Games I beat in 2012 or played enough of to know I didn't want to finish them.
Showing 1-10 of 21 items
First game completed in 2012. I wasn't a big fan of the first Layton game and I'd say I feel the same way about Diabolical Box. I think the characters are great, the art style's neat and the story's pretty interesting, but I really don't want to play a game where Brain Teaser puzzles are the primary mechanic. Unfortunately, I bought this game before I played the first one so I was stuck with it and wanted to finish it. I feel like I know enough about the series so that if the Layton/Ace Attorney cross over ever comes out in North America, I'm familiar enough with all the characters to enjoy it. I'm satisfied with that. All in all, not a great start to the year, but I have high hopes for whatever's next.
I am a total newcomer to the Fate/ series -- I have not played the original visual novel or seen either of the anime series. I picked up Fate/Extra primarily because it looked like an interesting Persona knockoff. I played as a male protagonist with Saber as my servant. I liked the premise and story and the combat system was a nice change from standard turn-based fare, but overall the game is far too repetitive. The dungeon environments are nice to look at, but they're all kind've the same, and the rest of the game's environment is about as big as the schools in Persona 3 and 4. The boss fights are probably the game's greatest strength because they can be quite challenging and require a good amount of strategy to survive. Other than the repetitiveness of the game, I'd say the ending is probably the game's weakest point. Not only are there some pretty significant plot holes in the story, but most of the ending consists of a long-winded explanation of 20 years of recent canon history that feels sort've unnecessary considering how many other aspects of the game were left unexplained. At least the actual conclusion itself was quite good, which redeemed the ending a little in my eyes. Glad I took the time to play this, but I will not be replaying with a different character gender or servant.
Christine Love's visual novel projects have been a bit hit or miss for me. I adored Digital: A Love story, which has become one of my favourite games of all time. Don't Take It Personally Babe, however, just did not connect with me on the same level emotionally as Digital did and I found it to be quite disappointing on a number of levels. Love has thoroughly impressed me again, however, with Analogue: A Hate Story. The story is fascinating, emotionally powerful and keeps you interested even though the gameplay is largely comprised of reading letters and diaries. As an archivist, I found the idea of finding this tremendous fonds that had such an interesting tale to reveal was totally compelling. Loved it. Managed to find two endings and will likely wait awhile before attempting to find the other endings -- the story needs to sit with me for awhile before I go back to it.
Played to about halfway through Act 2 in February. Unfortunately, stalled on this game and have not yet had the motivation to go back to it. I very, very rarely play shooters and I have to admit that the game play was sometimes frustrating for me, but I was so interested in what might be coming next in the story that I stuck with it. I'd love to finish this sometime during the first half of the year, but we'll see. Hopefully this text will be edited at some point.
Dropped after about 13 hours. I had never played one of the Atelier games before, but when I was looking around for things to put on my Christmas Wishlist and saw this was coming out last winter, I figured it'd be a good opportunity to try it out. Critics had generally nice things to say about it, I like turn-based RPG combat, and the art seemed cute. I figured Totori and I would get along fine. To a certain extent, we did. Atelier Totori's combat mechanics are perfectly serviceable as are the crafting mechanics (though I would argue that the sheer volume of items a person can create doesn't necessarily mean a system has depth). The problem is, there's nothing about the game that stood out for me and made me want to keep playing it. The crafting and battle mechanics got pretty boring after awhile when there was so little story to propel the game forward. And while I like cute anime art, this series is a little too moe, even for me.
Completed the main story in about 50 hours in April. My feelings for Tales of Graces are a little mixed. All in all, I'd say the game is super fun to play. The battle system is fast-paced and I liked it much better than Vesperia's, but I also felt like the story and characters fell pretty flat. The art was very nice, but it's also fairly obvious that the game was originally designed for the Wii and that the designers did not really try to push the system very much. While the towns are nice, I found myself walking through a lot of narrow corridors that had very little to interact with aside from enemies a la Final Fantasy XIII and, worst of all, the same locations were visited repeatedly. I think the general sentiment toward this game is pretty spot on. Not fabulous, but not terrible either and if you like JRPGs, it's fun and inoffensive. I hope that its sales were good enough to convince Namco to bring over Xillia -- I really want to see a Tales game built for the PS3. I plan to play the Adulthood arc at some point, but I need a good long break from this game before I go back to it.
Played about 2/3 of this game in April. Unfortunately, got stumped in one of the first quasi-stealth sequences and got a little frustrated. Took a break, then wound up getting totally sidetracked by RL issues. At this point, I have no motivation to go back and finish. I love the Story in Overseer, because I love the story in Mean Streets, but the gameplay in this entry is frustrating at times, largely due to the need for stealth-type stuff. I tend to dislike stealth sequences in adventure games, so they're often a stopping point for me. I own this, so eventually I will go back and finish it, but it's not likely any time soon. I'm hoping to play at least one more classic adventure game this year, but I haven't decided which series I feel like drawing from. I may make an attempt at another Tex Murphy game, but I'm also thinking about replaying Dreamfall or delving in to the Broken Sword series.
I feel like Journey is less a game than it is an experience. I haven't been on an emotional roller-coaster like this in a very, very long time. Feelings of curiosity, accomplishment, wonder, awe, fear, misery, and utter joy all in just about two hours. I'd say more about it, but I'd never want to spoil any of it for anyone. Beautiful game, well worth the money spent. I was thinking I might want to go back and get some trophies at some point, but I don't think I ever want to play it again, or at least not for a good long while.
Fun and charming turn-based RPG from Double Fine. Played through this in one day and loved it. Battle system was fun, premise was interesting and an all-around enjoyable way to spend a Saturday. Considering picking up the DLC, but I've spent my game budget for the month so it'll have to wait until next month if I bother getting it at all. One major drawback to the game is the lack of voice acting. I know it would have increased the game's budget by quite a bit, but it would have added even more charm had there been competent voice acting to go along with the cutscenes. Overall, pretty happy with how this one turned out and glad I finally picked it up and played it.
This game took me forever to finish. I think I started it at some point in May and didn't finish until August 1st. At first, I had trouble playing it for more than an hour or two at a time because I found the encounter rate to be frustratingly high. Once I finally got in to the game, I wound up getting a job in a different province and had to move on short notice, so I didn't have time to play games for awhile. The third thing that got in my way was the final dungeon. Died multiple times during long gaps between save points at the hands of multiple enemies that can kill your party before the battle even really starts. I like the battle system, the characters are interesting, music's fabulous, character designs are great and I want to see the story through to its conclusion in DDS 2, but this game got on my last fucking nerve quite a few times. Glad I played it and super happy it's over all at the same time. Will probably play a couple downloadable titles and maybe Persona 4: Arena before I move on to DDS 2.