AI: Finished. Was originally planning on a Meeple Rant, but then figured it just wasn't worth my time. So a bit of a mini rant? Yeah. Going to avoid specific character thoughts, just since its better for all of us. I'll just look at the game's strengths/issues/whatever as a whole.
Game started off alright. Had some neat ideas, good character interaction, decent documentation, what have you. Seemed like a polished RPG...
Then somehow, things go wrong. Gameplay doesn't evolve at all; it stays the same generic battles every time, even to the point of how the game likes to REUSE RANDOMS. No, I don't mean "lets take a random, change its name, color scheme, and up its stats some, and pretend its something new!" I mean "lets use an enemy from 4 dungeons ago in this dungeon, COMPLETELY UNSCALED UP!" This was stupid as some randoms felt unfairly tough in some areas cause they were scaled for later parts, and others felt moronically easy. I found it insulting that in the second to last dungeon, you're facing Punis and Red Punis. I don't care if Punis are cute and silly, YOU DON'T DO SOMETHING LIKE THIS. Ok, Breath of Fire 2 did have E. Sludges in the final dungeon's last floors, but...they were a rare encounter and just an easter egg of sorts; and it was offset by the rest of the dungeon being respectable. AI meanwhile? The difference in randoms is staggering. Some randoms are just stupidly annoying to beat, for all the wrong reasons ("Hey look! We go first...WAIT! FAST ATTACK! one of us gets an extra turn! Oh yeah, we all have Quick action, so we act twice! And there's 4 of us! Have fun with taking 10 hits before you can even act ^_^" No, I'm not exaggerating, there really is a random like this.)
Other flaws it had? LIMITED RESSURECTION. This is a PS2 RPG, you don't give your only source of resurrection to one of your frailer PCs whose also a complete slug. Now, you could say "some other RPGs do that!" and you'd be right...except most other RPGs have either some sort of limited resurrection item to make up for that, OR allow you to plan around the character not dying. Fire Emblems are a good example; yes, there's no resurrection whatsoever (or in FE4's case, you have one shot of it before you have to spend 30k to repair its sole charge), which yes, is annoying. Except its an SRPG. Which means you can plan around avoiding it. Enemies aren't just targeting things blindly, you can see who they can attack, and can try and work your way around it, either by shoving someone in their path, moving out of the way, etc. You can plan around this. Or even Dragon Quests come to mind. They tend to have GOOD resurrection from one PC (ahahahah to Vivify), but they still give you stuff like World Tree Leaves to at least bring back that one ally, or they still have Vivify, for all that its a piece of crap spell and fails at life, for some chance to erase it.
AI completely lacks BOTH of those. If Klein gets rushed in a turn, and enemy damage isn't always insignificant, especially on bosses (who sometimes come with support or randomly like to cheat the game's shoddily handled CTB) mind, there's a good chance he can die, and BAM! Now you're fighting with no healer (until 80% of the way through the game when Marietta joins, who has passable ST healing), and characters can't live.
"But there are items!" There are...but this game's documentation fails to badly that it doesn't even tell you HOW potent the item is until you use it...and items are randomized. Now, yes, there are games that don't do that either...except most of those games are nice enough to have limited variety of healing items, like there will be only 2 or 3 and you learn how good they are quickly. AI though? They randomize how good they are, AND you can't tell. Only ones I found that were consistently adequate were Tingleberry Something (heals Mana and HP a decent amount), and "Goodbye, Pain!" Teddy Bear Roll sometimes would be good but even it craps out.
I could be more forgiving if I found these issues on an NES RPG...or heck, an SNES one (Earthbound has the "Lots of healing items, no way of knowing how good!" thing, for example...but its less annoying since it lacks the resurrection issue), but that's not the case.
The battle system itself wasn't bad at its core, but...egads, would it really hurt to be some sort of turn indicator? I mean, have a bar below each PC showing when they're turn is about to occur, or just a number saying how many turns til it is? Its insulting cause its a game on the same system with a similar battle system to...say...Shadow Hearts 2 and 3, FFX, Wild ARMs 4/5 and MMXCM. Everyone one of these games uses CTB to some degree, and they all have TURN INDICATORS, so you can at least plan things out. AI completely failed at this. As such, enemies would often cheat the system, while you kind of couldn't.
Game's plot is just bad. Its a step above Dragon Quest level. I'm not being hateful, its just the truth. Dragon Quest plot is essentially "Run around gathering items or doing random fetch quests until finally you meet some guy who tells you about the ancient evil, find object to defeat ancient evil, go to his domain, kick his ass, BAM! DRAGON QUEST PLOT!" I more or less summed up how DQ1-7 were (for all that 4 and 5 were less offensive about it.)
