Based only playing about 1 hour if it, this game charming the pants off me. I love whole world design of this game, and artwork just beautiful. And I loving the poem format it feels like Ubisoft is experimenting with different ways to tell a story. Is anyone else enjoying this game?

@hailinel: I think some people are really concerned about length because JRPG, as a genre, is particularly attractive to gaming (start small, level up, get new skills, buy new gear, etc.) but people in general do not want to work with a genre that has a reputation for generic stories that last for at least forty hours, sometimes dozens more, and whose mechanics, while fun, haven't gotten more complex over time. Both of us know that this isn't entirely true (SMTIV and Bravely Default are vastly different games), but here's a JRPG that bucks all of those perceptions on a surface level and it's not going to ask you to play it for a few weeks. Seems like some people see this as a huge step in the right direction for the genre, perhaps along with South Park The Stick of Truth, and it's a little baffling to see someone who still wants every JRPG to take weeks to finish.

Perhaps they name-dropped Final Fantasy to get attention and then backed off once they got that attention? Kind of a cheap thing to do, but then maybe Child of Light wouldn't have half the attention that it does without that supposed Final Fantasy association. I could have sworn that FFVI's art was at least given a special mention way back then, though.

That's why I deliberately left out mention of Child of Light specifically. It just brings up general points I'm interested in.

Don't take it personally either. I am being combative but it's only because your opinions are so clearly different from mine and I stand to gain much more insight from discussion with you than someone who readily agrees with me. You should only take offence if I get bored of you.

@vinny No QL for this? C'mon bombsquad...

@dimi3je:

It's only been a few days. They need to record and edit the video. Give them time. Also calling out to Vinny won't get the video up any sooner.

I prefer the Polygon review to Tom Mcshea's wannabe poetry/advertisement review.

Yeah. I know people hate on Polygon a lot, but I think I prefer reviews from any of their staff members over just about anything I've seen from Tom McShea. I just don't tend to agree with his opinion or think about games in the same way he does. Even when I do I agree with his general opinion, I often don't follow the same line of reasoning.

This game is good guys! The combat is really fun... though not difficult thus far (about 1hr 30 - 2hrs in) BUT BUT BUUUUUUUT I can see a decent amount of depth in the slowing light mechanic alone. Really pretty and really charming and I love the poetry motive.

There's a lot of hostility towards this game. I love what Ubi Soft is doing with their 2D engine and I want them to keep making these games. For that alone it's warrants a purchase. It also has a world worth exploring and a unique, dynamic battle system that is fun so far. They are doing something different, and it's worth celebrating.

A lot of the complaints I am hearing is "it's not Final Fantasy." Is it a crime that it has taken inspiration from various sources and is it has become its own thing?

I'm pretty early, but it seems like a nice length for a game of this type. Not all RPGs need to be dozens of ours long to achieve their potential. I love the story book motif, but I don't want to be reading the rhyming dialogue for 60 hours. It looks more like Where the Wild Things are then Final Fantasy, and that's not a bad thing.

Well after playing it for about an hour and a half, here are my thoughts:

- Fun battle system and leveling
- Fairly interesting set-up
- The rhyming is forced as hell and I really do not like it
- On hard, the game is actually pretty damn hard. So that's cool.
- Good visuals like usual with this engine
- Controlling Igniculous with the mouse is waaaaaaaay better than with the right analog stick
- Why the hell is the healing spell for Aurora DLC, why is there already party member DLC, and how do I get rid of all these buff crystal things from my inventory. Why is making the game easier a popular pre-order bonus? Why did I even pre-order a digital game? Why?

And that's that. It seems pretty good so far basically.

I played five hours of this, so far. I think it's fantastic. It took me a while to really get the combat dynamics down, but once I got there it's really cool. It forces me to not go for the most damage per turn but to plan ahead and, for example, purposefully let the enemy wind up their attacks to allow me to interrupt them which sets the enemy back on the turn-timeline or whatever it's called. This allows for some interesting strategies to explore.

loving the game two hours in. when i bought the game tried to ignore the fairly large amount of dlc to get extra characters already...(oh UBI)

the combat is excellent and doesnt stay around to long as battles flows really quick.story seems good and the art style is amazing!

For some reason Aurora's hair disappeared on me during battle.

Ugh, that DLC stuff bothers me to the point that I have gone from probable day 1 purchase to potential sale purchase some months from now. :/

I never set out to hard-line boycott Ubi games but over the past couple years of constantly seeing this griminess from them I now find myself in that position.

