I have a bad cold and my wrist hurts, so I don’t feel like playing anything right now.
When I’m better, I’ll be playing the following over the next couple of months. New Year’s Resolutions? What New Year’s Resolution?
1. Star Ocean Second Evolution
2. Valkyrie Profile Lenneth
3. Princess Maker 3
4. Last Bullet – Already started. Rather boring visual novel
5. Avalon Code & Shiren the Wanderer – giving them a second chance like I’d promised.
Blehhh… zzzz… So who won the World Cup, btw?
Wow, the first three look really interesting!!! I loved Valkyrie Profile, it has a unique gameplay, so many people drop it because of the lack of directions. I’ve played it three times, so I’ll be waiting for your veredict.
It’s precisely because of the lack of direction that I’ve held off on playing the game for so long. I hear it’s hard to get anything/anyone good without a FAQ, but I don’t want to play a game for the first time with a guide. But I’ll do it anyway (eventually) and report whatever happens. Stay tuned.
The only thing you’ll miss without a guide is the good ending, I think. I guess you might miss some treasure in the dungeon or something.
It’s literally impossible to miss stuff like characters. The game just kind of asks you to press Start at the World Map, watch a cutscene and then go pick them up.
As long as the other endings are at least decent I guess I can live with that.
One of them is ridiculous. Still, Valkyrie Profile recruiting gameplay is sort of cyclic. It shouldnt be a problem. The real issue is that the juicy parts of the story will be shown during the “true ending”. Some stuff required to achieve that aint very intuitive. Still, its an amazing game, i play everytime they release those limited edition red beer arround here (bock kaiser).
World cup is in the semifinals, tomorrow will be Brazil x German and next will be Argentina x Netherlands.
Anyway, I never understood the appeal of Star Ocean. Xenosaga is my “space opera” jrpg.
Star Ocean is Star Ocean in name only. In SO2 most of the characters don’t even know there are other planets out there. But we gamers should be used to wacky Japanese names by now.
Honestly the normal ending is really unsatisfying and just a big “ARE YOU SURE AREN’T MISSING/FORGETTING SOMETHING GO PLAY THE GAME AGAIN”
And the other ending is basically just a glorified game over for failing the game.
WHAT.
DO NOT WANT.
……I’ll think about this a little more.
Valkyrie Profile was neat, but the best ending requires a guide and the game is kind of hard to grasp at the beginning. I was only going to play through it once so I used a guide. Game was around 20 hours long for one playthrough so it’s not a particularly long or draggy game.
20-40 hours is my ideal RPG length. I’ll start it once I finish SO2, which doesn’t seem very long either.