Of course. My luck wouldn't have it any other way.

Knowing me, my order will ALSO be shipped on Friday....

Facepalm

So I've been wondering where my Fairy Fencer F limited edition was. I wasn't even charged on the 10th like they said they would and so I decided to take a look back at my order.

I was about to send customer support an email when I scrolled to the bottom that I then saw this.

And then there's this information as well on the preorder pages:

So it basically means that I have to wait until the release date of Ar nosurge to get both games.....

Craaaaaaaaaaaaap.

In the meantime here's an old unboxing video.....

Tales of Symphonia Collector's Edition Box

THIS. OH my god. THIS. THIS is what needs to happen on every collector's edition box.

If you don't know what THIS is, THIS is a plastic encasement OUTSIDE of the box itself protecting the actual collector's edition from poor shipping and handling and snubbed corners keeping your mint condition box mint condition. Why hasn't THIS happened as often before?

AeriaGames buys IJJI (What does that REALLY mean?)

I only just heard about this today (I know, I'm about a month late) and honestly, I've got mixed feelings. For those of you who don't know either company let me give a brief history.

Ijji, or NHN usa, is a direct subsidiary of NHN Corporation, a Korean company that owns Naver and Hangame.
For those of you unaware, naver would be korea's version of MSN or Yahoo in terms of popularity and various services. While it may have originated as a search engine, its services expanded greatly to provide blogs, and newsfeeds and more or less has now become a web portal. Many well known web comics will most likely have their origins from naver comics and you'll find many korean blogs to have come from naver.

Hangame is a Korean game portal that competes with Nexon Korea and used to compete against Netmarble (It used to be big but failed to hold many games with long lifetimes and didn't get enough new ones to replace the ones that died out). 

IJJI only really started gaining a foothold when it decided to host Maiet's GunZ and bought NA rights to Gunbound (which it later sold). Being a direct subsidiary has its advantages, particularly in licensing rights and the difficult of acquiring them, or rather lack thereof, since the parent company can simply extend its license into NA territory. Server maintenance, as well as bug fixes are also much more easily addressable and it shows in IJJI's games. Their most popular games generally had a two week gap between general maintenance and security checks. It's quality has waned substantially and admittedly their more recent investments were worrisome but I'll get to that later.

As for presence, their customer support was fairly solid but their forums needed work. Simply put, they may have had some infrastructure issues in terms of staff assignment because there were always not enough moderators, and it was quite obvious where the company's focus was based on the number of moderators and their activity in the respective game's forum. GM presence was average. Nothing spectacular but at least the player base could recognize them and name them without the help of a cheat sheet.



Aeria Games is a subsidiary of Aeria Inc. Japan. It was started by two entrepreneurs who had a bit of investment capital....That's about it.....
They're a developing company that's been picking a handful of Japanese and Chinese MMOs.

I heard about this company when they held only one game: Shaiya. How did it do? Honestly, I have no idea but clearly they had enough money and zealous marketing plaster ads everywhere. They are still picking up games and while I don't know of the status of each game, this constant slow growth should still indicate something.

They are dipping into a pool that's been fairly untouched which gives them the advantage I guess. A lot of these games are also actual MMOs involving worlds instead of instanced Peer-2-Peer dungeons or Peer-2-Peer action games which means that they are also buying out servers to support these games. There's also the problem that many of these games are quite bot friendly point and clicks but that's enough about that. I'm talking about the company and not the games.

Aeria games for certain knows how to support a game. They don't have the strict maintenance that IJJI used to have when it was about as hold as Aeria is now but that isn't to say they're bad. Important patches are done in a timely fashion and bug fixes are just slightly delayed.

They make up for this in a significantly stronger community presence. GMs are very vocal and are also fairly open. It may be because the community itself may be slightly smaller but it's very obvious that Aeria Games is well staffed. They're also very transparent which seems to help the company hold such a strong bond with its consumers. I can recall for a game that was fairly new, a GM was late in enabling an event by 30 minutes (I'm assuming server sided auto execution scripts weren't ready yet) and admitted his mistake and extended the event by an hour. Should this mistake have happened? Probably not, but its handling was surprisingly well done.



So let's get to the meat. What does Aeria Games buying IJJI mean?

The immediate effects:
Gunz, Soldier Front and AVA (Arguably IJJI's biggest games so far) are going to shift over which will mean there'll be an explosion in the size of the community over at aeria games. This may place a strain on the aforementioned community presence that aeria games has established.

There's going to be a community clash for sure. Every game forum has its established "VIPs" and trolls and merging two groups only places additional strain on the community that's moving. Especially considering the lax moderation IJJI has had, aeria games might be in for a bit of extra work.

NHN may be straight up dropping out of the NA market. The previously mentioned games will probably be updating more slowly than it's community is used to. Though most of the games have already dropped to once a month now....

Screenname hell is going to occur. I know for a fact my name was taken in aeria games resulting in me having to pick a different screen name to login with. It's a minor irritation but an irritation nonetheless especially since I could log in as "zerreth" over at IJJI.

The current games may see a large player base, which is always good. Consolidation also makes accounts much more easier to manage player-wise. 

The long term effects:
As I said before, maintenance, bug fixing and immediate game issues will take longer to fix. There's a "middle man" to go through which only delays communication.

Any NHN game that you may have had sights on has an even lesser chance of making it to NA shores. I was particularly looking forward to Fighter's Club but I may have to rely on Ntreev USA to pick it up now. Any games under NHN korea is going to have to require an additional cost to license rather than a extra small investment to hand down the territory license to a child company. Companies that buy games under NHN will have to turn profit quickly which means that there's a higher chance for more "pay-2-win" games appearing and an abuse in development to get micro-transaction systems up faster than the actual game foundation...

"New Toy" effects wear off and transferred games return to their old player base.

There's also a reduced chance of seeing more "creative" events. Since the company isn't in direct contact with the developer regarding content, seeing user based content appear in game will be much harder.


