Category: Game Reviews

I truly do long for the glory of old Square enix to return once again but that day looks to be coming no time soon. So till then I guess I should make do with the closest thing I can get. That being Bravely Default. Though published by Square Enix, Bravely Default is made by Silicon Studio and truly they are the closest to capturing the spirit of Squares once great rule over the RPG. Though they just seem to be falling short of catching it. The first game of the series held a lot of potential. The battle mechanics where spot on perfect and the system took the best of the JRPG and removed much to the negatives to it. For example, you can alter the encounter rate at any point in the game. Random encounters were once the necessary evil of the genre in that they made traveling anyway a pain when you just seeked to reach the end of a level. In this game you could turn up or off the encounters whenever you wished so you can only face them when you need to. There are also things such as having a speed up button for combat and the game’s most defining feature. The ability to take multiple actions in exchange for skipping future turns. Two of these are small changes that remove a lot of the tedium of RPGs; so much so I wonder why it took this long for someone to implement them. The third gives a whole new depth to the turn based battle system. However while I can lavish praise on the game’s mechanics, the same cannot be said for it’s story. The story of bravely default is passable and has some neat aspects but the game truly suffers from it’s last arc. For you see before facing the last area you are forced to fight the same four bosses, not just once, or twice, or three times, or even four. Five times people, you are forced to fight the same four bosses five times over. When I played this it felt like a joke. I just couldn’t believe someone thought this was a good game design decision. Part of this could be blamed on how this boss rush seemed to be a part of a sort of updated version of the game but it still a terrible idea. The bosses don’t even change, they just level up which forces you to grind. Story Wise I can sort of understand the intent but it’s never a good idea to make your game intentionally tedious. Sorry I ranted quite a bit but despite the flaws in story and that last boss rush, I felt that this game could have a great sequel. Which brings me to Bravely Second. As to how I have it despite it not being released in america, us europeans got it before you Americains. So consider this a head up on what to expect and trust me when I say I won’t spoil.

After the events of the previous game has saved the world, we now have a new crysis. On the day the Church and the army decide to work hand in hand for the future, a mysterious man called the Black Kaiser crashes the ceremony and kidnaps the pope who is Agnes from the previous game. Having been completely defeated a young boy from a noble household and two friends of a royal army known as the crystalguard set off to assault the Kaisers floating Fortress and free the pope. The story of this game is better…I guess? The Kaiser is a villain that had a lot more layers to him than the villain of the last game and at least it puts aside the old plot of awaking crystals. However it does share a number of weaknesses with it’s predecessor. For one I think this series has now a tradition of having a main party with two fun characters and two dull characters. Two characters make a return from the first game, those being Tiz and Edea. Edea’s still fun but despite the fact that Agnes isn’t around for Tiz to constantly fuss over, he’s still a rather boring character. Our two new characters are Yew and Magnolia. Magnolia is an strange addiction whose background honestly sounds utterly ridiculous. She’s a bold sassy girl from the moon whose occupation is being a Ba’al Buster(Take note, that is pronounced “Ball Buster”. Clearly intentional and makes me smile every time.) and happens to sometimes speak in French because…people from the moon are French.(I know. I think it’s weird too but just roll with it) Yew on the other hand is not really that notable. He’s a bookworm, is oddly optimistic despite being meek and has a very strange saying of “For the gravy!” or “Coup de Gravy!” Other than that, despite being a step up from Tiz he’s still not all that interesting. The enemies you face fare a lot better as they all have their own reasons and distinct personalities. I also like the level of playfulness with the narrative. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and does make fun of itself at times. The main narrative does have a lackluster hook though as it mainly involves you chasing the Kaiser’s floating fortress all over the continents as he sends his elite members down one by one to fight you. There are also these creatures known as Ba’als that pop up now and again but really serve little narrative purpose besides being bosses at the end of some areas or things you can fight in the rebuilding mechanic of the game. The character interactions do work well to fill the less exciting parts of the story.

Taking over from Revo from the first game we have a new composer for the music called Ryo and I certainly pity the man. Revo’s Bravely Default soundtrack is excellent in its mismash of folk instruments and rock. It’s a soundtrack that gave expectation for the sequel to live up to and Ryo simply cannot meet those expectations. He is far from a bad composer as his boss themes do hold some promise as to how he can grow but he has far too heavy a reliance on electric guitar which makes his ost sound too derivative. The gap in quality is further emphasised when tunes are reused from Revos soundtrack which truly makes Ryo’s music feel inferior by comparison. In one battle there was points were the music switched between Ryo and Revos music that showed the wider range of instruments used by Revo and the impact. There are a few standouts in Ryo’s soundtrack, as I said I do like the boss themes, but it is an undeniable step down. As for the mechanics they remain the same as the previous game which is good as they were perfect. The only change in that area is the new jobs which you can obtain. There are some stranger jobs now like Catmancer and pastry chef but they do open up new tactics to play. Leveling up a job class remains a gratifying experience and the level of customization you can have for your own team is staggering. There’s also a gamble feature where if you defeat all enemies within the first turn then you are given the option to fight another battle with exp gain and Jp gain increased. If you manage to do the same in the next battle then the multiplier goes higher. However you do not reclaim health or character turns when you do so. So it’s a matter of risk and reward. As far as the general gameplay goes, it’s all good. Returning features include the Bravely second ability(Which I for the most part completely ignored) and a feature to rebuild a town in exchange for new abilities and items. However you can no longer buy from shops built in this town and I found it’s a lot harder to become overpowered in this game than it was in the previous game. Though pro tip, you can level up quite fast by going to Gaap Keep and making use of a lot of phoenix downs.

Here comes my biggest problem with this game and I must say that in all the reviews I have read there doesn’t seem to be hide or hair of this massive glaring issue. Perhaps it’s not quite as noticeable as I make it out to be but I must warn you if you are a fan of the previous title. For you see, Bravely Second recycles a heavy amount of content from the last game. You may think that’s not so bad but listen to me on this. It recycles a massive amount of things, so much so that I was getting a lot of deja vu while playing it. The world map is reused, the dungeons are reused, music is reused, enemy models are reused, and towns are line for line reused. It is to such an unbelievable degree that I truly question just how much of this game is truly new content. It feels very much like a glorified DLC expansion quest than a genuine new title. I so tried to ignore it and think to myself “But hey it’s not that bad right. The story is different.” but it nagged and nagged at me the more I played. I mean if you must make use of an old area then wouldn’t it be only right to change the layout? I mean I am going through the exact same area, pressing the exact same switches and seeing the exact same paths I saw in the first title. This is beyond lazy. This game may have dodged the problem of having a series of boss rushes near the finish line but it has filtered that same level of repetition throughout this title. I wouldn’t blame you if you felt you were done a replay of Bravely Default while playing this game. For those jumping into the title from this entry it shouldn’t nearly be as much of an issue though.

