I found a copy of Tales of Xillia at my public library, because my library lends video games and is therefore cooler than your library.
Tangible proof.
I’ve heard some pretty good things about the Tales franchise games available on the PS3. I myself have not played a Tales game since the original, Tales of Phantasia, a game released in Japan on the Super Famicon and later ported to the GBA, which was the first iteration that reached the United States. I played the hell out the GBA version on my GameBoy SP, mostly during my 100-level health lecture course in undergrad. Fond memories.
I haven’t touched the series since, though not because I wished it any ill. I really liked the active battle system of Tales of Phantasia, though the story was kind of goofy. One way or another, I simply somehow managed to never pick up another one of the games.
Until today! I’ve played about three hours so far, and I am at the moment slightly obsessed, although I have mixed feelings about the game as a whole. In brief:
Things That Are Good about Tales of Xillia
1. It’s very pretty to look at.
The game is about five years old at this point, and it’s still beautiful, with colorful, anime-inspired graphics and a world full of interesting and varied settings.
2. Battles are frenetic, fast, and fun.
The battle system takes all of the things I liked about Tales of Phantasia’s battles and adds a dash of Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. I’m still getting the hang of the face buttons + joystick directional commands, but I’m liking them, and I appreciate the emphasis on proper timing to successfully guard against enemies and perform link specials. Also (and this is very important in a JRPG), battles are quick. Most monster encounters so far have taken less than 30 seconds, when you’re going to be fighting literally thousands of encounters over the course of a JRPG, having the majority of them be painlessly quick keeps up the pace.
(Unlike some JRPGs I could name. Bravely Second, I’m looking at you.)
3. The Sphere Grid…uh, I mean, the Lillium Orb is super neat.
I was always a big fan of Final Fantasy X’s sphere grid, but really any suitably complex character development system with branching paths tickles my inner fiddly bits fangirl.
4. The battle music is awesome.
Look, again, if you’re going to be fighting a thousand battles and listening to the same song a thousand times, you want that song to be really fucking rad. The battle themes in this game remind me strongly of the battle music in Star Ocean, which is not at all a bad thing.
5. I have the option to play a lady.
Still rare enough in JRPGs that it makes me excited.
6. Mercenary Alvin Svint is sexy.
Self explanatory.
Things That Annoy Me about Tales of Xillia
1. The cutscenes drag on forever.
There are a lot of cutscenes, which isn’t bad in and of itself, but there are weirdly long pauses between every line of dialogue, so the scenes are. So. Slow. It’s bad enough that I’ve taken to keeping my 3DS next to me on the couch so that I can grind in Bravely Second while I wait for the characters to finish saying whatever the hell it is they are saying.
2. The voice acting is…not great.
Mind you, it’s not terrible. It’s no Star Ocean: The Last Hope. But it’s not great. Alvin has the best voice actor of the lot so far. Milla Maxwell’s delivery is particularly wooden, and while I know she’s supposed to be still figuring out how to be a human, her lines are still weirdly unnatural.
3. The story is clearly designed to only make sense if you play through it with both characters.
While I love the option to pick a protagonist, and I understand some of the appeal of seeing “both sides of the story,” it drives me crazy when games with dual protagonists structure their cutscenes so that you often won’t know what the hell is going on unless you play the game through twice. Case in point: early in the game, when Milla heads to the city of Fennmont to infiltrate a military base, Jude just shows up out of nowhere with zero explanation. I’m sure that this is clearly laid out in his cutscenes, but when I’m playing as Milla, the introduction is jarring. Also, I’m playing 31 games right now. I don’t have time to play a JRPG twice. Who has time for that?
4. The story is so far boring and predictable.
The story thus far: Once upon a time, there was a lord of all spirits named Maxwell, because when I think “Lord of All,” I think “Maxwell.” Some shit with the spirits got out of whack because irresponsible humans are doing irresponsible things with the mako energy…I mean, the spyrix, and building nukes with spirit energy or something. Now we have to go on a quest to get the spirits back and save the world. We’ve been joined on our quest by Balthier/Han Solo/Alvin, and it looks like we’re going to be picking up an irritating child character with a creepy doll pretty soon. There’s a lot of waaaacky anime banter. Isn’t it wacky? Yada yada yada, spyrix.
Time will tell if Tales of Xillia will hold my attention. It’s rare that a JRPG’s mechanics are a strong enough draw for me to ignore a story in which I have little interest. I’m certainly glad I picked it up either way. Especially because:
Ah, the plight of the first-world gamer: I own too many games. I own more games than I will ever beat; indeed, perhaps I own more games than I will ever play. And yet, paradoxically, the drive to acquire yet more games remains.
While this problem is especially prevalent in my Steam collection (as Steam sales are explicitly designed to encourage impulse buys in gamers), I am occasionally beset by the desire to impulsively purchase a console game.
Such was the case this weekend.
I took my boyfriend to our local gamers’ mecca to sample its nerdtastic delights. While there, though I had promised myself to buy no more games until I had finished at least a few that I was already playing, I happened upon a copy of Dragon’s Crown for the PS3, a Vanillaware game published by my favorite game publisher, ATLUS.
Now, I absolutely loved Vanillaware’s previous-generation offering, Odin Sphere. This game was easily one of my favorite pieces of software for the PS2. It had a fun, original battle system, a really interesting plot touching upon Norse mythology, beautiful hand-painted sprites, and a race of bunnies. What’s not to like?
Yes, in the world of the game, they are called Pookas, but look at the cute little buggers. They are bunnies.
It also had some really unique mechanics that I have not encountered in a game before or since. Game levels were “spheres” rather than linear – you started at an entrance, moved forward through a level that was linear in appearance, then came back to the beginning. Magic is powered through absorbing the souls of your enemies, and this also levels up your spells. And then my favorite wacky mechanic: your hit points level up through eating food that you grow by planting seeds. Some of these seeds grow delicious sheep fruit. Once the sheep are ripe, they hop off of the plant and walk away. You then must chase them, attack them, and then they turn into meat. I did not make any of this up.
So when I heard that Vanillaware was coming out with a fantasy action RPG for the PS3, I was pretty excited about it, but I never got around to picking up a copy, mostly because I never actually saw any copies for sale and forgot about it. Until this weekend, when I found a used copy at my local game store.
Of course, then I got up to the register and realized I had left my wallet at home. Luckily for me, my heroic boyfriend purchased the game in my stead, and then later refused to let me pay him back, because he is as stubborn as he is sweet. To be fair, I suppose he got to play the game, too, but still.
