![]() The best moments - in particular, emit an immersive yet disorienting atmosphere that reminds one of the more abstract, ghostly experiences of Xenogears' second disc, while others are boss fight intros rendered in creative and dramatic ways. Alongside the visuals, what immediately stands out are the main cutscenes: A minimal and reckless form of storytelling, packed with refined - almost cryptic language and portrait-worthy shots in which characters enter, ponder and exit with (seemingly) little to no regard for identity nor coherence, only to slowly decode a tragic plot and cast as it proceeds. There's not much of that to be had.ΔΆ3h 44m PlayedSquaresoft and Yasumi Matsuno's second collaboration spawned the painstakingly crafted Vagrant Story, a hyper-intricate and hyper-mystifying gem, perhaps the culmination of the former's acrobatic presentation and the latter's disquieting writing. ![]() Check it out to see the cool ideas if you want, but don't play it for "fun". It has a lot of interesting ideas like a lot of experimental Square stuff, but it isn't a good game. In the end, I'm giving this game a very hesitant 3/5. My beloved Final Fantasy Tactics' Ivalice, what have they done to you? "OK, but at least it looks nice, right?" I hope you like brown. There's not enough text that explains the world to you. I don't even know if the bad guys are bad and if the good guys are good. Too many characters have poorly unexplained magic abilities and I couldn't make any sense of the ending. TerriblePerson," you say, "what about the story?" I'll be damned if I can tell you anything about it. When somebody casts, the world freezes for 10 seconds so the very lengthy animation can play out, just to do more pitiful damage or have an annoying status effect (that you solve with more painfully slow animations!). If an enemy is a magic caster, may God have mercy on your soul. But you're spamming O to spam your own attacks, and you'll likely mess up the defense window because O is how you defend too. And if you time your defense right, you can do a skill to mitigate some damage. They'll attack you once per every 4-5 attacks you do. But what about your enemies? They don't spam attacks. Once your attack is finished, you have to wait about a quarter of a second before you can attack again. You hit, then you can chain attacks together by timely pressing O again during the attack animation. Just see which part takes the most damage and has the best chance to hit. This is mostly pointless, as there's no benefit to targeting a specific part. Basically, combat is in real time, but you press O to initiate an attack, where you have an attack radius and choose an enemy's body part to attack. Have you played Parasite Eve before? If not, play that instead of this! This game uses the Parasite Eve combat engine, but they changed it so much to make it the worst they possibly could. Have I sold you on the game yet? If not, there's more! Combat in this game is strange. ![]() Again, you're doing all this because otherwise you'll do 0 or single digit damage against a common enemy that has hundreds. If you need to do more than just switch weapon type to get their elemental or type weakness, set aside a few minutes of mindless menu clicking. Swapping weapons is buried under multiple menu clicks. And let me tell you, switching weapons is a real chore. So to fight one group of enemies, you might need to switch between 3 weapons. You can be facing 3 armored knight enemies and one can be weak to piercing, one to edged, and one to blunt. Weapon types feel incredibly random, though. Elemental types are generally easy to figure out, but you have little control over them aside from gems. If you do have the correct weapon type, then you'll do like 50 damage a hit and quickly kill them. If you don't currently have that type of weapon equipped, you're probably doing 0 damage to the enemy when they have 300-500 HP. Creatures can only have 1 creature type, but they are generally only weak to one element and weapon type. The weapon types are very distinct, but the creature and elements are slowly leveled up on your weapons or you equip gems to quickly level them up. Damage is divided into 8(?) creature types, 7 elements (including "physical"), and 3 weapon types. Combat is extremely reliant on resistances. 14h 52m PlayedInteresting ideas, but horribly frustrating execution.
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