Gaming with Killatia Tales of Symphonia

Today on Gaming with Killatia we take a look at hit rpg for the Gamecube Tales of Symphonia. Now Granted its not often that we talk about role playing games on this review show but I enjoyed Symphonia so much that I wanted to play it once to see if I still enjoy it. The answer? Watch to find out

Cam's Eye View: Eternal Sonata for the Xbox360 and PS3

You know what I have noticed with all of these Xbox 360 reviews and 360 games I want to do reviews on? The Xbox 360 is slowly turning into the Turbo Grafx-16. Before you leave a shallow hate-filled comment, let me explain myself. What do you get when you get a 360? Halo? Gears of War? Well, if you can’t think of any other genre besides a shooter, then no flipping way, Sherlock! The Xbox 360 is the home for more quality shooters from first person, third person, to arcade-style shooters. Is there ANY other genre you can think of putting on the 360? I know a lot of the 360’s profit probably comes from players getting Xboxlive Gold membership, because then they can play online with shooters that are mostly on other consoles, but for some reason people buy them on the 360. There are also a lot of arcade-style shooters like the Raiden series, Deathsmiles, and other arcade shooters on the console. What happened to the amount of high quality Japanese-style RPG’s that were on the console? I mean, there are a lot of quality titles on the system, like Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, and depending on who you ask, Last Remnant. For example, here is another quality RPG you could get on the PS3, but I feel like this is the better version, Eternal Sonata. It’s a very original and unique Japanese-style RPG that is definitely worth more of your time than other RPG’s that have come out, but since I have talked about them already, I won’t list them. I mean, who would have thought a video game based off one of the world’s most famous musicians, Frederic Chopin, would be well good? And on top of that, it isn’t a music game! Well, actually that’s a lie, since music plays a huge role in this game, but it isn’t a Guitar Hero rip-off. So, let’s dive into the Sound of Music and review Eternal Sonata.

The game starts out with the famed composer, Frederic Chopin, voiced by Patrick Seitz, in his bed in a very ill condition. He then makes some kind of fantasy world within his mind, filled with a tyrant named Count Waltz of Forte, voiced by Liam O’Brien who rules over the imaginative world. Chopin then joins up with multiple characters throughout the game to take down Waltz and protect the world. In that sense, you could say the overall style is unoriginal with the whole ‘take down an evil guy and save the world’ story, but to my surprise, Eternal Sonata has one of the deepest, memorable, and original stories I have ever seen. I mean seriously, there are themes of escapism, death, life, political espionage, and rebellion being the themes throughout the game. It’s told very well with some really great voice actors doing some of the best voice acting I have ever seen. I mean, there is even a girl in the game named Polka, voiced by Erin Fitzgerald, who has the ability to use magic, but in that world, people who use magic are outcasts and are doomed to die. There is some deep stuff here if you stay with this game. In the game, you will meet the already said Polka, Allegretto and Beat, two brothers who lived in the sewers, Viola, a headstrong farm girl who is skilled with the bow and arrow, and Salsa and March, two sisters who guard a magical forest that the Count wants to destroy. Later, the group will meet the rebel group, Andantino, consisting of Jazz, the calm-headed leader, Falsetto, Jazz’s lieutenant, and Claves, Jazz’s girlfriend. In the PS3 version, you get Crescendo, a young prince and Serenade, Crescendo’s fiancé.   All of these characters are fully developed and you really feel for some of them, like Chopin and Polka.

The gameplay is a mix of action and turn-based RPG mechanics. You only have 3 party members at once, which require some tactical planning later in the game when you have about 7 team members. You take turns freely moving the character around the battlefield and then start hacking away at the enemies and bosses. You can choose between a quick and combo-making attack or a super strong attack and they all run on a timer. Each time you make the character move, a timer will start and count down to zero, which will make the characters turn over. You have to think logically to choose between using more weak attacks and using two strong attacks, since enemies are tough in this game, but are tougher in the PS3 version. The other main gimmick of this game is the light and dark mechanic. In the battlefield, there are areas covered in shade that will affect your strong attack, but can also affect the enemies, either changing their attack or turning them into different monsters entirely if they stay in the shade. Lucky for us, in the overworld, enemies are visible so you can easily dodge them, but like my disclaimer goes, grind a couple of fights to make sure you don’t get wailed on later in the game because it will happen. I’ve died a couple of times going through this game. Each time your party levels up after a boss fight, a few things change, like the time to idle and the amount of time in battle that you can take. It gets pretty hard near the end of the game when you really have to think on your feet due to you not having a lot of time to plan out your strategy, but you can also get some benefits from these changes. Just expect a challenge later in the game. I’ll explain my thoughts about that later.