How the hell did this happen?
I don't know the specifics, but I have a good guess. About 1 or 2 years ago, IJJI licensed a bunch games that weren't under NHN korea to see how they would do in NA as an attempt to expand. The problem all the games IJJI had licensed already flopped in korea. One game I hadn't even heard of. Perhaps it was completely new. The point is, those games never made it past a 2nd closed beta, and one game went over to Aeria.

Then there are the handful of games that flopped on IJJI, which is, needless to say, NEVER a good sign. With a declining user base, and lack of new games that could increase cash flow, the parent company must've just decided to drop it. Guess that's the problem with every company once it hits peak and starts to decline.


Other things:
This is not a merger, this is one company swallowing another. Buy-outs/mergers have always indicated through history that the combined product is worse than either input on their own. In this case, you're seeing IJJI products now under Aeria Games management, which has its benefits and drawbacks.

As per contract, NHN is supposed to put a bit of investment into Aeria (probably to help the purchase of new servers and staff) but they're completely wiping their hands clean from the looks of it.

It's kind of sad. I was always hoping that IJJI would find some way to abuse it's position as a direct subsidiary to try and be able to compete with nexon like the korean version is doing. I despise Nexon with a hateful, hellish passion. The mere thought that they intend to continue operations in NA just sets a terrible example for other companies.

Fate/Extra - First Impressions

Inverseman and Laevatein over at moar powah! happen to be people I know outside of the internet and it seems that we all pre-ordered and started Fate/Extra with different characters. So as a result, Inverseman suggested we do a collab first impressions of the game as it will be different from each perspective. I personally don't know what's entailed in a "first impression" but I'm guessing that it's just a few paragraphs rather than an 8 page long review. This probably also means that I'm going to have to be very terse and skim over parts like how the game's music was great but the volume balance was bad without being specific....I'll give a full proper review once I finish the game.

Being a huge fan of Type-Moon's "Fate" series, I preordered Fate/Extra the moment I heard about its license in the States. I first heard about this game when it was announced in Japan and cursed my fate that I was still not proficient enough in Japanese to be able to play it without aid. As you know, story means a lot to me and while gameplay is easy to figure out, it's the Type-Moon narration that draws me to this game. 

Fate/Extra's story is as follows. You are a student who attends Tsukimura Acadamy who realizes that your entire life so far has been fake. It was all a pre-screening process to decide who was eligible to participate in the Holy Grail War that was about to start in the world you've been "living" in. The war consists of "Masters" and "Servants." Masters are the main competitors who have the ability to summon a Servant, the soul of a legend, who are catagorized into 7 Classes: Saber, Archer Lancer, Rider, Beserker, Caster, and Assassin. Forming a team, they will compete against other Master/Servant teams to come out on top.

I started this game with a few facts in mind: The main character's gender could be chosen (as it seems popular with all the games nowadays) and there was a choice of 1 of 3 Servants to use throughout the game. Saber, Archer and Caster. Coincidentally, that is also the game's projected difficulty level from easy to hard respectively. Not only having a thing for fox-girls, I also have a general mindset that games should be played on the highest difficulty as the challenge is what makes a game enjoyable but the satisfaction of playing a game using as much skill as possible is what makes it "fun" for me, with the exception of Cheating AI, so I decided to choose Caster and wow, what a difference that made....

Player commands on top. Enemy command list on bottom

Battle consists of simultaneous turns that are broken down into 6 moves. Each side submits a move order and then the battle commences depending on what both sides submitted. Basically, there are one of three commands you can submit per move: Attack, Guard, and Break. In a rock, paper, scissors fashion, Attack beats Break which beats Guard which Beats Attack. If the same command was submitted on a move, two things can happen. Both sides take damage or both sides cancel each other out resulting in no damage. If one side successfully manages to land the superior move 3 times in a row, that side deals an extra blow separate from the turn.

Here is where difficulty comes into play. First off, the player is unaware of what the enemy pattern is. Usually at first encounters, only one move is revealed, which means for a while the player has to guess the other moves. As the battles with the same monster repeat, there's a chance upon victory of having an additional move revealed slowly making battles easier. But what does this mean for Caster?

Most of the battles a physical punch fests. Caster being a magic type follows the general archetype of being weak regarding physical attributes, which mean that this can only spell disaster. Without a doubt, I felt the difficulty of my class rushing at me quite quickly. Having absolutely no information, I basically had to wing it and hope that I took minimal damage during the opening turns. Then by using deduction, I had to memorize my enemies patterns. Basically, by seeing which attacks went through and which attacks clashed or failed, I was able to learn what the opponent used during that move. Early on, weak inductive reasoning worked fairly well because each enemy had very few patterns so revealing key moves allowed me to assume certain patterns. Needless to say, this slowly got harder as I progressed on but luckily monsters of the same type but different tier seem to retain some of the patterns of the previous tier making it less dangerous.

DYNAMIC CAMERA ANGLE AND ACTION LINES

Which is great, except when I mess up because when I do... I'm dead. Literally. If I didn't memorize patterns immediately or figure out which pattern was weighted more early on, I'd be taking hits that remove significant chunks of my HP. One poor turn literally kills me and it's game over. It also doesn't help that when I improve the stats of caster, it makes minimal difference. It also didn't help that early on my caster would do such insignificant damage that battles with normal monsters would last around 5 turns.

When you're getting your ass handed to you by what appears to be two halves of a mechanical cube barely connected together by what appears to be some form of Dark Matter and named "MOONDUST", you've just hit a new low in player humiliation....

According to Laevatein, one of his friends pumped only magic into Caster which I can't say I'm supportive of considering how many battles I'm going to be in with normal monsters. Since Caster has limited MP, and it's much harder to recover MP than HP it would be better for me to balance my stats a bit.

No really, why are you SO weak?

