well i'm back,sooooo where do i start,let's start a bit with the plot basicaly two giant mecha who totaly looks like reshiram and zekrom duke it out in some time space infinity and end up both dead which generates the modern world,one giant robot end up spawning humanity and the other a bunch of robots,so of course this generates the usual "WAR AGAINST THE MACHINES!" and one guy ends up with some magical anti-robo blade called the monado which turns the tide of the war,alas you play a much less cooler guy who instead want to discover the secret powers of the blade since "YOU MIGHT NEVER KNOW WHEN THOSE ROBOT WILL BE BACK!!1!" well so far it just kinda sounds non-sensicaly but i barely scratched the first hour i guess so there is a lot of time for it to get better,so let's go to the actual game....
the battle system is in real time,you control 1 party members while the other 2 are cpu controlled,as far as i know there is no way at all to give orders to your other party members,and dayum! i really hope i am wrong and that i missed the option because i might explode out of sheer irony after all the comments i have read about youknowwhatgameimtalkingabout... no gambit to set here at all for all you borys and himuro's,the character all auto-attack when they are close to the target every 3-4 seconds,there are no MP,instead below you have a list of skills which you can use,each skill comes with a cool-down time but other than that you can spam them all you want
there is a tanking system where enemies will attack the one that deal the most damage,some skills deal more damage or have extra effects when attacking the enemy from behind or the sides so usualy one character draws attention by punching the monster while the other sneaks behind the monster behind and backstab the shit out of him,there seems also that there are no consumable to use at all so your only option to heal is shulk (SMASH) heal skill which heals very crappy amount of damage,your character also heal to full health at the end of each encounter (must not mention people bitching about this in FF13,must not mention people bitching about this in FF13)
character seems all to fit a certain strategy... shulk is the all-rounder and healer,his friend is the dumbass tank (a lot of his skills just draws the enemy attention) and the annoying chick who follows them around is the damage dealer (though this is offsected by the fact that she has really crappy defense so if she draws attention by dealing too much damage she risk ending up dead)
the game seems to reward you for a lot of stuff,more often than not you find random items on the ground like insects and flowers and you can put these in a collectbook and clearing collections give you loot,each time you find a new location the game declares "YOU FOUND A NEW LANDMARK!" and then proceeds to give you XP and skill points for it,i actualy ended up leveling up once for simply going to the plaza part of the town! game has achievement too which too nets you extra XP and skill points and good lord there is an achievement for everything,i got an achievement for opening my first chest with rare loot,one for killing too many bugs enemies,one for talking to my first npc,i even got an achievement when i ended up dead once!
towns have a lot of sidequests,like the character never,ever stop giving you sidequests,i got 15 like all at once but these are all the WoW variety of "KILL 3 WOOD RABBITS!" "KILL 2 SHELL CRABS!" "I WANT 3 BAT WINGS!" it's like everybody holds a grudge against small animals,most of these quest just reward you only money and XP and will solve automaticaly once you end up murdering whatever you need or gather enough loot which will probably happen naturaly by just murdering everything you find on the road but some are given you to named NPC and as such you need to go back to the original quest giver which is really stupid! i forgot where one named NPC was and i ended up going around the town like a moron for quite a while
while speaking about town,they are pretty big but also empty and boring to explore,i think the developer realized this too because you can actualy instantly warp to any landmark you have found by opening the map
named NPC are specials,first they follow a schedule so you can only find them during certain hours of the day (the game has a day and night system though there is an option to skip to any time you want whenever you want therefore eliminating the need of standing around like a dumbass waiting for the clock to move his ass like it usualy happens with system like that) and second you can trade the aforementioned insect and flowers to them for actual items,most of them holds junk but some holds rare item or piece of loot that someone might want for a quest therefore saving you some murdering time,apparently solving their quest opens up more item for trade but i haven't noticed it so far
some point of the town have HEART-TO-HEART points which basicaly are star ocean private event with a fancy name,the only difference is that some of them won't trigger unless the character aren't buddy buddy enough with each other
character customization? each character get 2 kind of points arts point and skill points,arts point can be consumed to improve battle skills so that you get stuff like more damage and smaller cool-down times,skill points are spent on a tree which only has 3 ramification which gives bonus to the character,each tree is different for each character so for example shulk gets a tree that can improve his healing while his tanking friend get a tree that improves his tanking abilities
each character gets to equip a weapon,and 4 piece of armor,some weapons and armor comes with gem slot which let you equip gem in them,these gem in turn gives the character stuff like more strenght,poison resistance and the like,it's kinda reminiscing of diablo though unlike diablo you can remove the gem from the weapon anytime you want without any problem,it's a nice addition but so far they don't have such big effect that i can see them making a difference,changing equipment also change your character appearance which is cool but some piece of equipment looks the same only with different color... that's really stupid,and there a lot of pieces that you just barely notice,it just doesn't have the same graphic impact of equipping a dragon quest 9 character with all his job related equipment
mmm... what else,game is very loot happy,in the first 5 minute i killed a rabbit and he ended up dropping an awesome cannon for shulk tanking friend
the music is made by mitsuda and shimomura a fact which should be way more important than "it has sidequests" but i guess i'm the only one who understands something like this :'(
also i can't help but think that some of the character just looks wierd,their eyes and nose just looks huge especialy the girl,though i don't know maybe here i'm just nitpicking
oh there are big unique named monster which drops special loot upon defeat so i guess this will at least make happy the borys and the himuro's and sure you can wander and wonder like a hobo if you want but there is not a lot of reason to do so unless you really want to murder more kinds of rabbit and insects
you can also save anywhere on the map which i guess it's a pretty handy feature as long as you don't forget to save because you never see any save point like i tend to do
the menu are also a total pain to traverse as it keeps loading and loading each time you open one... maybe it runs better when it's on an hard disk?
tl;dr version,game is not bad but i thought between the slow start of the plot and the fact that i spent 30 minutes taking random murder requests from shoddy npc the first few hours were kinda boring
also goddamn i was totaly right on the money when i said that the review are slobbering all over it only because it plays like one of those lame korean MMORPG
too late, i already said it's good and made my boypussy leak. you lose
too late the rant is already done