AI? Its the exact same deal, the difference is that there's a storyline, but its hidden underneath all the useless fetch questing, and shows up once every like 5 hours or so. At least the game had actual dialog, so the scenes weren't to bad, but I felt such a sense of futility as I went from one area to the next, never actually making any progress. I mean, you have one massive fetchquest to get to Avenberry...then you have another to make that Ruby Prism RIGHT AFTER? Shit, not even BoF2 pulled THAT crap. BoF2 had the decency to make its first fetch quest meaningful by introducing the characters, and then have a decent amount of game after the second one (everything from Farm Town and on is actually not bad, honestly, just doesn't quite make up for the all the BS before it starting off with the Post Trout nonsense.) AI just said "ok, now go back home and...oh shit! MONSTERS! Beat them? Good...now go to the final dungeon chain!" which...was short, and you didn't really learn much more.
I know you might be thinking "comparing it to Dragon Quest plot? Harsh..." but...well...
Lets compare it to Wild ARMs 4 for a second, a game whose plot gets viewed as mediocre. WA4, yes, you're going from location to location, with no real objective in mind...but the game actually throws things like Brionac at you to keep a whole idea of villains. You are constantly running into these members of an opposing organization, so at very least, you KNOW you have an enemy.
AI? "Lets fight Mull! Ok, by fight, we mean he's just going to be a backdrop reason for all the nonsense we're going through!" That's actually the whole story right there. You're running around doing random fetchquests to save Lita, then beat up the bad guy...
You know, I'm wrong; this isn't like Dragon Quest plot. ITS LIKE BEYOND THE BEYOND PLOT. Change "Lita" to "Samson" and you have the SAME FUCKING STORY. I guess AI does have an actual back story to it, but I find myself lacking the ability to care about back story to a game with little ACTUAL story. Final Fantasy 5 is a good example of this (for all that the back story aspect is why its plot owns FF4 <_< >_>), where there is a decent amount of back story (for a game of its era especially), but the lack of worthwhile characters or plot makes the back story kind of meaningless; felt like the same problem AI had. When the game revealed a plot point, my general thought was "yes, that explains that, but why do I find myself lacking the ability to care?"
The shop idea was neat with synthesizing, and the character progression system wasn't bad. Actually the latter I have no actual beefs with; it was entirely inoffensive, though could have used a few more tweaks to make it more interesting, but whatever, didn't really care that much. The Synthesizing needed more documentation to really work, and needed less redundant items. Do you really need to make THAT many "Physical Damage!" items from Veola's shop? I suppose the excuse is "AI has only a 9 item per inventory limit!" but...frankly, I call that a flaw more so than anything else. What? SD3 did the same?
Yes, it did...at the same time, SD3 also let you hold onto 99 extra of that item which you could refill between fights. The inventory in AI was so clunky as a result; you have so much items that you're navigating menus a lot longer than you want too, and the only sensible way to find something is via Alphabetical sorting.
For all that I am bashing the game to hell, its still probably 4/10 material. Its...similar to Disgaea either. Well done characters and interaction (though Norn needed to not exist; complete waste of space), but so many other issues compiled on top of it. Except it didn't succeed as well at areas that Disgaea did (its hardly an insult to say "Worse Cast than Disgaea" or "Less funny" or whatever <_<.) ALTERNATIVELY, its a Lunar game, except with really bad game play and lacks the simplicity charm.
So...yeah, got that out of my system. Yes, that's a mini rant; I didn't pick apart every single detail, go into character by character analysis, etc. I stand by that the game showed promise at first and I was actually kind of interested, but after a point, everything just kind of fell apart, and the game became a chore.
Also, the final boss (first fight in a while resembling anything remotely fun!) was at least interesting, cause he didn't cheat the hell out of the system I felt some bosses were (*waves hi to Prism*) Granted, the whole fight is "never let Klein get hit with Elemental Extraction" which translates to "Don't use Klein unless you absolutely must have MT Healing or Resurrection or he's out of both and thus is just another PC with damage!" Pretty much went the entire fight with Lita/Delsus/Marietta, Lita going all out offensive, Delsus being a bit of item tossing and damage, Marietta tossing healing around left and right unless she got a rare turn where she could sneak in some damage. Also, he needed to have more direct damage than MT 3HKO off a charge time move to actually be threatening. Its sad when you have MT HP Critical, but you can't take advantage of it at all (and not for the same reasons Kefka couldn't; that was just being in a game with absolutely ruthless healing.) Similarly, its also sad when you have a move that does damage *AND* random status which is MT, and the move fails at life (partially cause the only status that do stuff is sleep and poison...and they mesh together HORRIBLY since Poison Damage wakes you up, and doesn't take a turn doing so, and Poison damage isn't enough to really be threatening if you're constantly healing anyway.)
Um...yeah, ending the rant here before I ramble more, so instead...
God Hand: Got back to this! Beat the Wrestling Gorilla, and went to fight...7? 8? in the Arena just cause I figured I'd grab some quick cash.