WELL. If you got these kinds of scores on a test, you think you'd be doing well? You know that guy in the background? He's really plotting to kill you.

Still though, this is the kind of difficulty I don't mind. It's a nice challenge and mildly fun knowing that I have to concentrate constantly or else. I will admit though, I have simply ragequitted a few times after nearly clearing an entire dungeon only to be killed by a rare pattern that I didn't take into account for, but it's always temporary. The story is also very interesting and I'm loving Caster's personality and side comments which seems to every so often hint at who she really is, as well as her true wish and reason for being in this war.

Besides that

Uh...... huh.....

Well.... Disgaea 4 is supposed to be released September 6th, but I've never seen a package take 2 weeks to get across the country.... Soooooo I guess this means I'm getting Disgaea 4 about a week before release..... Nice. I've always wanted an excuse to fall off the face of the earth for a short period of time during summer break.

NIS America licenses anime

If you haven't heard about this yet, here it is.

We announced yesterday that we will release Anime titles in the US in 2010!
We are very excited to announce our first 4 titles!

Here you go!

- Toradora!
- PERSONA - trinity soul-
- PandraHearts
- Our Home's Fox Deity

We will let you know more about the release dates and all other info soon!
Please looking forward to them!

Please see the press release for more details.
Press Release (JPG / PDF)

Toradora!

PERSONA -trinity soul-

PandraHearts

Our Home's Fox Deity

To be honest, I'm not sure how I feel about this. NIS america's more recent works with Ar Tonelico II and Cross Edge have left me caring less and less about the company. I like Ar Tonelico II as a game and really want to play Ar Tonelico III, but when you have a company that purposefully removes voices because their own voice actors couldn't fill roles, have spelling mistakes, and forget to even convert and translate some of the japanese text, it leaves me wondering.

Having read through some visual novels (not by NIS) I generally ignored spelling errors and the occasional grammatical WTF, but thinking back on it now, I can't do the same with NIS. They should have a large enough staff of beta testers and quality control that major bugs, and aesthetics shouldn't be there. They're making rookie mistakes and it's making me question their other work. Just look at the email they sent. Notice how it says "Pandra Hearts"? I didn't do that, that was a copy and paste. You can look for yourself assuming they didn't change it by the time this is posted.

Stuff like this shouldn't happen, and it worries me when they start licensing anime.
I'm not sure if you've seen the Disgaea 3 opening as subbed by NIS America. It's pretty bad. The translation is....different from what I'm hearing and the subtitles themselves are extremely loud and the type set is a bit large. I'm glad that they're licensing anime and getting more content into our market, but I'm a bit skeptical at the quality it will distributed.

A Warning to ALL DFO Players in NEXON USA

DO NOT MAX YOUR CHARACTERS TO LVL 50.


This will be my one and ONLY warning. From the update, it looks as if Nexon has NOT implemented the Awakening dungeon which means you will NOT be able to awaken to your advanced class at 48.

Why is this important?

1. Your stat growth is dependent on your class. i.e. Desparados (awakened rangers) grow differently than rangers do. If you level up as a ranger past lvl 48, your abilities late game will be significantly nerfed compared to those who awakened properly. Unless you enjoy playing a handicap, I suggest you leave your character alone at 48. This isn't pokemon, you will NOT recover lost stats that you may have received in another class.

2. You do NOT skill reset at awakening, you simply get additional skills which means that by 48, you will have needed to save up at least 150 skill points. About 80 for awakening and the 70 as a safety precaution just in case your current skill build didn't fulfill the prerequisites for the awakened skills.

3. There are two dungeons players need to run for awakening. Both require thorough knowledge of the dungeon layout itself and the monsters. Inexperienced players will screw up and they will die. I'm not joking. All rooms have monsters will special properties and if you go in there thinking it's a normal run, you will screw up. This entails more unnecessary exp you may receive that may get you closer to leveling up.


To be honest, I'm unsure if the drops have even been added. Be wary, just because there's a cap increase doesn't mean nexon has fixed everything. It doesn't even make sense to increase it by 10 levels.

Update!

I've got one more final to complete before I'm officially free. I've quit DFO for K Dnf. DnF has recently had a new update which allows players to get one free level 40 character (what to choose). I've finished watching Baccano! (and have an urge to review it), and any other free time is spent either studying or staring in awe at just how much more awesome the korean version is compared to the american version....

Borderlands - Review

Excuse me for the late review. I've finally finished my work for a while and I've recovered most of my sleep debt, which means now I can actually start writing again (woohoo!). This week's review is on Borderlands.


Borderlands is a First Person Shooter with RPG-like elements. I would consider it to be a game similar to Mass Effect with a bit more freeflow and less protagonist to environment dialogue (actually there's no dialogue between the protagonist(s) and the environment).

Borderlands is about 4 treasure hunters looking for this entity referred to as "The Vault." It supposedly exists on Pandora, a planet under the supervision of a research corporation, who have abandoned their mining operations there leaving it to be controlled mostly by bandits who once were prisoners working there. A guide, referred to as the "guardian angel," tries to lead the treasure hunters to the Vault. The plot itself is very open ended and leaves room for a lot of content (some of which is apparently DLC now)but I'll get to that later. In this kind of game, I believe highlighting gameplay is key here.





As I said before, it's a First Person Shooter with RPG like elements. What does that mean? Well, this game is generally played like a first person shooter. Your HUD shows your compass, HP, Shields, EXP, Class Mod and ammo. Also when you switch weapons, stats for your weapon temporarily appear.





All your weapons have in-depth descriptions such as the weapon's damage, accuracy, fire rate, and magazine size. The item name's color indicates rarity going from least rare to most rare: white-green-blue-purple-light orange-dark orange-pearlescent (which is actually white, but the weapon comes with special traits). The modifiers in the weapon description don't mean additional modifiers, but describe the stats which have been modified from the "base" model. Any red text refers to a special trait the gun may have.

