Now we are off to... oh side quest!

Well the first job the guild had was to help Estelle find the giant talking bird monster rumored to live in a far off desert, but no sooner did the group enter the next city than they get tied up into another quest. Turns out some corrupt knights had secrectly transfered all the workers that were building the city onto a project of building weapons, in a plan to take the capital by force. The group stops the plan and meets back up with Rita along the way, also Raven tags along since he has some busness in the same direction the guild is going, so the gang is all back together (with room still for at least 1 more). When they finally sail off they quickly bump into a ghost ship and split up to look around.

Well there goes the plot...

Got a lot done in the game today.

Since the gang knows that the person stealing the magic orbs is the leader of a particular guild, they go to the guild city to talk to the head of all the guilds. Before they can do that though the protective field around the city breaks and monsters swarm in, then after the monsters are defeated and the barrier is restored the head of all the guilds leaves to stop the monster at their nest. The party then goes to a near by over grown forest and meats up again with Raven, the guy who helped them a few time, and he joins the party. In the forest they come across a spring of magical energy that's going out of control, but after a boss battle some guy shows up and some how fixes the magical spring with his sword. The group gets back and finally has a chance to talk to talk to the head of all the guilds, but Flynn is there first to deliver a letter from the prince for the leader. The letter was actually switched out though by the bad guys and replaced with a declaration of war, the leader gets furious and imprisons Flynn.

Yuri Then trades laces with Flynn so Flynn can warn the knights about the fake letter and the leader lets Yuri out explaining that it was a trick to lure out who was plotting against him and the knights. The party then catches the orb thief and the corrupt governor talking about their plan to get rid of both the knights and the guilds. Before they can be stopped though the governor escapes and the thief flies away on a magic flying chainsaw sword thing... but the dragon rider shows up and gives Yuri a lift to the bad guy's tower. The two of them get captured though and it's revealed that the rider is actual a female elf type person named Judith and she joins the party. The rest of the team catch up and they scale the tower until they finally fight against the orb thief, who after a sound beating throws himself off the tower to avoid arrest. When they return to the guild city they find out that the evil governor has used all his political power to get nearly all charges dropped (everything from feeding children to monster to attempting to destabilize the government), so Yuri takes the law into his own hands and kills the governor while he tries to slip out of the city at night.

With the magic orb finally recovered and all the bad guys taken care of the team is about to go their separate ways, but suddenly a giant fire bird shows up and tries to talk to Estelle. Before he can say much though the knights deploy their giant mobile tank castle to shoot it down and the bird takes off. Estelle is curious about what the bird wanted with her so she teams up again with Yuri, Karol, Repede, and Judith (who just formed their own guild) to track it down.

Things are at an interesting point in the game, all the plot points that have been driving it forwards so far have been resolved and a completely new plot is starting that I don't know where it will go. It's like the past 20 hours was just one huge prologue and the actual story is just starting off now, it should be interesting to see where it goes from here.

To aer is human

While in the port the gang gets a lead from the guy who helped Yuri out of jail, and they head off to a ruined town. When they arrive they are met by Nan, a girl from of Karol's old guild who he has some kind of connection to, and are told to go away. They stay though and while snooping around they come across a giant monster in a room filled with dense magical energy. The same person on the dragon shows up again and destroys the orb that was keeping the monster contained then flies off. After a battle with the monster the party leaves, figuring that the lead was worthless, but are arrested at the gate. It's then finally revealed that Estelle is not just any noble but a princess in the running to become the new empress/emperor, and the blond guy rescued before is a prince also in the running. After the party gets pardoned of all charges Yuri learns that the political climate is split between the nobles supporting Estelle to be the new ruler and the knights supporting the guy, I figure the easiest solution would have them marry and both rule equally.

It's kinda odd how a couple days ago I mentioned how much voice work Wendee Lee does, and when the group finally meets Nan she's voiced by Wendee Lee in full Haruhi mode!

