Games released this week

gillman

gillman

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Jul 19, 2005
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Bunch of games released this week, some good, most are terrible. Thought that I would spark some conversation in here forums to see if anyone had any picks for games that were sure to win, or games that you have no idea how they made it through any process towards being made.

Personally I didn't know that they still made GBA games, but I am super glad that they powered out "Barbie as Island Princess" for us. That just sounds super.
 
I'm mostly interested in GH3, Timeshift, and Manhunt 2. Basically I want to see if Timeshift does anything different with the manipulation of time. Judging from the demo, IMO it looks like it'll be just another pretty FPS that I forget about after 2 months, but I hope I'm wrong. Also, I really want to find out if Manhunt 2 is deserving of all the hype. I, unlike many people kinda dug the 1st one (I'm not saying it was great, but I liked it) so I'm hoping Rockstar improved on everything and didn't just add more blood.

VF5 has me slightly interested, but with info on Soul Calibur 4 and Street Fighter 4 slowly being released, it's been moved to the back burner, so-to-speak.

On a related topic to this week's releases- Is this the best year in gaming history or what? I honestly don't know when I'll be able to play all of these titles I'm gonna buy.

Oh yeah, about the GBA . . . who knew?
 
BARBIE

AS

ISLAND PRINCESS

Come on! Not only does the title itself boast little knowledge of English, but it probably is the shortest game on the list. Think about it, what do people love out of their games?

Terrible Graphics and little for their money.

Barbie as Island Princess promises you BOTH these things.
 
I haven't played a Panzer General game since I got my first computer about a decade ago. The formula however has been used in so many games since. I'm excited about it coming to DS, but I still gotta go with a Disgaea game out of sheer style preference.
 
I like Disgaea. It's just that La Pucelle is the best NIS tactics game. And FFT is the best game ever.
 
PLOT ASIDE:

La Pucelle is pretty much Disgaea lite. It was the game that they did right before Disgaea (it was only brought over after Disgaea did well), and if you start looking at the way that the game plays you can kind of tell that they took the lessons that they learned and threw them into Disgaea. The same can be said about Phantom Brave and Makai Kingom, Nippon Ichi took all of the lessons and experiments that they did through those games to further refine Disgaea 2.

Mechinically speaking FFT plays like a game from the 90s. When you move a character you can't unmove them if you can't attack, the movement is perminate. You can see how far away things will hit from, but if you want to do some really complicated attacks it gets really hard to line them up.

If you want to power level and get everything out of the way really quickly tatics forces you to wait until later chapters, and unlocking almost any class above squire for the majority of the first chapter in Tactics is a waste of time as the shops don't even sell the weapons or armor to use, making your awesome knight run around the field naked. This makes the entire first chapter harder than needed even for people on repeated play throughs.

The camera movement and extra dungeons are also very limited, as well as not really presenting a challenge after you are ready to beat the game. Sure they have the 13th zodiac and everything, but it isn't impossible, or hard for a group at level 99 with the right classes mastered.

Disgaea was just made from the ground up to have the system used against it.

The remastered story of Tactics is better, and for its time it did make giant leaps over the other games that came before it. Comparing it now to other games it just doesn't hold up as well.
 
Well, when it comes to FFT and high-level jobs early in the game, the only real problem is with Lancers and gun-slinging Mediators. Unless you suffer from a lack of judgment and decide you want a dancer who uses the fabrics or a calculator that needs to attack with one of the pocketbooks, the sword, shield, dagger, bow, isn't much of an issue. Granted, Katanas for samurai and flails for ninjas are nice, but if worse comes to worst, you can just spend some time and get the skills that let any job use whatever weapon (probably swords).

Though I do agree that it would've been nice for the opportunity to get the basic version of all weapon classes, it is a minor enough issue that it isn't detrimental to the game as a whole. Especially when you consider that you're going to need to spend lots of time as a monk or thief for lots of your characters.

As for Disgaea vs. La Pucelle...Disgaea had just random, stupid (not in a bad way) silliness. It didn't really have the deep character customization that was in FFT or the elaborate battle system of Phantom Brave. It was a pretty simplistic tactical game that became a cult hit because it had the singular distinction of being the only more-than-bare-bones game in the genre since FFT. Disgaea is a pretty good game. It's just my least-favorite NIS game.
 
