FantasiaWHT
03-17-2010, 10:27 PM
Anybody else playing this DS game?
Just picked it up today. Been playing for an hour and I don't have a farking clue what's going on. It's... umm... really strange. I've never seen an RPG where the text advances itself from screen to screen sometimes. The font is really really hard to read. They use a ton of really big numbers without commas in them to help read it.
The sound is bad. Really quiet, hard time hearing it on max volume. Sound effects are just painful.
Boy I hope this gets better soon. So far I've (1) watched the single hokiest cut scene I've ever seen; (2) jumped into a space fight with absolutely no context; (3) hit the A button a few times through some bad dialogue that I think recreates part of the cut scene; (4) apparently hired this bikini-clad pilot to take me off of my homeworld; (5) apparently engaged some kind of auto pilot off to some planet for some reason; (6) hit some buttons whose function I can't even figure out in a fight; and (7) landed in a spaceport for reasons unknown.
*breaks out the manual*
Ze_ro
03-18-2010, 12:29 AM
I've been looking forward to this game, as the premise sounds intriguing... how does it play? Is it a standard JRPG where you're stuck on a linear storyline, or is it like Elite where you can go anywhere you want?
--Zero
swlovinist
03-18-2010, 01:08 AM
This is going to be one of the games that either you love or hate. It actually sounds like a game that I would love.
FantasiaWHT
03-18-2010, 07:53 AM
Oh I'm definitely going to give it some more time. Just not an impressive opening.
FantasiaWHT
03-21-2010, 10:42 PM
Ok about 6 hours in now. It has improved. Somewhere around 2 hours or so in you get access to a all-inclusive in-game tutorial. Unfortunately, 80% of this stuff should've been in the manual so you could access it when you actually needed it.
The game suffers greatly in the presentation score... sound effects are TERRIBLE... just comes across as static and screeching. Music is utterly forgettable and poorly sampled. Graphics are very bland - would have been much better to not do the ships in 3D - except for the anime cutscenes and stills, which are very nice.
Suffers also in accessibility. The GUI is sorely lacking - there's no traditional "menu" screen. You can't check any information about yourself, your crew, or your fleet, without first docking at a planet or station. There's no way to track your quest progress or even remember what you are supposed to be doing next. Theoretically, bartenders are supposed to give you jobs, but so far about 1 in 8 actually has a job for you to do.
It's also a huge run-everywhere-talk-to-everybody-then-go-back-an-hour-later-and-talk-to-everybody-(and-I-mean-everybody)-one-more-time-to-try-to-find-the-one-person-in-dozens-of-planets type of game.
BUT, there's some incredibly cool stuff. You pick up new crew members who have 10 characteristics and some special skills (however I have no clue how to learn what the skills do...), and you get to assign them to literally dozens of officers in your fleet who use various skills.
Ship customization is very very cool. You can pick from dozens and dozens of different modules, and they all have to be actually placed in your ship. Each module is a different size - think tetris shapes, but some are only 2 or 3 squares - and each ship has a different combination of available spots to put the modules in.
Battles are pretty creative, although with all the running around I've been doing I'm getting a bit sick of them. You control all your ships at once, which is a bit of a bummer, but you can use shots of varying strength, such that the stronger shots take more of your battle gauge. You move backward and forward to get into range (and different guns have different firing range), and can even board ships with a basic paper-rock-scissors game.
It's a pretty open world (Even as far as I am in, there's tons of places to go), but not that much to do in it. They should've taken a cue from games like Freelancer and had simple missions to do for quick cash and exp - simple freighting, or kill X space pirates, or escorting... anything would've been nice so I can save up money for the new ship plans. Like I said before, there's some bartender missions but barely any at all.