the heels of the total failure of FFXIV, I had nothing but feelings of disgust for Square-Enix.

When the first details about the game finally came out regarding the monster system and what not, my first thought (and I’m sure a lot of other Tales fans’ first thoughts) was “Oh, it’s Knight of Ratatosk/Dawn of the New World.” Considering that Ratatosk wasn’t the greatest direct sequel, it was easy to get apprehensive about the direction of the game. Combined with the odd premise of Lightning disappearing, ending up in Valhalla  – and Serah with newcomer Noel traveling through time to find her, I wasn’t too optimistic.  I mean really now. It just felt like… too random of an idea. I didn’t need anything from 13 to continue.

Jump forward to January, closing in on the release date. After reading a lot of articles and impressions about the game that came out from between then and now, I became cautiously optimistic about it. Perhaps the only thing that kept me from really being excited about it was the fact that they kept mentioning that they had taken the user feedback into account from 13 and fixed a lot of problems. Where had I heard that before? Oh right, when I was in the FF14 beta. Trust is a hard thing to earn back, SE.

But hey, time to stop this jaded discussion. I did say it was a nice surprise earlier, right? I meant it. They put a ton of effort into making the game less linear than 13, and it really shows. Optional paths are abound while you work your way through the main story. Even when you finish that, I don’t think you can say you’ve beaten the game unless you’ve checked out all the Paradox Endings. Then of course there’s the addition of towns and people. Nice changes, but I personally didn’t care either way. Would I rather run through a straight hallway with a few monsters, or would I rather be riding on a chocobo trying to navigate Academia 4XX with kids yelling “Chocobo!” and “It’s huge!” at me every other second?Tough call.

The battle system stayed the same, but I don’t see that as a bad thing. People complain about auto-battle all the time, but having it in doesn’t really affect anything. The key points in both 13 and 13-2 are Paradigm Shifting  at the right times and having the right set of Paradigms. Micromanaging your ability selection only comes into play during certain bosses. The battle system was hindered by one thing though, and that’s the fact that the game is so damn easy. The only time I can recall actually struggling on a boss was when I was doing the Paradox Ending where it was Serah vs. Caius solo, and the only reason I struggled was because I didn’t have a properly leveled Sentinel monster, which I promptly made after one go with him.

A ton of people seemed to enjoy it a lot, and a lot of people even rate it higher than 13′s soundtrack, but the soundtrack for this one didn’t hit the right notes with me. Maybe it was the fact that a lot of it has quite a different style than 13? Maybe it’s because they reused quite a few tracks from 13? Maybe it’s the fact that Crazy Chocobo is the worst game track in the history of mankind – so bad that it outweighs any of the good aspects of the soundtrack? Either way, I usually pick a few tracks that I really like in these posts and there is only handful I can name here: Noel’s Theme ~The Last Journey~, Invisible Depths, and Plains of Eternity. I can give reasons for these picks, and two of them don’t really support the fact that the soundtrack is actually good. Noel’s Theme is sung by KOKIA, of whom I’m a big fan (see Fate and Cosmoflips, among other songs). Invisible Depths is obvious – I’m always a sucker for decent, ‘game-y’ sounding boss tracks. Plains of Eternity is the one track that I can 100% say that I loved, and I don’t think anyone would argue with that either. The rest of the soundtrack, while completely listenable (except Crazy Chocobo), just didn’t stand out to me at all.

Lastly – and I think this is the key point that made this game really work for me – the story was enjoyable. Especially the ending(s). I’m a sucker for time travel stories. This one isn’t an exception. I’ve seen a few reviews who call it convoluted and what not – a word I see get thrown around with RPGs way too often, and honestly it really isn’t. Sure, there’s probably a few things that gave time travel geeks a headache because some things are unexplainable, but other than that it was pretty simple. Some of Serah’s monologues can get a bit cheesy though. I recall her saying something like “Do I dare to dream?” once.

Some of you may be wondering about why I liked the endings so much. Here’s the thing – how many games will leave you in absolute despair? In multiple endings? Not that many. It’s especially brave of them to put the most terrible ending as the main one.I admit, it’s a little twisted, but also ridiculously refreshing. The only problem that comes up is them potentially continuing this in DLC form, which would be pretty terrible.

Looking back at what I wrote, this rant kinda makes it seem like I hated the thing, but I really did enjoy with the game. I enjoyed it enough to fully complete it, which is more than I can say for a lot of other games. I’m just better at explaining why I hate things more than I am at complimenting them.

Moving onto Genso Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen No Toki~

Let me preface this by saying I still haven’t played Tierkreis (I don’t even own a DS guys, what do you want me to do?!). I don’t know how good or bad Tierkreis was, but I did inquire about the whole “multiple worlds” thing they had going on, so I went into this game with the simple expectation that it wasn’t going to be a traditional Suikoden. I thought that would still be fine. As long as they’re still calling it Suikoden there’s bound to be a lot of the same elements still, right? Ehhhh… not really. Basically, the similarities between this and a normal Suikoden come down to these points: 1) There are 108 Stars to recruit, 2) naturally, you get a fort that will grow as you recruit more people, and 3) like every Suikoden, the game is easy. Everything else you knew about Suikoden – runes (and the drama that comes with True Runes), war battles, gambling, unites, duels, minigames (does Hunting actually count?)… you get the idea. In the end, I liked it, but I can trace that back to mainly one reason: the story. As I said before, I’m a sucker for time travel, but there’s actually a lot more to it than just that.