Speaking off topic slightly there has been controversy regarding this games localization. The biggest issue is that a character who was previously based on a native american style was changed to not offend native Americans. What I find most amusing about this change is that in order to not offend native Americans they changed a native American character into a cowboy. Now I don’t know about you but to me that seems far more offensive than simply having an Native american character. As for the change itself it actually makes more sense as the character’s skillset is based around guns and sniping. Through the localisers missed a bit as her skillset is still referred to as “Shamanism” in the localized title. The other controversy involves the side quests of the game which take on an interesting approach. There are a number of side quests in the game which can gain you jobs which were featured in the previous game. However each side quest involves a dispute between two job holders over an issue. You must choose which persons side to take and in doing so you fight the opposing side and obtain their job. Here is the interesting part, the game points out that you will not be able to obtain the other job for the rest of the playthrough and the argument between the job holders is usually not a black and white issue. For example, do you allow a jewel that produces water to be used to quench the thirst of dying desert nomads or let the jewel be researched to create a potential new energy source which could let to untold good? Do you allow a unknown song from a famous composer to be remade by a diva for modern appeal or respect the composer’s wishes for it to remain as it is? Lots of moral dilemmas which have no real right answer but create a dissonance between your needs as a gamer and your own ideology. For example I was caught in a debate between making a school Coed or having separate schools for both genders in a country which was primarily governed and populated by women. I was on the side of making the school Coed as I heavily disagree with the opposing sides reasoning. However a job which I had been after from the very start, the monk job, also sided with that argument. In order to obtain the monk job I would need to side with someone whose argument I disliked massively. It was an fascinating experience. I sat lost in thought over just what was more important to me. Do I stick to what I believe is right or toss my beliefs aside to get what I need? I was truly impressed by this feature which makes it all the more disheartening at just how they ruin it. For you see, while trying to keep this as vague as possible, something happens which effectively negates these choices and allows you to go back and obtain the jobs you missed. My hard thought out choices just invalidated like that. So I then disregarded my ideology completely and just sought out the jobs for completionist sake. In doing so I found out that it really didn’t matter what I picked as regardless everything turns out fine in the end anyway. Part of the controversy was that the more dark consequences of these choices was changed in the localization version which I don’t like. However regarding what happens to your choices in the end it’s really doesn’t make the pointless nature of the choices any better.

Looking back on my playthrough of Bravely Second I can’t help but feel that this series has the ability to reach greater heights but once again it has missed this opportunity. The heavy amount of reused assets, the lackluster soundtrack and a still lacking story hold back a fantastic battle system and RPG mechanics. I did quite enjoy it but I admit I was getting quite sick of it as I neared the end of my playthrough. The ending salvaged a good amount of my feelings and I say this game is good but not great. But I still look forward to another Bravely title for they have all the ingredients for the perfect JRPG and all they need to do is get them all together. Better yet, why not make a full console title instead of another handheld. Truly all that is needed is a better writer and to have Revo to come back for the soundtrack. Give it a graphical update for good measure and cut it out with the lazy padding and recycling. With that what you would have would surely be an RPG to remember.

There was once a time when Square Enix was the king of RPG’s. You name a beloved classic RPG from the SNES era and chances are it’s a Square RPG. However in recent years the quality of their games has gone down immensely. One could blame the advent of voice acting which highlighted the clunkiness of their writing. Others could blame them placing too high a focus on storytelling as gameplay becomes more basic while cut scenes grow ever more flashy. I personally place blame on Square trying to move away from turn based systems and focus on an action RPG approach. But what is truly an amalgamation of everything that is wrong with current Square is right here, in this game. And boy is it bad. I knew walking into this game that I would not be experiencing a standard final fantasy title but even with that mindset I wasn’t truly prepared for what I got. At this point it’s safe to assume that I am a Final Fantasy fan. I have played FFs 1 to 13(omitting 11) and I always thirst for a new Square title. Though no matter how much I love the series, there is no possible way I can love what it’s become.

On to the story and boy, it sure is a story alright. So this is a world with four kingdoms based around the four gods from China. Dragon, Bird, Tiger Tortoise each with a crystal of water, earth, fire and air. No real reason to throw the four gods of China in there but well cool points I suppose. Long ago, the four nations lived together in Harmony. Then, everything changed when the fire nation attacked. Well actually it was the tiger nation but this is pretty much sums it up. The tiger nation of Milites just decides to start conquering other nations. When they attack the bird kingdom things look dire when they jam the crystal and cut off the nation from its powerful magic. But along comes class zero, a group of twelve people created as a secret weapon that can fight without crystal power. So the nation must depend on class zero to reclaim their land and defeat Milities. Now let me make one thing absolutely clear. The writing of this story is completely, utterly, without question, horrible. I thought Valkyria has bad writing but it truly doesn’t even compare to the level of terrible of this. This is some of the most hackneyed amateur storytelling I have ever seen. Why is that? Well for starters the plot holes are abundant. The most glaring example has to do with the nature that when people die in this world then all memory of that person is wiped from everyone’s memories. An interesting concept I admit but it just opens the way of an abundance of logical failings. For example a big part of one of the characters arcs is that in the beginning his brother died because he delivered a message to class zero in the middle of a battle. Why was this message so important? Why did class zero ask for this person specifically to deliver it? Nope not important, what is important is that right in the middle of enemy territory one of their commanders decides that now is the perfect time to call this kid called Machina out and specifically let him know that class zero got his brother killed. He even outright says it “You could say they are the ones who killed your brother” This guy isn’t working for the bad guys and looks to be doing it just to spite the doctor who created them. When class zero is your main line of defense against a total destruction of a nation one would think self preservation would win out over personal vendetta. He straight up says this to another leader and she just says she doesn’t care as long as he keeps her out of it. This causes Machina to hate class zero and act antagonistic towards them. This is all undermined by the fact that he shouldn’t even remember his brother at all so he’s getting all angsty over someone he doesn’t even remember. it seems the details on this memory erasing is vague as a queen of the dragon nation dies later on and yet people still remember their was a queen and someone even tries to get revenge for her. This whole memory thing just doesn’t make sense in general. Speaking of the queen, class zero are accused of killing her and laughably nobody, not even their own advisors, think they didn’t do it. Made all the more ridiculous when because of the queen’s death Milites forms a convenient treaty that means they have control over the dragon nation crystal and the dragon armies support to help take over the bird nation. I mean does no one leading bird country have a brain? Well there is the one person that created class that looks to know whats up but she seems satisfied to just sit back and do nothing. What follows is a big battle that has bird country somehow come out on top and win the war but straight out of nowhere demons appear and start ending the world. Everyone blames class zero for this because…um…because. Class zero decides to save the world and defeat the endboss to start so new world order or something. I had long lost interest at this point.

