Rondo of Swords

Funny thing that I would complete this faster that I would Baroque... Or FES for that matter. Then again, FES is pretty long (100+ Atlus says... including the first one)

To put it bluntly I would need to refer to something a friend of mine said:
"So basically, it's like drive-by Fire Emblem?"
I can't really break Rondo of Swords down into organized paragraphs now that I've done this, so sorry in advance.

Yes... Yes it is.
As a melee character, you have to use your stylus (or D-pad) to create a path with the available movement counters that you have which will go through an enemy(ies). This also works for your allies as if they run through each other, they can receive support boosts if the ally has it. It's a tactics RPG that utilizes an interesting way to fight. It would make more sense for the cavalier units but less sense for the footmen, unless your ideal game was to have everyone be some super assassin soldier that passes through enemies in that anime style slash (without the delayed death, as they're not all 1-hit kills). But with every Strategy RPG comes magic and bows. They're normal. You just move and then cast in place. Archers get to move and shoot but that's kinda minor. I have to say though, the pathfinding system does negate many strategies where you box in the weakest,yet strongest character making a mobile fortress(there are units with the ability to block movement, but that's a skill).

One thing to note is the AI, and the existence of one. In many other games it was very, very easy to exploit the AI by figuring the very simple algorithm that the developers have programmed.
IE: Fire Emblem enemies always aimed for the weakest character and rigged the critical "probability" system so that it would get lucky shots on healers in range. Disgaea had the enemy deal the most to those with the lowest HP numerically and used Area of Effect whenever possible. When the player's unit lvl passed a certain point beyond the enemies, they ditched the AI and just attacked normally.
In this, if the enemy ever gets into a tight corner, the game pauses. Not because it has to manage every unit, but because it has to manage every unit WELL. But first a footnote. Characters were all assigned a "Momentum Counter" or MC for short. This can be raised or lowered with various skills or raised by attacking/killing. The higher the MC, the more likely the enemy will go for that unit first.

Major things to note were that if there were units that the enemy could severely wound en route to the unit with the highest MC, it would, even if there was a slight detour involved. Meaning? You lag a unit, regardless of their MC, it will be targeted and killed first. If you leave a unit open to die, it WILL die. The computer will focus on removing major threats first as well. Threats involve (from highest priority) MC/HP-ATTK/MAG-MOV. If a healer's nearby, it will split up the gigantic mass of units to aim for the healer while going for the highest MC. The thing is, the MC priority isn't set in stone like the tutorial (which took me a good hour by the way). I noticed the computer "leans" toward the highest MC unit, but is definitely distracted by many other things. I LIKE THAT. You have to actually THINK in this game. You have to prioritize which units to kill first or else it'll come back to haunt you.
There's this one map I was playing where you were on the top right corner of the map and the unit to kill was in the bottom left. A river cut through the map from top left to bottom right, giving you two bridges to attack. So you go left and defeat the small squad of archers and knights or go south onto the wider bridge that is swarming with cavalier, mages, archers, and knights. I went west multiple times only to see my troops get pincered, and cut to pieces on the bridge. Formation is crucial and the enemy actually uses battlefield strategies. When a unit's HP falls below a certain percent they retreat to a larger mass of reinforcements.

In addition, it's never a case where your units can overpower your enemies units and wipe the map with one character (Except for Cotton, but even she has some restrictions). You have to choose your characters wisely and use all of them to get the best results. Of course there will be some that never see the light of day, but that's bound to happen.


The story is well done. It begins with what seems to be a typical Fire Emblem story but the twist comes in really early on. You play as the Crown Prince Serdic, who is escaping your kingdom of Bretvalde as the Grand Meir invades, or so you think. The truth is, you're playing not as Serdic, but his double. He has given you Spanta, the Holy Blade, for it is corrupt and it's your job as the double to to purify it. There's a slight problem. The real Crown Prince has been killed, and his double watched him die. No one else knows that the real prince died. Serdic's double is then forced to be the Crown Prince and restore Bretvalde. No one else knows, not even the Crown Prince's younger sister, Marie. So you play with the notion that at some point he will be exposed but when and how...


This game is difficult. It's not Hoshigami difficult but difficult enough to be FUN. It felt great that this was more or less on even playing field. All the enemies could do what you could do (except the archers, they didn't run and gun) and were capable of moves that exploited your weakness. There was effort put into this and it shows. What I enjoy is that there's usually a target, it's not just "defeat all enemies" and so how long the battle lasts is dependent how how well you can fight.

