PixlBit

 So after playing a ludicrous amount of hours of Trails in the Sky, I decided I wanted to take a break before starting the second one. I didn't want to burn out on the series, afterall. However, I still had a weird itch for some JRPG goodness. I bounced around a few games deciding which to stick with, and these are the games I've been playing:

Final Fantasy X HD

 Fun fact: Child Blake was a dick. In the year 2002, I was 10 years of age and one of my best friends had just received a copy of Final Fantasy X after begging his mum for it for the better part of a year. Since we were both huge fans of Final Fantasy VIII and IX he decided to bring it over to my house after school one day. We started a new game, took the battles in turn and stared longingly at the then state of the art graphics and story. We were so immersed that we played it long into the early hours of the morning. 

 Now, there was a problem: the next day he was going to stay with his dad for a week in another town, and naturally he wanted to take the game with him. However, he fell asleep before I did, so I took the game out of the console, put another one in, and hid the disk. When we awoke and couldn't find the disk, I acted shocked and blamed my brother who I said must have played something else and lost the disk. My friend was disappointed when he had to leave without it, but it gave me a week to finish it. Yeah... not my greatest moment.

 

 Anyway, the HD remaster was on sale on pc, so I picked it up hoping to relive those glory days. Then I heard the voice acting.  Oh dear god, the voice acting.Tidus might just be the most annoying character on the face of the earth. In fact, none of these actors seem to know how humans talk! It got so bad that I downloaded a mod to switch to the original Japanese voice acting. That didn't fix things though, as somehow Tidus is EVEN MORE ANNOYING in Japanese. Seriously, you thought the infamous laugh scene was bad? Wait until you hear the japanese version!

 

 Yup, it's pretty fucking bad. So I went back to the English version, and I must say after a while the I stopped noticing the voice acting. The game is quite charming despite (and maybe because of) it's bad acting, weird translation, and occasional hamfisted dialogue. I got really into it, possibly because Final Fantasy X has the best combat system in the series. That's objective fact. Unfortunately, it takes so long for it to be interesting, especially when for the first 2 hours you're underwater mashing attack because you don't actuallt have any other skills to make use of. Once you have a full party though, it's a thing of beauty, and maybe one of the best JRPG battle systems period.

 Anyway, I stopped playing the game for a bit because it keeps asking me to play Blitzball. Fuck Blitzball.

Chrono Trigger

 So I bought two other Jrpgs for two different systems. I bought the DS version of Chrono Trigger for my 3DS and I bought Suikoden II for Vita since they were both super cheap. I haven't played much of Suikoden II yet, because I got hooked into Chrono Trigger something fierce.

 Believe it or not, I'd somehow gone all of my adult life without ever playing Chrono Trigger, and I was a little worried that it wouldn't hold up. After all, I had just attempted to revisit Final Fantasy VI and found it maybe hadn't aged as well as we'd all been lead to believe, especially in the visual/animation and level design departments.

 However, Chrono Trigger has aged exceptionally well. The graphics look pretty damn nice, with only a few areas looking a bit dated (the first time you go into the future and see the ruins is a sharp reminder of the age this game came from).  Honestly, this game feels like it could have been released today on steam as an indie. It feels slick to play, and it's always throwing something new at you so you never become bored. It's just so goddamned entertaining!

Anime

keeping up the weird Japanese obsession phase, I've also been watching some Anime. Firstly, Bilby hadn't seen Cowboy Bebop, So I decided we needed to remedy that ASAP. The other anime I've been watching is Claymore, which is quite great even if it constantly reminds me that Japanese people struggle with the letter 'l'. It might sound a little racist, but it is a little offputting to have the only words you understand be Cooware (Clare) and Craymore. Otherwise, it's a pretty entertaining show. The plot starts out pretty generic with an organisation of half human half monsters being the only ones that can kill monsters, but it's a lot more interesting than that, especially with the character backgrounds. The atmosphere is also bleak as fuck and the animation is awesome, especially in the bloody fight sequences.

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 Anyway, that's me done. Bye!