Pokemon: 20 Years Late to the Party

Most people have this or that popular game series that they've never played before. I'm no different. In fact, there are quite a few big name series that I've not played. One of the most notable of the bunch is Pokemon. When the series first started, I was already in college and the game just didn't interest me. My priorities were different, there were a lot of really good RPGs already gobbling up my time (FFVII, Suikoden, and Wild Arms to name a few), and I pretty much wrote off Pokemon as a game for kids since most of the people playing it were tiny little rug rats.

Now, a good 20 years on, I finally decided to actually try a game in the series, and started with Pokemon Red, as I figured I might as well start with an early game and go from there if I decide to explore the series further.

So far, the experience has been alright. It's quite obvious that the game is geared toward a younger audience. The battle system is very simple, even compared to other RPGs at the time. The main challenge has come in figuring out which creatures are strong or weak against which other creatures. It actually reminds me of the Shin Megami Tensei games where combat has a similar underlying premise much of the time. There's a little bit of a learning curve in these sort of battle systems (assuming players don't take the easy way out and just download a chart detailing what beats what), but once one gets the hang of it things get quite fun exploiting enemies' weaknesses.

While there is that basic similarity in the two games' combat systems, one thing that Pokemon has which SMT doesn't is this underlying sense of optimism. SMT is just dark with it so often focusing on demons and angels fighting for control, and neither of them being particularly good choices for humanity. While it's not Warhammer 40K levels of grim dark, the world of SMT is not a happy place. Meanwhile, things are smiles and sunshine in Pokemon. Ash is out exploring the world, trying to discover as many pokemon as he can while challenging other collectors of these creatures, striving to be the best at what he does.

Maybe the two games are reflections of their audiences with Pokemon having generally younger players full of optimism, while SMT fans tend to skew older and developed a thick shell of cynicism. It is what it is, but I couldn't help but dwell on this difference for a time.

So far, I have been enjoying my time with the game. I'm definitely taking a more casual approach with it. It's a lot simpler than I'm used to when it comes to these sort of games, but I've been enjoying exploring the game world and trying to find all these different creatures that have since become so popular in video game lexicon. My first pokemon was a Squirtle, which I thought was adorable, and I was quite pleased to be able to capture an honest to goodness Pikachu early on in the game. Now I'm starting to see some of these guys evolve into stronger creatures, which is pretty exciting if I do say so myself.

There's still a ton I have to do in the game, collecting a bunch of badges, never mind pokemon. So, I'm going to be busy for the next while. The game hasn't made me into any sort of Pokemon true believer or anything, but it has proven enjoyable enough. It's certainly made me curious enough to try other, slightly more current installments in there series somewhere down the line.

Project X Zone 2: Better Than the First

Back when the first Project X Zone came out, I was really looking forward to it. Having been a fan of Super Robot Taisen OG Saga Endless Frontier, I'd already gotten a taste of the juggling combat and the story was fun, so the prospect of a new game in that vein with the added bonus of a cavalcade of popular video game characters was quite enticing. Unfortunately, the original X Zone only delivered on half of this. The combat I knew and loved was there with some interesting tweaks. However, the story, that was a mess. When there are a lot of cameos in a game, movie, or whatever, the narrative can get really bogged down introducing everyone impacting the pace and diluting the story as a whole. A sizable chunk of the first X Zone felt like some drawn out version of the fight scenes from the Anchorman movies. Hours were spent introducing one character after the next with the story not going anywhere and after a time the whole thing got boring. Thankfully, with Project X Zone 2 this has been remedied since we have a lot of the same characters, so they already know each other, saving us a lot of time, and new characters are introduced a lot more quickly, as the developers seem to have learned their lesson from the last game.