....

Sorry guys, I got careless looking for a registry cleaner and ended up getting hijacked. I've fixed it to the point where I'm able to access the internet again and not crash on me, but this looks like a doozy. I'm nearing the final steps (I hope) and will post 2 ASAP.

Spiral - Review

I forgot to do an anime post, so here's one of Spiral (which my avatar is based off of).

Spiral is an anime based off a manga (I assume this can be implied by now) of the same name. The story revolves around Ayumu Narumi trying to figure out the link between his older brother, Kiyotaka Narumi, who disappeared two years ago and a group of people known as the "Blade Children." Existing throughout the world, the Blade Children, are those who will stop at nothing to achieve their destiny. While their presence is minute, there are those who shun them for who they are.

This is a 26 episoder with a plot line that uses mystery and logic to progress the story. (Bad analogy ahead) To make it simple, I would call Spiral a "Detective Conan with a solid storyline and character development. It's what Detective Conan should have been." The style of mystery used has that progression of accident/mystery --> investigation --> Conclusion/Solution. It's not a bad way to do it, but it's definitely something that's been done before. I always liked just watching an episode through just to go, "Oooh" or "Now I get it" at the end. In all honesty, it's not a technique I'm fond of, but it works. I mean... Look what happened to Death Note...

There's a good amount of character development for each individual character. The problem is, how the the story and the characters are affected as a whole. There's no meaning behind why they were called "Blade Children" and you're still left wondering what happened to Ayumu's brother. It's for the better that they didn't answer all the questions, but I thought the Blade Children thing was very important. I'm a person that's willing to simply go along with a story just so as long as the writers can wrap it up together, the problem is occasionally there were holes that didn't work too well.

Every character had a solid personality, which is what I loved the most. At first, you think Ayumu is just a "typical" delinquint/slacker archetype, but as you see later on. He actually works really hard. It's not like one of those typical, "works when he has to" types, he has certain triggers that seem to change his thought process. Then, each of the Blade Children are from around the world, each with their own reason as to why they should interact with the "Little Narumi." You also see the relationship between Ayumu and his sister-in-law, Madoka. It's very obvious that they're willing to have a relationship, but you can also see the very fine lines that could easily break it as well.

Rather than talking about the animation, which shows quality, but nothing spectacular, I want to talk about the direction in this anime. The director mixes up the style of mystery he uses throughout the series, which to some may show an inconsistent plot line, but to me shows work. There are parts where, if you were to use a certain style for that scenario, it wouldn't work. The use of humor was also very well done. It ranged from subtle to very blatant depending on how the story was progressing, and my only wish was that there was more of it. At points, there seemed to be too much tension, that a little quick snip may have worked. But I greatly appreciated the subtle humor used as I don't see that as often anymore. What's great about it is how it uses a peculiar quirk of a character to stand out.

Voice acting was generally solid, and American voice acting was generally off. 14 year olds sound like they're 20. 18 year olds sound like their 30, and the others sound like they're 7 years younger... What's even better? There's VA commentary in which they thought they did an AWESOME job. NO joke. I watched the DVDs and looked over the extra features... There were commentaries from the voice actors and they honestly thought they were doing an amazing job. I thought Ayumu was done well, but the other characters were so pompous. It then really makes me realize as to why the American industry has such a hard time getting quality dubs out. Yes, it was interesting to see the insight into what went on in the studio, but it was a bad insight. I didn't want to see that. Or rather, I didn't want to confirm my doubts...

Crisis Core

I still didn't beat it, but I think I've gotten far enough.


Crisis Core is about a SOLDIER officer named Zack Fair who gets caught up in a problem within his company, Shinra Electric, with a defected 1st rank officer, Genesis. Reasons as to why his highly respected officer deserts his company is found out as you progress through the story.

Now for the fandom. I'm sure that a lot of you know this game is the prequel to Final Fantasy 7. For those of you who've gotten far enough, you know that a lot of Cloud's memories are fake and based off of Zack's. Thus, getting the backstory of Final Fantasy 7 is really interesting. You get to learn why some characters did what they did. You also get to see a lot of where Cloud's memories are derived from.

