I am close to the end of the game. Close enough to give my final impressions (with all achievements).
Now, I haven't gotten to the final boss yet, but the last 2 bosses have leaned heavily on random cheapness, so that is what I am expecting for the finale, just moreso. My final impressions take into account that the last boss will probably make me cat rapingly frustrated.
It has taken about 30 hours to get where I am, and it was only yesterday, post-23 hour spree, that the game started to get long in the tooth. Now, this wasn't because I was getting tired of the game, but because the time I started yesterday was when the game started pulling out cheap tricks.
The fair stuff: Difficulty was increased by giving enemies better skills. They heal now, do more damage, and don't seem to mind spamming direct damage skills over and over, whereas previously the AI seemed to have a general policy of only ever using a skill once in a row, regardless of mana.
The maybe fair stuff: I must have hit a milestone mark that notched the AI up. It now appears to be the same AI as the PSP version, aka brutal. Never misses a skull match, never misses 4 in a row. I mean, that's fair, right? I am at the end of the game. The unfair part is that in addition to the AI bump, much like the PSP game, gem drops now seem to weigh heavily in the PCs favor. Sometimes it seemed like that before, but now it's like. . .it's confirmed. Even chump random encounters exhibit this behaviour, which is what gives things away. The PC will get chains of 5 (or more) in a row every fight, and when the PC makes a move, the board has the tendency to drop 3 or 4 skulls, doing instant damage without effort.
Ok, annoying, cheesy, but hey, it's the endgame and the game is kind of easy. You can still win via randomness, too. This is livable.
The bad stuff: The game put on a convincing show of being based on fair probability before. Now, late in the game, well, as indicated above, this has changed in some not terrible ways. It has, however, also changed terribly in other regards. Take what was mentioned in my last big paragraph and crank it to 11. Random encounters and, especially, bosses now exhibit some extremely annoying, extremely unfair behavior.
Let's go over bosses, first. The last boss I fight had the ability to randomly (as in she didn't have to do anything specific) spawn skulls via turning a random gem anywhere on the board into the skull. Naturally, since the game is leaning towards unfair, these skulls would appear in extremely favorable positions for her. Namely, during her turn, if there were two adjacent skulls anywhere on the board, a third skull would appear randomly next to them, doing instant damage to me. Sometimes it would be a +5 skull. The skulls would never appear in a position that would allow me to rape with skulls.
The boss before her also had a similar insanely bowerful skill. He could turn all red gems on the board into skulls, and then take another turn. Anyone familiar with the game could tell you that this meant frequent 1 turn kills. The enemy got to strike first, and twice, twice in a row, he 1 turn killed me before I even got a move. The AI never missing 4 in a rows was in full effect, too. My ass got RAPED.
But those were bosses. I could live with the cheese there, especially since the game is totally 100% fair with losing battles. The REAL annoying stuff has to do with the endgame random encounters. Many of these encounters are with LICHES and ARCHLICHES. These also have the Randomly Spawn Skulls thing going on, making a one time annoying encounter a permanent fixture in the late game. I encounter what was potentially the most annoying ability in the game every five minutes now.
What's worse about the random encounters is the clock padding via their frequency. Most missions at this stage involve you walking all the way across the map, which means you might encounter upwards of 10 random encounters in a single back-and-forth quest. This isn't Eternal Sonata or Blue Dragon: random encounters take a chunk of time to do. You can safely say that each one takes, oh, let's say 5 minutes. More if you come across an enemy that heals or has lich-like annoying abilities. Every RPG is probably like, at least 2/3rds random encounters, but I bet that this game would be like 5 hours long if it didn't have them. I will never, evre bitch about random encounters again.
Overall, though, can I really complain? These are the last 5 hours or so at the tail end of what has been a 30-35 hour game. Most people don't beat games at all, so they will never really know how iffy the last few hours are. Coupled with a cheap price, you'd be a fool not to get this game. You can play it while fucking around on the computer, you can play it drunk, you can put some decent strategies together, you can die as many times as you'd like with no real negative effect, it's far improved over the PSP version, it's got easy achievements, it's a 2d game that is actually in HD (and looks pretty good with some occasional good art, even if it veers towards the generic), lots of skills, pretty fun multiplayer (I raped demi) although I probably won't play it again. The goods far outweigh the bads here. My last real complaint is one mentioned by Patel last night: the game is kinda too long. The thing is that you don't really play this for the story, so that's really not that much of a negative.
GET THIS GAME, though I think I don't need to say that here.