With this game, the writers made a point of centering the plot more around one person, in this case Ryo from the Shenmue games. M. Bison and Saya are up to no good and part of their plan involves steeling a family heirloom from Ryo, so a short ways into the game he meets up with Chun Li and Xiaoyu who agree to help him out and before long he's joined the full group led by Reiji and Xiaomu as they muster a bigger and bigger force to deal with both the forces of Shadaloo and Ouma (not to mention any random evildoers they come across). Keeping the plot on track like this is much better than the first game and it's nice not having to spend so much time being introduced to all of the characters. That being said, story is still the weakest part of the game. It's not going to turn any heads, and it's only been elevated from paper thin to something on par with corrugated cardboard, but at least this time it manages to be entertaining. It should be said that this is a standalone story, so people who haven't played the first game can hope right in and won't feel lost here.

While the story itself is only so-so, one of the fun things to do is watching how the characters interact with one another. Since your little army is divided into smaller groups where you'll have a frontline assault force with a support unit attached for help, these people get along differently depending on who is matched with who. The things someone like Ryo will say while paired with Chun Li and Xiaoyu will be quite different than if you stick him with Morrigan and Demitri. Then there's Segata Sanshiro, who is fun to try matching with just about anyone.

Combat-wise, at this point I think one needs to be a fan of this type of battle system to enjoy it. If you've tried the previous game before or possibly OG Saga and didn't care for the combat, this game isn't suddenly going to change your mind. There are some minor changes to the combat here, but it's still all about the tactical elements as one places units on the map, then hopping into battles where the goal is to keep enemies airborne as much as possible, ideally only executing new attacks at the last possible moment in order to trigger critical hits. Doing this while calling in support units that trigger Cross Attacks where both groups are pummeling an enemy simultaneously is very satisfying. I'm a sucker for watching numbers flying by on-screen as a battle ensues with stuff flashing and fancy little animated scenes, so, for me, these battles are great.

I've never been terribly enamored with the aesthetic of these games, though. They have a very functional approach with simplistic maps and character designs while slapping up some anime-styled character art when people are talking. It gets the job done but isn't anything special. However, there's something about the use of music in this game that really tugs at my heart strings. Whenever a unit is selected a theme from the game that the people are from plays and this really cranks up the nostalgia. On more than a few occasions I was really tempted to stop what I was doing so that I could fire up something like Streets of Rage or Strider because music from those games started to play.

At this point, Project X Zone 2 is what it is. The combat is interesting, but you'll need to have a taste for it. If you weren't fond of the combat in the first game, you won't enjoy it any more in this one. However, if you are craving a JRPG with a different sort of battle system, then this is one to consider. Now that the story is borderline tolerable, X Zone 2 makes for an enjoyable experience with a fun mix of popular game characters from a bunch of different series, this time managing not to get bogged down by introductions.

Fairy Fencer F: A Surprisingly Good B Tier RPG

Back in the days of the PlayStation 2 there was a much greater range in pricing of games. We had the obvious super high-end stuff that would go for $50 (boy do I miss those days as we continue to see prices rise first to $60 and now $70), and there was the lower end of the spectrum where quality would often become questionable as the price dipped lower and lower below the $30 mark for a new release. Then we had the mid-tier stuff. It would usually cost about $40 and people would go into them knowing that they weren't going to necessarily be on par with the games at the higher price point, but they also wouldn't be on a level of the cheaper, generally badly made games. They'd provide a solid experience, usually with some interesting quirks along the way.

Fairy Fencer F very reminds me of those days. It's by no means the best of JRPGs but neither is it a bad game. What we have is a reasonably priced title with an interesting battle system and straightforward, humorous story. Most people will likely get through it in about 25-30 hours feeling entertained, glad that they made some time for the game.

This is another in the growing tidal wave of Vita games that have been getting ported over to the PC over the last few years, and that's the version that I played. With that, one shouldn't expect too many fancy features in terms of settings. It's a down and dirty port, but gets the job done. People who absolutely insist on a vast array of graphic settings maybe be disappointed, but the keyboard controls are okay-ish, or at least not as god awful as some other ports of Japanese games to come along in recent years. I can't comment on them too much, though, as I stuck with an Xbox 360 controller for the majority of my playthrough.