Part of the reason I was so excited about the game is that it is a co-op fantasy action-RPG, and now that I have acquired a boyfriend with whom it is really fun to play games (because he both likes RPGs almost as much as I do and is patient with me when we play games at which I patently suck), I rather enjoy co-op games. We’ve been playing a lot of Divinity: Original Sin (a game that I would highly recommend as an excellent example of turn-based co-op done right), but it’s nice to have something a little more action-oriented for a change.
So. Dragon’s Crown. First of all, this game is beautiful. Vanillaware’s characteristic hand-painted sprites are on full display, and as usual, they are a joy to behold. They’re even nicer in HD than they were in the PS2 generation.
I do have to point out, however, that some of these sprites are…awkward. For instance, feast your eyes upon the mighty, meaty thighs of the Amazon, one of your six character choices.
Hmm. Yeah. I don’t really have words for that. My boyfriend did, though. And I quote: “Her butt looks like it is made of tumors.”
And then there is the Sorceress and her…uh, bouncing, bountiful bosoms? Seriously, check out her running animation.
>.> …sigh
The Sorceress has got nothing on Morgan the magic shop owner, though. Her bosoms are, quite literally, heaving.
Boyfriend and I re-dubbed her with a much more appropriate appellation: “Lady Bigboobs.”
Now, to be fair, these…shall we say, extreme physicalities are not exclusive to the women, which makes me somewhat less uncomfortable about them. For instance, the Dwarf looks like he overdosed on elephant steroids.
So it’s pretty clear that this was a stylistic choice, though occasionally a slightly creepy one. I’m still on the fence as to whether I ought to be offended by the weird objectification precisely because it is so weird. Tumor Butt the Amazon isn’t exactly oozing sex appeal, after all (though Lady Bigboobs certainly is…in a disturbingly enormous, heaving sort of way).
So…whatever. The sprites are weird, but still quite lovely, and the watercolor world which they inhabit is simply stunning.
When you select a stage, the map rotates around in a swirl of layered backgrounds that is beautiful to behold. I kept moving the cursor back and forth between stages because I enjoyed watching the map move so much. The lovely visuals are what really sell this game.
The gameplay, while certainly competent, has so far lacked the unique luster with which its predecessor Odin Sphere glimmered. My boyfriend and I were prompted to make characters, choosing from six different classes. Some of the classes are pretty straightforward – the fighter fights, the wizard…wizards? – but some are less clear. I chose as my class the Elf, which as those of us who play Dungeons & Dragons know, is typically a race, not a class. In this case, the Elf seems to be essentially a Ranger class, shooting bows and casting elemental magic. Character creation is otherwise very basic: you get to choose your color palette and your name, and that’s about it.
Speaking of Dungeons & Dragons, that’s exactly what playing this game reminded me of. The game’s story is not told by voice actors voicing dialogue; it is instead narrated by a single voice telling the story in exactly the sort of manner in which I used to tell the story when I dungeon-mastered 4e D&D. The narrator narrates you through a tutorial (which only Player One gets to play through for some reason, even if you have two controllers active), and then narrates you through quests, dungeons, and even shopping. It’s sort of a charming idea, really, and the narrator in question has quite a soothing voice.
The basics of the game are D&D-like as well: you take quests, you slay enemies, you find treasure, you level up. Your characters are upgraded through skill-trees visualized as cards, which is pretty cool and fairly in-depth.
It’s neat to pick out skills to customize your character, choosing which skills to activate and which to upgrade, while resigning others to obscurity.
This attention to skills is a pity because (at least at a mere three and a half hours into the game), most battles are won by jumping a lot and mashing the basic attack button. Now, mind you, this is fun; boyfriend said it reminded him a lot of Golden Axe (and what’s not to love about Golden Axe?), but it can occasionally become difficult to see what’s going on. Most battles very quickly devolve rapidly into a blurry, hard-to-follow mess.
Because the sprites are so large, they crowd the screen while moving at speed, making it very difficult to track which one is yours. This is made worse by the fact that the Guildmaster back in town “helpfully” sends random extra party members along whenever you head into a dungeon, whether you wanted them or not. If the Guildmaster sent along party members that were the same class as either my boyfriend or myself, we had a ton of trouble telling our sprites apart from the AI-controlled sprites in the heat of battle. We recruited an Amazon and a Sorceress right before we stopped playing for the night, though, so maybe things will be easier to track if we have Tumor Butt and Jiggle Tits along for the ride. They’ll be hard to mistake for our more normal-looking sprites, Tiny Elf and The Goddamn Tank.
“Normal” in this case being very relative – The Goddamn Tank has an elbow three times larger than his head.
As much as I enjoyed slaughtering goblins and riding wyverns with my boyfriend, we started to get a little bored with the repetitive nature of the gameplay. I am hoping that things might get more interesting as more story and more gameplay mechanics are revealed, but time will tell.
In the meantime, I’m thinking that Tiny Elf and The Goddamn Tank would be a great band name.
I am just the worst about buying games and then never getting around to finishing the damn things. Adulting takes up distressingly large chunks of my day, so I no longer have the copious amounts of free time that once I had. This is a problem for all adult gamers, but it is especially a problem for me because my favorite genre, the RPG, is famous for being incredibly long. It’s not uncommon to have to sink over 100 hours into a good, meaty RPG in order to experience all of the content. This means that I have a bunch of RPGs that I have started and am still attempting to finish. Since I don’t like to write up a full review of a game until I am at least halfway through it, I haven’t talked about many of these in-progress games yet on this blog. So here, in no particular order, are my initial impressions of the RPGs that I am currently playing.
Fire Emblem Awakening (3DS)
I’ve already talked a little bit about my first thoughts on this excellent game. I’ve yet to be disappointed in a single aspect of this RPG. The battles are strategic and exciting, the voice acting is top-notch, the graphics and cutscenes are expressive and stunning, the 3D effects are well-executed, and the music is appropriately stirring and cinematic. I haven’t yet gotten around to the “tactical shipping” aspect of the game, but I am looking forward to it. I think? It’s got to be less creepy than Conception II.