Most people would just have a rec room in their basement...

Well the gang made it to the port city, well the port before the port they are after, but they run into a snag. The governor of the town is over taxing the citizens in order to pay for his collection of dangerous creatures he keeps in his basement, and if they can't pay they become food for the beasties. Just to be even more evil, he's using a weather machine to land lock all the ships so the people can't even hope to pay their taxes. On the up side the group finally run into Flynn, and after explaining the situation off camera (so I still don't know what Estelle had to tell him) he agrees not to arrest Yuri right away and even tries to see if the governor is connect to the orb stealing. The governor uses the legal system and his position to prevent Flynn from entering his home, so Yuri and the gang bust in so Flynn can enter on the grounds of stopping a robbery. Things go according to plan (with some help from the guy who helped Yuri escape from jail in the beginning) until someone riding a dragon flies into the place, blows up the weather machine and causes enough distraction for the governor to escape. The gang chase him onto a boat but he and the one in charge of the orb stealing get away as they deal with the assassin they met up with back at the castle. After the fight the group rescues some blond noble guy and finally makes it to the port they were heading to in the first place.

The difficulty level in the game suddenly jumped during the trip to the port town, before I could fight through most encounters in a matter of seconds, but currently at least 1 party member nearly dies every few fights and I'm going through healing items like crazy. Maybe it just means that I need to grind a lot more between destinations.

From Akira to Zenki

In ToV today the plot moved a bit more forwards. The gang went to the underground mage city but just missed Flynn again, but they did find Rita Mordio the suspected orb thief. Turn out though that the thief was using the identity of the Rita, who is actually a young expert female mage. So to clear her name to Yuri Rita joins the party as they explore an underground ruin where the thieves may have also struck (and where Flynn went too). They don't find Flynn but they do catch a thief in the act and learn that he's part of an orb stealing syndicate operating out of a port town. So now the party has 5 members and are off to the port.

With 5 in the Party now the 5th character sits out of fights, but fortunately still gains exp at the same rate as the other characters. I'm currently using Estelle, Yuri, Repede, and Rita in my active party so I'll have offensive and defensive magic and two physical fighters.

Rita continues the trend of expertly voice acted characters in this game. When she first showed up I though for some reason she reminded me of Nagato from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, even though they look and act completely different (maybe because she was surrounded in books). Turns out though I was right to think so since both were voiced by Michelle Ruff, who also worked on practically every anime and video game in the past 10 years, she's almost as prolific as Wendee Lee...

Get bent!

Well the story progressed a little more today, it's starting at the same kind of gradual ace as ToS did. Yuri, Repede (the dog), and Estelle meet up with a boy named Karol in the forest who is trying to find a cure for the magic tree that protects his village. Since the town is where they are heading, they team up with Karol and work together to try and heal the tree. When their efforts fail Estelle prays to the tree and it instantly blooms to life, everyone including Estelle is puzzled as to how it happened. Before the group can stay around long the guards from the first town show up looking for them, so they have to make their way to the next location that Yuri's friend and the orb thief may be.

As I said before, the voice acting in this game is really good. While playing the voice of Estelle seemd familiar so I looked the VAs, turns out that I haven't her her before (unless some how I caught an episode of Adventures in Odyssey that she was a minor character in). What surprised me though was that the voice of Yuri is the same guy who voiced Kanji in Persona 4, they sound really different and are very different characters.

Speaking about the voices, with names like Yuri and Karol and the almost bishonen art style, almost the only way to tell what characters are male is by their voice...

So purdy....

Wow, this is really the first next gen artistic looking game that I have played so far and it looks incredible! All the previous 360 games I've played were all gritty and trying to be more or less photo realistic (Crackdown was a little stylized but not too much). while a lot of my Wii games so far had stylized looks the system didn't have the power to fully pull them off and even then only in SD. This game though looks like an amine come to life, with some of the best cell-shading I have ever seen and 3D environments that look hand painted, and it's all rendered in real time. Even on just the title screen I saw the main character and his dog and thought "that has to be pre-rendered" and then they moved when I pressed start and I realized it wasn't. Then once the game started the character walked out of the house and you see the street sprawling back like a painted back drop, but as soon as I moved I realized it was 3D models.

