DE'S PROFILE

Up until yesterday I didn't know what Facebook and Twitter were.

Sometimes it pays to not live in an English speaking country.

So, what's your theory on the CastleVania timeline?

PSX era was when RPGs started delving into the SF genres more and more, as a result becoming much more serious than SNES RPGs (serious for a video game, of course). We got the phenomenal FF7, Wild ARMs games, Star Ocean 2, Xenogears, Parasite Eve, Front Mission 3, Persona, Sa-Ga Frontier and a few others. Suffice to say I was very happy about that; I disliked fantasy settings back then, and grew to simply hate it.

On a side note it was also the platform which gave rise to survival horrors. Need I say more?

One thing about FF9 that always put me off - pathetically easy boss fights UNLESS you want to steal every item each boss has. If so then some of the boss battles turn from 5 minute cakewalks into half an hour of tediousness. Often I had to HEAL THE BOSS so that he didn't die before I snatched everything. Being a completionist it drove me nuts. Furthermore there is that one boss (a Hill Gigas?) whose final item is absolutely impossible to steal. I spent an hour trying to get it. Imagine having to constantly choose defend with everyone and steal with just one person, sometimes pausing to recast Float or heal. Imagine doing this for a whole hour. In the end I failed getting the item. Which happened to pop up in a store an hour or so later. Fuck.

I agree about the story, it is very weak, the worst in the series in my opinion. For most of the game the party just wanders around the world visiting new locations without any real purpose. It's not like FF7 where you knew from the moment you left Midgar what you had to do (trail and catch Sephiroth). The events are not really connected to each other. Also, the main antagonist is incredibly shallow and simply... not antagonizing.

Load times... please don't remind me about THAT.

Spin-off: Mid-boss Project?