Noted ♪

I was finally able to start Xenoblde Chronicles yesterday, and while I only played for about 90 minutes, I already have a few things to say. First, I'm clearly not far enough to find all the advertised points of "revolution" here, but that will come with time.

So here we go!

- STORY: Clearly there's not much of one yet, but that's to be expected. What's interesting, though, is that when I start a new JRPG, I make sure I have at least two hours to do so, since there's usually a ton of cutscenes, followed by either slow-moving tutorial-type battles or slow-moving plot points to get you accustomed to the game. You also want to get to at least the first save point, and sometimes you have to wait awhile. Xenoblade took like 20 minutes to get from the opening cutscenes to a point where I was allowed to save. Color me surprised.
- GRAPHICS: The graphics are, as said by the producer, not one of the main factors here. In fact, the renders are pretty Gamecube-y. This really isn't a big deal except that the main girl's eyes are weird and disproportionately huge, which looks pretty strange and almost freakish compared to the others.
- LOADING TIMES: There is no loading that I've encountered! The game loads up, and that's it. You book it through the field into a different field? No loading. You enter a town? No loading. I vaguely remember this being the case when my friends played games like World of Warcraft (I've never played MMOs myself), but it's a pretty new thing for JRPGs and makes things a lot smoother. It's surprising what a difference it makes!
- BATTLE: There is no battle screen. Think of Final Fantasy XII; it's similar to that, except with a different interface, obviously. And although the commands and the issuing of them is different, the fighting feels pretty similar to XII's, too.
- LOCALIZATION: This is a big deal for me. I've heard the localization is iffy in places, but so far, only found that this is the case in battle. (And believe me, I scrutinize basically every single comma and line of dialogue.) This localization was done in Europe, and so everyone is British and so are some of the spellings. (IE: "Learnt".) Except for the battle quotes, though, I have been okay with the localization job. I think one of the characters actually has a line like, "We'll just keep getting better and better and better and better!" and it's pretty weird, but again, this is just the battle quote stuff.
- EXPLORATION: Obviously I haven't been playing long enough to do much of this, but it's very much worth mentioning. I dicked off from my story goal right after Party Member #2 left me, and I wandered to an area left of the actual city. I fought a frog because I was level 5 and cocky. :U Frog killed me. "Oh no," I thought. "When did I last save? Back at the beginning somewhere?" I waited for my RPG punishment: having to reload from my save file. And it didn't happen. I was plunked back at the city entrance, no harm done.

In the game world, you pass landmarks--fountains, entrance ways, big rocks, noteworthy shops--and if you die, there is no horrendous punishment. You're simply sent back to the last one you passed. (And you're alerted whenever you pass one, too, so there's no guessing.)

This is honestly so far the absolute best thing I've seen in this entire 90 minutes of game. Holy snap. I want every JRPG to learn to do something similar. Everyone knows the woe of sidequesting and then dying accidentally and having to redo a bunch of stuff. It's a pain, and if this game can do something about it, so can others.

This feature, in conjunction with your ability to save almost anywhere at all through the menu, will make me much more inclined to jump down cliffs, try to swim in water, try to reach distant viewpoints, etc., all because I'm not afraid of running into Level 60 monsters and dying. Freaking amazing.

That's pretty much all I can discuss at this point, but there will be more! I'll keep watching especially for the points I remember the producer talking about in the interview I read so I can comment on those specific things. Looking forward to it!

So my copy of Xenoblade Chronicles came on Friday and this morning I put aside time to start it. Aaaaand the Wii wouldn't read the disc. It would read other discs, however, so I called the 800 number. It turns out the Xenoblade disc is a double-layer disc, etc. etc., and so some Wiis have difficulty reading the disc. It usually means the lens needs to be cleaned, or replaced.

But, since my Wii is only failing to read that particular disc, this apparently counts as a problem I can have fixed for free. (However, if the Wii had ceased to read discs altogether, I would've had to pay for repairs/shipping, which totaled around $100CAD. Yikes, close call.)

Anyway, I guess I lucked out? However, this still means I have to ship everything out, and the whole process of shipping and repairs takes around 10 days, so I won't be starting Xenoblade any time soon. What matters, though, is that:

a) I didn't have to pay a bunch of additional money, and
b) I'll have time to finish Tales of Graces first.

I am side-questing to death in said game and it's the best.

I realize my LJ is primarily videogame TL;DR while my Tumblr is for internet nonsense and Homestuck, but I would also like to mention that I got my totally awesome red Converse hightops in the mail yesterday, and my Eclectica Jade costume is henceforth complete. Yaaaaay.

I'm going to commandeer my lovely friend Kamala's photography skills and hopefully get some nice pictures of the cosplay before I go to the con in May. :>

(Said con is Otafest, if anyone on my f-list is from Calgary and might be going. I can't remember, sob. If you're going, PM meeee.)

I finally started seriously playing Tales of Graces f this week! It actually got here on release day (I was surprised, too), but I was a little over-engrossed with Avatar at the time, so I didn't do too much in-game. Now that I'm done Avatar, though, I've been playing regularly.

I think they really did a good thing by trying to mix up the battle system a little. Each character plays distinctly differently and has different nuances to their play style, the world map is a decided improvement (though approximately on par with Vesperia's, regardless).

However, I think Tales Of needs to reconsider its story-writing strategy.
( TL;DR with no spoilers. )

Wow, I organize my thoughts really poorly.

Before I stop, I just want to add that Graces is by no means a bad game. The core of any game is, well, gameplay, and it does that really well. There's a lot to collect and find and make, and the fighting is fun. If you've never played a Tales game, you're not as likely to see everything coming from 50 miles away--maybe just 40 instead. ;)

But it's solid, and the PS3 needs more JRPGs, even if they're a little predictable.

I just realized I should use my procrastinatory (lol made-up word) Thursday mornings at the museum for updating my journal. (Wow, now I sound like a horrible employee, but there isn't a lot to do here.) 8Db

I've happily been taking advantage of the PSN's demos, since they let me try stuff for free with no actual commitment. Yaaaay. Stuff I tried recently:

Sonic 4: I'm not trying to knock the potential quality of fangames or anything, but this game is... pretty much as bad as a fangame. And not a good fangame--an average one. The graphics are really blah and so is the level design. This would be okay except that you have to pay actual money for it. I'm pretty forgiving of Sonic game mediocrity (and platforming mediocrity in general, actually), but this is so mediocre that I was actually kind of horrified. I showed it to friends just so they could see how blah it was. The backgrounds sort of reminded me of Sonic 3D Blast, and not in a good way.

Rayman Origins: I... suck at platformers. A lot. But the demo for this was a decent length, and was quite pretty. The character animations are nice and clean, and the locals are really, really lovely. Also, they have this cool ambiance going on with the weird and well-varied music. The situations you're put in are kind of interesting, too, especially for me, since I've never played a Rayman game. (Yes, really.) My friend and I kept laughing and saying, "What's going on?" and "Is that a _____?" and stuff like that. It was great.

Scott Pilgrim: I also suck at beat-'em-ups, and I was also playing alone, so this was really just frustrating for me and not really fun at all. If you like pummeling, though, you might like it. The music and visuals are totally amazing, regardless. Really good style.

I recommend just going crazy and trying a bunch of demos of things. They're free. They're accessible. You might find something you like. It's win-win!

I'm going to start cross-posting from now on, so if you don't know me from LJ/didn't read my LJ stuff, you might occasionally be slightly out of the loop regarding my game blogging. If that happens, please just check out said blog. :>

I'll be continuing my TL;DR about Final Fantasy XIII-2 shortly, now that I've actually done more things in-game.