The character personalities and voice work is just as good as in ToS, if not better, and it really feels like a true next gen sequel to it ( even though there were 2 PS2 games released between them and 2 others not translated) with the same feel of story and combat and art. So much so that when Estelle (a girl you team u with early on) says some of her post battle lines I'm reminded of the line from ToS "Uh... you're becoming more like Lloyd, aren't you? ".

The plot so far hasn't really started since I'm only a couple hours in, but the setting is that the world is over over run with monsters of various sizes and the only thing keeping people save are magical orbs that do everything from putting barriers around cities to controlling machines, to giving people magical powers. The main character Yuri lives in the slums of a big city and one day the orb that powers the water supply is stolen, so he goes off on a quest to get it back. Along the way he meets a girl named Estelle who's been always sheltered by palace life but now has to leave to track down a friend of Yuri who's life is in danger. So the point I'm at now they just barely left the city and are now in the world map.

Well that's thirty-seven down...

At last finished Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean, and the ending is just as convoluted as the rest of the story.

During the confrontation with the evil god it's revealed that the woman who appeared to be controlling it was actually the one being controlled. It turns out that she died 9 years ago and her grief stricken grandfather made a deal with the evil god to restore her to life. This mirrors how Kalas was brought back from death by his brother Fee who was the embodiment of life. After the final battle with the evil god Kalas saves the woman from it's control and all the islands return to earth as the toxic clouds disappear.

Then it's revealed that Xelha holds within her the spirit of the ocean and now that the earth is set back to normal she has to give it up. Before she can do that though there is one final boss fight, the emperor shows up back from the dead in the form of a giant head made of earth. Since the part just won 7 fights with gods in a row, he's a piece of cake to take down though.

So in the end the ocean return, Xelha lives, all the weird jelly bean creates turn into the whale god, and Kalas and everyone says good by to the guardian spirit (me).

Tomorrow it's on to Tales of Vesperia for the 360, and if it's anything like Tales of Symphonia, it should be really good! Also it starts a 5 game streak of 360 titles, so my Wii will be taking a vacation for a few months until Trauma Triage.

5 gods down, one to go!

Well the road to taking on the evil god was a little longer than I figured. After finishing off the two last side quests for my team members (both of which I rarely use) I triggered the event to start attacking the evil god's base.

First all 5 floating islands surrounded the base and then started bombarding with all the magical energy they had left until they broke a hole in it's shields large enough for my part to get through. Then I soon found out that I had to first navigate the maze like base and fight the ghosts of all 5 of the dead gods who's parts were used to construct the evil god. The ups side was that each god was based on a magical element, so attacking it with it's opposite element did a lot of damage, but it still took a long time to track down and kill all 5 of them.

So tomorrow it's the final fight against the evil god and the end of the game!

Story time!

Went around doing the side quests for most of my party members today. In addition to gaining a new finishing move and a new weapon, their side quest also give them an item that unlocks the 6th level of their deck. Now each one can carry 60 cards and play up to 9 at once in a round (previously it was 50 cards and 6 in a round). Now on a good hand a character could deal around 2000HP damage, which makes fights a little more one sided in my favor!

All that's left now is go on Mizuti's quest and Lyude's, then it's off to the final show down of ultimate destiny!

Face Off!

Lots of boss fights today.

The mayor managed to summon the evil god and offered the sword to him, and to thank him the evil god destroyed his village. well what did the mayor expect to happen when making deals with an evil mad god.

The team runs to the village to save it and Mizuti get so mad at what has happened that her mask breaks off when she unleashes a powerful attack. turns out she has a normal looking young girl's face but with kinda odd red eyeliner (why put on make-up when your face is always covered?). Then the gang fight the evil god and drive him back, but the sword breaks in the process. Immediately after Mizuti gets a new mask that looks exactly like her old one, so her face is only seen for 2 scenes.