Sidescrolling western Grandia. I love the combat so far (about an hour in,) even if things are a bit easy. Still getting used to the rhyming dialogue, though

@tom_omb said:

There's a lot of hostility towards this game. I love what Ubi Soft is doing with their 2D engine and I want them to keep making these games. For that alone it's warrants a purchase. It also has a world worth exploring and a unique, dynamic battle system that is fun so far. They are doing something different, and it's worth celebrating.

A lot of the complaints I am hearing is "it's not Final Fantasy." Is it a crime that it has taken inspiration from various sources and is it has become its own thing?

I'm pretty early, but it seems like a nice length for a game of this type. Not all RPGs need to be dozens of ours long to achieve their potential. I love the story book motif, but I don't want to be reading the rhyming dialogue for 60 hours. It looks more like Where the Wild Things are then Final Fantasy, and that's not a bad thing.

RPG fans are in general mono-gamers and will buy a game with the intention to stick with it for dozens and dozens of hours. I am not an RPG fan nor am I a mono gamer and I look at this way... 'High production values, 10 hours of gameplay, £11.99.... thats a bargain!' but yeah I don't understand why RPG fans feel like thy need to bitch and moan about every RPG that's under 40 hours long (they even did it for South Park ffs!) but I like this a lot, I like the music & the charm a lot. I think all that Final Fantasy did something to their brain which they need to be examined for... not EVERY RPG needs to be a tedious slog with a ham-fisted political angst story with unbearable characters that takes 80 hours to get to 'the good part'.

Man, there sure are a lot of people taking Hailinel's comment waaaay too seriously.

You're telling me!

There isn't a need to be combative, though. It's possible to engage in debate without acting aggressively. From what few times we've interacted, I'd say that not only is there that aggression, but your arguments also tend to focus more on the surface elements while suggesting an innate superiority to your analysis and opinion. I've bristled at your arguments before because they tend to come off as "I'm right, you're wrong." As in this paragraph from one of your responses in our conversation regarding Lightning Returns:

I wasn't saying the game said it was dark. I'm saying you're wrong to say that. That's not the tone of the game at all. "Not happy times"? There's a city dedicated to partying, and everyone else is just going on jolly holidays to the desert. No ones actions reflect the state of the world. I don't even hate the game. The series just deserves better. The throw so many resources at the graphics, audio, and revamping the battle system every time, but the writing is just embarrassing.

I am perfectly willing and happy to engage with you. You're obviously very passionate about certain topics. But I need to get a better sense from you that you are able to distinguish and accept personal opinions regarding these topics of passion that do not align with your own.

Not everyone sees brevity as the right direction for one very important reason. Many of the genre's most revered titles would not be the games that they were if they were games that could be realistically completed in the span of ten to twenty hours. The best games in the genre aren't considered the best simply because of length, but because they put that length to the best use; story and gameplay that are both entertaining in their own right and that sustain each other over the course of the game. That these games have longer, generally more complex and engaging narratives than, say, an action game, owes in part to that length. I can't be a judge of the quality of South Park: The Stick of Truth because I haven't played it and I don't really intend to. Not because of length, but because I just haven't found South Park or its brand of humor particularly attractive in a very long time; the subject matter just isn't what I want out of a game, regardless of how long it is or how it plays. From everything I've seen and read, it's apparently the perfect game for a South Park fan, both in terms of the apparent fact that it is a game of quality and the lack of quality South Park games in general. Which is great, but it's not a game for me.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a JRPG-style game with a play time in the sub-twenty hour range. The Last Story is barely longer than that if you don't take the optional missions and side content into account. But as I also said regarding The Last Story, it is a forty-hour game crammed into a twenty-hour plot and gameplay structure. And it's a game that I feel would have been better served had development been allowed the time to give it the full breadth of a forty-hour game, rather than shave elements out to simplify its plot, characters, and gameplay in a manner that better fits a twenty-hour experience. Perhaps Child of Light is perfect for those that want a shorter experience out of the genre, but it's simply not the experience that I'm personally looking for at this time.

Played it for a few hours and can only repeat what's already been said. Combat is great, art is well done, style is fantastic, but the poerty is not grabbing me at all. The game is not what I expected it to be at all, but way better than I thought it would be. I get that they wanted to present the game as a fairytale being told and not "you are Auroria", but it could've been done much better without the poetry. Although I have to admit the jester joke was funny... at first.

Really liking it after 2 hours or so. I'm playing it on Hard, which I'd recommend to anyone looking for a challenge.

Someone should totally make another Grandia, because Child of Light's action bar is lifted straight out of Grandia 2, and now I'm reminded of how rad that game's combat was.

@jasonr86: I mean Child of Light is no SimCity. I appolgize, the 9.5 they gave SimCity really upset me when the game was totally broken and unplayable. Then they dropped the score and I decided that they are source I can no long trust for my purchasing advice.

