I am on vacation for the next two days. Hurray.
In honor of this marginally auspicious occasion, I picked up two new RPGs:
Tales of the Abyss and
Devil Summoner: Kazunoha Raidou versus The Soulless Army.
Tales of the Abyss ain't bad. I was REALLY skeptical about it and almost didn't get it, but the recommendation of an animu freak friend of mine pushed me over the edge. He insisted that it wasn't as terrible as Legendia or Symphonia, which were unplayably tedious and cliched. Okay, Symphonia was just boring and mediocre, but Legendia was legitimately awful.
Anyway, the prologue is brief, and I quickly skip the stupid animu cutscene. The main hero is a spoiled jagoff; I can dig that. He hates yokels, shoplifts, and wants to kill the mandatory cute critter sidekick -- this is a bit of an improvement, yes. Battles play out like Symphonia, which is a plus, and the visuals are a bit more detailed albeit more jaggy. No random encounters! The growth system for characters looks like a good time-waster, and the music is solid. Load times are blessedly brief. Combat took a couple hours to get beyond button-mashing, but now that I can have the chick create the elemental circles needed for stronger skills and have learned to chain shit, I look forward to fighting. Oh wait, there's a FUCKING LOLI...thanks, Namco, you undersexed shitheel smalldicked pedophiles. Ah well. The game is good enough to endure that particular indignity.
Y'know what I liked about 16-bit gaming? RPG artists couldn't render their creepy loli/maid fetish shit in any detail, so I could pretend I wasn't somehow tacitly supporting the tastes of cretins. *sigh*
Initial assessment? The first decent Tales game since Eternia.
Devil Summoner seems really fuckin' cool -- the battles play out more fluidly than TotA, and the art direction is mercifully free of lolis. On the other hand -- and I'm ashamed to say this, because the thought of a Chandler-meets-Lovecraft tale set in Restoration-era Japan seems FUCK AWESOME -- the story is actually kinda SNOOZE, and I prefer Abyss' vastly more cliched plot just 'cuz the main character is such a refreshing change of snotty asshole. If I'm gonna madly mash the X button through dialogue, please make it be atypical.
On the other hand, Devil Summoner's battle system is in fact FUCK AWESOME. It's a little mash happy early on, just like TotA, but the action-based combat is so smooth and so fast and so slick I can see myself grinding it for hours. Demon AI is solid, and picking the right demon for the right occasion can be tricky. The recent Megaten aesthetic is honestly the best in RPGs, and I dig the setting, even if the first couple hours didn't give me a whole lot of decent plot provocation. Capturing demons for summoning and upgrading them is the sort of inexorable hook I can't escape.
Initial assessment? Megaten rules, even when more action-oriented.
I need to find a new copy of Nocturne, by the way. If any of you fucks wanna sell me or trade me your copy, I'm game.
