Well, I finally picked up the game today determined to make some more progress on it before we recorded Episode 3 of NFR, and I'm glad I did. I'm now in Chapter 5, and I'm liking the game a lot more now, despite how terrible many aspects of the main town portion of the game are. I'm sorry, but that town is ugly, and it's sheer amateur hour that the map does not mark the distinct sections of the town for quick reference. To make matters even worse, there's no quest log. At all. Nor are there any markers on the map for sidequest characters so you can find them easily again. Shops just have a generic "shop" icon on the map, so unless you memorize the layout prepare to lose track of what stores are where. Early on, it also wasn't clear exactly what I had to do to advance the plot until I happened to wander into the location-specific trigger just wandering through the won.
There's also this really strange and tacked-on item mini-game in the town where you get these "random item encounters" of sorts running around the streets. You get prompted to quickly scan for the item, and if you grab it in time another will pop up within the nearby vicinity, and so on. Get up to 5 items in a row, and you get a higher-quality item typically used in weapon/armor upgrading. This mini-game really draws attention, though, to how badly the crossbow is integrated into the game, since you can't move while in the 1st person perspective.
Thankfully, once you unlock a few abilities for Zael, combat opens up a fair amount since you can then take advantage of surprise attacks and magic field neutralization. Unfortunately, the crossbow still feels kind of useless since (even with all the upgrades I dumped on it for doing all the item mini-games, which I also used on my armor) once you're in that 1st person perspective it's really hard to tell enemies apart and the crossbow seems to do very little damage. When the combat works, though, it's an interesting mixture of something akin to Mass Effect and something akin to Assassin's Creed.
I'm really liking how the game does its storytelling, too, with the whole "chapter" system. The way cutscenes flow into each other reminds me (oddly enough) of Mortal Kombat's story mode or Assassin's Creed. In fact, the sequence where you meet Lisa reminded me a LOT of Assassin's Creed 2 for various reasons. The cast overall seems to have a good chemistry, and I enjoy their interactions with each other. I'm not terribly fond of Princess Jasmine Lisa so far, though. She's easily the least interesting character in the game so far, though like everyone else she's well-acted. I can see some Final Fantasy XIII influence in the way the party structure is handled, too.
So yeah, it took me a good 4 hours and a lot of experimenting, but the game's finally starting to grow on me despite having quite a few shockingly amateurish mistakes in the execution of certain systems. I just wish the game had been interesting from the start because those opening 3 chapters were terrible.
Topic: Mistwalker's "The Last Story" out in NA via XSEED! (Read 219821 times)
