Monthly post time! I lied about adding pictures to the other post. Maybe I’ll do it for this one soon.

Let’s see… early in the month I finished up Monster Hunter Tri with Scin, after putting in about a good 230+ hours into it (single player & farming included). Seriously fun stuff, even though searching for some of the High Rank materials can get pretty grindy.

Beating Alatreon for the first time was 40 minutes of pure intensity.I think all of us were pretty much out of potions by the end. As we went on and did it for the other members of our hunting group, we all got better at fighting him and only dipped into our regular potions every subsequent attempt (except for our last one where you could just feel everyone was a bit tired, so some bad shit happened there).

I found it a bit odd that the mission to hunt Deviljho came after Alatreon, since Alatreon kinda requires a lot more focus. I know you can encounter him during other quests in the previous tier but honestly, who is going to go out of their way at that gear level to fight him alongside whatever random monster unless they’re desperate for his gear? I think adding one of his regular quests into the end of the previous tier as key quests might have made a bit more sense.

I’m not that big on playing MMOs in foreign languages (actually subscribing to them anyways, as opposed to just beta testing) so I hope Capcom continues to consider setting up Monster Hunter Frontier over here. They’ve got a lengthy post detailing why it’d be pretty costly to set up but I think eventually when the fanbase is built up even more, they could do it successfully. That means make more console versions and localize them, Capcom!

But enough about that, let’s get on to the major news this month- XSEED is bringing a ton of Falcom PSP games over to the States, starting with Ys Seven! I totally forgot the order they’re coming in, but other games being localized include Ys I & II Chronicles, The Oath in Felghana, and the entire Sora no Kiseki trilogy. It’ll be really nice to finally play Sora no Kiseki full translated, even though it’s going to be on PSP. I’m still pretty sad that Seven hasn’t been ported to PC yet (will it ever be? I could have sworn they said that was their intention in one of the initial newsletters announcing it),  but honestly at this point I will take whatever I can get. More people will be exposed to the awesomeness that is Ys, and maybe this will help fund a transition to HD console games (Adol battling bosses in HD 3D, can you imagine?).

One of my other favorite Japanese developers, Gust, has already made a great transition from PS2/PSP to PS3. While initially they did not take full graphical advantage of the system with Atelier Rorona, they’ve stepped it up a notch with Ar Tonelico 3. Both games have seen decent success – enough to fuel Rorona’s localization and Tonelico 3′s soon to be announced. Now they’re taking it even further with Atelier Totori, which just looks so absolutely beautiful I get goosebumps thinking about it. To be able to recreate the character designs like that is what every cel-shaded game should aim to do. Well, I guess it doesn’t hurt that they have some great designs so ripe for recreation in the first place. Rorona and Totori are so cute! It”s pretty tempting to import Totori but I guess it’d just feel wrong playing it before the localized version comes out – not to mention that by the time it’d get to my house it would no doubt collide with….

…Deathsmiles!　A horizontal Cave shooter OMG! I’d like to point out right now that I am in no way, shape, or form actually good at shooters (i.e. being able to 1CC them with total ease) but maybe that’s because I don’t put in the effort and practice for long enough to get good at them. I usually get into the mood for shooters and I play it non-stop for a while and then some sorta RPG gets released and steals me away… when I end up getting back to it I’ve pretty much unlearned everything. Despite that, I still find them to be great fun and I’m extremely excited for Deathsmiles. I kinda forget what else comes out in July aside from SC2 Retail at the end of it, but more than likely I’ll be dedicating the whole month to beating every mode of Deathsmiles with the magic of online co-op. I hope this option comes as a standard to all 360 Cave ports, but oddly their most recent releases just don’t have it. Vertical shooters have it tough in the age of HD widescreen awesomeness I guess. I’m getting chills just thinking about playing it on my 60″ HDTV.

Anyways, with all that being announced I’ve decided it’s time to actually GET a PSP, probably sometime early next month. There’s a tiny dry spell between when SC2 beta ends and Peace Walker which will be perfect to get into one of the many PSP games I’ve never played. Or so I thought, I wrote that before they announced that the beta would be extended. I think I’ll just considering it ending on the 31st anyways; I’m satisfied with the amount I’ve played over the past couple of weeks.

Expect some streaming to happen with some of that PSP stuff later~!

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.

Done with 13. Clocked in at 43:31 with about 3 of those hours spent doing sidequest stuff/AFKing. A bit shorter than I anticipated…

Also of note – no grinding was done. Only killed what I had to, and sidequest experience was pretty much well negated since I skipped as much as I could toward the end of the game. It made for some challenging bosses, as they should be! I’ve only done about oh…12% of the sidequest missions so I guess I’ll be working on that until Resonance hits.

And to answer my questions from before…

Yes, it is linear. But that’s not the real problem here, because a lot of RPGs are on a straight path just like 13, its just how 13 presented it.  The problem is the game makes you feel confined. There are no towns where you can just relax and shop in. There’s no world map to wander about on. Basically, there is no illusion of freedom (until you hit Pulse). FF10 suffered from a bit of the same issue, but they still had towns – and eventually a world map even if it was just for convenient transportation.

Vanille’s VA didn’t grow on me, but it also didn’t annoy me.

And finally, the battle system is totally worth it. It’s definitely the best feature of the game, graphics aside.

Editing in more later.

EDIT 3/27: Now that the game rush is pretty much over, let’s elaborate a little more!

After initially writing about this, I went back and did a lot of the sidequest missions. They weren’t too bad – save a few which were pretty fun and challenging, particularly the ones that didn’t rely on gimmicky Paradigms/equipment setups and were just straight up hard (if you didn’t grind) but still very possible. I got bored of it before I finished all of them though. I’m not quite sure what it is about 13, the extra stuff doesn’t appeal to me as much as the previous games did.

I usually judge a soundtrack by whether or not they have great battle themes, and 13 didn’t disappoint. In particular  out of all of those, I think Eidolons is my favorite just because it reminds me of the tension of fighting against the Doom counter. Despite hearing the main battle theme in the trailer from so long ago, I’m surprised I still enjoy listening to it today. At the same time, it was disappointing that everyone had the theme spoiled just because they watched the trailer.