From the get go it becomes apparent that the story is very traditional fair. In the distant past, a goddess and demon fought for control of the world, but in the end it was a stalemate as their attacks forced each other into suspended animation. This in mind, the game becomes a race between the forces of good who want to reawaken the goddess and the forces of evil who would like to bring back the demon. It doesn't get much more cliched than this. With that, we follow the adventures of Fang, a young, rather selfish lad, who accidentally gets swept up in all of this when he pulls a sword out of the ground, becoming it's owner and being teamed with a fairy, Eryn, that resides within it. This makes Fang into a Fencer, a person who wields a fairy-imbued weapon. There are all sorts of weapons like this scattered through the land and they can be used to release the goddess or demon, so Fang, Eryn, and a growing group of friends set out to find them all before the evil Dorfa Corporation can do the same for the vile god.

What makes the heavily trodden story palatable is the cast of characters, as their interactions can often be pretty funny. Pippin is by far my favorite of all the people I encountered with his self-important, yet friendly demeanor. Others had their moments too, like Glados' budding bro-mance for Fang, and Harley's overzealous desire to learn more about fairies. There are also a few moments of obnoxious fan service. I'm not a fan of that sort of stuff, so tend to get annoyed by it, but thankfully they're far and few between. It is also possible to recruit two optional characters into the party if certain conditions are met. They aren't necessary, but are fun additions to the group making them worthwhile to pursue.

While playing Fairy Fencer F, people familiar with some of Compile Hearts' other recent RPGs will notice a lot of similarities, especially if you've played some of the Neptunia games. Things bounce between a hub city where one picks up new quests, buys items at shops, and talks to locals, and a world map where one moves an icon around, selecting specific locations to visit. It's a stripped down method that very much limits opportunities to explore, but adds a certain amount of brevity to getting around. It is also possible to modify any given region if you use the correct fairy. This will change the types of monsters that spawn there, which becomes necessary when doing side quests handed out at the local tavern.

Battles while hunting these monsters (and pretty much everyone else) are the strong point of the game. Combat is turn-based on a fairly large field where enemies and your party can more around, trying to get into range of one another and unload with various attacks. There's the expected abilities like special attacks and spells which consume energy, but what is really fun is developing combos. These are actually cobbled together outside of combat in the game menu. For this, players assign different attacks to different buttons, many of which play into one another. Then, when combat begins, if you bring a character within attack range and begin, instead of simply doing a normal attack you can string it from one into the next, selecting what you want to do as you go. This is useful when trying to exploit an enemy's weakness. Since everyone in your party are Fencers, their weapons can actually morph on the fly from swords to scythes to bows to guns and so forth which plays into the combo system since you can then select which attack to do next and go with something that will do the most damage to enemies. Early on, there isn't much one can do with combos, but as you spend ability points to improve characters stats and unlock new abilities it becomes possible to add new strings of attacks to a combo.

As fancy as the combo system is, combat is actually quite easy much of the game. For the first 10 hours, battles were extremely easy as my party steamrolled everything in their path. After this, there was a mild difficulty spike but this was more a matter of fights taking longer than becoming insurmountable. I did wind up unlocking Apollonius, which required grinding up to level 40, and this can make some areas of the game easier as well, so that is something to keep in mind. The only area that came off as truly challenging was Shukesoo's Tower, which is optional content anyway. The ease of battles doesn't really take anything away from the game, as they're still enjoyable trying to find the best combos and spells to unload and see if you can outdo yourself with the amount of damage your group can dish out in a single turn. People expecting tough, unforgiving battles, though, just won't find that here.

The game isn't exactly a looker either. A lot of the areas, art, and backgrounds have a fairly standard anime-inspired look to them. Apparently Yoshitaka Amano and Nobou Uematsu contributed to the game, but I had trouble identifying where they may have had a hand in that. I'd have to imagine the former designed some of the monsters, as some of them looked quite unconventional. However, I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out which parts of the score may have been done by Uematsu. The music as a whole is decent, though the tunes that plays when characters Fairize (ie. take on a more powerful form) is pretty cheesy and gets stuck in my head more than I'd like.

