I’m sorry Dianne, please stop crying.

I had a nice stretch of free time this week and basically marathoned my way through UnchainBlades EXXiV. I’m on the 5th dungeon, a nice beautiful sunny change from all the underground doom and gloom. I’m a little sad though, because they added some anime harem pick-a-girl crap after chapter 4, and I went and picked the wrong girl! Not only the wrong girl, but the worst girl of all – the tsundere. At least I made a save right before the choice, so I can go back some day and get Dianne’s ending.

Anything that has changed in the past 25 hours:

– I remembered the main guy’s name: Ryuga. I’m probably going to forget it again 5 minutes after I finish the game. Now I know why companies use funny names like Squall and Raguna and Crono.

– The whale dungeon really is a lovely place. I’d love to have a picnic or something there, sipping tea with one hand, looking out over the ocean, fending off monsters with my other hand…

– Scrap what I said about people not making stupid wishes in this game. They’re almost as bad as those in the previous game. We have a kid that uses the wish to cure his toothache, and yet another brother-sister pair who waste their wishes on cancelling each other’s out. It’s only now, after 45 hours of fluff and nonsense, that we’re getting to the meat of the story. Obvious padding is obvious.

– What’s even worse is that this time the main character has a very important reason for making a wish. Yes, he finally came out and told us what the curse was about. As soon as he turns into an adult, he’s going to go crazy and destroy all kinds of stuff and then die very quickly after that. The other two main characters also have fairly serious circumstances to deal with, so it’s highly unbelievable how they keep giving their wishes away to idiots who they know are just going to waste them. It was forgivable in UnchainBlades Rexx, but now it’s just stupid.

– Special sidequest options known as “Bond quests” that supposedly foster inter-team spirit. Or something worthless like that. The quests aren’t hard to complete, but all they do is unlock relatively useless skills on the Skill Map. Obvious afterthought is obvious.

– Using different designers for each character worked out okay in Rexx. I probably wouldn’t even have known if I hadn’t been told. But this time it’s really easy to see – and hard to look at. What a mess. Jeeq and Mint might as well be from different games, and Sophia looks really weird from the side while no one else has that problem, etc etc:

– Game difficulty hasn’t fallen off the cliff yet, but it’s teetering dangerously close to the edge. Ever since I got all three parties together in dungeon and unlocked the second/third Burst Levels for most characters, most battles have been mere formalities. The Nahash dungeon bosses were the weakest I’ve faced in either game. But then I barged into a room with a Special Follower and Holy— ABORT! ABORT! ABORT! I’ll be back though. With an axe.

– I can’t remember whether the previous game had them or not, but UnchainBlades EXXiV has an option for combo burst attacks that give you 2x EXP for finishing a battle with them. Guess what I always finish boss battles with now? 😀 It’s kind of cheating really… or it would be cheating if the bosses weren’t so stingy with the EXP. What is it with developers designing something awesome, then expecting gamers to use it and therefore nerfing the awesome option to compensate? It seems illogical, but maybe that’s just me.

In general my overall impression so far is that EXXiV is a slightly improved Rexx. Slightly easier, a lot more user-friendly, but with a worse story (because they actually added a story this time) and slightly worse characters. There’s not much to choose between the two, but Rexx gets the slight edge because of the freshness factor. EXXiV is very been-there-done-that. I’ll save any other complaints for when I actually finish the game, which shouldn’t be long now at the rate I’m going.

Related posts:

UnchainBlades Rexx – Almost done (spoilers) 20 hours into UnchainBlades EXXiV 65 hours into UnchainBlades EXXiV + Arc Rise Fantasia update Unchainblades EXXiV – Pretty good all around