Chrono Trigger (DS)
This game was one of my earliest RPG experiences. Soon after I beat Final Fantasy X and VII, one of my friends lent me the PS1 port. I really liked the game, especially the time travel, but I remember having a lot of trouble with the active-time battles. Now that I am a hardened RPG veteran, though, the battles are incredibly fun. I love that you need to take enemy positioning into account while quickly selecting the most appropriate techs. The DS port is excellent and having the menus immediately accessible on the touch screen is incredibly convenient. I had forgotten what an tightly plotted and stunningly beautiful game this is. I had also forgotten what a badass Lucca is. A younger me was most interested in the princess, but now that I’m older and wiser, it’s clear that bespectacled, super-genius Lucca is the most awesome character, an extremely positive representation of ladies in STEM fields since 1995.
Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster (PS3)
I was very excited when this remaster came out, and it helped me update my very useful blitzball strategy, but I’ve only made as far as the Lightning Plains so far in this playthrough. I am very pleased with inclusion of the expert Sphere Grid, which makes leveling up the characters much more interesting, though completely mystifying to anyone without an already-clear grasp on how the basic Sphere Grid works. The updated graphics and UI are excellent, but the voice acting is more grating and awful than ever (even if I now recognize the mind-blowing fact that Wakka and Bender are voiced by the same dude). Would it have been so hard to include the Japanese voice tracks on this re-release? That might have put this remaster over the edge into the realm of excellence rather than mere competence.
Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth (3DS)
This really is an awesome dungeon crawler, mixing oddly-addictive Etrian Odyssey-style touch-screen dungeon-mapping with Persona’s turn-based, elemental weakness-exploiting combat. This fusion creates an unexpectedly satisfying gameplay loop of exploration and combat that stays fresh throughout the long game because each dungeon is stylistically and mechanically unique. The story is interesting enough, but so heavily dependent upon an encyclopedic familiarity with the story content of Persona 3, Persona 4, and every single one of their spin-off games that it can be a bit challenging to figure out what the hell is going on. Also, you’re going to have to read a surprising amount of really terrible poetry.
Persona 4 Arena (PS3)
Do you like fighting games? Do you also like visual novels? You will need to be a fan of both of these somewhat disparate genres to enjoy this very odd game. As much as I enjoyed Persona 4, I didn’t ever feel the need to pick this particular spin-off, as I am not very good at fighting games. However, when it became clear that I needed to know at least a little bit about the characters in this game to fully understand what was going on in Persona Q, and when some perusal on the internet seemed to suggest that the game actually had a very interesting story mode, I went ahead and picked it up on the PSN. I was very surprised to discover that the story mode consisted of fully-voiced short story-length visual novels broken up periodically with one-one-one fights. But it’s way more reading than fighting. Like way, WAY more. Every character in the game has a chapter, and in true visual novel-style, it’s all told from the first-person perspective of each one in a literary mode that rather reminds me of overly-earnest fanfiction. The fighting mechanics are fun and easy to pick up, but require good timing to make your combos land. If you like reading stuff for ten minutes, then taking a two-minute break to beat up on someone, this is a great game for you. I’m kind of enjoying it.
Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance (3DS)
I have been eyeballing this game ever since the 3DS debuted and this was advertised as one of the earliest blockbusters for the system. I spied it used at my favorite local game store and finally picked it up a few months ago. I must say, I am extremely impressed by the depth of this game. It looks and plays so much like its classic PS2 predecessors that at times it was difficult to believe I was playing it on a handheld. The 3D is so complex and the battles so frenetic that it can be hard to keep the system lined up properly with your eyes, but when you can keep the 3D in focus, it’s stunning in its depth and detail. There is something really magical about seeing familiar Disney locales utterly transformed by the three dimensions. The touch screen controls are well-implemented and interesting, and there’s even an undeniably Pokemon-esque battle-creature aspect of the game, which uses an interface suspiciously similar to Pokemon X/Y’s Pokemon-Amie, which is odd, because Dream Drop Distance came out over a year and a half before Pokemon X/Y. It’s a really fun interface, though, and any game that lets me have adorable creatures as pets makes me happy. But I’ve just got to say: the Tron levels are fucking creepy. The odd photo-realism of the characters in the Tron levels is weirdly unsettling in three dimensions, especially in its stark contrast to the much more cartoonish look of Sora and the other levels in the game.
Child of Light (PS3)
I love this game so much. Playing it is like a meditation; the smooth, watercolored world of Lemuria is an interactive children’s picture-book wonderland. The music is absolutely gorgeous and I could happily listen to it for hours. I think I drive my roommates crazy, though, because I often can’t help but sing along. The protagonist, Aurora, can fly on gossamer wings, so moving through the maze-like forests, cliffs, and caves of Lemuria controls like a dream. The style of locomotion and general overworld movement seems strongly reminiscent of indie game Aquaria, but the turn-based battle system is all its own. The battles are unexpectedly challenging (though that may be because I am playing on “expert” difficulty) and the story is engaging and interesting. While I love that they wrote every word of the dialogue in rhyme, I really wish that the rhymes were, you know, good. The writers can’t seem to stick to any one meter, and many of the rhymes are terribly skewed slant rhymes. It’s a little painful to read at times. I wish they’d hired a proper poet to do the job and made the game’s linguistics as stunning as its visuals.
Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call (3DS)
I would have loved to be present for the concept pitch for this game. “Well, you see, it’s a casual Final Fantasy-themed dungeon-crawling DDR game that you play with your DS stylus!” That’s the whole game. And weirdly, it works really well, mostly due to the brilliance of Nobuo Uematsu‘s music. There are so many classic, wonderful, moving, beautiful, badass songs to choose from over the life of the franchise that it seems entirely appropriate to have an entire game about it. In fact, they should have just named the game Final Fantasy: Nobuo Uematso Is Amazing instead of making up a nonsense portmanteau. The game play is really fun and very tricky at higher levels, too, but let’s not kid ourselves. We’re here for the music. Play this one with headphones for sure.
Broken Age (PC)
I both love and hate this game. I love it for its quirky style, its fascinating world, its hilarious and well-voiced dialogue, and its satisfying story. I hate it for its unrepentant adventure game non-logic. While I understand that this game represents a tremendous leap away from the bat-shit crazy puzzles of the previous generation of adventure games (for some impressive examples, see Cracked’s latest article about terrible video game puzzles), there are still some pretty nonsensical things you have to figure out. I have been pleasantly surprised at how many things I have been able to figure out on my own, but some of the puzzles are just irritatingly complicated or vague. For instance, the knot puzzle (a puzzle that is coincidentally one of the puzzles featured in the aforementioned Cracked article) has kept me stalled in this game for over a month. I know I will eventually go back to it, because I really want to find out what happens, but I’m too frustrated with it for the moment. Stupid, awesome game.
