I just got through a couple games, and I thought I would post my thoughts and reactions to them.

Rule of Rose

I got this game through Gamefly, and I should have returned this earlier. I didn’t even finish the game partially because I was annoyed with it, but that was only a result of the poor execution of this game.

First, I’ll describe some of the aspects which led to the poor execution. First, the game tried to play off the good aspects of current horror games, like Silent Hill. It tried to create a mise en scene of spookiness and horror, but it led me to not be able to play the game at all. The darkness was so much that I could barely see what was going on, even with the game’s contrast set to maximum. In addition, the only other color that was used was a dull brown, but mad everything look gross.

In addition, there was a minimal soundtrack. There was very little use of voice actors, which is something that should be standard for today’s industry. Also, the only music was the sound of a screeching violin (only one of them), which segued to different tracks when enemies were around or when the player went to a different location.

Also, the control scheme inherited some of the same buttons as Silent Hill, but I still found myself yelling at the game because the buttons I expected to work did not work. In addition, the avatar moved slower than a tank, which led me to yell at the game. Also, one of the major features of the game was the use of the avatar’s dog, which would find stuff for you. Unfortunately, with the game’s clue system and level design, this more turned into having the dog be a walkthrough for the player, which I didn’t find fun at all, either. Also, the picture here shows a failure that shouldn’t be present in anything professional – unreadable text, especially text which describes how to use the map!

I sent this game back to Gamefly after playing it for only 2 hours.

FF12

I love playing the Final Fantasy series, and I picked up FF12 again after starting it last year. If you do the math, it took a long time. And believe me, it indeed took forever. Over 120 hours to get to what I consider to be done. The overall story was very linear and was centered around fighting against this evil tyrant who wanted to take over the world. I was technically done with the story around 50 hours, but the rest of the time was spent level grinding to try to see the rest of the content that was put into the game. Most of that 70 hours was fun, until I got to what made me frustrated enough to stop having fun.

The game’s battle system utilizes the ATB (active time battle) system, which makes the game have very fast combat. But the game helps one out by using the Gambit system, which makes the player’s characters act when certain conditions are present. The parts I was fighting at was essentially a fight against dice, as the boss’s attacks always had a chance of killing every player. And with my luck, it happened all the time. And the times which I got the boss down to low health, the game was nice enough to make the boss invulnerable to attacks. When I would try to use magic, the game started to run slow enough that I couldn’t heal nor attack in a fast enough manner to win, so I resolvedto stop the stupidity and finish the game.

And I didn’t even attempt the boss that has > 50 million hit points. It takes a minimum of 2 hours to kill, and I didn’t want to invest that much time into a battle that I would have to invest another 30-40 hours to even attempt. But at least the final fight of the story was easy. I am still left quite angry at this game. Maybe when you played it, you did better, but I put the final screen of the story here to celebrate the fact I am done with it.

And the fact that I didn’t describe the story in full detail shows how good the stories were. And I like to play for the stories.

I am now playing Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, which is so far pretty fun.