I am cutting down the story a bit but that’s what it boils down to and I feel like I just witnessed a teenagers first attempt at writing a story. It’s hard to truly pinpoint every example but the dialogue in this game never sounds natural and certainly is made all the more unnatural when read out by voice actors. No disrespect to them, they did all they could with this script. It keeps throwing out terminology without putting meaning to it. Expecting you to be interested enough to study up on lore just to explain why a Queen from another country can up and decide to call an end to a war between two other nations without question. l’Cies also make a return from FF13 and the game expects you to have played that to understand what they are all about. The game’s cinematic are littered with utterly useless voice over with black screens of text telling you exactly what you just saw. You see Bahamut unleash an attack on the enemy army, suddenly the screen goes black showing text which is read out by voiceover. “Bahamut attacked the enemy army” Yes, I know. I saw it and there is no reason to spell it out. I have heard if “Show, don’t tell” but this may be a case of Show and tell. Worst of all is the characterization. One or two characters get what could be considered an arc but in a cast of 14 playable characters they are all one dimensional caricatures. They are named after playing cards (except Rem and Machina because they ran out of cards) and there personalities are all defined by one single trait. With the leader being the blandest and most forgettable of all. The characterization of the villains is just as bad. You learn nothing about the main villain, just that he loves to talk in that old mastermind talk which assumes everything is going to plan. The other villain to get any screentime is a guy with an eye patch who you fight twice in the whole game. Theirs this cringe worthy moment of him talking to a subordinate whose gimmick is saying the word “fricking” a lot and it’s clear she’s meant to be saying the other F word. This character is introduced in this one scene and this one scene is her only real appearence. Her sole role is to humanize the captain before he has a heroic death scene but it’s just so forced. The death scene itself is equally stupid as it all happens because some random crazy soldier(He’s not even a mechanic) installed the base equivalent if a nuke to the captain’s mech on his own and…no one noticed. Isn’t there like whole teams of people checking this thing? I mean this bomb wasn’t some small device, it was like this big metal ball the size of a car door. And not one person noticed it being installed on the mech? Just ridiculous.

So the stories a bust but what about the gameplay? Well as stated before this does not play like a typical final fantasy game. There are no turn based battles while random encounters are still here on the world map. Instead what we have is a kind of inferior kingdom hearts system. Battles are fought in real time with four buttons assigned to certain actions. You have a standard attack, one for a special attack, one for offensive magic and one for recovery/buff magic. It’s interesting that they gave each character a different moveset and you are encouraged to use them all as in this game you have no way of reviving characters if they fall in battle. You only get characters back if you finish the mission or go to a town. But here’s my problem with it. There are nine melee focused characters and five projectile focused characters. Against flying enemies a melee focused character is useless as they fly out of your attack range. Now guess how many of the bosses are flying types? Here’s the answer, all of them. More or less all the bosses stay out of a melee attack range so if you lose all your characters who can attack from a distance then you might as well start the mission over. Any boss that isn’t a flying type is an unwinnable battle and there are a lot of those. A number of chapters end with you facing an impossible to defeat enemy where your only option is to lay down and die. It may be possible to defeat them in a second playthrough, provided you even wish to do a second playthrough. Though on a first playthrough when after getting beaten up by a gauntlet of enemies you are then greeted with a boss battle you cannot possibly win it’s a bit of a spit in the face for the player. What’s really a spit in the face of the player is the final boss battle which goes the opposite route and is impossible to lose. The entire last dungeon is ridiculously easy now that I think about it. The game has giant difficulty spikes in the missions beforehand but the finale has you fighting slow moving giants that are at half your level. Though on that matter I was relieved as I was long tired of the games cheap difficulty in previous missions.

There are three points of gameplay. The first is breaks which are periods where you can run around a academy and talk to people or go outside to grind levels. These parts are wasted as you can’t actually interact with class zero but instead with side characters that mean little to the plot. Grinding is terrible in that it is necessary and a slow arduous process. You can only level 3 characters at a time and you have 14 to keep even. And they will need to be as if you lose your mains in a mission they are the ones who will have to finish it. Even when given a Growth egg which doubled exp this process was just as slow. The break segments between missions mainly serve as filler and I mostly found myself fast forwarding to the missions. Then there are the Real time Strategy missions which is not really an accurate term for them. There’s no strategy, you are told what to do and what you do is exactly the same every time. You kill enemies coming from a base so the soldiers from your base can take over the enemies base. The order you take over the bases is determined and there’s no skill in it. This aspect is woefully lacking and there are a grand total of three of them in the entire 20 hour game. It’s just a waste of time. The last point is the bulk of the gameplay which is you going through a series of rooms and killing enemies. This is the pattern. Enter a room, kill all enemies, enter the next room, kill me all enemies, rinse repeat till boss. The environments may change and the enemies may change but the experience remains a linear series of rooms filled with enemies with little change besides occasionally being asked to press A somewhere in the map and kill all enemies.

I am aware this is a HD release of a PSP game but visuals are very telling of that fact. I pity those who spent for the same price as a main PS3 title. I at least can say I got it off steam with a heavy discount. The CGI cutscenes may look very pretty but the gameplay visuals are bare bones. Almost PS2 level. Music is fairly unremarkable which is a deep disappointment for a FF title. So after all the negativity is there anything good I can say about it? Well the final level did have interesting challenges and small moments of great visuals. The ending I quite liked as it showed that maybe underneath all this was a genuine effort to make something great. And truthfully I like that they had the guts to take that route. Though despite efforts to make this a darker story I found its darkness more juvenile than mature. Dark storytelling takes a great writer, one who can weave tragedy and handle subtlety. This writer wasn’t even close to that. After all, you can’t attempt to write a story you want readers to take seriously when you have a bloody Moogle giving out objectives with a “Kupo!” In fact that does highlight an impression I get of Square Enix. Back in the NES era of gaming a little company was going out of business and they decided to make one last game before they were snuffed out. In order of it being their final project, they named the game “Final Fantasy” and that title sold so well that it saved them. Square is in trouble once again and they are expecting the title to save them once again. But they now seem to hold contempt for the classics they made but in a odd situation depend on their nostalgia. They once claimed they will never remake FF7 till they make a game that surpasses it and we’ll they couldn’t. Now they are remaking FF7 but the product bares little resemblance to its classic counterpart. They seem determined, nay obsessed to prove that new Square is better than old Square and in doing so have disregarded just what made them great in the first place. So many fantastic IPs like Chrono trigger, the world ends with you and Secret of mana(I highly doubt adventures of mana would have got an IOS remake if it wasn’t called Final Fantasy Adventure) are left aside while Square keeps trying to shove flashy graphics and barrels of lore down our throats. Square listen. Stop trying to be cool. You are not and it’s embarrassing. Stop trying to make movies. Make a game with a fun gameplay system and levels. Stop trying to make real time battle systems with only simplify down strategy to its bare necessities. Return back to a turn based system or go for the best of both worlds like Grandia 2 did. Want proof this is the right choice? Well look at Bravely default. In fact, give up on all future final fantasy titles, take Bravely default’s gameplay mechanics, pretty up the graphics to console level, get Nobuo Uematsu back or bring in Revo to do music and hire a damn good writer to write the story. There, a masterpiece.

This is a game that you truly don’t know what to think of until you play it. It’s a strange blend of third person shooting and real time strategy which is set in a World War 2 style world. It’s a very odd game but perhaps what’s stranger is just how much fun I had with it. For this review I was playing the Steam version of Valkyria Chronicles and it is a very impressive port indeed. Performance may vary but on my laptop it ran beautifully and best of all, I was never on a loading screen longer than a second. I feel if the loading times were longer it would worsen the whole experience as they do come up often but this game played lightning fast and for a JRPG that’s a massive plus.