Life Is Strange
I’ve only played through a few hours of the first chapter of this game so far, but I already like what I see. The time-traveling mechanic is very intuitive and cleverly designed, turning the protagonist’s life into what is essentially a video game that she can reset at will. This gives the player free reign to try every option in a given situation – if you don’t like where the story is going, you can rewind time to take a different path, and choose the one you like best. What’s fascinating is to see how your choices affect the world around you. The game’s settings seem fully realized, and the voice acting is uncommonly excellent. I am looking forward to seeing how this story turns out.
And there you have most of what I am playing. The most interesting things I am playing, certainly. I really just need to pick one, buckle down, and beat it. I’m just easily distracted.
You may have noticed that I play a lot of Shin Megami Tensei games. I have mentioned before that Final Fantasy and Shin Megami Tensei are my two favorite RPG franchises, and I’m going to take a stand here and say that I actually think that Shin Megami Tensei is the better franchise. Now don’t get me wrong, I love Final Fantasy, and I directly credit that franchise for getting me into gaming in the first place, but I also believe that Shin Megami Tensei as a franchise takes more risks, creates more interesting and more believable characters, and forces gamers to ask a lot of really important questions about life, the universe, and everything. SMT games are also typically dark as fuck, and explore heavy themes like loss, sexuality, self-identity, and even suicide. They’re also mechanically complicated games that never bother to hold your hand through difficult dungeon-crawling that is at times punishingly hard, but never unfair and always rewarding. I’ve played almost every game in the franchise since Nocturne, even the obscure PS2 releases like Digital Devil Saga and both Raidou Kuzunoha games, and I always enjoy myself immensely. Persona 3 and 4 are two of the best RPGs of all time, no question.
SO I WAS SO EXCITED WHEN THE PERSONA 5 TRAILER HIT HOLY SHIT YOU HAVE NO IDEA JUST LOOK AT THIS SHIT
AAAAAH THAT WAS SO AMAZING I AM GOING TO WATCH IT AGAIN
So there’s a lot going on there, and this trailer gives lots more information about the world of Persona 5 than last year’s creepy teaser.
-Are we going down some kind of path that includes enacting some revolutionary vigilante justice with Personas, V-for-Vendetta-style? Because that was my first thought upon seeing that mask, and I am SO ready for that.
-The cast looks much smaller this time around, which could be a really good change. One of the most difficult things about Persona 3, 4, and Q was ensuring that your huge party was equally leveled and adequately equipped. Only having four characters to worry about would streamline that process greatly.
-Does the dungeon-crawling include some platforming and cover mechanics? That could be super fun, assuming the controls don’t suck. 3D platforming can be a disaster if it’s not handled carefully, but I trust you, Persona Team!
-I love the design asthetic, marrying the griminess of a lived-in city with the candy-color-stylishness of the most recent Persona games.
Needless to say, I am STOKED about this game. I am also grateful that Atlus is planning to release the game on both the PS3 and the PS4. I’m going to upgrade eventually, but I’m too broke to do it right now.
I somehow managed to escape the early 2000s without ever playing a Diablo game. Several of my gamer friends recently expressed shock and awe at this apparently criminal lack of Diablo in my life, so when I noticed the demo available on the PlayStation Store, I downloaded that shit. And then it sat, sad and lonely in my game menu until I finally had the time to spare to try it out this afternoon.
I did sink about 40 hours into Torchlight when it first came out, so I kind of knew what I was in for. Diablo-style dungeon crawlers are usually not my cup of tea, though. I find the endless, Sisyphean loop of click-kill-loot-equip quickly boring, especially if it is not accompanied by a riveting story with sympathetic characters. Does Diablo III deliver “riveting”? Well…not really. Diablo III delivers incredibly competent polish – and I would expect nothing less from Blizzard – but my brief time with the game did not inspire me to keep that time at anything but brief, because it delivers little else.
My three most common thoughts while playing Diablo III:
1. Who the fuck is going around this zombie-infested wasteland hiding small amounts of their gold in rotting barrels?
2. I am dressed like this, but the game lies to me and insists that I am wearing pants.
3. This quote from my husband: “Diablo III is like they took Diablo II and just made it shitty. It’s like they hired a really hot model for their movie and every time you’re just looking at her, she looks great, but whenever she opens her mouth to talk, you realize that she can’t even act.”
I believe I have said this before, but it bears repeating: fuck blitzball.
Seriously, I know so many people who love Final Fantasy X. It’s such a great game! The story is great, the characters are great, the battle system is great, it has probably the best summons system in any Final Fantasy ever, it’s got a ton of strong, smart female characters who wear a decent amount of clothing, the music is gorgeous…I could go on for HOURS about how amazing of a game Final Fantasy X is.
Except for blitzball. Everyone hates fucking blitzball.
Seriously, the number one search term that people use in Google that finds this blog are the words “fuck blitzball,” followed closely by “i hate blitzball.” WordPress tracks these things. I’m not making it up.
What gamers find when they use those search terms is this guide I wrote a few months ago detailing a fairly foolproof way to beat blitzball almost every time. I even claimed it could work in that first game against the Luca Goers.
(Also, side note: what the hell kind of a name for your team is the “Goers?” Seriously, what the fuck is a “goer”? Every other team on Spira has a totally badass name, like the Aurochs or the Psyches, but the reigning champions are named a nonsense word that maybe means they’re good at…going, I guess? They go really fast? Or something? I don’t know, it’s a stupid name. And it makes me hate them even more. Asshats.)
Anyway, I was wrong about my strategy working for the game against the Luca Goers Asshats, because I just replayed that first game against them a few days ago on Final Fantasy X-HD, and my strategy just did NOT work. SIGH. So here is a NEW, REVISED strategy that will win you that shiny tournament trophy. I will reference the original strategy, though, so read this first.
A tournament trophy that basically looks like a blue dick.
Okay, so you still want to get the Jecht Shot, because it will make winning all future games an absolute breeze, but you won’t use it in this game against the Asshats, because Tidus’ blitzball level is so low that it will take almost all of his hit points to use it and unless you manage to use the ability in the first twenty seconds of the second half of the game, you will never get the option. It is POSSIBLE to score with the Jecht Shot, but you can only do it once, and if the Asshats get the ball and score themselves, you’re probably screwed.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that for any of these strategies to work, you need to switch your movement to “Manual.” The default sets it to “Auto,” which means you have no direct control over where your blitzball players swim. So as soon as your team has control of the ball, hit the triangle button and set your movement to “Manual.” There’s an A and a B option; I prefer A, but try them both to see which you prefer.
