This spring has been nothing but good to me as far as game releases have gone. I've already written at length about my love of Lightning Returns, and since I wrote that blog, I actually went back and completed a New Game Plus run before moving on to other games. It's been a pretty diverse run of titles since then, and I figured that hey, why not do a big impressions dump blog post on a lazy Sunday morning? But first...

Lightning Returns: New Game Plus Thoughts

Playing through games of any significant length in their entirety on a second go immediately after beating them once is something I almost never do. The last time I can recall jumping into an RPG for a second go-around and playing all the way to the end shortly after beating it the first time was probably my first NG+ run in Chrono Trigger back in when I was a teenager in the '90s.

So it's been a while.

That being said, when I created the clear save file at the end of my second run through Lightning Returns, I had played the game for a total of 95 hours, 18 minutes, and 15 seconds. In other words, despite it being a NG+, in which I could have theoretically beaten the game in a much smaller span of time on the second go, I ended up spending almost as much time on my second playthrough as I had in my first. The speed at which I cleared all of the main quests was faster, sure, and I was able to race through most of the side quests at a much quicker pace, but then I started putting more effort into some of the side content that I hadn't finished on my first run. I exterminated most of the monsters in the game, cleared the bonus dungeon, and when it came to the end, fought a powered-up version of the final boss that, while my victory was scored a 0 out of 5 stars, I managed to beat on the first try.

And truth be told, I feel like I could play through it all again. Part of that is probably due to the fact that there are still a few things I've left undone. I have yet to beat the super-ultimate optional boss, and I have yet to finish up the quest to defeat every Last One monster in the game. Those stragglers in the endgame dungeon will have to wait for another playthrough, which means that I wouldn't be able to punch out on that quest and earn the reward until a fourth run. I can deal with that!

inFamous: Second Son

I've only played a few hours of inFamous: Second Son so far. I didn't not play either of the earlier games, so I'm coming into the series fresh, mostly owing to the fact that the game is set in the city I call home. And though I haven't played enough yet to unlock areas of the map outside of Seattle's downtown, I've gotten enough of a taste of what the game has to offer to say at least a couple of things.

One is that the gameplay is really fun, but it takes a lot of getting used to. Particularly when graffiti artist and beanie enthusiast Delsin Rowe hasn't been powered up yet and doesn't have a wide assortment of abilities. A lot of my fights have come down to entering restricted areas, blasting a few enemies, and then running the hell away so that my health could recharge and I could locate a smoke source to power back up. As Delsin has gotten stronger and more abilities have become available, these sorts of situations have become more manageable, though I have no idea what sort of obstacles the game will throw at me to keep the challenge up. The characters are also really entertaining, particularly in Delsin's interactions with his brother and Betty.

And then there's Seattle itself. I understand that Sucker Punch is based here, and don't get me wrong, it nails the general feel of the architectural style and feeling of Seattle in a lot of ways. But then the geography gets weird. Like when Delsin first arrives in Seattle just after the 520 Bridge sequence. Somehow, the first neighborhood he ends up in after getting off of the bridge is...Queen Anne?

Really? Because in real life, the first exists after the bridge lead into Montlake near the University District. You have to go further west to even approach Queen Anne. And then there's the weirdness like Belltown being in the northeast portion of downtown? And the International District doesn't exist, for whatever reason. You cut through the homeless camp in Pioneer Square (OK, that's unfortunately pretty accurate), and...water. No ID. No sports stadiums for that matter, either.

Go Seahawks?

Man, I can't even imagine what North Seattle must look like in this game. Then again, I'm also a bit flabbergasted by the notion that Seattle could be cut off by destroying the 520 Bridge. The city isn't an archipelago and there are more ways out of it than just that route. Hell, there are more ways to the east side of Lake Washington than just that bridge. (Congratulations, evil concrete lady, you just made a lot of commutes more inconvenient.)

What I am saying here is that the Seattle in this game, for all of its accuracies, is really damn goofy, and the ways it fails in that verisimilitude make it more of a curiosity for me than anything else. When I actually get to go north of Lake Union, is Fremont in this game? Is the Fremont Troll in this game, at least? Like I said, I still need to unlock the rest of the map, but man, this is weird.

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F 2nd

I ordered the import version of Project Diva F 2nd days before Sega announced that the game was officially being localized. This means that I will buy the game twice. Possibly three times to get this goodness on both the PS3 and Vita in English. The biggest change to the gameplay is the addition of more scratch note mechanics that place star marks on continuous tracks and new star marks that require both analogue sticks to hit. And that's cool. It takes some getting used to, like anything, but it's not a bad addition.

The overall quality of the track list is arguably better than the first Project Diva F. (This is not to take anything away from the previous game, of course, because it has some fantastic music in it.) There's a mix of new songs as well as returning tracks from the earlier PSP entries that have been reworked with the new mechanics in mind, and the mix of styles on display also shows a great amount of diversity for the Vocaloid characters. The tracks that unlock in the final stretch of the game are also incredibly brutal, even on the Normal difficulty setting. The Intense Singing of Hatsune Miku (one of several rough translations the song goes by) alone is, well, just watch this Extreme difficulty setting play:

MY GOD. DEAR SWEET MOTHER OF GOD IN HEAVEN, WHY MUST YOU BE SO WONDERFUL AND YET SO CRUEL?!

Of course, the game also features some of my favorite Vocaloid tracks in it, as well that aren't as, well, intense.

OK, that one is still really intense, but you hopefully get the idea.

English release this fall. I AM SO THERE.

Final Fantasy X HD

Most recently, I've started playing through Final Fantasy X in the PS3 release of Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster. It's a game that I've played before, but not for many years, and as it turns out, my memory of the game had grown incredibly foggy over that time. Major plot points aside, there's a lot that I just straight-up forgot about. Just the amount of game that there is before the full party is together (I've already played for over ten hours, according to the save file timer) is surprising to me.

I really like the redone graphics, and the new versions of the old music tracks are growing on me. If there's one thing that really sticks out as "this is an old game," it's that a lot of the animations can be very jarring in how stiff they are. That's of course to be expected, and I've gotten used to it, as well, but it's definitely a bit of a shock compared to the rose-tinting on what memories of the game I had.

But what changes have been made on the surface level, Final Fantasy X is still a fun game to actually play. It's taken me a bit to get a few of the basics down again (relearning everyone's Overdrives has let to a few goof-ups), but the actual pace and flow of combat and the nature of the sphere grid have that good familiar feeling to them. One odd thing I've noticed is that thus far, I feel like I've been better at blitzball now than I ever was when I played the game all those years ago. Maybe I've just taken more time to pay attention to the tutorials and how the game is actually played, but in the few matches I've played so far, I have yet to actually lose. (Though my most recent match against the Ronso team ended in a tie and good lord, the stats on those guys.)

One thing that is pretty funny in going back to Final Fantasy X is in being reintroduced to its linearity and the lack of world map. People gave Final Fantasy XIII a lot of criticism for being a linear RPG (and to be fair, the maps in that game are incredibly so for the majority of its length). But Final Fantasy X is also a very linear game, with the primary direction more or less being straight forward, even if the path occasionally bends and there are more nooks off to the side to explore. So it's no Final Fantasy XII, either.

Still, everything I enjoyed about Final Fantasy X is still present. Though the game has certainly aged, Square Enix did a fine job of putting some polish on it for the rerelease. If this is indicative of the quality that we might be able to expect for similar HD versions of other Final Fantasy games, I'd love to see what they do next.