ToV does have some tedious quests and all...trust me I know ( i managed to get all the acheivements) but I feel the best parts about the game lie in the combat and the characters. Is it a five star game? no, but its still hella fun and it DID get me to spend about 300 hours playing the game multiple times and exploiting the brokenness of the fighting system.
Tales of Vesperia update
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 On 12/21/2011 at 05:37 PM by Angelo Grant See More From This User » |
Just a quick update
Well, some of the cracks are starting to show on this one. It's not game breaking by a long shot, and nothing huge, but I'm now understanding why this isn't exactly the perfect JRPG the first chapter had me believing it was. Don't get me wrong, I'm still playing it and loving it, but there's some frustration mixed in with the pure awesome that was the first cheaper.
First problem: The dog pissing game. Yes I’m serious. There's some dog that challenges a canine character in my party to a literal pissing contest. The goal is to see who can 'mark' more of the world than the other. It's a crazy, funny, ridiculous idea that would only work in this kind of a universe. There's just one problem: It's not explained very well at all. If we didn't live in the information age with a Google machine literally sitting on my phone, I would have really gotten pissed off about this one. As it stands, I've missed some awesome urinary opportunities, but it's nothing I can't probably recover from once I get out of the funnel I'm currently stuck in.
That's another thing. In the first chapter there wasn't really an issue with not being able to return to earlier places in the game, but now there are some big ones. In order to craft some of the weapons I need to teach my characters certain skills, I need to shop at places I left behind a while ago. Trouble is, once you get stuck on a story mission, you can't really explore the world map anymore. I understand it doesn’t make much sense to go world traveling when you've got something urgent to attend to (I left Rinoa hanging from a cliff in FF VIII for a few hours while I went and played cards just for kicks once) but I really dislike being stuck in a corner because of it.
This is just details though, like I said before. The game remains fantastic. I just realized that it still has all sorts of flaws and isn't the answer to the million dollar question. That being just how relevant is Japan, it's personality, and it's RPGs these days. Honestly, I can say that I still love them, but they just don't financially compare to the likes of Call of Duty, Mass Effect, and Skyrim. The days of a Final Fantasy game taking the world by storm may be long behind us, and that saddens me quite a bit really. There's FF XIII-2 on the horizon of course, but I don't know if any amount of marketing can dig them out of the hole their reputation is in after XIII and the complete bomb that was XIV. The franchise has had its stinkers in the past (FF II on NES... oh wow what a crapper) but never have they been hyped up so much only to fall so hard. Japan has serious potential (Dark Souls people!) but just can't seem to get the grip on the industry it either saved or created, depending on your perspective.
Come on Japan. Impress me. Give me a reason to tack 5 stars next to something you ship over here. I'll do it, I swear.
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