Once you can move your dude yourself, immediately press the square button to bring up the Pass/Dribble menu. Pass the ball to Tidus. Then swim Tidus behind your own goalie and just chill there until halftime. The opposing team’s AI won’t be able to spot you there. If they follow you over to your goal, they may try to tackle you and steal the ball, but Tidus has a high enough endurance that the attempt will most likely fail. After they try (and fail) to steal the ball, they will leave you alone until halftime.
At halftime, you can probably equip the Jecht shot, but again, you probably won’t have the chance to use it. Once Blitzoff happens, get the ball to Tidus, and swim him back behind your own goalie. Hide there. Seriously, just hide there until Tidus leaves and Wakka returns to the field around the 3 minute mark. Once you get the ball back, guess what you do? Yep, hide behind your goal again.
If you did this correctly, the game will end at a 0-0 tie. Good. You want that. Now you will go into Overtime, and in Overtime, the first team to score just flat out wins the game. As it turns out, Wakka’s pre-equipped ability, Venom Shot, is a pretty good ability. So get the ball to Wakka, get him as close to the goal as possible, and shoot! Depending on who is blocking, you have a pretty good chance at making the goal. And then you WIN THE TOURNAMENT. WHEE!
Now, I have got to say, despite how difficult this is to do, there are very few in-game benefits for winning this tournament. The prize is a Strength Sphere, which will generate a +4 Strength Node on the Sphere Grid. Certainly, this early in the game, a +4 Strength is nothing to sneeze at, especially if you activate it for Tidus, but it’s not a game breaker. You don’t even get a PSN Trophy! Seriously, they should have given you a trophy for this. It will LOOK like you get a trophy called Teamwork, but you get that trophy just for winning your first Blitzball game, not for winning this specific tournament. So it’s just a bronze trophy. I was totally disappointed.
But in-game, the Aurochs get a trophy. A really big trophy. So there’s that.
One of my favorite things about owning a console that can connect to the internet is the capability of downloading demos for games. There is nothing more effective at making people excited about your game than letting them play it for a little bit. Last night, I got to sit down with two PS3 demos, and I had a lot of fun playing them.
I downloaded the Abyss Odyssey demo for one reason: it’s published by Atlus, who is hands-down my favorite publisher. As someone who loves weird Japanese games, Atlus is near and dear to my heart. They regularly take risks to localize and market super-niche, oddball video games that might not ordinarily make it out of Japan. Also, they publish the Shin Megami Tensei games, which I have mentioned before as a deep and abiding passion of mine, and a close tie with Final Fantasy as my favorite game franchise of all time.
I had zero expectations of Abyss Odyssey. I kind of assumed it would be an RPG, as Atlus publishes a lot of RPGs, but I was surprised to discover that it was in fact some kind of strange side-scrolling, combo-based, beat-em-up, platformer thing with roguelike elements. Oh, it also has a really beautiful and unexpected Art Deco visual style that I found immensely appealing. Interestingly, the game was developed by ACE Team, a game developer based in Chile of all places!
I was immediately thrilled that the playable character was not only a lady, but a lady who is dressed in some very stylish and not-super-revealing clothes! Also, listen to Katrien talk:
Although I couldn’t find any confirmation of the voice actor’s involvement in the game, I am pretty damn sure that is Mary Elizabeth McGlynn. Atlus uses a lot of anime voice actors pretty frequently (especially my personal favorite, Liam O’Brien!), so it seems probable. Score another point for this game!
Abyss Odyssy gets lots of points for style and presentation, but its substance, while interesting and briefly diverting, wasn’t enough to make me want to buy the game. It’s pretty button-mashy, and although it looks like there’s some room for ability customization, the demo didn’t make it seem like a particularly deep system. More of a problem for me was the sketchy, uninteresting story. Seriously, check out the Wikipedia page I linked to above – the story synopsis is literally three lines long. For someone who mostly plays games for the stories they tell, that was kind of a deal-breaker. It’s really pretty, though! If you like fighty games, it might definitely be worth your time and your investment of $14.99.
I have no idea how I missed the fact that this game was a thing. Beyond: Two Souls heavily involves two very famous actors, one of whom is Ellen Page, and I LOVE Ellen Page! She’s so adorable and snarky and nerdy! So I feel like there must have been some sort of intense advertising blitz that I somehow managed to avoid, but whatever, there was a demo, and I downloaded it!
And holy shit, wow, what an experience.
I feel like this kind of interactive experience is ever-so-slightly distinct from what many people would consider a “game,” although I’m not 100% sure where that distinction really falls. Certainly, this is much closer to the “movie” end of the spectrum than a traditional video game with all of its expected fiddly bits like stats and a health bar and equipment and what have you, but I was completely sucked into this demo in a visceral way that far eclipses any movie watching experience I have ever had.
It was…intense. I found myself literally yelling at the screen almost the entire time. “WATCH OUT, ELLEN PAGE! OH SHIT, ARE YOU OKAY?? NO, NO, DODGE THAT LOG!”
I know the character had a name in the context of the world of the game, but I can’t actually remember it now. The motion capture was eerily accurate and the voice acting so good that I was sold on the idea that the digital being before me was actually Ellen Page. No unexpected visit to Uncanny Valley here, no sir, this was ACTING.
All of the “gameplay” consists mostly of quick-time directional button presses, but for all its simplicity, I was absolutely THERE in a way that I found incredibly engaging. It helped that the story is really very interesting, with a lot of mystery that I found myself quite excited about unraveling. To be fair, things do get more “game-like” when you control the mysterious entity called Aiden, and the controls for its part of the game are actually really tricky to use and a little bit frustrating. I actually found that my difficulty in controlling Aiden made the game even more immersive, because a huge part of the plot seems to center around Ellen Page’s lack of control over Aiden and Aiden’s lack of control over itself. After all, if you were a non-corporeal being trying to interact with a corporeal world, wouldn’t you have a whole lot of trouble? Wouldn’t you constantly be falling through solid matter and overshooting the mark of your intended targets because you aren’t affected by friction? I really felt the frustration at having all this power and ability but so little control. It was excellently implemented!
I will most DEFINITELY buy this game. Probably right not this very minute, because $40 is a lot of dollars for me, and perhaps I will wait for a Black Friday sale or for enough Powerup Rewards points for a coupon, but I WANT this game. I need to know what happens to Ellen Page!