Accuracy actually refers to how large the crosshair is and determines the spread of the bullet when in iron sights/scope. That is to say, you can't just aim in the general vicinity of an enemy and assume it'll hit because the weapon's accuracy was 80%. To be honest, I'm not even sure if the number next to the accuracy refers to a percentage, just a general number system to use to compare one weapon's accuracy to another.



All the characters have been broken down into 3 "subclasses." These subclasses generally determine how you play as the skills (all of which are passive) affect certain weapon types or boost a certain stat that would make another weapon type better to use.

All characters are given on active skill referred to as the "action skill." Needless to say, this action skill varies per player and most likely each character has one subclass tree dedicated to boosting the action skill.




In addition to skills, there are items known as "class mods" which modify skills and apply other effects to complement a certain skill tree or class type. Like skills, these class mods will enhance a certain playing style and generally do not have any adverse effects. The only one I've seen to be a problem is Brick's berserker mod which occasionally gives negative bullet resistance.



Finally, you have the Proficiencies tab which basically tells you which weapons you like using, since the more enemies you kill with a weapon type, the higher your proficiency is with that weapon, the better the boosts you get for that weapon. Just exactly how you can improve weapon damage by using a certain type of weapon multiple times is beyond me, but I really couldn't care less.



If I were to put it bluntly (and I will), the entirety of the game consists of fetch quests, kill x amount quests, go here or "kill this guy" quests. Yes, gameplay wise, that's all. It's actually that monotonous. It's probably one of the most linear "MMO-style" games. There are hardly any cutscenes. There's a lack of plot (or rather, it's so weak, you hardly realize there's a plot) and it tries to pick up but just crumbles.


The difficulty curve is also pretty bad. If you actually play "normally" and generally kill enemies as you progress the story, more often then not, there's going to be a major gap between "recommended" levels and your actual level with you being a good 3-5 levels higher than the target level. Each quest has a "recommended" level that is a marker of the general level you should be. After running through the game with a few characters, my friends and I have figured out that you will BARELY be under the difficulty curve if you ONLY complete the quest and kill NOTHING unless required. What does that mean? The beta testers were picking their noses and twiddling their thumbs when testing this game. More often than not, it's the enemies that initiate attacks (unless you're a sniper) and so the most logical course of action would be to shoot back until said danger was no more.

There's an easy fix for this, either increase the experience tables or reduce the amount of experience you get for completing quests.

So what's keeping this game from being scum of scum?

4 player coop. Probably the saving grace. This kind of gameplay warrants multiplayer and 2k games delivers.

Next would be the unique art style. Cel-Shading isn't anything new, but it's not common either. The art in this game is really well done and the textures are really nice. Animation wise, everything is extremely clean and very visually appealing. It's easy to just throw something like this away for another game when it attempts to go for some kind of realism, but it's worth noting when there's a bit of artistic value to it.

Next would be immersion and flavor text. Despite the core of the game being really boring. The extra effort for dialogue, sound clips, and quest justifications make the game quite amusing. More often than not, I found myself chuckling at certain moments in the game. The developers know how to write well (to an extent. Like I said, the main story sucks). Reading quest descriptions and listening to sound recordings are definitely worth your time and improve the overall experience.

The game mechanics are well organized. They're simple, relatively easy to use and don't require a massive learning curve. The developers know what they wanted from this game and the players can expect the same thing.


This critique isn't so blatant but after a couple playthroughs is very noticeable. The developers play favorites with the characters, particularly Mordecai, the hunter. Upon close inspection, nothing seems wrong. His skills are relatively fine, and considering his weapon types, nothing is drastically overpowered. But certain weapons throughout the game make him a very cheap, broken character. Each one of his skill trees combined with a certain mod can allow him to generally stand still and watch everything around him explode. The trees at full skill allotment Allow him to effectively be a one man army at long and mid-to-short range, or short and mid range with damage dealt easily giving him 1 hit kills. If you look above at the screenshots, you'll notice the sniper rifle equipped along with my proficiency. The red text allows me to fire the sniper rifle like a fully automatic rifle (Meaning, I don't have to press the mouse button for each shot). Combine that with my proficiency and I can fire 13 shots faster than the Soldier class with battle rifles. Not only that, I deal more damage and if combined with a passive skill that decreases cooldown time for my action skill per hit, can use my action skill endlessly. THE ONLY drawback ( and I hardly call it a draw back) is that At the end, players can only have 120 sniper rifle ammo. Meaning that ammo is the only thing holding this character back from completely annihilating the game, but that's easily fixed with at least 1 character having a ammo regeneration support mod.


Overall gameplay is really short. One playthrough takes about an hour and a half, and second playthrough takes shorter totaling around 2 weeks. DLC will probably extend it but gameplay is exceptionally short. The only replay value this has is the post game monster modifications. All enemies enter a third tier of difficulty and are set to level ranges from 49-51.

It's fun for a short while but may not offset the price tag. The coop is definitely fun but with people generally being computer illiterate, joining an online game is somewhat boring. People don't really talk much and voice settings are either on or off. It's better to play with friends then trying to find a good online game.

Record of agarest war delayed.

I dunno. I can't help but feel that sometimes people try too hard. No doubt Atlus is guilty of such antics but this feels too forced......






MASSIVE WARS, BOUNTIFUL WOMEN, AND A CORNUCOPIA OF DEBAUCHERY, NOW ON TWO CONSOLES!

Record of Agarest War receives a simultaneous release on the PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system AND Xbox 360®video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, Spring 2010!

Torrance, CA (Friday 13th, 2009) – Aksys Games, a publisher of interactive entertainment products, announces its first epic SRPG, with Record of Agarest War for the Xbox 360 to coincide with the previously announced PLAYSTATION Network version. In this game developed by Compiled Heart, Red Entertainment, and Idea Factory, SRPG fanatics will finally be able to play a game worthy of the genre. Sporting over one hundred hours of gameplay, Record of Agarest War invites players into a gorgeous, expansive world of hope and despair. Players will wage war against the evil forces of darkness, take a bride—actually, several brides— and extend their lineage across five generations!

