According to what I’ve read it’s fully Japanese and English.
I tried this and I must say I don’t get it. I’m assuming that they throw you in somewhere in the middle because of all the stuff you already have. I died in my third battle because I’ve got no idea what the sheer flood of numbers means.
I understand that a demo needs to show off it’s stuff but I’m just being left horribly confused now. Is this stuff easy pie for JRPG fans and I’m just hopelessly out of date?
I grabbed the demo from Steam, but it’s quite a pain trying to play without a 360 controller. I kinda like what I see, but it’s really difficult to evaluate a JRPG when they just drop you in the middle of the game somewhere and expect you to figure out all the characters, abilities and the system.
Yeah, as far as controls and interface, they don’t even do what I consider the minimum. It looks like more and more games are giving up on older controller support (which is odd given the OS has no problem with my controller) and the mouse and keyboard layout is unintuitive.
That said, it runs great (though lacks some of the technological shiny) at 1600x1050 on my middle to low end machine. There’s some texture pop in in some areas (especially on initial load into a zone), but otherwise I’m pretty happy with how it looks.
There’s absolutely no explanation how to play. I didn’t die though, but only played 4-5 fights. It seems like they’d at least want you to give you the opening three hours or so, so that you get a sense of the plot and and decent introduction into the mechanics.
Here’s the gametrailer’s reviewof the 360 version. I tend to like that site’s reviews.
Thanks for the reminder. I was thinking about “what was that JRPG that was supposed to come to the PC” when I found this thread. T
he bench results were average 26 fps (on my more than three year old rig). The lowest fps count was I think around 15 during an especially intense scene.
Now I’m not to sure if my PC is up to the task - though 26 fps average should still be doable, right? Plus I want to support this endeavor (hoping for more jrpg releases on pc)…
Try the demo. I guess it’s up on steam. I know it’s on filefront as well.
I tried the demo, too. Game was a slideshow at 1680x1050 on my Radeon 4850, despite getting respectable numbers from the benchmark app. Bad texture pop in and frequent loading is a shame given how sparse and ugly the environments are. Some of the combat effects are nice, but enemies pop in and out of existence and you might as well be fighting in the holodeck turned off.
Speaking of the gameplay, I had no idea what was going on either. Pretty poor introduction. It doesn’t initiate you into the story. It doesn’t tell you how to play. All you can do is blunder through the dungeon hoping you don’t come across the unending wave of flank attacks I saw. But, hey! You can save anywhere!
So this is Japan’s idea of an “action” RPG… walking a single avatar towards monsters, whereupon your party will materialize and take turns to bash the monsters, all flanked by lengthy load times. Great example for the backwardness of Japanese game design that has been talked about a lot recently. Pass.
While circulating a demo is certainly helpful to consumers in this case, I don’t know if Squenix is doing themselves any favors by letting the market know how bad thier game is. Also, if their final product isn’t terrible they’ve scared off a bunch of customers with the poorly ported slideshow that is their prerelease demo. The last time I saw UE3 run so poorly it was my own prealpha hobbyist mod… and at least that was a pretty slideshow.
Chalk up another seriously disappointed PC JRPG fan.
I don’t know where you got the idea it is supposed to be an “action” RPG. It’s always been promoted as a turnbased, menu driven RPG with a twist involving commanding squads rather than individual fighters.
EDIT-- Oh, I just saw the quote in the PR. Either that’s a bad translation or someone in SE’s marketing dept should be shot.
But, yeah. Not very fun. And SquareEnix should have stayed as far from the UE3 engine as possible. Not that the Star Ocean 4/Infinite Undiscovery engine is very good. Here’s hoping the White Engine from FFXIII isn’t a complete dog!
This game is supposedly by the SaGa team, which would probably explain why it seems so weird and half-finished.
Wow. You guys with 4850s are really getting a slide show? Something weird is going on with this next generation of cards. I was thinking of upgrading to a new video card, but with my older card it runs perfectly fine at 1680x1050 full screen. Are you running it in windowed mode?
Edit: An really, I think it generally looks pretty good. Some of the environments are small (and the dungeon is pretty sparse), but I wouldn’t call this game ugly by any means. However, I do agree with the pop-in problems, but they seemed mostly negligible. I had no problems with load times either and my computer is nearly two and half years old.
I’ve got a Q6600 with a 8800 GT and the game runs great for me at 1600x1050.
That said, this is a terrible demo only because I have no idea what is going on. The battle system looks like it could have potential. You appear to control groups of folks instead of just a single person at a time. Outside of that, lots of people attack and I’m not certain why.
According to GT’s review, you basically choose your tactical option mostly as a group (rather than individually), so it’s like executing maneuvers. In the options menu while playing, you can setup formations which have different effects I guess and affect how combat plays out. From there you can select who you want in your group and such too. I haven’t messed with it a lot but the demo is terrible at explaining anything to you.
For the record, the framerate was fine on my 8800 GTS at the default 720p resolution. Sounds like the engine has a big problem with ATI cards.
This is the only thing that could possibly have interested me in this game.
Well, ATI 48XXHD’s because I’m running a 1950xt and it runs ok in the demo.
FWIW, I didn’t have any performance issues in the demo with my 4850.
I played the demo a bit more, and I’m somewhat warming up to it. I read a couple of reviews of the 360 version, which described the battle system and that made it a bit easier to understand what was going on. It also helped that when I unplugged my joystick, the onscreen button indicators changed to the keyboard ones instead of the xbox controller ones. The keyboard/mouse support is still bad, but not quite as bad that I originally thought. The game seems to recognize any game controller as a 360 controller and changes the UI accordingly.
The battle system is rather interesting, actually. I just wish there was an option to maneuver into a better position instead of a) holding position or b) advancing directly towards an enemy. That would add a bit of depth to the flanking system. But even now, you can often engage with an enemy and then charge into their flank with another squad. I feel it has a lot of potential compared to the more traditional JRPG battle systems, especially once you have more squads on the battlefield.
Am I going to buy it at full price? Absolutely not. But I think I’ll pick it up once it’s cheaper (and once I have the means to connect a 360 controller to my PC). I guess I might consider the 360 version too, but the PC version seems to fix the load times and graphical glitches that were criticized in several 360 reviews.
If this is what fixed is like, the 360 version must have been really bad.
Really? Man, I just downloaded the demo and it displayed the 360 controller buttons even though my 360 controller hasn’t been plugged in in months and I even deleted the 360 controller driver before playing. I guess it just hates me. Lost Planet did the same thing.