Shortcomings aside, I still enjoyed going on this little adventure with Fang and the gang. Fairy Fencer F by no means tries to reinvent the wheel. It simply provides a fun story with some enjoyable characters and a good battle system. The game's publisher was also smart enough to give the game a price that reflects this, so I didn't feel at all out of pocket for the experience I had. People with a hankering for a pleasant, straightforward JRPG should give some serious consideration to this game.

Wild Arms Revival Incoming?

One of the earliest JRPGs on the original PlayStation was Wild Arms. For a lot of early adopters of the system, it was what kept them busy as they waited for Final Fantasy VII to come out. What they discovered, though, was that the game was actually pretty good. While simple, it handled 3D visuals reasonably well, and the Old West aesthetic was a setting that just wasn't coming into play in the genre (or any other genre for that matter). With that, Wild Arms became a reasonably successful series, resulting in five mainline games and a tactical strategy RPG. However, we haven't seen a new entry in the series since 2007.

Now there's reason to be excited as the series creator, Akifumi Kaneko, tweeted about meetings he was having with Sony regarding Wild Arms' 20th anniversary. Gematsu has a translation here, and it looks like the series composer, Michiko Naruke, was there as well. That's all we have to go on right now, but it does open the door to some interesting speculation.

Will this just be a remaster of one of the early games, possibly with some new arranged music tracks a la Final Fantasy X / X-2 Remaster? Maybe a bit of fanfare for the Wild Arms PS2 games before they become available on the PS4? If it was a new game in the series, I could see people being pretty happy about that. There've been rumors floating around that Sony has two JRPGs in development for the PlayStation 4 with one possibly by Level-5, but we don't know what the other is. For all we know, it could be a new Wild Arms.

For now, though, all we can do is wait and see if any more information trickles out. I for one wouldn't complain if the series came back. The Western theme always struck me as unique and the games are something I've closely tied with the PS1 and PS2. Star Ocean managed to stick around, making an appearance last generation. However, Wild Arms just disappeared. It could all be a pipe dream, but it would be nice if this is a beginning to actually reviving the series.

So, Final Fantasy IX on the PC...

A week or so ago, Square-Enix let slip that they're planning to bring Final Fantasy IX to the PC in 2016. It's a move that isn't all that surprising when you look at all of the other games in that series which they've been steadily porting to it over the years. At this point it's largely a matter of speculation as to which of the remain games in the franchise will be ported next rather than if it will be ported. (I'm honestly surprised that Tactics isn't on PC yet.)

Now that we know IX is coming our way shortly, we're also beginning to learn about some of the changes being made to the port. When the Steam page went active, one of the first things that I noticed was that the game is going to require 20GB of storage space. For a port of a game that originally released on the first PlayStation, that's a lot of real estate. As a point of reference, Final Fantasy VII only requires 3GB while VIII needs 4GBs. So, we're seeing quite the jump here which suggests a lot of changes.

I have to assume that the majority of these 20GBs comes from all of the high resolution movies that the developers are promising. Cut scenes were a big contributor to why the various iterations of XIII gobble up so much hard drive space. This move isn't exactly going to win brownie points with me, as I've come out in the past expressing my concern with the continuing bloat of game size in recent years.

For those who like their graphics extra pretty, FFIX is getting a bit of a discombobulated upgrade. As mentioned, the cut scenes are getting the HD treatment (whatever that means), and character models are getting polished up a bit as well. Unfortunately, backgrounds are not. You can thank Japanese design ethos of the 80s and 90s for this, when companies didn't make a point of keeping back-ups of all assets for that. So, for this release the most players can hope for is a bit of upscaling on the environments which, while not terrible, kinda stick out judging by the screenshots making the rounds.

Another thing we'll be seeing in this edition of the game is a number of methods by which players can speed things along. We know that there'll be a "high speed" mode that pretty much does as one would expect, speeding up actual battles, as well as a "no encounter" mode which eliminates all random encounters from the game. It sounds like there'll be more modes, but it's hard to be sure, and it is funny because they really do showcase one of the Achilles heels of traditional, old school JRPGs: random battles. They're often so tedious that revisiting them now almost necessitates accelerated modes of play like these.