Graphically, it’s beautiful. It’s one of the best-looking games I have ever seen artistically. It doesn’t push the limit of the consoles, but I think it looks amazing. The detail of the anime-style look is amazing. It doesn’t take a Tales of Vesperia look, but everything from the characters and monsters are all well-designed. The music is what holds this entire game together with great tracks that are wonderful to listen to and are beautifully composed. The composer in charge of this is Motoi Sakuraba who helped rework some of Chopin’s work while making some original tracks for the game. She is, of course, famous for working on the Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile, and the Tales franchise. There was also some help from Stanislav Bunin who also helped record a few tracks. The voice acting is top notch and is definitely worth talking about. Each character sounds great even when some of the characters are more annoying, but even the annoying characters sounds great. There are some impressive voice actors like Sam Riegel, Patrick Seitz, Mona Marshall, Megan Hollingshead, Amy Rose, Tara Strong, D.C Douglas, Tara Platt, and other great voice actors.

I could easily go on why this game is great, but there are some flaws that I just don’t like and might be the deciding point in which you invest your time in this game.  The whole party level idea is interesting, but it makes combat tedious later in the game and some of the benefits are not worth it for less time in battle. I mean, I really enjoy the combat system, but the Party class totally ruins it for me later in the game. There is also an early dungeon in the game that will drive you nuts with an extremely tiresome puzzle. Clearly, no one went through this part thoroughly because it is a major roadblock in the game and halts the pace due to a somewhat unclear way of solving the puzzle. I am also surprised that they didn’t use other mechanics, like if the monsters are weaker than you, they run away. I just think they could have added more little touches like that instead of making battles tedious later on.

This could have easily been one of the best action/ turn-based RPG’s of any console, but due to some confusing game mechanic decisions, I can’t fully say this game is for everyone. If you want a good challenge and beautiful music in a RPG format, then I would highly recommend this game. It is still a bit pricey, but it isn’t like 60 bucks or anything. The PS3 does have more content, but the game is much harder and with annoying party class mechanics, I can’t fully agree that it is the better version. I say, get the 360 version since it’s about 20 or so dollars. I would really like to see a sequel to this game or some form of spiritual sequel. You will just lose yourself within this magical, musical, and creative world of Eternal Sonata

This game gets a solid 7 out of 10.

Cam's Eye View: 199th RPG Review Special Part 5: Grandia for the PS1 review

Welcome to a very special review for the 199^th and 200^th game. On June 29^th 2011, one of the founders of the wonderful developing company known as Game Arts passed away at the age of 45. This wonderful man is named Takeshi Miyaji. He is a man who was behind many classic games like Grandia and Lunar Silver Star Story. These are two of my favorite games of all time and in my top 10 favorite RPGs of all time. These last two reviews will be a tribute to not only Game Arts, but to Mr. Takeshi Miyaji and the hard working people behind these two games. Let’s start with the wonderful and much loved, Grandia for the PS1. The classic RPG was originally released on the Sega Saturn in Japan and was brought here to America for the Playstation 1, and is now downloadable on the Playstation Network store. It is a wonderfully lighthearted RPG that stands the test of time. This results in Grandia being one of the most memorable and one of the best RPGs of all time. Let us begin my 199^th review of Game Art’s classic, Grandia.

