Legaia 2: Complete!
Mystic Arts wasted Avalon so hard. Go go Tireless Ribbons.
I enjoyed the game. It's very mediocre, but it's good at what it tries to do. The Art comboing system is easy and intuitive and the encounter rate is low enough that sitting through the ridiculously long Arts animations for the entire game doesn't get as repetitive as I had predicted it would. Though by the final dungeon, you can bet I was all about the No Encounters skill. The battle system had just worn out its welcome by then.
The game's story was... there. It was more about its characters, which were far better than I was expecting considering that -none- of them fell into anime tropes that I normally like. Lang was saved by his dialogue options. Kazan was awesome by virtue of turning the story into a martial arts flick. Sharon was genuinely funny a few times. Ayne was just kinda there, but his unexpected fatherhood thing was kinda cool. The less said about Maya, the better, though. Avalon was just kinda there, too. Velna somehow managed to be a more deep villain there. Oddly, the three members of the quirky miniboss squad were far more developed, and really lent to the amusing nature of the earlygame. So... a decent cast overall, though nothing special.
The game feels a lot like Grandia to me. A simple adventure with colorful characters on both sides of the conflict. Although in Legaia 2's favor is the fact that it had actually competent challenges to overcome in terms of gameplay. Probably the game's strongest point is that it is well-balanced throughout. Or maybe it's not as well-balanced as I think, I didn't figure out Mystic Arts until Avalon, so that might have changed my opinion.
tl;dr: 4.5/10 game, possibly 5 if I'm feeling generous. It exceeded my expectations, but that's not saying much.
NieR (PS3)
Immediately jumped into the English version of NieR after beating it.
I had played the first half of this game in Japanese, but as I don't have an HDTV, I could hardly read any of the text, and had to muddle through what was going on based entirely on the fairly rare voiced sections.
Playing it in English, I -still- can't read most of the text because developers seem to think that everyone who buys the new systems has an awesome TV so they can make the text super-small. It was hard enough in 360's ToV, but apparently we've gotten even further into the realm of microscopic text. It gives me a headache to play it, but at least my native language is more intelligible in too-small text. Dear god, I have no idea how even native Japanese speakers can make out kanji in that font size.
Really good English VA work in this, though. Kaine's opening spiel of bile was so vicerally entertaining and convincing that I'm glad I decided to give the English version a whirl. I may buy this game once I return this copy to Tal.
Also: Oh this soundtrack. Best OST since Katamari Damacy? Game is worth it solely for the soundtrack. The fact that it's a fun game is just a bonus.
