Thanks to everyone who took the time to reply to the thread I made a month back. I was originally going to post this right in the thread but as it got ever longer I realized it would be more appropriate as a blog post. Moving on.
OK, so I finally decided to get back into LO and give it another go. I just played through the story segment at the very end of Disk 2, and man, let me tell you, that was the some of the most tedious gameplay in an RPG that I can think of. For those of you who can remember, the end of Disk 2 is at the experimental staff. My first problem with it was unnecessarily big. The level design seemed large just for the sake of being large, and the layout didn't really make sense from an in-universe standpoint; it was very gamey.
The random encounters are another thing. This is probably true for all of the game but I'm just noticing it here, but the rate of encounters seems really random. Sometimes I would get into another battle literally 10 steps after finishing another, at other times I could walk freely for a good few minutes without any fights. Which, naturally, happens only when you actually need to get into a fight in order to get a Gate Pass. Having to get these passes was a huge pain in the ass because you had to steal them from the enemy, which takes forever, and they were one-time use only. A big annoyance I have with this game is that the battles take FOREVER. There are just far too many people in a fight, both on your side and the number of enemies. A five person party is huge. And when you're facing about 5-6 enemies on average each battle, who take two of your characters two rounds to kill each, it just never ends.
The crate/platform/lever puzzle, was simple yet mindnumbingly tedious. The boss fight was pointless and lacked any sense of danger. It was fairly obvious to me that you were supposed to lose the fight. Most damningly, it did nothing for the story. I didn't learn anything new about Gongora, Kaim, Seth, or anyone else. The plot in this game hasn't really gone anywhere since the end of Disk 1. It's ridiculous.
Then, after the fight which you're supposed to lose, everyone just stands back up because Lirum somehow heals the kids (BS), they heal Jansen, and everyone else is immortal anyway (boring). There is a countdown timer to get out of the staff but they might as well not. There is ZERO sense of urgency, danger, excitement, adrenaline, nothing. Two examples of games that did this concept MUCH better immediately come to mind. Remember in FF VII when you have to escape Midgar on the bike and you have to protect everyone in the car from being attacked? Remember in FF VIII when you have to escape Dollet and the giant mechanical spider is chasing you and you (Leon/Squall) almost get left behind, barely jumping on in time? Those were some of the most memorable moments in the game, and I don't even have to get into the awesome scenes that those two games had right before the switch between each consecutive disk. In LO, there is a time but timer which gives you 12 minutes, way too much time to feel any sort of Metroid-esque time crunch, the boat is waiting for you, you get on and leave, and thats that. Oh and the music doesn't help.
Sorry for the rant but I just wanted to get my feelings about my latest experience with LO out. I'm trying really hard to enjoy this game, but its just not letting me.
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