When they return to the floating islands they get a message the the doctor from the very beginning of the game wants to talk to Kalas. It turns out that Kalas and his brother (who I though was his sister due to poor voice acting and being named Fee) were actually artificial being made from magic cards as an experiment for the emperor. So this make Kalas' "grandfather" actually his "father" (since he made him) and the big bad from disc 1 is actually his brother of sorts.

Speaking about the big bad from disc 1, when on a quest to retrieve an item that was left for Kalas by his maker, the evil trio returns and reveals they were not killed earlier. Then after fighting the in two consecutive fight (taking quite a while) Kalas retrieves what was left for him, a new artificial wing to replace the one that was just coincidentally broken in the fight, grating foresight on the maker's part...

Now it seems to be the final section before the final fight with the evil god's home base, but first several reports came in about side quests with appear to give each of the party members new weapons/abilities, so I'll be doing that tomorrow.

Tower defense

Well the gang trudged through the garden of death (more just a huge muddy swamp), any to find that the Sword of the Heavens was gone. Then after asking around in the next village they find that the village mayor, tired of living under the magic poison cloud, took the sword in order to make a deal with the evil god.

So now the gang is climbing up this huge puzzle tower to catch up with him before he can screw the world over for his own interest.

Garden of Death, sounds nice.

After wandering around Mizuti's home town a bit, trying to figure out how to trigger the next story flag, I finnaly talk to the head of the place and gather a lot of story info.

Turns out that about 1000 years ago gods (or just huge powerful beings) and humans lived on the planet, but eventually humans got uppity and decided to take over the god's land. The humans eventually won the war, but the Planet was so messed up and damaged due to the war it was almost unlivable. So all the top wizards got together floated 5 huge chunks of land into the sky, including in each one a part of a god to help it prosper. The wizards (for the most part) then stayed behind on the planet and covered it in a magical cloud that would absorb the toxins and repair the land. To seal the 5 god parts into the land 3 powerful items were use: The earth crystal (which we had from the start but it's broken), the ocean mirror (which we just got in the ice land but is now broken) , and the Sword of the Heavens (which we have to get now from the Garden of Death).

Then eventually some idiot got into his head that taking the parts of the gods that were embedded into each island and combining them into a huge undead freak god was a good idea, and were in the mess we are now.

But all that is minor next to the final revalation that under that mask Mizuti is... a girl, probably around 12-14. This is one of the only times that I have found that a character's gender was successfully hidden in a game, I suspected she might be due to he outfit sort of having dress, but then considering how weird she is I wasn't too sure she was even human until we got to her village.

a maze-ing

The arty decides to seek help from the last remaining source, an isolated group of magic users that live below a poisonous layer of clouds. Our landing wasn't as accurate as planed, so we first had to make our way through a large maze before getting to the first village.

Why won't you die!?

Well finding the big bads was rather easy, they were about 30 feet from the save point...

Fighting the evil powered Kalas on the other hand was a more daunting feat, the one fight lasted over an hour and a half!!

It wasn't so much that he was hard to defeat, it was just that his attacks were so frustrating. He would first attack for about 500HP and freeze the party member, then he would immediately have another turn where he would attack for 600HP more and absorb that health into himself. Also, since the target is still frozen they can't fight back for a couple of rounds, allowing Kalas to do that all over again for his next turn. Luckily I still had my impromptu mage loaded with all the healing items, so my chracters were healing about as fast as Kalas was, so it was only ma matter of eventually taking off more HP than he absorbed each turn, but boy did it take a while!

After the fight the queen that he was working for reveals that the power and unity the arty used to defeat Kalas was just the kind of force needed to fully release the evil god, and it looks rather silly. At the last moment some ancient being poped u to weaken the good enough that it retreated and the arty managed to escape. Now everyone is back together, even Kalas despite not even apologizing for lying to me and erasing my memory!

