"You've acquired some impudent wisdom."

[darkken]

Well! Talk about time flying. It's down to the last period of university, now, and I assume there's a lot of things I probably should be doing instead of writing here that I ought to be doing, insofar as getting a degree is concerned

Comments

[tenshi_kain]

Well said, but this:

And then there's, heh, Feres Island. And let me say here and now, one day I want to find the person who thought Daath Cathedral was a good idea, and slam his head on a wall once for every fucking identical corridor there.

Is especially true. Whoever designed Feres Island, Daath Cathedral, and Mushroom Road should be cast out of Heaven for his arro- OH WAIT. >=E Yeah, I echo your praises and complaints on the gameplay. And indeed, outside the Sunlight Chamber, I don't particularly see the point of FoF - one noteable improvement on this in Vesperia is that, by using a certain arte in conjunction with a certain elemental affinity that modifies the skill (like a portable FoF, really), you can eventually learn that new, elemental arte permanently. I would've loved a feature like that in Abyss for at least some of the FoFs.

But yes, ultimately? Wonderful game, with a lot of brains and a lot of heart, even if the core game design seems to have had the Prince of Darkness on hand as a programmer. T_T

[cross_scars]

I dunnnnno...

I really didn't get TotA. I think it was about 40 hours in when I thought, "You know, I'm a little bored of this now," and I put my controller down and never returned to the game.

Everyone said what a wonderful cast TotA has but I didn't really like any of them, and I suppose that was why I gave up caring. Luke was... a fairly awful main character in my mind. Until it's known what he is he's a pretty big dick. Thereafter we're supposed to feel sympathy and the game attempts to redeem him; but it was all so hammy, I felt, and I just didn't care. Not to mention that - even in the undub I was playing - his VA is terrible. The rest of the cast? Guy was nice, but almost the "despite everything I'll be your friend until the end." Tear was another nice character but a fairly generic one at that. Jade and Anise were characters who were, I found, a little too snide to be really likeable. They weren't unlikeable, but I never felt enamoured with them either

[veers1138]

[darkken]

Oh, I totally see where you're coming from. Like I said, Abyss is a game where people talk in length about other people's feelings. The game has the narrative drive of a blimp on a warm summer day. You'd honestly have to care about the cast to get anything out of this. Also, this is a secret - but I didn't really like Jade either. He's a bastard who relies on no one calling him off just because he's the smartest guy around.

For my part... well, I guess I thought it was pretty novel and interesting to have a main character who sucks as much as Luke does, and then go all the way to salvage him as a person. It's a pretty riveting (and wildly preachy) premise, and the game really milks it for all it's worth. I think the only thing that keeps it from devolving to ham is how massively earnest the game is about it.

I did enjoy Symphonia for its cast a great deal, but the plot of the game was basically irrelevant to them. In Abyss, meanwhile, the cast is the plot, and as a result, the game gets to do some awesome things with them,

[veers1138]

[veers1138]

[darkken]

Heh, funny coincidence, there! Well, Abyss is a game that really deserves to be played. Watching the anime has just made me more firm on the belief that it's a story that gains surprisingly much from being a game. Not that the anime's not bad, it's just... it's funny to watch it and see how the characters just can't develop the same degree of depth, there. also how royally the battles suckYeah, I think Abyss was intended to be replayed, for a lot of reasons like that. I remember it worked for me like that in Xenogears - there's a lot of nice touches you really don't see during a first playthrough. Come to think of it, banking on replays is about the only way the sheer mass of hidden things in the game make any degree of sense, too. However, for designers to expect people to replay a game over eighty hours long in this day and age strikes me as... sadistic, I suppose. /=E

[veers1138]

[darthhowie]

Well-written as always. I'm curious to hear your thoughts about Vesperia whenever you get a chance to play it because it subverts every RPG hero convention Luke doesn't with Yuri. On the other hand, the cast as a whole isn't as good and the plot's final third plays out in such an unexpected way that many people thought it committed ritual suicide. I disagree, but I'm also a person who defends Nicolai's final scene in Shadow Hearts Covenant because of its deliciously, borderline hilariously anti-climactic nature. I enjoy having my expectations subverted more than most though and give out points for sheer audacity.

Still Vesperia fixes just about all of your gameplay complaints. The gameplay in that one is near sublime.