Well, that was easy. Less than 14 hours and I'm done with the game. No, really,
done. There are no side quests, there's no New Game+, there are no towns to visit, literally like three people to talk to in the whole game beyond generic same-model characters with snippets of throwaway dialogue. No weapons or armor to buy/manage (there are some accessories like earrings and such, but I never really bothered).
Oh, and there's no party. There are two characters through the whole game that share health, magic and command points. If one gets hit by one of the
three different kinds of incapacitation effects, you get to watch them both spawn in and then just sit there after picking all their commands. It's infuriating.
I absolutely destroyed every single boss, but ironically it was random enemies that killed me a couple of times because they could just haul off and hit me for like 20% of my life until I leveled up. One could grind, but once you hit a certain level you simple don't get XP from enemies anymore.
This was a PSP game and at some point Hit Maker decided they were just going to move it to the PS3 without actually considering what that would mean for the scope and presentation of the game.
There's nothing offensively bad about the game, honestly -- in fact the localization actually dips into some deeper vocabulary than you're likely to hear in most games. The voices, too, are good, but none of the characters is anything more than a trope cutout right down to the smart-ass main character. There's no character development, no real story, no reason to actually spend even 14 hours with the game.
Oh, but there is
one seriously awesome thing about the game: one of the battle tunes is fucking
awesome. I wonder if it's on the official site, because it's the only thing I'd recommend the game for, honestly. Well, that and the battle system.
Lain said:
I'd like to read a more detailed explanation. The battle system seemed interesting from the last video I saw.
It is, actually. You can target enemies' individual body parts as you've probably seen, and there's a very specific order that you have to follow if you want to get a BINGO, which locks in that as the proper hit at the proper time. I know it's a lame comparison, but think of it kind of like the sort of hunting and process of elimination you'd see in Sudoku; each body part has to be hit at the right time in sequence, which turns BINGOs into COMBOS.
Those fuel the bonus meter (up to 999) and end up doling out
massive XP bonuses (I went up
six levels on the last boss because the meter was at 999 and I was nearly one-shotting even the toughest common enemies at that point). Once you've figured out the parttern for a particular enemy (and there are sometimes multiple versions of the same enemy), you can bank the sequence and pull it up with the shoulder buttons to use to crank out a huge COMBO.
Oh, and since all the stupid Trophies are secret, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do to get the last eight. There's literally nothing else to do in the game. It's over. Kaput. Finito. And here I thought it'd be an easy Platinum...