My eyes are down here!

Sent most of the time laying today on an annoyingly tough boss battle. Some mostly random guy turned into a giant with eyes all over the place and hit for about 1200HP (most monsters do 200).

After about 4 attempts of various combination of magic spells I changed tactics and made one of my party members into a make shift mage, by loading them up with all the healing items i could. Using this method I managed to keep my other two fighters, who I loaded with all the weapons they could use, alive long enough to beat the darn thing. Just barely though, by the time it was dead one of my fighters had 27 HP left...

So tomorrow it's on to exploring the palace more and maybe track down the big bads.

Occupied!

So I spent most of the time today going through the imperial city and taking down all the monsters that was taking over. After that I made my way into the palace and tried to find the big bads in charge.

One funny bit was searching the bathrooms and one stall was occupied by a guard reading a magazine, after a couple seconds he noticed the party and stated a fight. Since he was only about level 5 (vs our 35) it was rather one sided.

A dragon I don't have to kill?

Well it turns out that the epic battle that we had to endure to get the magic mirror, which had claimed the lives of many queens of the ice land in the past, was a blind game of card matching?!

The goddess of the ice (who was also some how Xelha mother) would hold up a card and I had to pick from several face down cards, get it wrong and Xelha lose a little health, get it right and move to the next card. Unless these past queens were like level 3, I don't see how they could lose this contest, I got a dozen wrong and only lost about 1/4 of Xelha's health.

Then we were told to go and tell the other rulers that we had the mirror, so I trudged back through the blizzard to where we parked our flying bloated sea-monkey thing, but I couldn't get back on. So I went back up to the ice city and checked the port, but nothing was there. Then I checked the room with the big white dragon, but I couldn't ride it either. Finally I went back to the room of trails and talked to the witch there, and only then did it trigger the process of getting remission to ride the dragon... Would have been nice if they mentioned that before I sent half an hour running around in the snow!

At least that side trip gained me some new levels and I picked up the item needed to ride the dragon along the way (not knowing what it was for at the time) so it wasn't a complete waste of time.

So with the dragon I informed the other leaders of the plan and headed off to the headquarters of the bad guys (formerly the capital of the empire), but when I arrived the place was overrun with dark evil monster, so thins may not be going as planed for the bad guys.

Oh, Didn't I mention it before?

Well when the party went to the meeting only one of the nation rulers were there, the rest were off fighting back the start of the evil forces. While trying to come u with a plan on how to beat the evil forces, one of the party members mentions a rumor about an ice land with a powerful witch, but no one has heard from this land in hundreds of years.

After trudging through knee deep snow that gradually filled back in (a rather neat effect for the Game Cube), we get to the ice city and it's revealed that Xelha is actually from there and their queen! Odd that she never mentioned ruling over a powerful ice nation when we were brainstorming ideas to fight evil...

So now the plan is to perform a ritual that should give us a magical mirror that may defend against the powers of the evil side.

The party is back together... kind of...

With the help of a spoiler free FAQ to help me navagate areas that i haven't been to in over a year, I was able to gather up the remainder of my party today. Excluding the insane Kalas of course.

So tomorrow it's off to plan a war meeting with the remain good islands and make a plan of attack on the evil interdimensional strong hold.

Deja vu all over again

In the game today my new main character went around collecting up the former party members, so far I have only obtained 2 but that's enough for a full party.

And speaking about party...

One year ago today I started this edition of this blog and 36 games later it' still going! The really ironic thing is that one year later and I'm on the same game that prompted the reboot of how I run this journal due to it's agonizing voice work and game play.

In an unrelated move I also bout today 2 new low range 360 RGPs (and rearranged some of my list while placing them). Spectral Force 3, which was given low scores for it's last gen looking graphics (which I don't mind much) and Risen, which was given low scores for slow pace and awkward controls (which I hop I wouldn't mind much). Due to their low scores I won't be getting to them until maybe this blog's second anniversary...