“In truth, we had Record of Agarest War ready to go up on the PLAYSTATION Network months ago,” [Ed.'s note: That's a lie.] says Ben Bateman, Editor, Aksys Games, “But when a haggard man emerged from a ball of crackling energy that materialized outside our office with dire warnings from a dark future, we decided to reconsider. As it turns out, a PLAYSTATION Network-exclusive release of Agarest was—or rather, would have been—the catalyst for World War III. The gaming community was torn apart—literally—by this apparent favoritism, and from that schism poured the infinite minions of Satan himself, the Lord of Lies. The man told us, his eyes blank with the 1000-yard stare, of the horrors of this future war. He had been sent back in time, the last hope of a desperate human resistance, to prevent what the people of this desolate future Earth called, simply, 'The Breaking.' As the last spark of life passed from his body, broken and battered by his journey through the time vortex, we swore to honor his final wish.”

“This is why Record of Agarest War has been delayed,” Ben continues, his eyes wet with tears, “So that we may release it on both consoles, and in doing so, save the world.”

Record of Agarest War Prologue
War darkened the skies of Agarest. Not a simple war between mortals, easily ended by divine intervention, but a war that split the gods themselves. Armies such as the world had never seen before, and would never see again, clashed in the skies of Agarest, across its surface, and even in the caverns that wound their way through its interior.

As is the way in war, many died on both sides, gods and mortals alike, and the war left Agarest broken, blackened, and dead. The gods wept for their paradise, and in a final act of creation, sacrificed themselves to bring life back to its charred and twisted surface.

Although the gods are long dead, the withering darkness that began and fueled their war is not. Imprisoned for millennia, its bonds have begun to weaken, and as they do, a shadow once again spreads across the surface of the world.

Born into this world perched unknowingly on the brink of the apocalypse, a young man by the name of Leonhardt and his descendants are the last, best hope for Agarest. Their journey will span generations and continents as they strive to once again bring peace to their beleaguered world, even as the cost of their own souls.

Record of Agarest War Key Features:

* Soul Breeding!

Tired of just living through one lifetime in typical RPG titles? Then witness the Soul Breed system! Choose a bride at the end of your adventure and give birth to the hero of the next generation!

* Collaborative Attacks!

Position your forces on the battlefield and wait for the right moment to string together massive combo attacks using multiple party members—both in melee and at range!

* Affection Rating

Curious how one of Agarest's lovely ladies feels about you? Look no further than the Affection Gauge, which gives you a quick and easy visual representation of her opinions! Is she smiling? You must be doing something right! Frowning? Uh oh... If only real relationships were this easy!

* Newly Engorged with Content!

Enjoy an enhanced version of the game based on the Japanese release of Record of Agarest War: Reappearance! Hot pix included!

* Exclusive Trophy and Achievement Support!

The North American version of Record of Agarest War is the only version in the universe, and all the other places too, to have trophies and achievements! [Ed.'s note: I think you'll find that the universe pretty much covers everything.] [PR's response: Shut up, woman, get on my horse!]

Record of Agarest War has not yet been rated by the ESRB. More information about Aksys Games and Record of Agarest War can be found at www.aksysgames.com.

Playing Borderlands

Rather.... I started yesterday and I won't be able to post for a while again.....
Midterm japanese project + 10 page research paper + computer science project = absolute mayhem until thanksgiving break.

To top it all off, thanksgiving break is the first break my college has had in this school year. Sonova.....

I'm holding out on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.... i think

It's not that it's too expensive or that Infinity Ward doesn't deserve the sixty dollars of quality that they put out, it's Activision. I know it's stupid, but currently i'm not too happy with how Activision is presenting itself as a company, so I'm really on the fence here. I love Infinity Ward and what they've done and from the previews, it looks beautiful. I can't wait to see the story and how they've twisted it.

But every dollar i send to infinity ward for call of duty modern warfare 2 is a dollar to activision to continue being an ass......

Persona 3: PSP

If you haven't heard of it already. Persona 3 for the PSP is now out in Japan. Why should you get it? Probably because it's a great game and you're now able to change the gender of your character.... and it incorporates most of Persona 4's battle system including the side effects of getting a high ranked social link (helping others up, knocking you out of the way if you're about to die...). Movement is a bit restricted (like Persona for PSP) but they've made a lot of improvements to compensate that. If you can't read Japanese.... well, i highly doubt Atlus USA is just gonna let this go, so all we have to do is wait a little while.

Nexon USA (Soon to be named Block Party) - Review

I've been trying to find a good way to start this review. You see when something is bad, it's almost too easy to blind yourself over all the bad components, and writing a review for it is simple: Just label the fault, make a witty comment and move on, but there are always certain topics that are really hard to write. Not for long list of faults, or the jokes to begin with, but with simply finding a starting point (Ar Tonelico II, Cross Edge, a handful of anime that I can't seem to name off the top of my head....) and no doubt, Nexon USA (and the Korean branch for that matter) is one of them.


You see. Nexon is a company. A company hosting free-to-play (seemingly the new definition for the acronym FTP....) online games. They stay afloat via micro-transactions (small payments that are based on the whim of the end user). With these transactions they receive site-based money that they can use in game to purchase "premium" content, exclusive content for those who invested into the company. There are many other hosts of this sort (Aeria Games, IJJI, NC Soft, Ogplanet, Ntreev USA) and yet this one is the company I choose to review. Why? Because despite all their flaws, poor service, and lack of end user support, they somehow not only manage to stay afloat, but prosper and continue to buy rights for other games....


