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Words Of Wisdom on 05 June 2009
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...and I enjoyed it.  I got it last Christmas, played until I was in the Underground Ruins, and just got sick of the characters and game.  5 months later I decide to finish it.  With an unimpressive finishing time of 36:32, I finally did and here are my thoughts:

Pros:

  • Featured a lot more Regal.  Considering he was one of the few characters I liked personality-wise in the original, it's a good thing.
  • Monsters were useful.  Toward the end of the game, my monsters were all I needed.  Emil is doing like 400 damage to an enemy and my Were Bear/Fenrir were dealing 4000/3300 damage respectively.
  • Alice was great.  I love how evil she was from start to finish.
  • Iron Maiden charms were not a scam.  'nuff said.
  • I went through the whole game without ever grinding.  I never grinded for gald or experience.  I didn't always have enough gald to buy everything I wanted especially toward the end but I never felt hindered by that.
  • The ending was good.
  • Skits were better.  I don't know why but I enjoyed them much more this time around than in the first game.
  • I was able to playthrough almost the whole game using Marta.  I found playing with her to be a lot more fun than using that other kid.

Cons:

  • Enemies were unbalanced.  Some were very hard and many were very easy.  Often times I could have one battle where no one even got hurt to one battle where people actually started dying in less than 5 seconds.
  • Boss Mystic Artes are freaking annoying.  I had a game over against Decus and Alice because Decus brought Marta and Emil down to 1 HP each with a Mystic Arte and Alice happened to be right next to both after and went *swipe* *swipe* before I could heal either.
  • "Unwinnable fights" are cheap.  I'm sure it's cool that you can probably win on a second playthrough and all but the part of the game where it keeps throwing "unwinnable" Richter fights at you just got old fast.  At least I won the third one.
  • Boss fights weren't that interesting when it came down to it.  Often times it seemed like either I kept the boss comboed and unable to fight back at any time or it started killing my people in 2-3 hits each.  There was no middle difficulty.
  • Dungeon design was awful.  The environments were boring and the puzzle design was pathetic.  Honestly, the puzzles felt like half-hearted endeavors  to lengthen the game.  The Temple of Lightning was the worst offender.  It wasn't fun or interesting, it was just long and boring.  It was like they took the worst elements out of Zelda's notorious water temples and used them to create that temple.
  • Lloyd's excuse for not even talking to his friends was complete load of BS.  It would have been far more in-character for him to have simply told them that he needed their help and to ask why later.
  • You can't control monsters.  I would have really liked to have played as the monsters...
  • NPC dialog was written by a 3-year old.  I almost fell over when I met the weapon smith who says exactly two things in the game and one of which is "Cats are cute."  *facepalm*
  • No bonus 1000 grade at the end of the game.  I was really hoping to get this.  I ended up with like 1000-something grade.  Just enough to buy most of the things I wanted but not all of it.  I may do a replay eventually but I'm not really keen on it right now.
  • Unskippable cutscenes.  This was really annoying after I had a game-over in-front of Alice/Decus at the end as I had to sit through that long-ish cutscene again.  Seems you can skip cutscenes with A+B.
  • Stupid mini-games.  What.  The.  Hell.  Seriously, do we need a pair of waggle mini-games for the sake of it doing something with waggle?  I mean... really?  The dropping platform mini-game was at least fun but the other two were just stupid.
  • Emil.

I'm sure there are more but that's all I can think of off the top of my head.