This edition started off with just 43 games to finish (24 of which I have completed), and over the year it grew to 71 (including my 2 latest additions).

Now for my own reference, a break down of the evolution of the list:

Before 04/29/09
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - Halo 3 - Mass Effect - Jade Empire: Limited Edition - Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door - Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure - Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance - Tales of Symphonia - Fable: The Lost Chapters - Harvest Moon: Magical Melody - Marvel Ultimate Alliance: Gold Edition - MadWorld - Shenmue II - Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean - Rune Factory Frontier - Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection - Eternal Sonata - Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn - Lost Planet: Extreme Condition - LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures - Baten Kaitos Origins - Culdcept Saga - Blue Dragon - Blinx: The Time Sweeper - Enchanted Arms - Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility - N3: Ninety-Nine Nights
Before 10/10/09
Sacred 2: Fallen Angel - The Last Remnant - Infinite Undiscovery - Star Ocean: The Last Hope - Lost Odyssey - No More Heroes - Saints Row - Saints Row 2 - Tales of Vesperia - Pikmin 2 - Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem - Super Mario Sunshine - Metroid Prime: Trilogy

11/05/09 Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition - Dead Rising
12/26/09 Dragon Age: Origins - Fable II - Assassin's Creed - Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers
01/07/10 Project Gotham Racing 4
03/11/10 Super Paper Mario
04/08/10 Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love
04/13/10 Mass Effect 2
04/29/10 Record of Agarest War - Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World
05/17/10 Skies of Arcadia: Legends - Trauma Center: New Blood
05/20/10 Trauma Team
05/26/10 Super Mario Galaxy
06/23/10 Phantom Brave: We Meet Again
07/15/10 Trauma Center: Second Opinion - Pikmin - Resonance of Fate
07/22/10 Arc Rise Fantasia - Deadly Premonition - Kameo: Elements of Power
07/30/10 Little King's Story
08/01/10 Harvest Moon: Animal Parade
08/31/10 Metroid: Other M
10/11/10 Risen - Spectral Force 3

Things just got personal!

Well I was hopping that things would turn around by the second disc and boy did they!


After defeating the emperor everything gets revealed. It turns out that Kalas, the main character was so obsessed with taking revenge for the death of his grandfather and sister that he secretly made a deal with the princess of the last city we went to gain the power of the evil god (actually a Frankenstein's monster of 5 gods). Also through out the game the player's interaction with the main character was as a "guardian spirit" who could talk to Kalas, and it's turns out that Kalas erased the memory of spirit then lied to it (in this case me) so that it could not stop his insane plan. Now the guardian spirit has left Kalas and now helping the under leveled (and poorly voice acted) Xelha, so I'm controlling her now as the main character and we have to rescue the rest of the party.

I can't think of any other RPG where half way through the main character is revealed to be the villain, and the young random princess is the evil mastermind. It's like if Luke not only killed Vader in RotJ but also killed Palatine and took over the empire himself under the orders of Leia!

Things are getting really interesting now, too bad I had to slog though hours of cliche plot to get to this twist.

I am your uncle!

After a bit more grinding I ran after the main bad guy in his airship, and finally beat him (only took 2 tries). Before he put the ship on self destruct the bad guy told the main character that his grand father was the bad guy's father. So this either means that the bad guy is the main character's uncle or the contrived star wars ending that he's his father (I'm hoping for the former). Even though the bad guy was beaten soundly and the ship he was in blew u on the side of a cliff, I doubt I have seen the last of him. For now the party is after the evil emperor before he revives the power of an evil god.

Another annoying aspect of the combat system is that attacks stack and are only counted at the end of the turn, and elemental attack negate each other. So you can attack some one with a series of ice attacks and then finish it with a huge explosion, but since fire negates water the total damage is minimal, it's like being burned alive goes away if you are hit with a sword made of ice first? So when fighting the big bad the second attempt I cleared out all my fire attacks so they don't dilute my water attacks (which he was weak against).