Of course, there will be stuff like achievements and autosave features implemented as well, so a decent amounts of bits and bobs added for the PC release. Personally, that 20GBs of hard drive space is making the game a bit of a hard sell for me, even with all of the new stuff being added, and granted I do have the PS1 version of the game that I can play whenever I feel like it, so there isn't exactly a huge urge welling up inside of me to play this. Nonetheless, Final Fantasy IX is pretty much up there as one of the best games in the series as far as I'm concerned (alongside IV, VI, and XII), so I can see quite a few people snapping it up when the game releases. It's won't be lacking for demand at any rate.

World of Final Fantasy Trailer

Square-Enix announced that they were working on World of Final Fantasy at this year's E3, discussing how it will be aimed at younger players to introduce them to the series. It'll have a chibi art style to the main characters with quite a lot of monster collecting, as they will help the party fight in battle. It's planned for both the PS4 and Vita with cross play support to help with the monster collecting.

All things considered, it sounds like a pretty safe way of going about things. Adopt a cute, inviting visual style with simplified battles and toss in some vaguely Pokemon-esque monster hunting, and it seems like a good way to try and get the young'uns interested in the series.

With Jump Festa 2016 underway, the company has now released a lengthy trailer for the game. So far it looks pretty good in terms of environment and character designs. Now it's a matter of speculating what the full roster of characters and monsters will be. Square-Enix tends to be quite thorough with games that span the entire Final Fantasy series, so I expect quite a lot of popular choices will make the cut as well as some more unexpected ones.

With that, does it make me a bad person to be looking forward to this more than Final Fantasy XV or the Final Fantasy VII remake?

Revisiting Romancing SaGa (PS2 Version): Dancing to a Better Tomorrow

There are a couple of JRPG franchises that I really wish did better in the West. One of them is Phantasy Star and the other is Squaresoft's SaGa games. It wasn't for a lack of trying. Square did make an effort to bring these games across the Pacific a few times. Unfortunately, not enough people showed interest in them.

It's a shame, because SaGa games have done a lot of things differently from your run of the mill JRPG, standing out as a very unique oasis in the sub-genre. The series did quite well in Japan, but its style of play never really caught on here. There are more RPGs that do what SaGa did now, however, so I am left wondering if maybe the series was a little ahead of its time for when entries came to the West, especially the non-linear storytelling.

With that, I've been having a hankering to revisit the series for the last while. It was a toss up between SaGa Frontier and my PS2 version of Romancing Saga. Both have their charms, but in the end I opted for the latter, as I do like some of the changes they made to the game when updating it from the Super Famicom version.

It's been 10 years since the remake came out and almost that long since I last played it, and consequently forgotten much about the game. I remember playing as Hawke, the pirate, but after that a lot of things get very fuzzy, very fast.

Found this alter early on. It's in a pentagram. It must be
important.

So, I've decided to play through the game once more, and as a different character. That's one of the things that's nice about the SaGa games, as a lot of them have multiple characters to choose from, each with their own goals. For this go around, I went with Barbara. She's an entertainer in a travelling troupe of dancers and the like. It's always been a dream of mine to save the world through the power of dance and this will finally allow me to do so vicariously through her.

I'm not entirely sure what her motivations are in the game. It never really said. Some of the characters have clear goals as to what they want from life, others not so much. So, I'm left to take her and her friend Herman as they wander around, talking with folks, and generally making the world a better place...well, hopefully anyway.

And this is one of the things that I like so much about Romancing SaGa: it's non-linear, a rarity in JRPGs. If anything, I think this is one of the things that scared away a lot of Westerners when Square tried to bring SaGa games out over here. They had expectations of a much more linear experience where adventures would go on rails from points A to B to C with NPCs explicitly telling the player what to do. Romancing SaGa doesn't have this. There's a lot more figuring things out for yourself.