I am loving Child of Light so far. I think it's my favorite game of 2014 so far. Though Age of Wonders 3 is pretty fantastic.

Arthur didn't like it? I'm not even going to bother giving a second look to this game...

Agreed, I thought it was a platformer from the vids but then I watched some guy streaming it and he was in a fight, one fight, for like 5 minutes. No thanks.

Probably should be noted that he did a piece in collaboration with the developers for promotional purposes (and its as gorgeous as you'd expect it to be). It's not like he was involved with the art or aesthetics of the actual game in anyway.

As much as a I disagree with Arthur Gies most the time he's spot on with this one. It obviously looks stunning and the combat does require a little more management in the back half of the game. It's not really hard, but it's not a complete pushover either. The problem is that there's a ton of it and it never really changes other than what gems you have inserted into weapons.

I love the old storybook stuff, but the writing is poor, really, really poor and the game often throws these conversations at you randomly for the next five minutes after a new party member joins. Some of the rhymes feel so forced it breaks the flow of the writing... and even then nobody has anything particularly interesting to say. None of the characters end up having their own personality because of the way everyone speaks. I found myself wanting to skip through the conversations as the game progressed.

It's fine. I started out loving the game, but a few hours in it has become pretty monotonous with only the art and the gorgeous musical score keeping me going. ( One of the battle themes sounds reaaallly like that bit of music from Requiem for a Dream and some of the NPC art is really rather poor.)

Any massive differences between each platform? I'm mulling over whether to pick this up or not. I imagine a decent PC and the current gen consoles will look the same?

Played through most of it, and man, this game does not quite have the legs for even its relatively short length. It's combat system has that one gimmick of interrupting enemy attacks, meaning the strategy you go into a fight with differs little between the first enemies and the ones you find 7 hours in, with little variety in the types of attacks you use (most characters have only seem to have 3 unique attacks).

Customization is pretty sparse, with the occuli crafting system being interesting, but not offering enough. You have a lot of orbs to dump skill points into, sure, but it's more like FFXIII's leveling mechanic except being limited to just 3 paradigms. The platforming and general exploration of the world is honestly more compelling than the combat itself, but that is quite limited as well given the small size of the world.

The game looks quite lovely, music is great, and I don't even mind the prose all too much, but half way through, I already wondering why I was playing this when I still had SMTIV to finish.

I actually like all the rhyming dialogue and think the narrator is fantastic and think the characters are likable enough (Rubella and Finn especially), and while you don't get to like, social link with them or go on loyalty missions for them or anything (well, you do a couple loyalty missions sorta), I don't know what you guys really expected of the party members in an RPG with this sort of budget because this seems perfectly acceptable. Also the art is fantastic throughout. That being said:

This is really an issue for me. Especially the part where each party member has fuck all in skill variety. Regular attack skill + 3 other skills (all 4 of which then have AoE variant) just isn't really enough, especially when some of those skills have serious overlap (Aurora's two offensive spells aren't different enough to really matter). The "heal all party members" and "buff all party members" barely seem worth using when "all party members" is 2 fucking people. I know that switching out characters is a free action so I guess they want you switch people in and out as necessary to buff, debuff, heal, or just DPS, but I just feel like if you're going to include such a limited skillset, you may as well at least allow 3 party members to fight at once (and maybe bump enemy encounters up to 4 enemies). Something like Paper Mario only allowed two characters going on, but I feel like their skills were much more varied and you had really good customization of Mario's abilities, and also that battle system had way more going on. Child of Light's combat is a step above Costume Quest, but just barely. And it's a step down from anything made by Zeboyd (Cthulhu Saves the World, Penny Arcade Adventures Ep 3 and 4), and that's a 2-person dev team.

And playing on hard, I found I barely bothered to try to do anything tricky during boss fights (in the back half of the game), because you basically have to devote one character to constant damage and the other to just healing every single turn because the bosses are so fast and hit so hard and usually have a group of some sort. Again, another party member might've made that slightly more interesting. One thing I do appreciate it that the guard works sorta similarly to Default in Bravely Default, though I have no idea whether Child of Light stole that from Grandia or not (never played Grandia).

@sagebirt: I'm pretty sure it looks the same all around tbh. The only differences I can think of are maybe resolution differences between 360/ PS3 versions and everything else

I assume everyone has stopped talking about this game, but got it last night and so far I am really liking it. Clearly I am rubbish at games these days as well, as two hours in and have already died once.

Oh, wow, this game came out over a month ago? Feels like only last week. :|

Anyway, I stopped playing this. Found it painfully boring and uninteresting. Maybe I'll go back to finish it some day.