I'm afraid I may be providing very little context so as an example, I will use their newest game Dungeon Fighter Online (DFO) to provide information. DFO has been officially released to the public under the status of "Open Beta" about a month and a half ago. During the Closed and Early Beta, there were many issues brought up in the forums (and probably on support tickets) referring to many changes in the game that struck previous DnF (Dungeon and Fighter) players as unusual.

For starters: It seemed that this uncleaned version of DFO had traces of code that originated from the Korean, Japanese, and Chinese servers. When players joined a party, the connecting screen would be written in chinese, when players tried to join a Passworded PvP arena, the confirmation button would be written in Korean, and some bots (because they stayed in the same spot and idled all day) obtained a title that said "rooted to town" in Japanese. Not only that, a friend of mine set his non-unicode support to korean and to his surprise found all the text to be in Korean. We, the US branch of players, received some freaky Frankenstein'ed version of the game where bugs existed from some bosses in early versions of DnF while other character balancing was already set.

This probably set off the first large warning signal in my head.

Only about a month later, did Nexon then decide to patch in the "item shop" ( a general term for the foundation of the microtransaction process in many Free to play MMOs. Often referred to as an item shop as site based item shops would usually transfer the premium item bought to the game server. Other games implemented the item shop into the game itself).

Most of the game was still bugged, quests and dungeons needed to be fixed, client issues arose and yet Nexon decided to patch the item shop first... Not only that, they implemented the Japanese system of "Gachapons" (in reference to the Gachapon slot machines where people would insert an increment of money to receive a capsule that would contain a collectible. Needless to say, it was a lottery and the money required to "complete a set" would be based on your luck) for low ranking (low quality compared to the other servers) premium items and greatly inflated prices. In addition, items that were supposed to be bought with the in game "gold" were being sold for cash. The Mentorship system (a simple system in which higher levels will be able to support lower level players by running dungeons together and recieving boosted rewards) was removed. In its stead is a "noob-o-meter" which diminishes the experience that both high levels and lower level characters receive when they party togther. Guilds don't exist yet. It's as if Nexon was attempting to remove any sense of community in the game.....



I could go on, but I won't, because there are issues on the surface that require attention.

I'll start off with the forums, the home for many of Nexon's users. From what I can tell, there's only one moderator for the entire forum spanning multiple games...
That's right, a single account responsible for cleaning up all the drivel on site as well as performing the duties of Public Relations. I've seen text based web games feature more administrators than this. And considering the age demographic that Nexon seems to be targeting (based on the games they host) there's going to be a greater need for administrative staff. No doubt the moderator -Hime- has his/her a rough day each time he/she has to walk into the nexon office.

These forums are extremely primitive resembling a loose variation of the old fashioned BBS coding used by Geocities (may god rest its soul) and Angelfire (theirs too). When you run the forums through a google search, you can then see the foundation of the forum... and it doesn't look very pretty. In addition, I'd like to note that YOU CAN'T EDIT YOUR POSTS. So if you notice something is wrong with your post, or you missed a typo. It's there forever. You can't delete it either and so you're usually forced to either double post or deal with the fact that a point you missed won't be spoken. The lack of any sort of post-comment function is definitely unusual and quite old. I certainly wouldn't expect a company like nexon to skimp out on features that players use... (oh wait, yes I do.)




Events hosted by nexon are fake...

As you can see, not only do they not follow their own rules but half of those accounts including the 30k NX winner doesn't exist. I have proof of it too. Accounts and characters of the same name were created me and my friend AFTER the announcement of the winners. We even have videos of ourselves doing it. It will be uploaded soon as soon as we're finished with another video.

Events are ways to improve popularity for a game. Usually, when companies host events, they don't LIE about it. Notice the winner for the 40k milestone. The prize is probably 10k because that name actually refers to a player/character in the server. I also have experienced some poor service by nexon. I was a winner in the Mabinogi: Say hello to G1 contest in which we had to post on their forums the URL for our blog post that had two of the embedded videos in their terms. I won, but never received an email. I contacted them vis support ticket a few days after my name came up and this is the following response:

"Inquiry: My forum name is Zerreth and I was a winner in the Mabinogi Promotional Video Contest.

http://mabinogi.nexon.net/Event/View.aspx?boardNo=202&contentNo=0008l&pageIndex=1

Unfortunately, I have yet to receive any details as to how I can claim my prize."



I'm not stupid. I've checked my spam folder as well as my inbox. I never received such an email at any point in time. Which leads me to believe that they never sent it.I specifically mentioned that I didn't "receive any details as to how I can claim my prize." I had assumed that whoever was in charge would understand what that meant and attempt to work with a customer, but that doesn't seem likely. At that point I tried looking through the forums to see if anyone else had any issues and vaguely remembering a nice list of posts commenting on it with less.... grace.




That said, I'd like to move on to customer support, or lack thereof. My friend recently lost his account which had over $6,000 worth of NX. At one point he needed to do a password recovery except that it sent the password to an email account doesn't exist anymore (the server hosting the email account is gone). He tried making an account and filing a support ticket concerning the matter at which he received a response of "In order to have this issue reviewed, you must file the ticket on the account in question....." Makes me wonder if they even read the tickets. He then called their "contact us" number in which he received a reply, in vocal form, that "this number is not to be used for customer support" and was then immediately cut off. He is now gathering all of his receipts to make a case and filing a lawsuit. There's one issue. Nexon's transaction logs only log transactions as old as 90 days. Meaning any transaction that was made via nexon point card that's older than 90 days doesn't exist... lovely.

In addition, if players didn't realize it yet. Nexon points disappear after 1 year as rights for it expire in such a time. Meaning if you have any points in your account that you want to save for another game that nexon may be releasing or saving up for newer content, it better be under one year, otherwise it will be removed from your account. MOST companies, notify you of such rights expiring around 30 days before expiration. IJJI even has that in their terms of service:

"Regardless of any terminology used or any name freely given by NHN USA at any time with reasonable notice on the Site, rights granted in the Virtual Money, Game Point and in the Items are a limited license right available for one year or less as the case maybe. NHN USA may charge fees for the right to use Virtual Money, and any right of use in the purchased Virtual Money will be terminated within one year from the date of purchase. We will use reasonable efforts to notify via your registered e-mail thirty (30) days before such termination."