You'll need to visit towns and talk to everyone to take in the local color and figure out what the situation is in a given region. Is there a conflict in the area? Is someone in town missing? How are the local deities doing? Are there any points of interest near this village? Your characters are travels in this world and they may know a bit about some of the major cities, but that's about it. They need to learn all of these things in order to have a better idea of what is going on in a given region. How are they supposed to know there's a monster-infested cave just outside of town? Of course they'll have no idea it exists. They don't live in that city. Only by talking to the locals and learning this themselves can they go there.

Shooting the breeze with townfolk.

Even after getting all of this information, there's still the question of what they plan to do with it? Will they check out those ruins, cross that desert, or explore that cave? Maybe. It's up to the player. Even the big bad guy that players will have to deal with is only hinted at early on. There's a forest inhabited by fairies early in the game that hints at them, and a travelling minstrel that you'll cross paths with many times tells a story about them. Players learn about them, and at the back of one's mind the thought, "I should probably do something about that..." comes into play.

Sometimes you don't even need to do anything about problems some town folks are having. For example, there's one village where a mother is panicking because her son has gone missing in a nearby cave crawling with monsters. I popped in there and took a look around, but noticed some of the monsters were to strong for me, so I left thinking I'd come back later. However, when later came along the kid was already back home as he'd figured out a way to escape on his own. So, to an extent it feels like a real, living, breathing world.

That's what I've been doing up to this point, just wandering the land meeting people, helping them with their problems (or not). I can have up to five people in my party and I actually managed to find Hawke, and decided to bring him along for old times sake. He has some nifty moves in his repertoire, and an entertainer and a pirate seem like a match made in heaven, or at least a seedy bar by the docks. I even managed to find his helmsman, Guella Ha, who has some pretty great stats and is an expert at pokie-pointy-stick type weapons. For a time, even the minstrel that hangs out at all of the local pubs and volunteers to boot people I don't want in my party anymore asked to join me for a bit. He actually hit quite hard, but then the guy got bored and buggered off after when we rolled into town. I have been on the search for a mage and finally found one in North Estamir. Her name is Myriam and she likes to burn stuff.

The game likes tossing much stronger enemies at players out
of the blue sometimes.

Helping my party grow is pretty neat because Romancing SaGa doesn't use a traditional leveling system. Instead, individual abilities improve after each battle, and depending on the person certain things will get better faster than others. It's usually pretty intuitive with stats that accentuate the characters play style going up much faster than others. However, enemies seem to scale with the party's strength to some extent, so these gains are quickly offset.

I've largely been making the party stronger in a more viable way by leveling their skill sets (aka professions) with trainers in town. Getting a bunch of strength or vitality pales in comparison to hitting up a trainer, spending some jewels, and getting martial arts training up an entire level, for example. That's how you get big results. Unfortunately, jewels come slowly early in the game, so getting a skill set past level two will take some time while saving these up.

You can also buy new gear for everyone, which yields big improvements very quickly. The best way to do this is by raiding treasure chests as you find them. Enemies drop a bit depending what you run into, but chests are much better. Of course, completing quests is better still. Suiting everyone up in nice equipment makes a huge difference, and it improves your standing with the various merchant associations in the game. Doing business at item or weapon shops boosts your reputation with their affiliated association and as your levels go up with them the better deals they'll have for you and the more of an item that they'll have in stock at a given time. Loyalty does have its rewards.

We even helped a grave robber.

So, there is definitely a bit of a grind in order to get jewels for leveling skill sets and to get enough gold to buy all of the goodies, but the thing that makes it feel worth it is the glimmer system. This is something that was introduced in later SaGa games and not in the original Romancing SaGa, but since this is a remake the developers decided to toss it in. This is a system where characters are struck by a moment of clarity and suddenly learn a new ability during battle. A little light bulb blinks over their head, and bam, they do the new thing. This comes from repeated use of a specific weapon type or school of magic making it feel like they're constantly learning something new. It's really satisfying to see them discover these abilities while grinding, and then you even get to figure out combos where two or more characters' special abilities synergize for an even more powerful attack. These attacks are a little bit RNG in when they get used, but if they do whip them out it usually helps a ton.