The plot follows the exploits of Welkin Gunther who is thrown into the war once the empire attack his home town in order to take control of a precious resource mined by the countries called Ragnite. Together with his sister and a local bakery girl, they join the Military and work to drive out the Empire from the country of Gallia. The story of this game is actually really good. It manages to touch on racism and concentration camps without getting too dark. As well as the old horrors of war and political underhandedness. In looking are the story and the beats it hits I would say that Valkyia Chronicles would boast a very strong story. Well at least it would…if the writing was not god awful. I pity the English dub actors, they really tried and considering what they were given I think they did a great job but some of these lines just make me shake my head. The dialogue has a large amount of heavy handed preaching and utter cheese. In a way I would say this style of writing is a bit too “anime” What do I mean? Well it’s rife with anime clichés and mannerisms. The characters are not natural, they tend to have over exaggerated characterizations and quirks.

Now you get to enlist a number of people to your squad though they are mostly given one note personalities and are absent from the main storyline. Instead the story focuses on a small group within your squad. Welkin, Alicia, Isara, Rosie and Largo. Welkin is the leader and is a guy obsessed with nature, often talking about bugs and flora. You would be forgiven if you took one look at Alicia’s design and figured her to be a tsundere. She does have the trademark ponytails after all and at first she looks to fit right into the mold. However Alicia isn’t a tsundere, I was pretty surprised to see her handle her emotions well. She’s logical and well grounded though her primary role in the story is to be a love interest. There is a small subplot with her and a powerful weapon but its brushed off quick. Isara is the blandest of the group, she has very little to her. I was worried when the story made it a point to specifically address that she was none blood related to Welkin but luckily the two have no romantic events. You can assume the love each platonic and that’s just fine by me. Overall she acts as a representative of the oppressed race of people known as “Darcsen” and as the squads tank mechanic. Rosie is a singer and her character arc is simple. To learn to not be a racist bigot. Rosie hates Darcsens and is especially hostile to Isara. This is due to an event in her past that really doesn’t make much sense. As she goes through the story it’s mainly about her warming up to Isara and coming to terms that Darcsens are no different from anyone else. If she had better reasoning for her racism I would find her tale quite poignant but it can come across far too heavy handed at times. Finally Largo is the father figure of the team who has some strange fascination with vegetables. Not much to say about him besides his history with the commanding officer.

What makes the story much more of a drag is the games insistence to ask you if you want to watch each and every cut-scene. Every time you watch a cut-scene you are brought back into a book menu, where is need to select the next cut-scene and play it. You do this for every cut-scene in the game. It’s really odd as there are cut-scenes that continue without prompted but the majority require you to constantly agree to watch a cut-scene. The effort required for this is minimal and it doesn’t take long to load up the cut-scenes but it is a pacing breaker. In regards to user interface, its primary through menus. There is no hub world or over world and you essentially handle plot progression and equipment through menus. Leveling is not done through fighting in battle. Instead you earn experience after a mission and you can choose to spend it to unlock orders or level up a class. Individuals units do not level up, instead you level up a class and anyone in that class gets a stat boost. Weapons work in a similar fashion, you buy upgrades for a class weapon and everyone is equipped with it. The upgrades start very liner and later branch off slightly to allow you to focus on a certain aspect like firepower or accuracy. It’s not all that much but it gives a small bit of customization. You can also equip weapons manually to your units but you likely will never need to. Your units also have things called potential which grant they special bonuses in certain circumstances. They act as small character traits as well and can help endear you to characters. Such as Jane the shocktooper who gets a attack bonus sometimes because she’s a Sadist. The bonuses don’t make too much of a difference but its a nice quirk, even if it can prove to be detrimental at times. As units can have troublesome potentials, like the humanitarian girl who will sometimes refuse to shoot people even if you order her to.

This may sound negative so far but let me get to the meat of this game, the gameplay. Valkyria Chronicles has a phenomenal battle system called BLiTZ (short for Battle of Live Tactical Zones) that strangely reminds me of a old great game boy advance game called Advance Wars. You are given a top down perspective of the battlefield, seen enemies and your units. When you select a unit you are brought down to a third person perspective were you are given a meter to show how far you can move and a chance to shoot/heal. Despite how it looks, this isn’t a third person shooter. You may move and aim but whether your shots hit or not and how much damage they deal is dependent on stats you are given five classes. Scout, Shock troopers, snipers, lancers and engineers along with two tanks you get. Scouts can cover the most distance and are the most versatile units. But can be taken down quickly if faced with stronger units. Shocktoopers are the main assault force, lacking the movement of scouts but making up with firepower and defense. Snipers start off unreliable but with upgraded accuracy they can be one of the most useful units in the game. The have limited ammo but can kill anything besides tanks with a well placed headshot. Lancers are primarily anti-tank units, practically essential for a balanced team. The engineer is the weak link of the bunch but can be really useful for restocking both the sniper and lancers ammo and when paired up with a tank they can make it unstoppable. There isn’t a single useless class and the mechanics behind them make for some great strategic play. While moving on your turn, enemy units can shoot at you which can prove to be troublesome. However you can make use of this too and it prevents units like scouts from just walking headfirst up to people and shooting them in the face. I remember being surrounded by all sides with tanks and just saying “screw it” and rolling my tank straight into the enemy base and using volleys to blast every enemy solider out of it. And then sending in my scout to take out the last unit and capture the base, winning the mission. I remember moving my favorite sniper on to a hill, hiding in the grass and proceeding to pick off every solider in the field with a series of satisfying head shots as the computer proceeds completely unaware of my god of death on the hill. It’s moments like this that make Valkyria a fantastic game.

The graphics engine makes use of a style which gives the game a drawn look with the border of the screen being in sketch form and the center giving a watercolour aesthetic. It can be quite fantastic at times especially when you walk into smoke and everything suddenly looks like it was sketched on a page. Though the environments don’t quite show off what it can do as many of the environments are rather bland. It’s the cut-scenes that really benefit from this style. The graphics are not really impressive and the funny thing is that there is remastered version coming to ps4 that really doesn’t look too much different. Music is suitable though not too memorable. Valkyria Chronicles is a game I didn’t think I would enjoy as much as I did. It’s about 25 hours long and I was practically addicted to it. I had some truly great fun playing this game and I am most interested in the sequels. Sega, bring those games to steam so you can shut up and take my money.

 

When I first looked at Fairy Fencer F I knew exactly what to expect and it didn’t deviate from my expectations in the slightest. In that regard it was like junk food, inherently bad but a comforting satisfaction in it’s simplicity. The story is minimal for its run. It basically involves our main character having to collect a hundred magic swords so to revive a goddess. So the majority of the game is you going to different areas to collect swords, gathering companions and doing this till one of the characters remembers a magic macguffin which can revive the goddess without collecting the rest of the swords. Insert evil corporation that would prefer to revive the evil God instead, ultimately steals your hard work, succeeds, a final boss fight against said evil God and you got the plot. Pretty predictable from the get go. They really want to depend on the characters to sell this story and at least for the main character they succeed.

 

 

The main character Fang starts of as a snarky egotistical bum who pretty much acts like you would if placed in the same situation. His Dialogue is quite funny and he has a general policy of just making fun of the situation. Sadly the story demands that he become a more friendly person so as the story goes on he sadly becomes more boring. The rest of the cast suffers from being a lineup of anime clichés with only Galdo being an exception because they gave him a canadian accent in English. They have some funny lines but really it’s when they play off Fang that they work. Still despite the clichés I found the assassin who communicates primarily by saying “kill” and the slob female researcher quite likable. But one thing that I found rather disconcerting was to rapid change of character one of your party members when through once the second half of the game began. How this person started and how he was by game’s end were so completely different that they could have been separate characters altogether. But when it comes to reality it is easier to buy bulk ammo online for safety but it also comes with a lot of responsibilities.

