Not This Again... (An Update)

[matty_boy91]

Been a while since I updated here. Yeah.

My laptop is crapping out on me and won't Internet for me. Again. So, same case with what happened back in the spring. I'll be more active on my brother's Dell, though, as the semester ended around two weeks ago (I'm already losing track of the time). Here's an update while I try to get this fixed. Again.

Comments

[bkamiro]

Good to hear from you again Matt! It sucks that you still have two more semesters to go but it sounds like you're making the best of it before you transfer. I also totally hear you on the laptop thing. Mine's still holding on but it is definitely starting to show its age and I'm probably going to need to get a new one at the latest before law school.

The more I've sat on Awakening, the more mixed I felt about it. There were a lot of cool new ideas but they weren't implemented perfectly and some were just atrocious. The difficulty scaling in particular was really frustrating and I was bothered by how almost every map felt like a giant plains where the enemies bum rushed you. As for the story...well, we can talk more about THAT later if you want. Needless to say, the more I saw that story, the more angry it made me. Really lackluster villains combined with erratic pacing and the Gary Stu the avatar didn't help it at all. Not to mention there is the world's biggest plot hole in Chap 23.

And yes, Tales! Welcome to the circle. :D I think the Tales series might be my favorite game series; I just find them so addictively fun to play. Abyss is definitely a good one but if you can get your hands on a copy of Symphonia for the GC, that one is a classic. Anyway, I will suppress my inner fan from gushing more about the series and just end it with I hope your laptop gets fixed soon and that you have an awesome summer.

[matty_boy91]

It's not that my laptop is old or anything - not in the slightest! It's a little complicated to me, but I hope once I can get a friend of mine over again it won't be an issue. 'Til then, I can still write, so it's not all that bad. :/

And I totally agree with you on Awakening. I dunno if there's anything I can add to that. The last chapters are just... blargh. For what it's worth, I enjoyed it and I plan on playing through Lunatic next time around. ^^;

Thanks for the warm welcome, BK! I knew about Symphonia a while ago; I'll just have to get a copy of it on Amazon sometime. Sadly I don't think there are many "Tales" titles released for Nintendo.

Thanks again, pal, and I hope you have an awesome summer as well! :D

[bkamiro]

Yeah, but when it's a new piece of equipment that's usually when I find it the most frustrating because then you're like "it shouldn't be doing this." At least you can still write with it.

Believe me, I could go for days on Awakening. I really enjoyed playing the game. Heck, I beat it I think seven times (four were draft runs). It's just that every time it took a step forward, it felt like it took one and a half steps back. The supports came back in full glory, but this time it was almost too many because there were many that were just bizarre or unnatural, at least with the marriage options. The non marriage ones tended to be great (Owain and Male Morgan is unquestionably my favorite). The pair up feature was awesome but so broken that enemies had to become god tier to compensate. It would have been better if enemies had less stats but could also pair up. That also would have avoided the stupidity of Lunatic. One for the fact that skills are randomly assigned, meaning you can get an army of Counter Warriors or none at all and you can control it by just resetting. And let's not forget the fact that Nosferatu + Armsthift + Avatar = game breaking. And then the story. Gods. The plot twists were every self-insert out there combined with villains that were either poorly developed or nonsensical. Validar has no reason for his actions and Grima is just EEEEEVIL. Sigh. I digress.

Yeah, Namco Bandai has more or less said that all Tales releases from now on will be PS3 and other Sony platforms. Symphonia and its lackluster sequel are the only two for Nintendo platforms. If you have a 360, I would highly recommend Vesperia though.

Same to you!