This game uses a lot of boss concepts from Nier, just from watching this QL. Obviously it looks a lot tighter, mechanically. I'll check this game out later but it really just makes me even more hyped to see how Platinum does with Nier.
@brad The map is an item because High and G Rank start you off in a random zone during a quest, not at the start with the item box, so you'll be running around without a map a lot of the time. It's still really arbitrary and dumb but there's at least a reason for it. It also forces you to give up one of your very limited item slots if you haven't memorized the zone layouts yet.
This might be covered later in the video by Jason but I'm not too far into it yet.
I don't care about the stupid argument, but Dan saying that Kirby is "floaty and slow" as a reason that it's not as good as a Yoshi game is baffling (they're both floaty and slow).
I'm pretty into how they kept up the tradition of a bigass tree as the first boss, but now he's a robobot.
@rwbladewing: I've seen a lot of people recommending the Trails series and I don't really get it. I've been attempting to play Cold Steel over the past few months and find the writing, especially for the characters, to be super bland. I'm only in Chapter 4 out of 7 so maybe it'll pick up and get interesting but I've been skipping chunks of dialogue so far, something I don't usually do. (Like, there's a part where your characters are being served dinner by one dude's family and it goes around to every character saying, "Thank you," and "That was good, thanks!" in the most benign and uninteresting way. That's been my experience so far.)
Cold Steel might be rough as a jumping off point, the consensus even among fans is that the story and cast are generic compared to previous titles because of the school setting, and much of the characterization and real action happens in the second game (similar to Trails in the Sky). CS is appealing more for its modern improvements in combat and new quality of life features, which I figure mostly only returning fans can appreciate. It's also interesting in that it's a sub-series from the perspective of the "bad guys", the empire, which isn't very meaningful to new players.
The Trails games are generally praised for their sheer breadth in world building and immersion through tons of character development and dialogue, from supporting to main cast, all of which culminates in a big payoff when the plot finally starts to move. This amounts to a massive script, and unfortunately is reflected in the structure of the games where the first game is by and large devoted to the setup (Trails in the Sky FC and Cold Steel) and the second game is where shit gets real (Trails in the Sky SC and Cold Steel II). Unlike Cold Steel though, I think FC has more likeable characters and stands better on its own despite its somewhat dated battle system and mechanics.
Definitely not a format for everyone, it's a lot of investment and the writing doesn't try to escape anime cliches. But I think if you can stomach the pacing, the games are worth playing because there's very little quite like them in terms of their combination of scale and charm. The developer Falcom is kind of an underdog in the West and XSeed puts a lot of work into translation, so people are always trying to spread the word and show their support to ensure future localizations.
Yeah, I have always loved Falcom's gameplay, even in the Ys bumping era on Turbografix, but I've never loved one of their stories. They're fine, just super boiler-plate to me. This didn't matter too much in the Ys games since they're mostly gameplay.
I'll give the PSP games another try at some point, probably, but man do they start slow.
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