Thank you, please come again!

Well I'm now on to the second disk, and I developed a strategy for this stupid combat system.

Before I would have about 45% attack cards, 45% def cards, and 10% misc, but I would get bogged down with def cards when a character isn't attacked for several turns. So now I'm using 80% attack cards, 10% def and 10% misc, and I'll rely on being over powered to survive attacks. A convenient thing that helps with this is that I'm currently in a section where I'm being attacked within a town and the store which heals me (not an inn, since that would make sense) for free is still open. So I just have to attack enemies until my character's health gets low and then heal at the store for free to grind up EXP.

The down side to this is that the backwards play mechanics has it that you don't level up automatically when you get a certain amount of exp, you have to go to a save flower and then use an option to teleport you to a other world church where you pray for your level up. So I could grind all day and not get any stronger until I find a save flower to level me up...

Battle!

Well I got through the mirror maze and then had to fight the guardian of the card (a giant mask/moth) only to have the villain (who was standing there the whole time to just walk u and grab it.

Another frustrating thin about this game is how incredibly stupid the characters are. It's like they can't move and speak at the same time, so when anything happens they just stand still and say out loud what is clearly going on. Several times they are faced with the bad guys and a monster shows up, then the bad guys just walk off with out being stopped. There are six of the good guys and only 3 can fight the monster at a time, why can't the other 3 just fight the bad guys!? Or in this case they chase the bad guy into the chamber with the card and the guardian shows up, during the whole fight the bad guy is just standing off to the side wiating for the good guys to win, and presumably half the good guys are sanding around too. Then once the battle is over they just stands there as he walks over to the card says "I'll take this" and grab it, no one thinks "Hey, our nemisis is feet away from the card we just risked our lives for, better grab it quick" or even "Hey, he's going for the card, stop him!". They just stand there as he teleports away and then say in flat stilted dialogue "oh no, he's getting away with the card."

The battle system is also getting more frustrating. To stand a chance I load the deck with about half attack cards, half defense cards, and some healing items, since the cards are dealt at random I then have better luck having both types when needed. Unfortunately what normally happens is that the monster targets one character the whole fight, so not only do they use up whatever def cards they may have but the two other characters soon get full hands of def cards they can't use and no room for attack cards when their turn comes. So I would go 6 turns in a row of having to waste 2/3 of my turns discarding useless defense cards while one character is being slowly killed due to a lack of defense cards! At least the fights last for 30 or so rounds, so eventually I get back to a point where the other characters have attack hands, but by then the monster switches targets to the defenseless members...

oh, I should have known...

Turns out what I had to do was give the robot the magic plant to flip reality to reveal a door to a fortune teller that gives a dark waring about the protagonist, then I go to the magic forest where the bad guys have the kidnapped princess and I fight a giant monster, after that the bad guys break into the castle basement to steal the magic card in the mirror maze.

...

This sounds like the kind of nonsense that people make up in movies when talking about RPGs if the writers have no clue what an RPG is like. Next I'll have to beware of the sacrilege.

This game may have been really different and artistically striking at the time, but the static background, BAD voice work, and over the top lot just seem really dated now. Also the battling system is unnecessarily awkward, since it's like a card battle but on a time limit and most cards do little damage so fights drag out.

At least judging by the FAQ i'm almost half done, maybe it picks u on the second disc...

Wut?

Well I tried to lay some more of Baten Kaitos, but the last place I left off was some weird Katamari Damache and after a couple hours trying to figure out how to advance I called it a night.

Tomorrow I'll try it again with a FAQ

Well that's thirty-six down...

Well that ended quickly...

It appears that even though the game was in 4 parts, the first two are twice as long as the second two, resulting in a game the starts off slow and then screeches to a halt.

