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  • There’s only so much you can jam into a blender before youve got a mess on your

  • hands, regardless of what the YouTubes tell you. Let’s say you threw some beef, tomatoes,

  • peppers, cheese, noodles, herbs, and spices in said blender. Even if your machine could

  • take it, you can’t just call the resultant pulplasagna.” It just doesn’t work

  • that way. Similarly, you can’t just lump together decent combat concepts, several stables

  • of franchise characters, and an intricate weapons system and presume that the result

  • will be a decent RPG. Youve just got a jumbled pile of gaming parts. There needs

  • to be some effort to bring these things together, be it baking or a decent story. And frankly,

  • youve got a better chance of your PS3 overheating.

  • So youve got two of three spatially-displaced teenagers, one of whom is a quiet, confused

  • girl, the other is a gun crazy hot-head with a zipper pull that weighs more than the rest

  • of his clothes combined. I’d sayStop me if youve heard this one,” but I’ve

  • got three more minutes to kill. They wake up in a grove, get attacked by monsters in

  • a veryhere’s the tutorialkind of a way, realize that theyre suffering from

  • amnesia, and encounter... Morrigan. Yes, that Morrigan. From Darkstalkers. Who’s also

  • spatially displaced, and suffering from amnesia.

  • TJ’S TIPS FOR RPG-WRITING DUMBASSES, SPECIAL EDITION. Amnesia is NOT INTERESTING. It’s

  • why Final Fantasy VIII feels fake as a three-zenny refractor. When your party is wandering around,

  • allOh, I can’t remember anything,” it divorces them from the past. Hell, even

  • fake memories are better than no memories at all. And another thing, and this pertains

  • directly to this game and others like it: When you change charactersnames seemingly

  • arbitrarily, especially in a VERY niche game as you have here... leaving the Japanese vocal

  • track in just serves to underline the level of meddling that’s gone on. If youre

  • going to pander to the middle, in politics or in localization, you lose more from your

  • base than you stand to gain. Full stop.

  • And that’s kind of a shame, because the hybrid tactical-AP system with mid-fight personnel

  • switches, hyper attacks, and a focus on action economy is exactly what I’d like in RPG

  • combat. Unfortunately, this implementation leaves out a fair deal of information, including

  • the range of your attacks (without going through two menus), why in particular you can’t

  • use a particular attack (be it insufficient AP, insufficient range, insufficient super-hyper-shiny

  • points, or any of another number of reasons), what these powers actually do (without the

  • aforementioned two menus) or what your items do at all. And while aliasing theend turn,”

  • switch,” andshiftfunctions to directions on the left analog stick is a really

  • spiffy idea, it doesn’t shine through the balance issues, including horrendous accuracy,

  • nor the mechanical problems of the display itself. This combination of sprites and 3D

  • foes not only looks jarring, but get any semblance of a fight going and the framerate starts

  • making Mega Man 3 look smooth.

  • Let’s face it, the basic idea was pretty cool. And who wouldn’t want to see Morrigan

  • and Etna in the same game? But when youre chewing through mountains of plot - or what

  • passes for it in this amnesiac world - while slogging through dicey combat where youre

  • lucky to land two hits out of twenty... it’s untenable, dood. You can have the finest ingredients

  • and ideas, but without enough batter to holdem together, your okonomiyaki is just a

  • pile of hot cabbage. Cross Edge: It’s a pile of hot cabbage.

There’s only so much you can jam into a blender before youve got a mess on your

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