So what exactly filled the void that was left when you’ve gutted all of those mainstay Suikoden aspects? Let’s go through some of those items. Be warned, this is pretty much more of a gameplay mechanics explanation rather than a review-thing… at least for the first few paragraphs. I just feel like I need to explain these things so people know what they’re getting into with this.

The Ancestor/Skill Inheritance System: Early in the game the main character realizes that he’s not strong enough to defend his village from monsters that appear every 100 years. When presented with the opportunity to travel back in time and learn from his ancestors (who are regarded as heroes in his time) that fought the same monsters and won, he gladly takes it. Being linked together as Stars of Destiny allows the party to learn skills from them at a rate that shouldn’t be possible.

Almost every skill you learn will come from your ancestors, with the exception of when you recruit another playable member who uses the same weapon as another character – in which case they can learn from each other. You’ll learn a few skills for your characters as you progress through the main story but if you really want to get some great skills you’ll need to seek out ancestors you wouldn’t normally be able to reach if you just continued along the main path, with a total of six skills per weapon type. If that wasn’t enough incentive, meeting your ancestors also means ‘recruiting’ them, as they are entered into your Stars of Destiny tablet.

A replacement for Unites: When you’re learning skills, you have to ‘link up’ with the character you’re learning from. You can use that same system to link up with other characters and have them form one unit whose speed is determined by the average of all of the characters combined, and all of the characters take their turn in the order you designated them in. What does this do exactly? Well, when you attack with a linked unit, you can start a chain bonus for extra damage if they’re all attacking the same creature. The bonus grows with each person attacking, so obviously you’ll want to designate your hardest hitter last. The bonus is increased even further when everyone linked has great ‘Friendship’ with each other. I like the idea of adding a tiny bit of depth to setting up your party like this, but given the ease of the game it’s not really necessary.

That’s not all though. Much like Unites in traditional Suikodens, if you link certain people together, they’ll form a ‘Unite’ of sorts – indicated by the unit you linked together being given a title like the classic Beauty Attack. This isn’t quite what you think though, as they won’t be able to perform Unite Attacks. Rather, when those people are linked together, they gain stat bonuses like increased Speed and Strength, etc. The majority of your Stars of Destiny are actually your ancestors and non-party members so you won’t be able to form too many of these, but still, it’s there.

Reagents: Many of the playable characters have skills that require the use of a reagent. For instance – Myura, the first magician you’ll have in your party, requires Magic Stones for every spell she casts. The type of Magic Stone she uses determine what element spell she casts. If I remember correctly, there are six types of Magic Stones in the game. Combined with her six skills, she has a total of 36 variations of her Magic. I doubt you’ll really need to use all of them though, since like I said… the difficulty of this game is not that great. Plus, the final types of Magic Stone you find are just stronger than the others, so you’ll probably end up sticking with those.

As for obtaining reagents, you’ll need to recruit people who can make them obviously! These reagent creators adhere to the same Skill Inheritance system that you need for your party members; you’ll need to find ancestors who are willing to teach you to make new ones and you’ll be given a choice to drag someone along to the past so they can learn from them. While I do like the variety they provide, the fact that they get expended is really just an excuse to get you to go back to your base and have more made for you.

As a side note and not really related to reagents, weapons and armor upgrades are also designed as an excuse to get you to return to your base. Gone are the blacksmiths who will permanently upgrade your weapon and eventually change you weapon to Odessa++. Now you’ve got smiths who enhance your gear for a limited number of uses – basically something like enchants in Skyrim or insert whatever game.

——————–

Mmm… I think I’ve covered the majority of mechanics and what makes this Suikoden so different from the originals.

To be perfectly honest, I started to hate the game around I wanna say… 10-15 hours into it. The pacing in the beginning is quite slow. Since the game is based on going into the past and not the future, a lot of the early points of the game revolve around one of the most simple time travel tropes – a problem has occurred in the present, let’s travel to the past to prevent it. The music is fairly lackluster, although you’ll hear tiny, tiny hints of the old Suikoden scores. There also seems to be a lot of forced encounters where a dialogue will go down like this between the heroes and their foes:

Random enemies:“Hey, what are you guys doing here? You look suspicious!”
Heroes:“We’re not suspicious, please listen to u-”
Random enemies:“SHUT UP!!!!!”

*proceeds to attack the heroes*

I don’t know why this happens so often, but it does. More than I’d like to recall. Nobody listens!

I stuck with it and a few hours later I actually got my Tablet of Stars. That’s when it struck me that I was indeed still playing a Suikoden. I started to get a little hyped about it again and I immediately went searching for recruits. Did I mention that all of the recruitment scenes are voiced? It might not seem like a big deal, but when you have a choice to bring different characters in to learn a skill and each character selection has their own unique dialogue with their ancestor, it adds up.

The plot really starts to pick up after you get your Tablet, and I think that’s pretty much what kept me going. That and I started to like some of the characters. I don’t know if that’s enough for anyone to endure a radically different Suikoden – especially when I can’t tell you what’s so good about the plot without spoiling it, but there you go. If you go into this without expecting the old Suikoden, I think you’ll find it to be quite decent.

Next month is Mass Effect 3 – the highly anticipated conclusion, and Tales of Graces f . Since I’ve already played and posted on the original Wii release and the JP version of f, I probably won’t be posting anything on Graces.

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.