 

 

Graphical, I was surprised to learn that this was a PS3 title as from the screenshots above it would be better suited to PS2. I played the Steam version of the game so this wasn’t a deal breaker because I bought it on sale. But those who bought it at full price would be quite underwhelmed. It’s a very cheap looking game. The 3D graphic models above are only used in the Area levels which are only one or two rooms long. About the size of a Kingdom hearts world with enemies roaming about instead of the band of many a JRPG, random encounters. For the majority of the game you will be working though menu’s and the story is told in Visual Novel format. There are some pros for the fairly good English voice acting and animation on the sprites but for an RPG it’s the lowest form of presentation. But it does come with a plus. This may be because of my high spec Laptop or the general low requirements for a game such as this but I never experienced a loading screen in this entire game. It was a rather refreshing experience to have a game that reacted instantly no matter what you did. Hit load and straight away you are right where you left off. Entering and exiting battles is fast making grinding less of a chore. Overall it’s nice that the game doesn’t hold you up as you run though it. Except when it comes to the tutorials which are intrusive to everything. They pop up frequently at the beginning to teach you the most obvious things imaginable. I was honestly shocked to enter the shop and get a tutorial on how to buy items. Game, this isn’t my first RPG and even if it was I am sure I could figure out the nature of capitalism. The combat system I found to be quite unique up until I noticed other JRPGs that use the exact same system so I don’t think I can give Fairy Fencer any points for something that was likely lifted from somewhere else. Still I rather liked the combat system for being quick and satisfying.

 

 

So Fairy Fencer F is a title that can be wholeheartedly enjoyed if you enter it knowing that you won’t be getting something original or outstanding. I believe it’s worth a recommendation to those who like the genre…or at least that’s what I thought before I reached the halfway point. For you see Fairy Fencer commits what I consider to be a cardinal sin of game design at that point. I find it odd that this point is rarely mentioned in its reviews on sites as it can change your outlook on the game completely. For you see once you reach the halfway point an event happens that transfers both the main characters to the past. Storywise it’s a mildly interesting development but take note. The characters have returned to the very first area of the game and that means that you must replay all the levels yet again to reach the ending. The areas where you need to go don’t change. Neither do the enemies or bosses.(Except for some extra enemies and one different boss.)This has to be the most insulting, lazy and blatant padding to grace an RPG since Bravely Defaults final section. You literally replay the game over again. As a person who has limited leisure time and someone who was genuinely enjoying the game up to this point, I find this to be an unforgivable betrayal. So much so that it spoiled my experience with the rest of the game.

 

 

With that the problems of the game really started showing, in particular the overabundance of mechanics. You have two kinds of expence, normal experience which levels you up and Wp which can be used to gain new abilities, spells or upgrade one of your stats. On top of this you have challenges which are like achievements that net you permanent stat boosts. Some of these can make sense like attacking a certain number of times will grant you a strength stat. But some are insipid and tedious such as jumping a thousand times in the over world to upgrade endurance. You can also equip fairies which gain experience with your character and level up, granting you more stat boosts and extra buffs. On top of that you can grant Fairies special buffs by using them to pull out a sword from one of the two gods of the world. There are numerous ways to power up your character but it’s clear the game was not built to work with these mechanics. So it is very easy to become an overpowered god long before game’s end. This makes the game very easy and what baffles me is that you can buy DLC which only serves to make the game even easier. If people need that then they might as well give up on playing the game and just watch a let’s play of it. This isn’t simply in the levelling system but combat and other areas. For example the shop has a synthesising system where you can take materials got from enemies and convert them into items and equipment. This system is completely worthless, items lose most of their value once you get a fairy with a SP regain ability and equipment makes very little difference. What’s more there is a side quest system meant to complement this, which rewards you with materials and money for going to areas and gathering a certain material or killing certain monsters. But you will never need this at all and the shop and pub become worthless by the halfway mark. Combat has a number of unnecessary systems too. Attacking has a combo system where you can attack a number of times based on how much WP you spent upgrading the combo tree. You can buy new combo moves with WP and these can change your weapon into various modes, like guns,axes, bows, knuckles, swords etc. Enemies are weak to certain weapon types but the extra damage done is barely noticeable and this weapon weakness systems serves only to activate something called avalanche mode which allows other characters to put in extra combo attacks without using up their turn. This Avalanche mode is useless. It’s activation is based on luck and rarely activates when you need it. Instead it often activates when an enemy is nearly dead and the extra attack amount to nothing but overkill.

 

 

There is also a world shaping mechanic which is where you can sort of equip a Fairy to a area and it will grant a special buff to that area. However while it will give you a benefit like enemies dropping extra gold, it will pair it up with a cost such as gaining less exp. However I found an exploit in this system when I happened upon a shaping ability. The ability granted that you would receive more WP but all damage was doubled. I believe the double damage was intended to be a danger but they didn’t think it through. You don’t just take double damage, you deal double damage too. Meaning, your attack power is doubled. End result was I often killed enemies on the first turn before they had a chance to attack. Only way they could get the upper hand would be if they ambushed me but that stopped once I gained an ability that makes it that I can never be ambushed. I actually had to stop myself from using it out of pity because the game was easy enough as it is. How much of Fairy Fencer F you enjoy really depends on if you can excuse a weak story, enjoy its battle mechanics and most importantly deal with a large amount of recycled content. The last part of that sentence was the deal breaker for me and makes this a game I wouldn’t recommend. If it’s one thing this game proves it’s that length for the sake of length only serves to test the patience of the player. If Fairy Fencer had simply opted to remove this time travel nonsense it would have been a shorter JRPG but ultimately a much better experience.

 

So at a time when when Konami is busy burning every famous gaming franchise it has to the ground and trying to mould the ashes into pachinko machines, I thought now would be a good time to take a look at a Konami title that’s been on my backlog for a while. Suikoden is a turn based RPG with parties of six with 108 recruitable characters. The story is somewhat based on a Chinese novel called “Shui Hu Zhuan” by Shi Naian.

