WHAT VIDEOGAMES ARE YOU PLAYING RIGHT NOW?

So, having just beat Tales of Symphonia, I started up Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World last night.

I like the game, and I think I'll continue to like it, but I've encountered some things I'm uncomfortable with.

tl;dr - Tales of Symphonia=The JRPGs I'm used to. Tales of Symphonia 2=JRPGs of the new millenium.

Where to begin? Well for starters the main character, Emil, has the constitution of soggy bread. HE seriously starts shaking when someone even looks in his general direction. Come on Japan, I know you have self-confidence issues and you put characters like that into games to have them grow, but this guy is so dickless he's a unick. Until the eldritch abomination he makes a pact with turns on the badness and turns him into yami yugi with an aggression problem. No sirree, that comparison to japanese escape fantasies is only getting more strained.

The main heroine is voiced by the same chick who voiced Tohru Honda from Fruits Basket, which is nice, but even I don't believe that she meets with the most passive submissive guy in existance and falls in love with him. True, it's all because of some incident 6 months ago, but damn women in jrpg's need standards. ToS was far more subtle.

One thinsg that is both for and against this game is the way cutscenes are performed. In most rpgs we're used to characters have a range of motions they have which can be used to convey several emotions. In this game, they've decided to go the motion capture route. This is good, because it conveys a great deal more emotion. On the bad side, it sometimes looks a little too "real life" to the point where it looks like they took some real people, and slapped some of these anime masks on them.



That being said, the models are very detailed, and nice to look at.

Finally, never before have I wanted to punch the protagonists of a game so much. Emil is more milquetoast than a spoony bard, allows himself to be pressganged into making a pact with something called RATATOSK (in a game with a tree keeping the world from exploding), and lets himself be bullied by an entire town made of people so mean they must kill puppies for fun. I don't mind low self-esteem protagonists, but seriously he needs to be half as much of a pussy. He's literally so scared of people at the start of the game he spends 5 minutes trying to work up the courage to THANK SOMEONE. What I assume they were going for is a Colette (ToS 1) knockoff that you just want to hug, but forgot to give him any redeeming qualities.

The other reason you want to punch them is because they spend the first several hours of the game talking about how much they hate the protagonist of the first game - someone you undoubtedly just spent 50 hours pretending to be - and blame all their problems on him and his friends saving the world.

It's amazing how much JRPG's can change between 2003 and 2008.

Despite all I said, I really do enjoy the game. It's beutiful to look at, and it's really neat to see how everyone's changed (usually towards the dickish) in all the towns from the first game. I just REALLY hope they have more tricks up their sleeve than "That Ratatosk guy you made a pact with and have been powering up all this time? Yeah, that was a bad idea." Because it's so obvious it burns like urinary tract infection. I literally have to force myself into thinking making the pact probably wasn't a bad idea while playing.

Breath of Fire IV. I am slow but determined since I have to beat it before I go to summer camp on Saturday (which probably means I can't sleep for the next forty-eight hours).

I just saw the face in my avatar, like, right now. Her first text box is sitting unclosed in ePSXe. So early (I'm assuming). ;_;

sadnfklasndfklnasdlf half-naked butlers zomg

this is the best dungeon in any game ever

i raise you the secret of monkey island disk 23

Final Fantasy IX and Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood.

story in a metroid game is always inessential.

Playing Alan Wake. Slow start but pretty good once it gets going, I like the episodic structure.

So, yeah, Ursula's my favorite female character (Cray<3), but, uh, welp. I guess none of the other party members are looking, so that makes it subtle, right?

I always used to see shadow madness in this little shop I used to go to, but when I finally decided to pick it up, it vanished.

Literally the ONLY time I finally decided to pick up a game and it was actually still there was Valkyrie Profile for the PS1. By the next time I went there, they'd taken it off the shelves. I was super happy years later when I discovered it was a highly sought-after game on the inerwebs, at least until the psp remake.

I still prefer the anime cutscenes, but that's neither here nor there.

The most dissapointing "show up to find it gone"? Earthbound, complete with strategy guide. Years later, though I managed to snag a copy of EB for 20 bucks, I still don't have the strategy guide T_T