By the way, Nexon doesn't have such a term in their terms of service. they just remove it at will and you can't do anything about it because their transaction logs only 90 days. Therefore, using a nexon card will end up hurting you.




The way nexon USA conducts itself is pretty shady. They provide poor service, and seemingly try to rip you off at any price, and really try to do anything with a minimum amount of effort. Any attempts at actually trying to make nexon a good company would require the shutting down of said company. Not only do they basically have no idea what they're doing, but they're not even trying to fix it. They're simply rolling around in the money that kids with their parents credit cards are giving them. It annoys me to no end that shitty companies such as nexon stay afloat because it then crowds out better companies who could do a better job, earn the money they deserve, and release titles with quality service.

Here's the thing. I know nexon's a company which means they want money. That's OBVIOUS. Making profit is a fundamental point for a company. There are, however, many ways to go about doing this, none of which involve being the epitome of the American population.


Take a look at Valve. They quite well known for the support they provide for their games and customers. My account was hacked and they were able to recover it within 4 days. Look at the guard dog in TF2. It was a joke/fan made content and they actually thought it would be a good idea to implement it.

Look at Atlus. They have a set of administrators who actually take time to read the forums and provide their own input. The Atlus Online newsletter always has a section called "forum quoteables" which include 3 quotes (usually humorous even out of context) from the forums.

The reason starcraft is so famous is because of the time that Blizzard spent the time taking user feedback to balance units out.

In terms of other microtransaction hosts look at AeriaGames. They have a handful of games, GMs that actually spend time with players and they carry "mature" rated games. They even admit to mistakes they made to the players, and establish a sense of trust.

Look at IJJI. They're not too great in advertising and forum maintenance, but their game maintenence is pretty solid and their in-game GMs do try to establish a bond with the players.


To top it off. Nexon's swear filter sucks. It's so bad and primitive that "sucks" is censored as well as any combination of letters (regardless of whether they're in another word or in MULTIPLE words) that may or may not allude to a slur or a swear. They also have some personal touches such as "4chan".....

Simply put, don't buy cash from nexon. If you have to, buy $5 worth so that you're not targeted for when they do their arbitrary account wipes/bans. You're only supporting their bad practices and cheap tactics to make money. There are better companies out there that deserve to host the games nexon has.

DFO review in need of a revision

Now that nexon has opened up the item shop for Dungeon Fighter Online, they have reared their ugly head of incompetence showing to all just the kind of moneymongers they are. I'll be updating the DFO review soon to reflect how nexon's poor hosting capabilities can kill a game (and its community).

DFO Fan AMV WIP

I've got music, and I've got a handful of gameplay footage. Problem is. I'm actually missing someone who can supply me with some decent footage for the Spitfire.

I'm looking for a lvl 30+ Spitfire for my video. He doesn't have to be amazing but he should be able to handle himself in most dungeons and be well composed. Preferably, I'm looking for a PvP build, but strict PvE is fine as well.

WET - Review

I actually ordered this much earlier, it's just that both college and DFO have been taking up a bit more time than I expected. So it took much longer than it should have to beat this game.

Wet is a third person alternative shooter developed by Bethesda Softworks, responsible for some pretty recent titles such as Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Fallout 3. They've also had a hand in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth which is a first person shooter based on the HP Lovecraft novels.

Wet is about a gun for hire named Rubi Malone who is famous for her acrobatic gunplay which resulted in people likening her to a monkey.


Wet was more of less everything I expected it to be. It's a stylish third person shooter where you (and mostly a set of dual pistols) take on everything. (sigh) Because Rubi is badass and tough as a brick and people who are badass and tough as a brick don't care about anything....
The gameplay in the game is pretty solid. While the flow of it is pretty much the same throughout the game, it mostly involves firing two guns while jumping through the air, firing two guns while sliding on the ground and seemingly not wreaking your jeans, or using a sword to remove people from the game. Of course, Rubi also has some skills that allow her to move from point A to point B more efficiently, while firing two guns. She can wall run, hang onto cliffs and then run along it, slide down ladders hanging by her feet, run up and jump off of enemies, use enemies as launching platforms and enter a state of pure "pissed-offedness...." to wreak havoc. (I don't see how the last one relates of movement.)

The flow the game seems to generally follow a pretty structurized level design. There's a small gunfight that usually doesn't mean much and is just there to make sure the trek from point A to point B isn't too boring, then there's some form of arena fight. Rinse and repeat and add a few action scenes that involve a lot of quick-time event usage.

You get four weapons, all of which have their purposes and add more fun to the game. Unlike Wanted, where you're stuck with two weapons, which basically do the same thing, while the the enemy has a variety, you have about the same amount of weapons the enemy has. I think the only thing you're really missing is an assault rifle, and instead of that you get twin bowguns that fire explosive bolts. Good trade. They all have somewhat specific uses but after a while, that seems to matter less as it almost feels like ammo is attempting to tripwire you everywhere. Simply break open a box and you have about 1/4 of your total ammo.


The action packed quicktime event scenes are honestly the highlight of the game for me. The very first time I encountered this, I basically wet my pants. Rubi Malone is basically trying to hunt down a guy who stole her package and through a series of events, you find her on top of a car, driving along a bridge. In the meantime, there are other cars with enemies trying to kill you. You take control of Rubi and every so often she has to jump from car to car or pull off some flashy stunts to avoid getting roadkilled. So it's a combination of a rail shooter style gameplay combined with quick time events that appear frequently.