 

The plot details the son of a General in a corrupt empire who is pushed into joining the Liberation rebel army after the court Magician targets his best friend. His friend turns out to be a be a person who has been living for 300 years guarding a powerful rune the Magician wants called the soul eater. Before he’s captured, he entrusts the Rune to you and thus the tale begins to build up the Liberation army, rescue your friend and overthrow the evil empire. The biggest problem with the story is with how weak the villain is. The Imperial army is just obnoxiously evil as many people in it don’t see anything wrong with their obviously wrong actions. Its more moronic than evil in that regard because at least a villain like the Joker from Batman doesn’t try to justify things with logic like “That orphanage attacked me first!”. There are other soldiers who are evil because of a magic black rune but that excuse is just as weak. Windy the Court Magician acts as the main antagonist but her motivations come down to wanting the Rune so she can destroy the world. Near the end of the game her backstory is revealed that people burned down her home and she just wants revenge but for a woman who’s been living hundreds of years that motive is just petty. She doesn’t end up being the last boss, the last boss actually being the king who seems a lot more complex but only gets two scenes in the entire game. A majority of the games story has you traveling to lands to gain new allies and a strange formula happens. Almost every single time you go to ask someone to join, they refuse you saying they don’t want to get involved. Almost immediately after the imperial army shows up and gives them a reason to join. Examples include, a teacher doesn’t want to become your military strategist but when the army show up and take his students hostage to force him to work for them. After rescuing the kids, he joins you. A doctor doesn’t want to become involved but then a General takes him prisoner, you need to rescue him and he joins you then. เดิมพันกับ ยูฟ่าเบท วันนี้ and start winning! Or you try to recruit a officer from their army, he says no and at that moment a higher ranking officer tries to rape his wife for his own amusement. Quite honestly its like these guys are trying to help you in their own way and your army builds up from the number of people they tick off. The elephant in the room is why is it that the imperial army never attacks your base because it’s clear that everyone knows about it seeing as every person you recruit goes to it without direction.

 

Suikoden’s game changer for the genre is the ridiculous amount of playable characters and to get a good ending you have to collect them all. It’s because of this I recommend a guide as its easy to just miss one of these guys. There are points where you can get one killed and doom yourself to a bad ending. The large amount of characters does lead to a problem of too much quantity as a majority of them whom you recruit, you will just toss them into the castle to never be used and use only a select few. The only time this changes is when the game forces you to use other characters which can be pace breaking as you are forced to return to the castle and put a character in your party just so you can advance through the story. Your castle headquarters is a great touch as its nice to see it grow as you collect more characters. The characters personalities are fairly one note and don’t really develop much beyond that. One of the most notable characters in the game, Mathiu, is more or less the high point of characterization and mainly because he’s a non playable character you deal with the most. One major problem with the game is one that you can see in the screenshots. Even by PSX standards this isn’t a pretty game, it’s at Super Nintendo standards at best and even that had more alive environments. The area’s are drab and basic, some bordering on ugly. Controlling your character through these places is stiff as you cannot move diagonally and feels restricting. Luckily areas are often very short and you can get through them very quickly.

 

The battle system is pretty standard. You have attack, items, defend and magic. There’s also a unite option that when certain party members are together you can do combination attack like in Chrono Trigger. Magic doesn’t have MP but instead you can only use certain spells a certain number of times. You spell uses come back once resting at an inn and as you level up you get new uses and new spells. Things which really help are the options to bribe enemies and set everyone to attack which makes random battles go by so much faster. It’s a simple but satisfying system. Levelling up in the game is rapid as there are a large cast of playable characters. This makes it easy to get low level characters up to a respectable level as having them in a party in a high level dungeon can have them around the same level as the other characters within a few battles. The mechanics of the game are fairly solid but there are a number of small counter intuitive things that prevent it from being great. For one at the beginning of the game you cannot run. You are forced to walk everywhere and you will only be able to run once one character of your party has a holy Rune equipped. That will allow you to run in towns and areas. However to run on the world map you need a true holy Rune. The Holy Rune can only be got a third into the game and True holy Rune is only on a Character called Stallion. You will pretty much need this Rune the entire game but it means that one member of your party must always have it equipped. There is only one Rune slot per character so that means that character will not be able to use magic or other beneficial runes. The Holy Rune only provides the benefit of dashing and nothing else. When that character is forcefully removed from your party, its back to walking everywhere again. On the matter of runes you can only equip runes at runemaster shops which are in some places and not in others. What this means is that you could have to travel to one town to smith your weapons and then walk all the way to another one to equip runes.

 

Another problem is equipment where each of your six characters can carry a number of items but in order to equip something it needs to be in that character’s inventory which leads to annoyance as you are forced to trade items between characters and make room so you can equip them with the right armour. Considering that you will be getting new characters a lot, you will be fumbling around these menus quite often. Many irritations are solved as you progress and collect characters such as unlocking a world map that lists towns and areas when you recruit a map maker or all the shops being in one area in your castle when you recruit blacksmiths and shopkeepers. But these conveniences only come in the later and till then you will have to deal with numerous annoyances and even when you do get everything some of the things don’t quite go away. For example you will go through this routine a number of times when you return to your castle, first you change characters and for that you need to go to the fourth floor of the castle, talk to someone and remove and add party members, then you go to the vault on the third floor to store items in your inventory to make room for new ones, then go to the second floor to the blacksmiths were you sharpen your weapons. Not enough money? Well then go to the gambler on the first floor and make easy cash. Then go to the first floor, buy equipment and items, move around and equip purchases, go to the runemaster and equip runes and the go to the inn, rest and save. Finally you go to the basement and teleport back into the field. You do most of this every single time you go back to your castle and there’s loading between each floor. This eats away a large amount of your time.

 

The game throws in small changes with army battles and one on one battles, both which boil down to rock,paper,scissors rules. They don’t add much other than dramatic flair but it’s still nice to have something to break up the RPG battles. Music is not really notable, one or two tunes might stick in your mind but nothing that would make you nostalgic in later years. There is a rather odd quirk with the sound however as I noticed that they somehow thought that using a elephant roar sound for a dragon’s roar would go unnoticed and believe me it does not go unnoticed. I had to do a double take when I heard that unsuitable roar the first time. It’s even stranger because the final endboss has a dragon roar that’s normal and why is it they couldn’t use that? The final verdict is a pretty good RPG held down by unintuitive mechanics, lacklustre graphics and a weak story.

I don’t plan on doing this often but I thought it might be good to talk about this game as I put about forty hours into it and found it to be a highly flawed yet fascinating experiment.  Now myself qualify as a big fan of the final fantasy series, having played and completed Final fantasy’s 1 through 10, 12 and now 13. Seven was my very first introduction to the very concept of an RPG and Eight was the first one I ever finished. I have a lot of love for this series so I guess that’s why I can label this with confidence as the worst main Final Fantasy title. Of course going into it I knew this wasn’t going to be a stand out title. I heard many of the complaints about it, all of which are sadly true.

 

This game is liner, and I mean that in every sense of the word. The majority, if not all, of the game has you running down a straight hallway with little deviations and while your surroundings may change that straight line doesn’t change. People say that 30 hours in the game opens up but what this really means is that at the 30 hour mark you reach a area called the Archylte Steppe and it gives you a taste of what this game could have been. But it’s only one wide open plane, before long you are forced into the corridors again. It is true that final fantasy games in general are linear as you need to follow a path to reach the boss but in those cases at least the path had branches that lead to items and at any point you could just exit the area, climb on an airship and go somewhere else. 30 hours into FF13 you are offered a teleport system but this pertains to a single part of the game and it just allows you to go to other parts of a pretty linear path. In this regard its as though the game is putting in gameplay as an obligation and gives you only the bare minimum to achieve it. Here’s a path, kill everything on it and get to the next part of the story. When taking this into account, the actual gameplay of Final Fantasy XIII feels like padding.