After picking up the two items needed to stop Doom it was just another two shot levels before the final battle. An interesting thing when I finished the game is that I was using Doom to beat Doom in a one on one battle. So in the end Doom won and the universe was saved! What?

Tomorrow it's going to be a bit of deja vu when I start again on Baten Kaitos.

Smash things for world peace!

Well in MUA:GE the current plot is that Dr. Doom has the powers of Odin and believes that he killed off a bunch of the earth's heroes, but they were actually teleported to the moon where they can start a quest to find super powerful items to stop Doom.

Since the game was originally for the first Xbox then ported to the 360 there is an odd mix of graphic quality in the game. The game it's self has pretty good quality graphics, yet some of the secondary characters have small texture maps, resulting in seams in their faces, and the character portraits are blurry and have dodgy transparencies due to the rescaling. The key note cinematic are really well done and look better than some of their related movies, then in contrast the prerendered cut-scenes look muddy and lower quality than the actual in game graphics (since they are based on the Xbox. So the visuals go from movie quality, to current gen, to last gen within a few minuets some times.

The game play consists of destroying everything that moves, and some things that don't. Even though the game suports 4 players (3 AI) I normally play the levels with 1 character at a time to unlock the costumes and not get in my own way

Well that's thirty-five down...

Finished Shenmue II today, and the last section is rather different...

Ryo starts off at a small port village with a population of about a dozen, and then follows a path that should lead to the village the mirrors came from, after that it's just one huge barely interactive cut-scene till the end of the game.

Ryo meets the the girl from the into when he saves her and a white dear from the rapids. Since the girl is from the village Ryo's heading to, they walk together. The game then alternates between sections of walking where Ryo talks to the girl about stuff, QTE sections as they run through the forest, and free walking down narrow paths when they get lost. At this point in the game super natural things start happening, like the girl willing a cloud of dandelion seeds to take flight.

The girl turns out to be the daughter of the local stone smith, and they have the titular Shenmue tree out side of their house (took 2 games to get to it). The father is not home but they find a old diagram of the 2 mirrors, when they go looking for the father in the local mines things really get weird. They find a jewel covered sword left there by the father, and when they put it into a stand it triggers another stand for the Phoenix mirror. This then triggers the sword to start floating and glowing blue as two gigantic versions of the mirrors are revealed. The girl then recites a prophesy that seems to be coming true and the game ends with the ironic text:

"The story continues..."

Too bad it never did. Well maybe since Kid Icarus is getting a 3rd game finally on the 3DS and MegaMan Legends is also finally getting a 3rd game on it too, maybe Sega will get on the reviving franchise for a 3rd part bandwagon and make Shenmue 3D.

One really interesting thing is that beating the game unlocks some production video of when Shenmue was originally a Saturn game. It looks like the development was really far along and that the game would include both 1 and 2 since there were scenes ranging from the start of the first game to Ryo and the girl in the forest at the end of 2.

Tomorrow it's on to Marvel Ultimate Alliance, I've started it previously but only got the first couple acts done and the game is really long. I hope I can finish it by the 10th...

Wow, story progression!

So, after many, many, fights and QTEs Ryo and Ren make it all the way to the top of the bad guy's building. They get there just in time to see Lan Di (they guy who killed Ryo's father) escape in a helicopter, but manage to rescue the guy Ryo was trying to find after a big boss battle.

With the guy finally saved there is at last some exposition as to why everything has been happening for the past 2 games (it's about time!). It turns out that Lan Di's father was the teacher of Ryo's father and also the former owner of the mirrors. Lan Di thinks that Ryo's father filled his father and took the mirrors, that's why he killed Ryo's father and is after the other mirror. The mirrors are actually a weird map/key to the location of the treasure of an old Chinese dynasty (the other reason Lan Di is after it).

So now Ryo leaves Hong Kong to got to a remote village that the mirrors came from, in order to get some answers about them and where Lan Di is heading next.

The walk-through mentioned that the next part is only about an hour or so long so I should be done by tomorrow!