From the same guys who did Odin Sphere, and it looks gorgeous:
Trailer
Game play
Hopefully it makes for a better game this time. Unfortunately it’s Wii only. :-/
Wii only? Curses.
I’m somewhat gladdened by the gameplay video not being as horrible and hitchy as Odin Sphere, since that’s the game that I wanted to love so hard that I put up with it long after the swearing and throwing things should have clued me into the fact that it was treating me abusively. If they don’t put in a slow ranged fighter that doesn’t work at all with the game, I’m in.
Humm, I didn’t have any issues with Odin Sphere’s gameplay. It was challenging, but there were no ‘broken’ aspects to it, as I recall.
Still, I think I’ll end up buying a Wii for this.
For serious? You didn’t experience frequent, crippling, hideous slowdown? Because I sure did. Maybe it’s a unique issue to playing it on a PS3 (Emotion Engine intact - not software emulation).
I do recall slowdowns when things got busy, though not very often, and only during the ‘hundreds of things going on’ bits. It didn’t really handicap me though…
Edit: Yes, played on the PS2.
I had one issue with Odin Sphere’s gameplay – it was too frequently boring. I simply got sick of the grindiness of farming and cooking; my tolerance for such things is very low anymore, so YMMV.
I also had some annoying slow down (on a PS2), but it wasn’t a deciding factor.
Yeah, I didn’t play through it because the gameplay wasn’t engaging enough. I also found performance to at least be adequate on a PS2. But it certainly was a nice game concept, if only the execution had been a bit more pleasing…
Personally, it was the artistry that kept me hooked. I agree with your assessments, but aside from the fact that it was damned gorgeous (imo), it also was a pleasant break 3D games in general.
Yes, very nice art direction, even on those silly characters. But there’s a limit to how far that will go with a game which is essentially the old arcade game Defender on crack.
I really enjoyed the quirky gameplay. I don’t recall grinding much, but I liked opening a battle by placing a seed, and choosing seeds relative to difficulty of the battle, and having to balance plant growth with character growth (HP vs. weapon), and I enjoyed learning to fight effectively as most of the characters. The most compelling aspect for me was the radically different playstyles of the characters and curious and complex storytelling. Very modern take on mythological storytelling, I thought.
I quit when I got the final boss rush. I didn’t like most of the boss fights in the game to begin with, so ending on a boss rush seemed really poorly planned. It also didn’t seem like the narrative needed much more resolution then it had already gotten. And I think to get through that, you would have had to grind. A lot. But endgame sequences like that are never my thing, so I didn’t disparage the game for including them (especially because I felt I had beaten the game before the fights began).
=/
Watching the gameplay vid makes me worried, if only because of the constant pauses (each “scene” lasts only one battle and is only a few meters long) and the sameness of the encounter style (enter area, step forward, monsters appear, kill monsters, get graded, leave area).
I mean, the combat itself looks exciting. . . but it just seems so compartmentalized and so repetitive. A prettier Streets of Rage with 30 second long levels that don’t necessarily seem to connect in a logical order.
I dunno, maybe I’m being too negative on this one view shrugs
I liked the vignettes, like sudden and sharp encounters while you travel, rather than the standard dungeon crawl.
I agree however, many of the encounters did seem quite similar, although at least some were substantially different. It’d come down to how repetitive it became, and whether there are other aspects to the game. Hard to tell how much scope there is just from a trailer.
Classy, Halverson.
The article in the magazine is ridiculously long and filled with great info.
it’s really repetitive after a few hours of play, I imported it for my wii, spent about 5-6 hours into it and haven’t touched it since.
the art style is great and all, but combat gets extremely repetitive.
I’m sure it is (not really), but I’d rather not support that kind of crap. It’s bad enough they do that stupid Girls of Gaming thing every year, but they could at least keep the tentacle rape foot fetishism off the regular magazine’s cover. I assume you ripped the cover off before you let your kids read it?
You should really loosen up in the US concerning this.
In Europe that cover would raise no eyebrows on EDGE / other serious game magazines (GEE in Germany for example) apart from the odd perverts that are reminded of their “anime” (cough hentai cough) collection.
I don’t know about this being a US sexual mores thing. I’m a commie-sexy-fun-time yuropeen, and a cover with a girl in buns having her skirt-lifted and front bum perused by an octopus, action gloriously to the fore in vivid technicolour, dead centre of the page… Well, it gave me pause. And not in a good way. Not even if you try and wankily fob it off as edgily imitating “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” to prove how culturally sensitive and artistically discerning you are when it comes to your freaky wankbank material.