Hey! It's been a while. I've been both busy and incredibly sick, a smashing combination for productivity, especially with things that I don't actually have to do like this blog! But I'm back, and am writing this time about

GAME OF THE DAY: KINGDOMS OF AMALUR: RECKONING

I'm just going to come out and say that the Chakrams are pretty much the coolest weapon. Moving on!

KOA:R is very much a video game. I know that might sound a little weird, but it's honestly one of the things that this game wears on it's sleeve. It is a game, and it is proud of it. One notable example would be that no matter how you build your character, you have a shield, and you're able to bring it out pretty much whenever no matter what weapon you're holding. It just appears out of thin air really, with your weapon magically disappearing along with it. Which, I, for one, am really thankful for, because that shield is damn useful, and two-handed weapons are cool and it'd be a drag if you couldn't block with them like in most games. Of course, in most games, it's like that for a reason. In this game, everything about the combat was really built so you can have fun.

I built myself a Battlemage type character in my 30 or so hour run. She uses Battlehammers and Greatswords, along with a set of chakrams always ready in the secondary slot. At first, I didn't really use the spells that much, but as soon as I learned the Ice Spell, I started using that all the time because it does a ton of damage and is really satisfying to use. I'd say that satisfying is a good way to describe the combat in general. It just feels good. You really feel like you're doing damage to the enemies with your strikes, and it's awesome to scoop up a bunch of enemies in your sweet greatsword into chakram combo, and end a fight without taking a scratch. That said, the combat is pretty easy a lot of times, even though I'm playing on hard. Like Jeff, I invested in sagecrafting and put in lot's of health regen, which is incredibly helpful. I also really enjoy the blackmithing system. It encourages salvaging the random equipment of the type you want to build, and using different parts to make powerful and unique equipment, made even better when you get the ability to use gems in the crafting process. It's very well done, and the loot lust is in full effect.

I gotta say though, getting caught into enemy stun loops and sometimes be really annoying, especially when it's because of spell casters. Pretty much all of the spells home in on you, so you pretty much have to block them, and it's really irritating to have your combos interrupted by a fireball flung at you from across the screen. It's also kind of irritating whenever you have an AI partner around, simply because they suck so much. The hope would be that they'd serve as a tank or something, but they seem to pull no aggro whatsoever, made especially apparent in fights with spell casters, where all the spells still go to you even if they are being attacked by the AI directly. They also tend to interrupt combos too. These two points are really just me whining like a baby about little things. They really only stand out to me because I like the combat so much, that when the flow is interrupted it's a drag.

However, one thing I need to mention is that I encountered a game breaking bug that caused me to lose about 4 hours of game play

It was a quest you get later in the game, once you reach the second continent, that involves killing tuatha around these giant red crystals. Apparently, I killed the mob that spawned by one of these before I got the quest, resulting in the quest becoming impossible, and that was a main quest as well. Because I was overwriting my saves, my last save is quite a few hours in the past. Luckily, the game has probably one of my favorite things in it, the fateweavers.

The Fateweavers are essentially respec NPCs that allow you to pay a fairly small amount of gold to completely reset your character. It's awesome. You can get rid of skills you don't like, experiment, and completley remake your character whenever you want. So, to make up for the fact that I need to redo a good chunk of the game, I'm going to respec my battlemage into a...stealthmage? (I dunno what to call it). So hopefully that'll alleviate some of the fatigue from having to replay a good chunk of the game. Keep that glitch in mind though!

I also have to say that I found myself skipping a lot of the dialogue in the game. I really didn't have the patience to wait for the voice actors to finish, and I didn't really care about what most all the random NPCs had to say. The world seems neat in conception, but for whatever reason, seems kind of flat. I like the idea of being someone that can mess with fate when no one else can, and yet, it feels like what you do barely affect much of anything. It's really too bad, should the story stuff have been more interesting, this could have probably been one of the best games of it's type, up there with a skyrim. Because of this though, it's a fun action game with a ton of quests, but pretty much all of the content in Skyrim had more interesting storylines.

All in all, I highly recommend the game to RPG fans and action fans alike. I could see the action wearing a little thin after awhile, but should you mix it up with fateweavers and combos, I think it'll last you a very long time.

WILL LISTEN TO MOST ANYTHING ESPECIALLY IF VIDEO GAMES

I'm having some trouble getting the youtube embedding to work, and I should really get back to homework. I'll post extra music next time to make up for it I guess. Sorry!

-mattscout007