Wait…what? A PS3-exclusive JRPG about fairies? A PS3-exclusive JRPG about fairies with a soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu and his Earthbound Papas?
WITH A BUNNY…DOG…BUNNYDOG…CUTE THING?
WHAT ARE YOOOU? I don’t care, actually, just come home with me and be adorable forever!
HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THE EXISTENCE OF FAIRY FENCER F? I love fairies! And JRPGS! And Uematsu! And cute things, especially cute things. The trailer from Game Informer looks really cool. I really, really hope the game is as cool as it looks. I’ve been burned by adorable-looking JRPGs before. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!
Yeah, I know, I bought this gameback when it released in March, and it’s what, almost July? But I have so many games I haven’t beaten yet, I determined that I had to beat AT LEAST TWO before I played Final Fantasy X HD. I managed to beat Catherine last month, and I was going to wait until I beat Bravely Default, but I am REALLY frustrated with Bravely Default right now and I had a rough weekend, and Final Fantasy is like my mac-and-cheese comfort food of gaming, so I said SCREW IT and finally played the first few hours this weekend.
Let me tell you, it was worth the wait.
I have mentioned before that Final Fantasy X is my favorite game. This does not mean that I think it is the BEST game, mind you, because it has many flaws (*cough*BLITZBALL*cough*), but it was my first RPG and my first non-Atari game that I played all the way through and the first game that I really got super into. I have played it multiple times and unlocked most of its secrets. I even once played enough blitzball to unlock Wakka’s secret weapon. Because I am a masochist.
So the idea of playing an HD remaster of my favorite game was understandably VERY EXCITING. And believe me when I tell you that this excitement was not misplaced.
The remaster is just…so beautiful. Really. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Final Fantasy X was a fantastic looking game for its time. It was released in 2001, very early in the PS2’s life cycle, and it continued to be one of the best-looking games on the system right until the end. It was colorful and dynamic and had tons of really cool environments to explore, and the rendered cutscenes absolutely blew my mind when I experienced them for the first time in 2004.
The HD Remaster took all of that beauty and made it 1000 times better. It’s like someone took my favorite painting from the Renaissance and carefully and lovingly restored it to how it was supposed to look. The colors are brighter. The contrast is better. The water! Holy shit, the water! FFX is essentially Waterworld: the Role-Playing Game, so water is EVERYWHERE, and super important, and now it looks AMAZING. Seriously, I spent a ton of time just staring at the water once I got to Besaid.
The biggest improvement in the graphics is the revamped character models for the main party members. I can’t really express how much better Tidus, Yuna, Lulu, and the whole gang look in the remaster.
This video from Sony does a pretty good job of showing the changes, but it’s even more beautiful rendered from the PS3 onto an HDTV, believe me.
Besides making the game into even more delicious eye-candy, which is awesome, the improved character models give the characters a much greater range of facial movement. The eyes especially are much larger, more mobile, and much more expressive. This makes them MUCH more sympathetic. Even Tidus, who often comes off like a whiny little bitch, seems waaaay more likable now that his face can actually register the confusion and unhappiness he feels.
The other major graphical improvement is the contrast. Final Fantasy X is full of gorgeous outdoor locales like forests and islands and mountains and lakes, but it’s also got its fair share of dark, dark temples. REALLY dark temples. Maybe I just played the original on really shitty televisions, but I always had a hard time seeing what the hell was going on inside those dark, dark temples. Every single Cloister of the Trials puzzle that I played was made intensely frustrating by the fact that I had a great deal of difficulty seeing where doors and empty sphere receptacles were, because it was so goddamn dark! This is no longer a problem in the HD Remaster. In fact, now I love going into the temples, because I can see a million details that I couldn’t before. I never knew there were so many statues in the temples! IT WAS TOO DARK TO SEE THEM.
There were banners hanging from the ceiling this whole time? WHO KNEW?
Sadly, not everything received updated visuals. The backgrounds and the main party characters look amazing, it’s true. But they didn’t bother to update any of the secondary character models, and it’s really, horribly, glaringly obvious. Every time Wakka has a conversation with the rest of his blitzball team, it looks like he’s a human interacting with a bunch of blow-up dolls. Or creepy robot people. Or mannequins.
I understand that it would have been a massive undertaking to remodel every single NPC in Spira, because there are a LOT of NPCs in Spira, but it’s a little jarring, especially when they talk and their mouths don’t really move.
Obviously, the main reason to play an HD Remaster is to experience the shiny new graphics, but there’s a lot of other little improvements sprinkled through the experience. The soundtrack was completely remixed and remastered, which isn’t generally super noticeable, although it certainly sounds crisp and wonderful. But they DID add electric guitars to the main battle theme, and let me tell you, that shit sounds AWESOME.
The user interface and menus are also completely redesigned. I never had a problem with the original UI design, but the new one is probably optimized for HDTVs, and it’s pretty and easy to read.
There is also a new Sphere Grid option available – the Expert Sphere Grid. I was pretty damn excited about the Expert Sphere Grid. The Expert grid is smaller, more compact, much more interconnected, and it opens up a wider range of character customization way earlier in the game. Like, immediately. You can send almost anyone down anyone else’s path. There’s still locks around some branches and more powerful abilities, but the possibilities are much more open. I’ve got Kimahri and Tidus both headed down the Tidus skill tree at the moment, because having two super strong, super fast doods that are hard to hit seems like a fantastic idea. Maybe I’ll make Rikku a Black Mage AND a Thief! The possibilities are endless!
There’s also some new abilities and items that allow you to farm specific types of spheres from enemies, which I think is an excellent addition to the game, particularly when used in tandem with the Expert Sphere Grid. I remember being irritated in past playthroughs if I ran out of Speed Spheres or Ability Spheres and just had to camp out on the Sphere Grid while my Sphere Levels accumulated uselessly, just waiting for someone to FINALLY drop the right kind of sphere before I could move on. No more! Now I can extract Speed Spheres to my heart’s content.
I have only played the first few hours of the game, so I haven’t gotten to experience any of the new endgame content from the International Version, but I am excited to fight me some Dark Aeons.
