Thomas Kobelsky's Blog

December 6, 2008

Gameplay: 9/10
Story: 9/10
Music: 10/10
Visuals: 10/10
Overall score: 9/10

Enough of the numbers, onto the text.
Easily the most beautiful game that I've played so far. Not saying it's the best looking (as that would go to Crysis) but it's the beauty of the world, environments, characters and music that really makes it such a diamond.
The environments are so lush and full of everything needed to make it feel like it wasn't just some random generic area that you had to pass through in order to win.
The level design was so well done, each puzzle being more challenging than the last, each maze having more paths than the last, as well as not overly populating the encounters. and with that said, it still felt like the levels made sense in the game. not like some other games, where things are there just to be there.

The battle system is amazing. The only other games I can compare it to are Rogue Galaxy, Final Fantasy X, and Tales of Symphonia.
Rogue Galaxy because you can basically go anywhere during the fight.
FFX because it's turn based in that style (whoever has the highest speed goes first, etc).
Tales of Symphonia because you have to hammer the attack button until your "time bar" is empty (although i guess that's closer to Rogue Galaxy than ToS).
Youtube some gameplay videos to see it better.

But enough about what's great about it. there's a couple little things that I noticed that might be considered bad design/poor integration.
First, I dont know what engine they used to make the game, but it seems like the shader they created for the outlines was only half-way finished. If you get any sort of dust in front of characters, the outline shows through in front of the dust, as opposed to behind it where the characters are. It's not so bad that it makes the viewer cringe every time they see it (I actually didnt even notice it until one of the last dungeons, then I saw it like non-stop), but it definitely could have been improved on during development.
The next is the second play-through. I can understand why they did it: to get people to play it again and be more thorough, as it's not that long of a game (I beat it in under 30 hours first time going through) but the fact that almost half of the achievements (and almost 70% of the gamerscore) REQUIRE you to go through the second time is a little weird in my opnion.

With all that said, I loved the game so much. It was well worth the $45 I laid down for it, as it's easily become one of my favorite RPGs of all time (and I've played a lot of RPGs).

-tk

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