What makes this game likable however, are the characters. I'm not talking about how they were compared to FF7 (though, they were pretty cookie cutter.), but how they are in general. You don't just have the typical elitist high ranking officers. You really see how they were able to obtain their rank (besides skill). One thing that bugs me is how every character seems to have one peculiar aspect that makes him stand out. It's not that the character as a person stands out, it's that what defines him is a single trait. For example. Zack, is famous for his squats. If he didn't do his squats, he wouldn't be Zack. Genesis, has this creepy obsession with a literary work known as LOVELESS. If he didn't quote LOVELESS every other time, he would just be another typical pretty boy. Angeal needs to wail on about his "honor" otherwise, he's moot. You can't describe a character in a broad sense, only with that single defining trait which, to me, shows poor writing.

Graphically, this game is intense. Compiling a lot of pre-rendered videos while using the PSP to it's near full potential is what Square-Enix is capable of. What's also characteristic of Crisis Core is what is characteristic of all Final Fantasy games. By that I mean, digustingly time-consuming summons. While this time around, you're allowed to skip the pre-rendered stuff, it's still really long. (Yes, Bahamut is still 1 and a half minutes)What I'm still bothered about is how the main and secondary characters have "baby faces." By that, I mean perfect skin where the lighting shows no visual faults. Even actors have wrinkles and features, but apparently everyone that's "important" has the time to spend on conditioning their skin every morning in the Final Fantasy games. I'm not saying it's bad to have pretty boys, but when it covers half the cast... in every game... that's a problem.

Now for gameplay. It's a decent action RPG system. It kind of reminds me of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, without the cards. Your attacks, materia and items are in a straight line and you can flip through which action you want to take with X. Triangle guards (though I never use it) and Square rolls, which allows you to dodge pretty much every attack except for specials (which I use all the time). What I'm bothered about this game however, is how much it wants to be a Playstation 2 game, but fails with the inadequate number of shoulder buttons. I'll explain what I mean. On the field, L and R change the camera. Once you're in battle, L and R change which action you want to take and the ability to change the camera is gone. The camera is "supposed" to move along with your movements, but it seems to suffer from "entity syndrome." What I mean by that is that, the camera itself is considered an entity, which means it will bump and STOP against walls. So what do you do when you try to get a better angle along the wall? You spin the camera in the other direction, but what happens when you can't control the camera? Problems occur.

Also, with the lack of free buttons, you can't change targets, and so Zack auto targets whomever is closest to him. This becomes a problem when you're fighting more than one monster (which is always). If you're trying to take the strongest monster out first, you have to be hugging the thing the entirety of the battle, which provides you with less time to react to the enemies movements. There's also no radar which is a pain occasionally as monsters from off the screen tend to cast ranged magic, or just shoot you from a safe distance, and you have no idea when they're going to fire. Honestly, all of these issues could be fixed with a use of a D-pad, and two extra shoulder buttons (Square-Enix thinks people LIKE using the D-pad to move around in an action RPG (apparently, Tales of the World wasn't enough to give other companies a clear message) and not the joystick, so they give an option to use either one and completely negate any other use of the D-pad). If this were to come out on the PS2, all of these problems would've been fixed.

Honestly, as a stand-alone. I liked playing Crisis Core. It gave off a feeling that all you were doing was quests at times (though all side-quests ARE technically optional but since there's like.. 120 of them, you might as well try to complete as many as possible) but the story, or rather the progression is nice. The game is crazy easy however. Once you get Materia fusion, the game is a cakewalk. My friends call me a "gamebreaker" because I abuse the customization in games to the point that I have godly stats early on. I blame it on Disgaea, but I can't help it if I skipped all the second tier skills and just used third. They gave me the option to, they can't complain. SO WHAT if my HP+ materia gives me 120% at lvl 1, or if my lvl 2 Firaga gives me 80% extra MP when I'm only lvl 14. They put that in there, I'm just there to use it to its fullest extent.

Oh yeah, and this is before Cloud is in need of depressants, which then sparked this interesting dialogue that my friend and I made up.

Zack: "Oh hey, Cloud. How are you?"
Cloud: "Hey, I'm feeling great. Life is beautiful you know?"
Zack: "What'cha got there?"
Cloud: "This? Oh, this is just a clock that tells me how much time I have left until my depression kicks in."
Zack: "That's kinda depressing..."
Cloud: "Whoa, whoa. Let's not go there."

I don't care if you're not into it. I think it's funny.




What's after this? Baroque. I got it on it's release date and playing it 'till I get Arcana Hearts... Damn that delay.

Poll

I'd like for you to answer the poll I've just recreated to the right. Every time I log on to look, it's the same and I set it to change... So, I'd just like to know if you seen any other ads.

Crisis Core-Pending

Just wait a little longer....