My one great disappointment in the HD Remaster is that they didn’t include the Japanese vocal track. That just would have been SO COOL if they had. The English voice acting isn’t terrible…okay, yeah, it’s pretty terrible. It was really good English voice acting for the time, mind you, but when compared to modern games like Bioshock Infinite or The Last of Us, the voice acting did not age well. Especially compared to the really excellent Japanese voice acting. It would have been a nice bonus to include the Japanese voice track, and I’m sad SquareEnix chose not to include it. According to this interview, it wasn’t possible due to the space restrictions for the PS Vita release. Ugh, really, guys? It’s not like anyone owns a Vita anyway, don’t base your decisions on the goddamn Vita. I think a lot more people would have bought the PS3 remaster if the Japanese voice tracks had been included. If only to avoid having to sit through this scene again:
Terrible voice acting aside, I am also excited to share the game with my husband, who tried to play the game once on my PS2, but got really fed up with blitzball and stopped playing. We’re playing the HD Remaster together, switching off every three save points (although our agreement states that I also have to do all the blitzball and the Cloister of Trails puzzles, because I know how to cheat at blitzball and I kind of like the puzzles). It’s great playing the game with someone who has no idea where the plot is going, and it makes me happy to see him forming attachments to some of my favorite characters, especially adorable, wonderful Yuna. He’s even stopped making fun of Tidus quite so much, now that Tidus’ face moves like a real person.
I am really excited to play through the rest of the game again. Every time I visit a new location, I am going to squeal like a little girl about how pretty it looks. I am going to find all of the ultimate weapons. I am going to get all of the secret aeons. I am going to murder all of the secret bosses. I am going to team up with my husband to level grind. And I am going to enjoy all of this game’s feels.
Let me just say this up front: I have never beaten a more frustrating game than Catherine.
I have played more frustrating games, certainly, but I got really frustrated and stopped playing those games. Because they were frustrating. Somehow, Catherine manages to stagger drunkenly along a thin line between controller-breaking, rage-inducing uber-frustration and enough delicious plot dangled in front of you to keep you playing.
Catherine was released back in 2011, and it was the first “next-gen” title developed by the Persona Team. I was pretty stoked about it when it came out, because I love me some Persona, and I was expecting more of the same. For those of you who haven’t played a Persona game, they are a fascinating mix of dating/school sim and hardcore dungeon crawler, in which you go to school and hang out with your friends by day and fight monsters by night. I absolutely love Persona 3 and 4, and they are hands-down some of the best games ever released on the PS2.
Catherine…is a very different game. You play as Vincent Brooks, an unmotivated 30-something who lives in a dingy apartment, drinks a lot, and has been dating a woman named Katherine for about five years. One night in his usual boozy hangout, the local dive bar called The Stray Sheep, he gets a little too drunk, meets a sexy little blonde named Catherine, and ends up taking her home for a one-night stand. That’s when the nightmares start: surreal dreams in which Vincent is forced to climb an impossibly tall tower with a bunch of humanoid, talking sheep who are all actually other men who are having the same dream. Sound weird enough, yet? Because it’s even weirder in practice than it sounds in theory.
The first thing you will notice about Catherine is that it is a really great-looking game. Sure, at this point, it’s last-gen, and it doesn’t do anything to really push the graphical capabilities of the PS3, but it’s incredibly stylish. There are quite a few excellent animated cutscenes by celebrated Japanese animation house STUDIO4°C, probably most famous for their work on the Animatrix. The in-game engine uses very crisp cell-shaded graphics, and all of the character models are really top-notch. I particularly enjoyed how well-animated the facial expressions on the character models were. It really made the cutscenes a joy to watch.
Which is good, because this game is at least 50% cutscenes. You are going to spend a lot of time watching the same people sit and talk to each other. In a lot of ways, this game was essentially an interactive anime soap opera. More than that, it was a really good anime soap opera, with a lot of unexpected twists and turns. The characters were interesting and varied, and their struggles seemed believable and real. I was really invested in Vincent and his relationship troubles, and I attribute much of this to the uncommonly excellent voice acting. I honestly cannot think of a single other game I have played where the voice acting was this strong across the board. Most games have one or two stand-out performances that make the voice acting tolerable, but Catherine’s voice acting was 100% awesome 100% of the time. Atlus really went out of their way to hire the best of the best in the industry, and it shows. Vincent, for instance, is voiced by Troy Baker, who you might recognize as the voice of Booker DeWitt, Joel from The Last of Us, and Hawkeye in the latest iteration of the Avengers cartoons. Michelle Ruff, who voices Katherine, has a Wikipedia page that could double as a list of anime classics, and has been in everything from Chobits to Trigun to Ghost in the Shell. Even my favorite voice actor Liam O’Brian makes an appearance!
So Catherine looks great and sounds great, but if that’s all it’s got going for it, Atlus should’ve just made an OVA and been done with it. How does it play?
The game is divided into nine days and nights. Each day, you watch a handful of cutscenes in which Vincent interacts with his friends and his girlfriend, Katherine. These cutscenes always culminate in a trip to the Stray Sheep, the bar at which Vincent and his friends hang out. You get to assume direct control of Vincent while he’s at the bar, and you can talk to other patrons, send texts to your girlfriend(s), drink a variety of alcohols, and play an arcade-style minigame (I love when video game characters get to play video games, it’s so meta). Each night, Vincent enters the nightmare realm, and you must help him conquer a set number of puzzle levels in order to survive that night’s ordeals.
So ask yourself: are you the kind of gamer that enjoys games with cutscenes? If you’re not, this isn’t the game for you. All of the daytime portions of the game consist of cutscenes and dialogue. Even the bits where you get to move Vincent around in the bar, you’re pretty much just moving him from one dialogue event to another. Every once in awhile, you get to chose how you will respond to something that someone says, but mostly you’re a passive receptacle for the admittedly interesting dialogue from other characters.
There are some fun little interactive touches: you get to check your in-game phone for texts and choose how Vincent responds to them; you get to order drinks for Vincent and get him drunk; and you can choose what music plays in the bar on the jukebox. But mostly what you get to do in the bar is listen to other people talk.
The meat of the game happens at night, during the nightmare sequences. And those puzzles…fuck. Man, fuck those puzzles.
It’s actually pretty difficult to explain the gameplay in the nightmare sections of the game. Just take a look at this video.
The object of the puzzle sections is to climb the tower as quickly as possible. You can only climb one block at a time (without a powerup, anyway), so the puzzle is figuring out how to manipulate the blocks in order to make stairs you can climb on. As the game progresses, more obstacles get thrown in your way, everything from murderous sheep, to blocks with spikes that shoot up and murder you, to enormous bosses that follow you and try to murder you. In short, everything is trying to murder you, and the only way to escape death is to outclimb it.
