The Biggest Game Project on this Planet

Silence of Ruins

Estpolis Gaiden is finished! YAY!
This was really one of those games that made me go: "Why the Hell am I doing this again?" and it certainly doesn't make you feel good to be a gamer or anything.

It's so tremendously, astoundingly, stupefyingly BORING.
The game took me a whopping 33 hours, which is very impressive for a GBA game, and certainly a very respectable length for an RPG, if it's any bloody FUN, but it ISN'T.

Battles are very slow and uneventful, and too numerous. The only redeeming factor is that there are no random battles, I was very happy with that, but instead, enemy characters can be seen on screen and you can effect the start of the battle, depending on how you touch them. Please don't make any jokes, I've heard 'em all.
Ideally you should approach them from behind (I'm warning you!) so you can start the battle with a preemptive attack. It really sucks if it happens the other way round though. It can really turn the tables on you.
But no matter what, battles are just SO boring and SO slow; I'm glad I played this on the Emulator, cos at least that allowed me to just surf around the Internet whilst the battles were going on. That saved my sanity (or what was left of it) probably.

And there's another thing, there are practically NO save points in this game. You can only save at churches in some villages, other than that NOTHING. You can make a temporary save anywhere you want though, but the problem is, if you load that save, it'll be gone forever, meaning that if you die you'll have to restart from the last time you made a real save, which can be a long time ago. Extremely Frustrating.
Add to that the fact that Reviving spells and items are exceedingly rare (reviving is generally also done at a church) and you have one shitty annoying game on your hands.

Dungeons? Long and boring! Without any save points! Yay!
There is the very occasional puzzle, but it's usually ridiculously easy and an insult to everyone's intelligence, even to people who are just sitting next to you when you play this on the train. In fact, I got a 25 Euro fine for playing this in a public place once. Damn you, Atlus! I want my money back!

Is there nothing nice to say about this game then? Well, you can turn it off when it starts to annoy you, that's pretty cool.
Oh, one thing! You can catch monsters! In a feeble attempt to copy the Pokemon rage, you can capture most of the enemies you meet in dungeons, using a special kind of monster-catching-disc and you can raise them, use them in battle and even merge with them, to form some kind of monster-human-hybrid thingy! I think that's how Pavarotti was born!
Granted, that feature is pretty cool, there is some decent music, the game doesn't look bad at all and I never felt really reluctant to play, so I'm going to give this a 'barely-sufficient' mark: 5.8
But I never want to have to do this again!


In other news, I've reached the Battle with Wiegraf in Final Fantasy Tactics.
If you've played the game, you'll know what this means and you'll probably burn some candles for me, if you don't know what this means, then you've simply never experienced the true meaning of the words Motherfucking Hard.
This is one of those epic one-on-one battles with a major bad guy, the Hero's brother in this case. (don't get me started on the whole family-relations business in this game, I don't think the Internet has enough storage space to hold it).
He's Strong. He's got high Attack and Defense powers. He's Fast. He can act twice in one turn. He can hit you from a distance. You are DEAD.
Still, it's not impossible, if you use steroids and have a breakfast of 50 raw eggs and 5 unprocessed cows. I'm going to win though. Cos, you know, I'm INGEN!

posted by Ingen! @ 3:00 PM