FF 13- Up to the middle of the Airship dungeon. Game plots along nicely, although sometimes when it tries to do serious plot it comes out as an overmelodic joke. So far it's done decent at avoiding stagnation in it's battle system, although it would have done really well for chapters 4-6 to be 20-25% shorter. Lightning smashes worlds.
ToV- Just beat the tower. Barbatos would have been an awesome fight if he kept his aqua-powered chain saw (I mean...the fight was decent enough anyways! But would have been fun to see him lugging that around). But solid boss fights are something the game has done very well except for the hell wolf of course! Fun game, although very Tales. I was very, very, very happy to see the general scene after the Tower (And generally, seeing RPG heroes act like grownups capable of making tough decisions is great. Even if the decision was only made because of stupid non-sensical law systems!). Generally thinking that party now is going to be Yuri/Judy/Estelle/Rita. Seems like in terms of other fighter PCs that aren't Yuri, Repede has the speed, Judy has the combos, Karol has some smashing and gets some durability stuff earlier and light healing, and Raven has versatility (magic, range, status)? That covers it well?
Banter attempts sometime come off as really odd and stilted. Some of Estelle-Yuri's end battle interactions just have ceased after being thrown out once. She's naive, not an imbecile!
Oh yeah, battle system feels like it has too many damn buttons. Fatal Strikes are very unforgiving time wise. Does this alter at all? (As if my wall of text and likely horrid grammar will even let people get to this question!)
Also mentioned this in chat, but yeeee gods that is a horrible fail on the singer's part on the intro song. Well, the translation is pretty bad too. Just really stands out because the voice acting is great, but the intro song was translated via Babelfish and the singer clearly couldn't speak any English.
Finally, no scene skip? Am I missing the method? There are games that still don't have this?
LO- So reminiscent of LoD in a lot of ways. From weird battle specific things like timed hits (Although...I hate LO's system. Why make a timed hit system where you have to hold a button down and then release it? Why not just hit the button at the right time. And then have it in a turn based system where you won't know exactly when the person is acting. Yeah, stupid planning/obvious flaw), the overall clunkiness, and the fact that it's the system makers attempts to make an expensive high-powered RPG (Okay, maybe that alone makes the other comparisons feel so much larger).
Up to the mountains. Something about the game makes it feel very directionless (Well, the city part felt like I had to run around too much. Mountain part...I seemed to have hit a notable dead end). Maps in the game suck badly. Town maps that don't auto note things like shops and inn when the game's graphics don't make it fully evident? I uh...well, that's actually really weird.
I really, really like the music so far. I also like that the game was able to mention sex, even if it a throwaway! Just because making games where adults can be adult in some manner=great.