It’s actually pretty rewarding, once you get into the rhythm of it. Once you have a modicum of mastery over the controls, you kind of feel like a badass. The problem is that these puzzles are punishingly, retardedly, unimaginably difficult. And this is not just me being a pussy gamer. Catherine is renowned for it’s extremedifficulty among gamers, to the point that Altus actually released a patch after the game’s launch that added extra retries and a “Super Easy Mode.”
I was pretty proud of myself for playing the game in Easy mode, which sounds funny to say, but even on Easy mode, there were levels that I had to play fifteen or twenty times before I got through them. The game’s level of difficulty is a little weird, though, because it never becomes unplayable. You have so many retries that it’s almost impossible to get a true Game Over screen – I never saw one once.
Get used to seeing this screen, though.
I had 99 retries for most of the game. After you’ve played the same portion of the same level over twenty times and fallen to your death or mudered slightly differently each time, though, you get to the point of throwing your controller at something. Or someone. I broke finally during the last night’s levels. Near the end of the game, “mystery blocks” are introduced, blocks that don’t reveal their booby traps until you step on them.
See these? Fuck these.
So you never know if that block you need to step on in order to keep going is going to support your weight or break or even stab you with a million pointy knives. Or maybe eat you! Because that’s a thing. Blocks can eat you.
FUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUCK
So this was the point at which I turned on Super Easy Mode. In Super Easy Mode, you have access to a power up that allows you to climb three steps at once, which makes the game a cake walk. I used the power up in one area of one of the final levels that I just could NOT get past, mostly because all of the video playthroughs of the level that I could find seemed to hinge upon stepping on a block that just did not seem to exist in my game. After playing through that portion of the level 24 times (I counted), I screamed, waved my arms around a lot, and reset the game on Super Easy Mode. After using my cheating cheatery cheater powerup to get past that portion of the level, I am proud to say I did not use that power up again, even in the final, insanely frustrating boss battle in which I had to play the final portion of the level 31 times. Let me say that again: I had to play the final portion of the level THIRTY-ONE TIMES on SUPER EASY MODE. WTF, Atlus?
So I suppose the question is why? Why did I keep playing this sadistic game until the very end? That’s…a very good question. The story was excellent and I was genuinely surprised by some of its twists and turns. I liked Vincent, even though he was a totally incompetent shit in all aspects of his relationships. I could have watched a playthrough online, though, and experienced the story that way. However, one of the really cool things about Catherine is the way it handles its multiple endings.
It’s not a new thing for a game to have multiple endings. Games have been doing that since Chrono Trigger. And Chrono Trigger has like thirteen endings! Catherine only has nine. Catherine, however, determines how you get your ending based partly upon how you answer pointed relationship questions throughout the game. At the end of every level of the nightmare tower, Vincent enters into a little confession booth where he is presented with a question about relationships that he must answer. (These questions are slightly different every time; there were a few times where I had to reset my game after answering a question but before I had saved, and the next time I went into the confessional, I was presented with a different question.) The questions read like a surreal Cosmo quiz, things like “Is romance annoying? I hate it! or I Wuv it!” or “You must kiss one of these. Choose: a cephelopod-like alien or a beautiful corpse.” Your answers determine your positioning upon a spectrum of Order and Chaos, which in turn determines which ending you get.
I was genuinely curious to find out which ending I would get by answering each question honestly.
(For the record, I hate romance, I would rather kiss a living alien, and I’d rather have a short and full life.)
The other cool thing that the game does with your answers is that it shares them with the Playstation Network. So after each level, you get to see a graph representing the answers other players gave on their first playthrough. It’s a cool little feature, one that I didn’t ever know I wanted in a game, but now that I’d seen it, I’d like to see it more.
I ended up getting one of the “bad” endings, which I won’t spoil here, and it was pretty lame considering all the work I put into the game, but it was still a really cool experience.
So there were a lot of things both to love and hate about Catherine, but one thing I haven’t touched upon yet is its somewhat problematic representation of women. I realize that the preceding sentence has probably raised some defensive hackles, but I’ve just got to say, this was a really weird game to play as a woman. It was entirely about love and relationships, but from a firmly male perspective. The game does not pass the Bechdel test, for one thing, but I don’t feel like that’s the real issue here. Vincent, our main character, IS a man, and the game is presented from his perspective entirely, so it makes sense that the player wouldn’t be privy to any dialogue that didn’t directly concern Vincent or his situation. It also makes sense from a narrative perspective that the player doesn’t get to see any aspect of Katherine’s or Catherine’s lives that isn’t related to Vincent, because again, the game is completely about Vincent’s journey.
That being said, the game seemed to have a really weirdly conservative picture of how relationships should work. The binary nature of the questions meant that either you were a good person for liking marriage or a right bastard for disliking the concept, which sort of sidesteps the entire continuum of potentially healthy human relationships. It also set up a binary between the two extreme female archetypes of virgin and whore: the idea that women come in two flavors, fun-loving sexpot and practical, frigid bitch, without really an in-between option, and which would you prefer? Neither Catherine or Katherine seemed like a real person in the same way that the male characters did, and although I feel like the excellent voice acting helped to make them seem at least believable, they still came off as caricatures.
Honestly, neither relationship was at ALL healthy, even though I felt like the game “approved” of Vincent and Katherine’s relationship. But Vincent and Katherine had really serious communication issues from the very beginning, even before Vincent started messing around, and they didn’t even seem to like each other very much or have anything in common. Catherine at least seemed to share some interests with Vincent (namely drinking) but their relationship was also plagued by communication and consent issues. Honestly, even though I got a “bad” ending, it seemed like one of the best possible endings for Vincent, because it seemed pretty clear to me from the get-go that Vincent ought not to be with either of these women, nor any woman, til he gets his own shit sorted.
So should you play this game? I do not have a resounding “yes” to give you, but nor do I have an emphatic “no.” As much of a pain in the ass as this game was, I feel like an awesome badass for conquering it, even on Easy/Super Easy Mode. I ran a motherfucking gauntlet, and I made it through. The voice acting, graphic design, and story are definite selling points. But this is absolutely not a game for everyone. Or even most people.
But I’ve got to say, I’m really glad it exists. I’m glad someone pitched a crazy-ass game about marriage and relationships and murdering sheep, and someone at Atlus was like, “Yeah, that! Let’s make that game.”