 

So what about that story then? Surely if the focus was on the story it’s bound to be something special right? Well that’s what I figured. FF13 story has ambition, and I can respect that but it has massive problems. First off, voice acting has not done the series any favors and during this game I had a number of moments where I felt I would think more highly of this story if the lines were not being spoken. Final Fantasy titles have their share of dialogue that sounds good when read but when a voice is put to it can cause it to sound quite stupid. The story itself is needlessly complicated and yet very simple when you get past all the terminology. Humans live in a world called Cocoon which is fueled by Summons/eldions/Fal cie which is under a dictatorship by a pope like figure who has been forcing people to relocate to a survival of the fittest hellish nearby world called Pulse. Our heroes are cursed and given an unspecified mission by a Pulse summon when attempting to fight back against a relocation. If they don’t finish the mission within a unspecified time they turn into monsters. If they do finish the mission then they turn into crystal where they remain till given a new mission. The rest of our story us our heroes wandering about aimlessly trying to guess what their mission is till the big bad shows up and tells them. Though in a game with 13 chapters the villain doesn’t show up until the tenth. So our heroes don’t agree with the big bad, wander about on Pulse and then end up doing exactly what he wants anyway. But everything turns out alright because two characters pull a deus ex machina out of nowhere and save the day. Ladies and Gents, with that paragraph I saved you forty hours of your life. As you can tell by that, a lot of the game is our heroes going about without any direction on what they are supposed to be doing. Most of the time the characters end up committing to some arbitrary goal only to do a heel turn and do something else. One particular moment is when the party goes to Pulse do to the big bad saying so and for no real reason all decide to make their way to Vanile and Fangs hometown in some vague notion that something might happen. What actually does happen is they encounter the big bad again and decide to go back to cocoon basically making the whole Pulse section one big pointless Journey when they are already short on time.

 

Characters can make up for a lacking story and due to the haphazard nature of the plot I think that’s what was intended. However while some characters have potential, it’s not quite realized. Lightning is an absolute mess of a character. From my understanding and what I believe was intended, she is supposed to be a female version of Cloud from Final Fantasy 7. However Cloud had an arc as well as a character whereas I spent forty hours with Lightning and still don’t get what she’s about. At most I gathered that she’s incompetent, dangerously impulsive and suffers from massive mood swings. In one fmv scene she went from happy to aggressive to encouraging to hopeful and then tears all in the span of about three minutes. She decides to go on a one man assault on the enemy headquarters, convinces a boy to join her and along the way after one single sentence on Summons she does a complete heel turn and begins to try and convince the boy she already convinced otherwise that the attack is foolhardy. She is just a barrel of Mary sue whose actions are purely determined on what the plot needs at that point. Sazh is the best character of the game, being quite likable with a interesting arc involving his son. Some of the best parts of the game involve him and while his son is a bland Gary sue it does give him the most engaging drive in the game. There’s not much to say about Fang. She’s decent strong character who I say some might grow fond off. Only real downside is when the plot forces her into annoying situations such as one where she needs so sort of demotion emotional breakdown in order to gain a summon which involves her saying they should destroy Cocoon instead of saving it. A hissy fit that comes out of nowhere and is immediately forgotten once the summon is beaten. I like Snow, or more I like the idea behind his character. Snow is essentially what happens when you take plot armour away from a stereotypical hero. Snow talks lofty and embraces the risky nature of heroic gambles. However most of the time things which would go perfectly for a action hero, turn out disastrously for Snow. In the beginning he inspires people to take up arms and fight the oppressive army. As a result he gets them all killed, including a party members mother. However not a lot is done with it and he basically remains the same by games end. His relationship with Lightning’s sister is also rather off putting as she looks 14 when he looks mid twenties. Hope is a character who starts of the worst but slowly becomes more tolerable over time. His character arc is given quite a lot of attention but has the problem of concluding too early. He had an interesting chemistry with Snow as Snow mistakenly thought Hope looked up to him when in reality Hope was more interested in killing him for causing his mother’s death. Ultimately he learns to let things go and for the rest of the game becomes a tag along who only says a uplifting speech around the end. Vanile is a very hated character which I can understand as to why. She starts off so alien that I was under the impression that she wasn’t even human and had difficulty with human concepts. Seeing as her dialogue generally made no sense. As the story goes on her weirdness is hugely toned down and any gripes that remain would be about her rather annoying voice. As for minor characters, they don’t make much of an impact. Most of them are there to provide the mains with some sort of revelation or understanding and there are not many appearances from them in the entire game. One particular moment that comes to mind is when a character called Raines showed up as a boss. When he appeared everyone acted familiar with him but I couldn’t recall just who this guy was. I later remembered that he was a man who appeared in one cut-scene for a few minutes about twenty hours ago.

 

Let me be frank, the Paradigm system may be good for managing fast paced combat but the depth of its mechanics is lower than that of the first Final Fantasy. Here’s the basic rundown, you can assign different roles to each character such as Medic, commando, ravager, etc. Each of these roles is setting the CPU to a certain manner. In this case, Healing, Attack and magic attack. You cannot control your other party members, only the leader.  You can switch between six different variations like Commando, Ravager, Ravager or Commando, Sentinel, Medic. You cannot switch the Paradigm of a single character and if your character is set to one role they cannot use abilities from another one. Meaning you cannot have a mage alternate between attack magic and healing without changing the roles of the entire party. Same for you, if you are a Commando then you are stuck using physical attacks. This cuts down the number of strategies immensely but what makes matters worse is that you will barely be strategizing at all. Here are the two things you will be doing for the entirety of FFXIII. Switching Paradigms and pressing auto battle. True you can pick your own commands but it’s often pointless as auto battle picks the best ones already out of your limited move set. And you might occasionally make use of items and summons. But this is pretty much how the majority of fights go in FFXIII, Switch Paradigm, auto battle. The system has been simplified down to the level that they might as well just make the main character a CPU too. Another part of the system to mention would be staggering, where once you dealt enough attacks to a enemy it stuns them and allows you to attack it for a time with your damage dealt being increased the more punishment you dish out while its staggered. This basically makes the battles a rush to stagger your enemies as it is the only time you put out real damage. Due to this in FFXIII, speed is everything.

 

The the equipment and leveling is equally abysmal. You get two pieces of equipment, a weapon and a accessory. That’s it. No Armour, no shield. Nothing. Later on you can level up to equip two more accessories but unless you are trying to stave off a status effect the difference is negligible. There are also no defense stats. You can level up your weapons and accessories by using materials gathered from enemies which makes getting new ones pointless as they will always be weaker than what you currently have. Leveling is a pain as instead of getting exp and leveling up random stats automatically, you are given something called CP which you use to level up your character up a chain of upgrades to health, attack, magic or gain new skills. The path is strictly liner though and adds only a layer of tedium as every time you gain enough CP you need to go into the menu, and manually level up each of the six characters one at a time. There is different paths for each Paradigm role but you only unlock all the roles near the end of the game and it takes twice as much CP to level up a character in a role that wasn’t set for them and even then they with never learn the same amount of skills as someone who is set in that role. So what your characters are going to be has already been determined by the time you get the option to level them up differently. But the biggest problem is that regardless of how much your character’s stats go up, it never feels as though you have gotten stronger. I could be adding over a hundred points to strength and yet barely be doing much more damage than before. The music is just decent which for a final fantasy game is fairly disappointing. The battle theme is good and the main theme is alright though heavily overplayed throughout the game. For the most part the soundtrack isn’t that noticeable and there is a song played in the Pulse area of the game which is a tune similar to a elevator wait music. The game is admittedly graphical beautiful which is pretty impressive for a game six years old. In reflection FFXIII is a hard game to recommend. It has numerous problems and while it is a fascinating experiment, it misses more than it hits. There were times I enjoyed FFXIII, but for any moment of fun there was three moments of tedium. It wasn’t an easy game to finish and at times I had to force myself to play it. Still while I am glad I played it, I don’t recommend it. I am just hoping FFXIII-2 fixes a number of problems that were in this title.

