It’s here! And so is Imca!

Uh, I’ll add a bit more flair to this write-up later. Grand Knights History was neat, but I think it loses it’s charm during the second half. You get to a point where you realize that all you need to do for non-bosses is just press Triangle for auto-battle and maybe occasionally stop to heal for one turn every now and then, and that there is a total of three unique bosses repeatedly thrown at you with different colors and sometimes different abilities until you reach the fourth, final boss. Well, unless you count some of the human teams of pure archer or pure wizard they like to toss at you, which admittedly can be rough too.

TL;DR, it gets to be a repetitive game – something I didn’t mind in Muramasa but I do here.

Online mode is a different story though, and it pretty fun. It’s something I plan to keep playing occasionally throughout the year.

More on Grand Knights later.

P.S. WHOAWHOAAAAYEAAAAAAAAA~ (you’re obviously not a Xillia fan if that was lost on you)

This’ll be a short little post as I wait for El Shaddai to arrive.

Catherine was fun. Saw the True Freedom and True Catherine ending. I should go back and check out the True Katherine one later eventually. I felt like if I played it on anything short of the highest difficulty, the game would have been disappointingly short for me, so I aimed for Hard mode perfect chain Gold clears… I think I actually regret it a little bit. Not because of the difficulty, but more that it amplified things that I hated about the game like the camera angles changing constantly to show you that a boss is throwing some shit at you.

I saw the recent Falcom concert, Falcom jdk band 2011 Summer Live in Nicofarre. As usual, they’re the greatest, but I’m getting tired of their male vocalist. I can’t really name a song he did that wasn’t marred by his presence.

I’m not exactly sure when the next time I’ll post is going to be…other than the usual monthly that I’ll always try to get out, things are going to be extremely busy since the “endless stream of games” is going to hit starting today which consists of:

• El Shaddai – today!
  Xenoblade Chronicles – August 19th (played the import, but the game is just too awesome to not go for round 3)
  Grand Knights History – September 1st
  Tales of Xillia – September 8th
  Atelier Totori – September 27th (already played the import, but I’m sure this is on people’s lists)
  The Legend of Heroes: Ao no Kiseki – September 29th (but I need to finish Zero)
  Dark Souls – October 4th
  Final Fantasy Type-0 – October 13th
  The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim November 11th
  Diablo 3 – 2011? (too hopeful?)

September 13th also has White Knight Chronicles 2, but I don’t have high hopes for it. I’ll mainly be aiming to see if I can have some decent multiplayer fun there.

Hopefully I’ll see you guys when El Shaddai is done.

Umm… I’ll put some sort of picture here later.

Whew… that took a while. Finished Meruru completely only a few days ago, and got my first platinum trophy.  Ideally I would have liked to finish much sooner so I could have a little break before Catherine, but between re-learning how to stream, record, and encode HD properly and fixing the damn Justin.tv videos’ audio sync, it took quite a while. I tend to take my sweet time with any Atelier game so that didn’t help either. I imagine I spent as much time as I did with Atelier Totori when I went to get the True End on my first run there. Totally worth the time spent on both accounts though.

As far as posting something review-y about it, I can’t do it. I’m far too biased about the Atelier series to tell you anything that doesn’t sound like pure love for it. I can tell you that Meruru will probably be a breath of fresh air to anyone who played Rorona or Totori or both, considering that jobs in Meruru do not have due dates AT ALL. Naturally they still have a system in place to keep you wanting to turn in jobs, but having the freedom of turning them in whenever you want is quite nice.

Next month is… El Shaddai (was supposed to be today but it got delayed) and White Knight Chronicles 2? Ah wow, when did that get delayed… I really need to make a calendar for this stuff.