Dragon Age: Some kid gave me his grandfather's sword after I persuaded him that it will help in my glorious fight against the forces of evil. I immediately sold that shit to buy a gift for Shale: An amethyst. He liked it.
Whenever there's an active stat raising spell on a character, there's a big graphical effect. This means that 100% of the time there's a ridiculous big pink cloud following all of my characters, because of Song of Courage. This carries over in cutscenes, meaning that I can't take any of this game's cutscenes seriously anymore.
This would have been MUCH better in FF6: Blind your team -> sunglasses on everyone during the whole game. OR: Blind Strago, then solo the game with him. Ooooh yeah.
Finished the Darkspawn Chronicles DLC too. Nothing noteworthy about it, aside from the dog being named Barkspawn.
Game of the day:
Nier
Nier's the swan song of not-great people. Those guys focused on what they did best, and ignored the very obvious shortcomings.
Case in point, graphics. The ground textures are unacceptable:
But the game has breathtaking scenery, like in Aire village.
I had unreasonable expectations after the beginning - It was simply amazing. Gameplay was, if not great, extremely varied and fun (It's usually a God of War clone, but there's a lot of magic available, there are elements of bullet hell shooters, Diablo and text adventures), music was perfect, graphics were lovely, storyline was very intriguing and unusual, bosses were great, etc. There are three levels of difficulty, I appreciated the challenge in hard mode very much, while easy is a cakewalk, as this should be.
Unfortunately, Cavia has a tight budget and lacks good writers. The entire second half of the game is a Zelda like gather-the-crystals fetchquest made of nothing but recycled dungeons (granted, you can visit new areas in said recycled dungeons)
Only the final dungeon is new, but that's where the story can't keep its facade and goes downhill. Cavia is made of trolls (see the other topic), they didn't make a game around an awesome plot idea, they made a game around the idea of deleting all your saves at the end. (and then Square Enix had them stay reasonable about it, I guess)
The ending is riddled with RPG cliches, including a nonsensical betrayal.
Devola and Popola... I hate you. All your music too. You can then replay the game to get other endings (which I did), but that doesn't wash away the sour taste in your mouth.
Still, it is the journey that matters in the end, and I prefer the strange little Nier to mediocre games... And average games. Actually, I prefer it to a lot of great games too. Try it out if you want something different. I'd give it something like a 7-8/10.
PS: Dragons are to Dragon Age what Boars are to this game.
This should have been named Boar Age instead.