    After the dreadful Kantai Collection anime of the last season, I’ve been wanting to try out this free to play Japanese web browser game, because its gameplay is constantly being compared to the likes of Fire Emblem by fans. However, after 40+ hours of gameplay I can say that while it is nowhere NEAR good enough to be even compared to other free to play tactical rpgs, much less Fire Emblem, I want to praise the things it does well first, because it is definitely popular for a reason.

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    The game basically breaks down into a game of unit and resource management with your fleet, aka “ship girls” who have armaments identical to their real ww2 ship counterparts. As the game progresses you can choose to modernize them, and there is a somewhat extensive level of ship customization. This part I like, because it’s definitely a challenge determining which fleets you want to keep for later upgrades, while doing quests to unlock new ships and obtaining essential materials in order to do the various tasks. This forced me to think long term about my fleet because the enemies do get progressively more varied as you level up. Because of this, I found myself in situations where I wished I hadn’t scrapped an older ship because an upgrade would have been more efficient than building a newer ship.

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    The voice acting and art assets are amazing, beautiful at times, and I can tell that the art department really cared about these characters when designing them. All of the characters have top notch details (such as Yamato’s decorations that are all historically accurate). But if Kadokawa Games thinks that high art production and a lazy game mechanic (more on this later) is going to cut it, it’s not.

    First of all, I can’t stress how rage inducing it is to even try to start the game. Because the game’s servers at DMM Publishers are incapable of holding large numbers of people at once, they 1)don’t allow people outside of Japan to play the game and 2)In order for new players to join the game, they must take part in a lottery where the studio chooses a handful of people who can join their game. So in order for me to play, I need a VPN/ Proxy to connect to the game through a Japanese IP and enter the lottery. I was fortunate enough to register with DMM on my third lottery attempt, but I’ve heard of some fans who weren’t able to play until several draws, which is just ridiculous. This game has been out for years now and it is absolutely inexcusable that they don’t switch to a better server system. If it’s about money,  charge people for some expansions or hell, even make some ships only attainable by purchase–this game NEEDS dedicated servers and the studio/publishers are clearly not seeing the value in opening up this game.

    However, despite my initial excitement to finally get to play the game after that hassle, what I got was highly disappointing and I haven’t yet seen any review that was honest enough about the game’s flaws to speak about it. First of all, what immediately jumped out at me was the soundtrack–there is none. There’s a generic 10-15 second loop playing at the naval base that changes as the game progresses, but with a game that requires you to sit and grind for hours on end, I quickly played my own music over it, because holy crap it got annoying real fast. But on the other hand, it’s eerily silent at times much to my confusion. I know that it’s a free to play game so it wouldn’t have the budget of, say Civilization V or even another free to play game like League of Legends, but since its conception, this game has gotten tons of additional income sources besides the in-game purchases. Where the profits from the anime, manga spin offs, figures, and micro transactions are going, no one knows, but it’s certainly not here, in improving the core gameplay experience unfortunately.

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    Now let’s delve into the meat of the game, the unit management and combat system. Unfortunately, they’re both done poorly here as well. In this game, you allocate resources to build the fleet girls and as the game progresses and you gain exp, you can build better ships like heavy cruisers, aircraft carriers, and even battleships like the Yamato. This is where patience is needed to play this game, because once you commission a ship, building a single ship can take up to eight hours of waiting (depends on the class of ship. A heavy battleship will take four times as long to build as a light aircraft carrier), which would be completely fine with me if only they DIDN’T COMPLETELY RANDOMIZE the process of getting the freaking ships after I’d waited several hours for them. I frequently got the same ship girl that I already had, forcing me to scrap the older one once they got badly damaged because I didn’t want to waste resources repairing a duplicate. Why the game doesn’t allow me to choose what ships I build according to my PLAY STYLE and SITUATIONAL NEEDS is completely beyond me, and it’s possibly the worst sin this game commits as a “strategy” rpg.

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                                      No, I already have you. Please go away.

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    Now, combat breaks down into choosing one of several battle formations in the beginning of a battle that caters to your playing style and needs–certain formations are good against certain things and weak to others. For example, the diamond formation is powerful against submarines while weak to torpedoes as opposed to the line offensive formation which is weak to submarines. This is a good concept, because certain formations allow you to avoid a lot of the enemy’s brunt force, yet sacrifice some power of your own. But I never felt the need to stray from the safe double line formation (basically one that gives the highest accuracy in shelling, but less damage than a line ahead form. Torpedoes have moderate accuracy and damage, and the fleet is moderately weak against submarines), which meant that combat was always the same old with changes to tactics only happening when I felt like it. Simply put, there never was a risk so great that would force my hand into a more extreme formation, besides bosses in the higher levels. In my opinion, allowing both sides to change their formations to outplay each other during sorties would make combat just slightly more interesting. If this were a ten hour long game, the combat here would be alright, as there are variations such as night battles to keep things a bit more interesting, but for a game that expects players to play for weeks, it just fails to stay fresh and interesting. However, I will say that the game improves in the higher levels as I’ve mentioned with the bosses, but it’s not significant enough to wash away the bad taste left in my mouth from the first handful of hours.

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At this point in the game, battles are somewhat exciting. But if you sat through hours of staring at a screen like this as I did, it’s no surprise.

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    So finally, in a game that emphasized unit building and combat, the unit building relies overly on RNG, and the combat is too easy and repetitive. Yes, the main appeal in this game is the fleet girls meant solely for fan service, but that is no excuse for the fact that Kantai Collection is setting a terrible standard for free to play games in Japan by using the idea that a half-assed game is okay as long as you have amazing art and fan service. Through the stupid server practices all the way to the mind numbingly dull combat, I have to give Kantai Collection, a 45/100, a below average game, that no real fan of strategy games should play unless they can’t spare seven dollars for Battlestations Pacific on the PC.

    But if you can steam through a weak game mechanic and utter lack of story (the enemy fleet are generic and have zero intrigue) just for the fan service, go right ahead, as seemingly thousands of people are doing. Yes, it is a free to play browser game so while my review may seem unfairly harsh, it is only logical to point out flaws where they exist and call them out as elements that need balance in the overall scheme of things. In the end, this just isn’t the browser game for me personally nor is it something I can recommend.

Storytelling:	0/10 – There is none here
Gameplay:	6/10 – Simple and intuitive, but tiresome for a 20+ hour long game.
User Interface:	7/10 – I’m sure if I understood Japanese and didn’t need a wiki page it’d be excellent
Production values:	5/10 – Great art, music I can only describe as torture. Music should be where it matters most in a game like this.

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