Speaking of which. I think that the quick time events handled in this game are probably the best I've seen. The quicktime command is pretty intuitive as the buttons aren't randomized and they generally correspond to basic controls. For example, let's say the car Rubi is on is about to crash into another car. The game goes into slow motion, and X (the button to jump) appears. She jumps and wall runs a truck, vaults over and jumps to another car with a guy sticking out of the window. As she's in mid-air, time slows down again to display the square button (the button for sword attacks). Once the event clears, she slashes the guy in midair and lands on the car.
In addition, I feel that the game gives players pretty ample time (about 1-2 seconds) to press the command. There are times that I simply fumble because I wasn't expecting it but it's not that big of a deal. In addition, the cut-scenes that include quick-time events are pretty well done. After a quick-tiome event is cleared the camera usually stays in the same "shot" so the transition looks very smooth. It also doesn't transition the moment you press the button so when you clear an event, a green circle appears around the button you have to press and the event continues on until the timer runs out. Because of that cutscenes aren't really choppy, the main problem I had with Resident Evil 4.


Music rocks. Enough said. Dialogue is pretty solid and the voice acting is really nice. Eliza Dushku voice fills Rubi with life.

The loading screens are actually kind of creative. I didn't realize until about halfway through the game that they were loading screens. Excluding the main loading screen chapters where there's just a single shot and a small loading animation at the bottom, in chapter loading screens consist of 70s movie theater commercials and small shots of what Rubi does when she's waiting in an elevator. It was humorous and entertaining so I didn't think much of it, but when I considered that at one point, the animation was looping and that they were placed in key areas involving doors, I realized it was a loading screen. Pretty clever.


Of course, there are issues with the game. One such issue would probably be the obscene precision required to move from place to place (feels reminiscent of Tomb Raider...). Rubi generally has a set running speed. It doesn't feel fast but when she jumps it's much further than expected. So what usually happens is that either you jump too early and fall to your death, or you screw up a simple combination of movement tricks which also features you falling to your death (wall running, jumping off, and then hanging onto a cliff). Other times the frustration of missing a simple chain in a link of moves during an arena fight warrants a save load. (Jumping off a ramp, killing two guys before swinging on a pole.... only to miss the pole and land on the ground where your combo has now been trashed). Because this game is so combo/chain-time sensitive, it's as if the developers were expecting you to know how to pull off everything you do at the start.... which is ridiculous.

I recieved a "poor" ranking in the first major fight that involved spawn points because I didn't utilize all the acrobatic tricks properly which would also help my time as the acrobatic elements help you reach the areas that contain the targets which you need to cut to kill the spawn point. COME ON.


Another issue would be how rigid the gameplay is. You hardly see any enemies when you're moving from one "arena" to another. While the gameplay is linear, and there's nothing wrong with that, having too rigid gameplay only emphasizes how linear the game is. In addition, I want some practice during the transition from point A to point B. It's somewhat annoying that I can't try out certain moves unless there's a target I can test on (i.e. flipping off enemies, or going for a super fast slash from a wall) and the game doesn't accommodate me with such a chance other than in an area that's grading you for your performance. It's as if you just learned how to drive and know the fundamentals of driving, but the only time you can drive is when you're taking a test. Unless your ability to adapt is that of god, OF COURSE YOU'RE GOING TO SCREW UP.


Another thing I was unhappy about was that there wasn't a "new game +" after you beat the game. Meaning after you complete the first runthrough of the game, you can't start a new game without removing the upgrade data from the old character... which is annoying because I'm pretty sure a bunch of the extra mini-stages that you unlock after, use the story mode clear data. You also don't get multiple save files, and there's no chapter select screen. I guess, if you count the Point attack mode (how many points can you score in a particular screen), that would count as "chapter select" but I would prefer something a little less competitive.


Some of the characters have VERY short appearances despite their importance to the storyline. Other characters aren't explained properly which almost makes you feel as if you're missing something or skipped a scene or entire game. The storyline, while fairly thought out is missing key plot points and explanations. As a result, what would have been a classic, yet overdone, story is filled with holes and information leaks that aren't necessary. They degrade the feel of the game overall and to top if off, it seems as if they left it as a cliffhanger for a second game...



Overall, Wet has that kind of Kill Bill feel to it, except that instead of a sword, Rubi is more about guns. The music sets the game's tone really well and I think because of it, I like the game a lot. There are a handful of game flaws in terms of technicalities, but in terms of flow, it plays really well. It's shorter than expected but it's nice. It's much better than the Strangerhood and being able to shoot two people at once, and seeing how well she changes the direction of the guns is pretty awesome.

DFO Early Beta Key results

Considering only one person commented. MrLucky77 will get two keys.

That means that I still have 5 remaining. If anyone else wishes to get a key at some point between early beta and open beta. Comment and I'll see what i can do.


In other news. I've pre-ordered Wet which looks like it's going to be that game that I wish was made already. Can't be sure though, and DFO begins tomorrow. Luckily, college hasn't roundhouse kicked me in the face yet.

DFO Beta Key Giveaway Contest

Gamespot has "only" 50,000 keys available, and 1up.com apparently has now stopped releasing keys.

Considering that there were keys distributed at PAX, I find it hard to believe that anyone WOULDN'T have a key if they wanted. Regardless, I have 7 keys at my disposal to distribute. So I decided to host a contest to distribute keys. Here's how it works.


Simply post a comment with your e-mail address. There are restrictions however:

1. When you post a comment you are not allowed to choose anonymous. Anonymous

2. If you choose Name, you MUST type your email address or blog site as the URL.
2a. Name must be appropriate. You don't have to type your actual name, screen names are fine. I will completely disregard nonsense. You know who you are. I have some tolerance, but I still can't stand stupid.

3. No repeat entries. I understand that there are trolls and griefers, so it's best to use either an Open ID account (Live Journal, Word Press, Type Pad, AIM) or a gmail/blogger account. Because this is more easily traceable, it will guarantee you a slot.



Results will be revealed on the 14th where you can then download immediately and wait the next day.



Good Luck to you all.