As far as Disgaea and FFT is concerned it's like a ying and yang to me, tactics has a better story but disgaea is far more entertaining. Disgaea has the over the top special abilities, while tactics abilities offer very little, effective but no eye candy. Aside from some of the black knight and special character abilities might I add (Agrias, Cid etc.).
 
The real clincher, IMO, is the awesome awesome awesome amount of character customization. Yeah, Disgaea had all sorts of silly characters and classes, and the Prinny is one of mankind's greatest accomplishments, but the sheer depth available in FFT is just crazy.

I must admit, though. I was greatly disappointed by FFT on the PSP. The complete lack of a rebalancing is unforgivable. While there's plenty to love FFT's customization for, the complete brokenness of the four dancer and Ramza as a gun-slinger is still just embarassingly dominant. Same goes for the ol' Blade Grasp skill (the Samurai counter skill) still, literally, makes you unhittable (under a 3% chance of being hit with a melee attack). Though the redone localization is still worth it, if they wanted to make multiplayer good, they should've done something about some of the utterly dominant tactics.
 
There is a couple extra things that they added in Tactics, small minor things that you would only ever remember not being there if you played it a ton. But Tactics also had a way of being impossible if you weren't properly prepared for a fight, even if you were over leveled. It is still the only time that I have ever had a friend weep with joy when he beat a boss. He had been stuck there for over a year because you are given the choice ot save right before the boss. He started a new save and was playing through again and one day just played that save and beat him. He started crying.

Disgaea is way more customizable. You can transmigrate characters back to level 1 and they get bonuses for doing so. you can move them while having a spell selected, you can also cancel an action before it is done as well as move someone back to where they started after you moved them, and you can throw them across the board. The first two are things that were just plainly wrong with Tactics, flat out. Throwing people is awesome because it instantly makes any board clearable in one turn. It wasn't needed but it helped, a lot.

I have always maintained that Tactics had a deeper story to it then Disgaea. Disgaea 1 is also broken in a couple of places, namely the item world. It can be so random that sometimes you can't clear a floor because of how it was made. It also will randomly throw out combos that the board is pretty close to impossible to clear.
 
Maybe, maybe not, how many of the abilities in FFT are actually worth it? Archers I only picked up the concentration ability, Orators and Mystics are worthless, Geomancers are a sweet class but weak magic wise, and do I even have to mention the Bard? How many abilities did you actually use in FFT aside from the move/find and autopotion ability? Maybe some magic? Flare and Meteor were available but at over a thousand JP unneccessary. How about those sweet classes that had crap abilities, Archers charged, Dragoons Jumped, Knights broke crap, Thiefs stole items (but you were glad you had them when you stole all the pieces of the Genji armor) Ninjas threw crap (By the By other ninja specific throwing items woulda helped instead of two shurikens and three element bombs), Finally level up a Black mage, learn the Calculator abilities and you have yourself a broken character. The monk was the only Class I really enjoyed using, skill wise of course.One other thing, sure you could recruit monsters, but they were useless. Disgaea on the other hand found a place in my heart once my jack learned the Jack the Ripper ability.
 
Samurai was pretty serious. The only problem is how it had that whole sword-breaking thing, which made it tough and pointless to risk your one-of-a-kind weapons. But there are lotsa abilities that are useful. The various equip abilities, especially the gun, blade grasp, dual weapons. Move+1/2/3, Levitate, Jump. Really, the fight against Algus at the end of chapter 1 is what really lets you appreciate the great stuff the abilities let you do. With Algus as a Knight with a crossbow and item subskill? And things only build off that. What about a monk with equip armor? Or a Dark Knight with sub Monk (beastly attack with the mixed range and healing of a monk)? Or a gun-slinging Time Mage with sub-Calc (break out the demis from anywhere and snipe for the kill)? And the list goes on of all these slick ideas.
 
Funny thing is most of those happen to be support abilities, sure having all sorts of combinations are pretty sweet, but what ever happened to offensive abilities? Having support abilities be the main focus would be like turkey without the gravy! That's why monks, geomancers and some of the mages were the best.
 
Monks were beastly, but Geomancers and the non-black/white mages were all crap. The reactive abilities were no joke, though. Same with movement+3. I had a ninja with move+3 on one game.
 
I think what he was trying to say is that the non STORY characters matter because you start up with them. You don't really recruit all the powerful characters (Cid, Cloud....just kidding, Worker 8) until later in the game.
 
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