My favorite part of gaming podcasts is whatever derivation of "Whatcha been playin?'" the hosts have decided on.   Sadly, as podcasts have settled into rote form, this segment becomes more a repository for the latest hot game updates, previews for things yet unreleased and I've played something you can't hear about yet teasers than an honest "Hey, I spent the weekend playing Icewind Dale."   I really enjoy hearing the minutia of games and absolutely love finding out why someone ended up playing something, but I know many hosts will gloss over older games for fear of boring the listener.  Honestly, I can only speak for myself, but I enjoy podcasts for their reality-tv-esque voyeurism, not for news.  Hearing about what people have played is like a Let's Play mixed with an autobiography: the why for an older game is always more interesting than the because it is new of unreleased previews.

So I'm going to write about what I've been playing.  Yesterday I popped in Resonance of Fate, which I picked up back in January from Amazon for thirteen dollars, and played almost exclusively for a month or so.  I had gameflyed it about a month after beating FF13, so approximately June '10, and absolutely hated it.  I sent it back after spended twenty minutes with the tutorial.  Maybe I was burned out on JRPGs after two months of FF13, maybe I wasn't ready to invest so long in one game-- whatever it was, it was out of my mind.

But attempt two, in January, went well--  was really enjoying the whole experience: character-driven story, unique and bizarre battle system and enjoyable voice acting really kept me hooked.  Then, I discovered the battle coliseum, and things ground to a halt.  See, depending on how far you were in the story, you could unlock different ranks, which functioned as battle encounters with randomness removed.  I had completely ignored this aspect of the game until about 25 hours in, so I had unlocked a few hundred possible battles.  As I mentioned earlier, the battle system is both unique and bizarre-- it could also be described as slow.

If you've never played it, the gist of combat is each character has an HP bar, and traditional attacks do not do much damage.  However, other attacks like machine guns, do lots of damage that is considered scratch damage:  it can't kill you, and it heals over time.  But if you get hit with a traditional attack before your scratch damage heals, that scratch damage is turned into real damage.  Therefore, you almost always need to attack twice: scratch damage first, then traditional damage.  As you can imagine, this makes fighting many smaller enemies tedious.  The coliseum, because I had ignored it, was almost exclusively many smaller enemies.  Tedious, to say the least.

So a few days of coliseum clean-up and I was completely sick of the battle system.  Then Two Worlds 2 came out.  Then Dragon Age 2.  Then fastforward to yesterday, and I decide to put Resonance of Fate back in.  The characters are still interesting, but I after two or three battles I just cannot maintain interest.  I am somewhere in Chapter Ten, about 45 hours in, and I have no idea if I'm going to finish or not.  I have chosen to ignore the optional quests and the coliseum to push forward in the story-- however, the battles are definitely the best part of the game and they just feel too cumbersome and slow to appeal to me right now.   But rest assured, I will write about whatever I end up playing.


<Total gametime yesterday 5/10/11: 20 minutes-- Resonance of Fate>

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