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chuckroSky pirates in airships! Fighting an evil empire! Discovering awesome magic powers!
This really seemed like something that would appeal to me, despite Mithrigil’s insistence that the plot was utter dreck. The first two hours of the plot weren’t bad, but weren’t enough to distract me from my many problems with the game itself.
To whit: The spinning screen in battles (complete with jumping to characters on their turn) makes it hard to focus on what’s going on. The 3D view out of battles makes it hard to navigate, though the dungeons have a semi-useful minimap.
Were there no heal spots in the intro dungeon, or did I just miss them? Battles ended up unpleasantly difficult, but it didn’t seem like I had a lot of alternate strategy to work from. You spend battles accumulating SP, which you need to expend (along with MP) to cast spells or to use your special attack—the latter of which I didn't find terribly impressive, given it took four rounds to use it, when it did around double the damage of a standard attack.
Then you get to the first “town” after risking impossibly-hard battles in your airship to get there, and it’s too large, hard to navigate, and the equipment system is obtuse. At which point I stopped.
As random notes, there are very few rpgs for the Gamecube, but oddly, it seems like most of them involve flying islands. Also, Gamecube games tend to be very pretty (even if this one is particularly cartoony) and I think some of that is the developers’ willingness to use color, which tended to be lacking in console games of this era. (The “real is brown” era.)
Overall: I had hopes for this and borrowed it from Bigscary on the possibility it would be something I’d enjoy. It wasn’t, unfortunately.
This really seemed like something that would appeal to me, despite Mithrigil’s insistence that the plot was utter dreck. The first two hours of the plot weren’t bad, but weren’t enough to distract me from my many problems with the game itself.
To whit: The spinning screen in battles (complete with jumping to characters on their turn) makes it hard to focus on what’s going on. The 3D view out of battles makes it hard to navigate, though the dungeons have a semi-useful minimap.
Were there no heal spots in the intro dungeon, or did I just miss them? Battles ended up unpleasantly difficult, but it didn’t seem like I had a lot of alternate strategy to work from. You spend battles accumulating SP, which you need to expend (along with MP) to cast spells or to use your special attack—the latter of which I didn't find terribly impressive, given it took four rounds to use it, when it did around double the damage of a standard attack.
Then you get to the first “town” after risking impossibly-hard battles in your airship to get there, and it’s too large, hard to navigate, and the equipment system is obtuse. At which point I stopped.
As random notes, there are very few rpgs for the Gamecube, but oddly, it seems like most of them involve flying islands. Also, Gamecube games tend to be very pretty (even if this one is particularly cartoony) and I think some of that is the developers’ willingness to use color, which tended to be lacking in console games of this era. (The “real is brown” era.)
Overall: I had hopes for this and borrowed it from Bigscary on the possibility it would be something I’d enjoy. It wasn’t, unfortunately.