And with that, I still have no idea what I want to do next. From what I can tell, there's a demon of some sort imprisoned somewhere and some not-so-nice people are trying to free it. That's probably the big bad, and what I'll probably have to get around to eventually. There's no rush, though. I've yet to see much of this world and there's a lot of other stuff going on. For now, I'll just take Barbara and the gang for a merry romp around the world exploring everything, soaking in the sights, getting to know the local townsfolk, and maybe do some vaguely heroic stuff along the way. It really is nice to spend time with such an open-ended JRPG and I don't want to rush things.

I Still Can't Decide Whether to Be Excited about Final Fantasy XV

Since the very first game, it's been easy for me to get excited for Final Fantasy games thanks to a combination of the series generally being quite good and a borderline unconditional love for JRPGs. However, the more I see of the fifteenth installment currently in development, the more my enthusiasm falters and I find myself not sure what to think of the thing.

A big part of this is probably the protagonists, as the game looks like Pop Idols Go On An Adventure more than anything else. To a degree it smacks of a "design by committee" approach where people in high places that really shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the design process looked at some consumer purchasing statistics, noticed what way the wind was blowing and went in that direction. Part of me wonders if this will devolve into Uta no Prince X Final Fantasy at some point when my cynicism gets going.

On the plus side, I suppose one could look at this as a bit of an about face in terms of character design, though. Instead of going with a cast of buxom beauties that have their tits jutting out, which is often the case in this industry, the game is going for some rather handsome men. So, now the female segment of the series fan base has some characters to oggle, and a slew of FFXV boys love fan art will surely proliferate through Google image search in the coming years. So that's something.

Questionable cast aside, combat is the big thing that makes or breaks an RPG for me, especially if it hails from Japan. There's something so charming about how developers from that part of the world put so much effort into this aspect of their games with unique systems ranging from resource management to party composition to special abilities. The fact that Final Fantasy XIII had a good combat system was one of the very few saving graces of that game, preventing me from completely hating it.

So now I'm left feeling a little bit uncertain about what's planned for this game, as the combat is very action-oriented and very simplified. It's more like something out of Elder Scrolls or Dragon's Dogma, which makes sense as Final Fantasy XV is planned to be an exploration-heavy open world game, just like those two. As such, this action RPG approach seems more logical in the greater context of the game. That being said, part of me can't shake my decades old expectation of a more traditional approach to combat in a JRPG that the Final Fantasy series has been known for. It's obvious bias on my part, but at the same time it leaves me wondering if this will feel like a Final Fantasy game or will it just be an open world action RPG with the Final Fantasy label slapped on the box cover. I don't think this would be such a big thing for me if this wasn't a mainline Final Fantasy, and initially it wasn't since the game was originally supposed to be Final Fantasy Versus, but with a mainline installment in this series comes certain expectations, and a much more robust battle system is one of them.

So, with that, I'm having some very mixed feelings about Final Fantasy XV based on what we know so far. XIII made me very skeptical of the series and XV isn't doing anything to change that so far. It may turn out decent, but the cast of characters look set to be more annoying than Snow, Vanille, and Hope, while the battle system comes of as anything but what I've come to expect from a Final Fantasy game. Square-Enix will have a lot of convincing to do to make me want to try this game when it comes out.

Review: Ni no Kuni - Wrath of the White Witch (PS3)

Ni No Kuni has already been out for two years, at least overseas it has. It was released back in Japan in 2011 and was extremely well received, encouraging co-developers Level -5 and Studio Ghibli to localize the game and bring it overseas.

The same, charming gameplay and story has been a hit here, with the game easily being one of the best RPGs to come out in recent years with a unique combat system, well designed plot, and a variety of endearing characters you encounter in this “coming of age” story.

Review: Tales of Graces F (PS3)

Tales of Graces F is a game that may not have wide appeal, however, if you are looking for a fun JRPG (Japanese Role-Playing Game) with a good story and a great battle system, this is definitely for you.