The story of the game starts off with a young boy named Justin who lives in a town called Parm. He lives there with his mom and his young friend Sue. He dreams of becoming an adventurer, and travel the world finding new places and people. He ultimately wants to follow in his father’s footsteps and find out what’s on the other side of a giant wall named the End of the World. After doing a few adventures outside of Parm, he sets off across the ocean to see what the world has to offer him. Along the journey, many companions join him. Childhood friend Sue, Feena, a famous adventurer of New Parm, Gadwin, a powerful knight from Dight, and many others that are very memorable, join him on his quest. The story as a whole focuses on Justin, Feena, and Sue, but the thing that makes the story great is how light-hearted it is. It’s more family friendly, like Castle in the Sky or Porco Rosso’s stories are. It gets dark near the end, but it’s an overall great story since it doesn’t fall back on stereotypes, like brooding young men with giant swords, or females with abused pasts, and of course melodramatic storylines. It’s a cheerful tale, even if some of the jokes and the voice acting are bad at times.

The gameplay is a typical Japanese style RPG, but with some fine-tuning. The whole world is viewed from an isometric-style camera, something I mentioned before in my Xenogears review, which was popular with games during that time like Final Fantasy Tactics and Wild Arms 2. Enemies are visible on the overworld and dungeon areas, and will run at you if they see you, or are close enough. The good thing about this, though, is that you also have a run button so you can escape the enemies if you don’t want to get into battles while getting to an area. This takes care of the issue of slow walking and random encounters that make for long hours of grinding. However, I’d recommend getting into a few fights so you can level up and not get wailed on by the boss and tougher enemies down the road. Battles are turn-based, but all actions are done on a timer on the bottom part of the screen where icons for each character and enemy are on the bar on the screen. If your icon reaches a certain part of the bar, you can then select your action, like attacking more than once, doing a single strong strike, using special attacks, using magic attacks, using an item, or defending yourself. You can move your character around the screen, which is a good idea, due to some of the stronger attacks having a large amount of range and area that can hurt multiple enemies or your party. The unique thing about the magic and combat system is that the more you use your magic and a certain weapon, they grow stronger. It’s like the magic system in Secret of Mana or Secret of Evermore. You can also learn special moves depending on what magic you have and what weapon you are using. Even though some characters are better as one kind of character than another, it still gives you a good amount of freedom as to how you want to build your party. The only drawback is that you learn magic by finding Mana eggs. There are not a lot of them and you can only use each egg once, so make sure you put the right spells on the right person. Outside of battle, if you see an enemy and he doesn’t notice you, you can get him from behind and get an advantage in the battle. If the enemies get you from behind however, they will get the advantage. It’s like the systems used in games like Blue Dragon and Earthbound.

The graphics are brightly colored and look nice. If you liked the graphical style of games, again like Xenogears, Wild Arms 2, and the Breath of Fire games on the PS1, then I think you would like them here. They might not age well in some areas, but I still think they have a charming way of making me look over some of the aged spots. The voice acting is hit-and-miss. Sometimes it’s good, but sometimes it’s so bad that it’s good. Though it does have that Xenogears problem where the voice acting isn’t used a lot, there is much more voice acting in Grandia than Xenogears. The music is amazing. It gives you that feeling of adventure over the horizon. It makes you feel like you should take every day to the limit and live it! This is, of course, thanks to the composer for this game, Noriyuki Iwadare. He is famous for doing the music for the entire Grandia series, the Lunar series (not including the DS game), Megaman X7, Growlanser, Radiata Story, Y’s 3, and he worked on two games in the Phoenix Wright franchise. It’s a great soundtrack with a lot of lighthearted themes. Even if some of the songs in the soundtrack can get annoying at times, due to a couple of them being short, the soundtrack for the most part is very calming atmospheric music, with simple beats and drums in some areas. I just love this soundtrack.

Even though I want to give this game a perfect 10, there are some minor faults. I wish there was a program inside the monsters that would make them back away from you if you were stronger than them, like in Earthbound or Dragon Quest 9. That would be so cool and would get a lot of the annoying battles out of the way due to the speed that the enemies come at you. I also wish there was an unlimited item-holding container instead of a limited amount of items on the character. There is a storage bin to store items in, but it is inconvenient because it is only in towns. Like I said earlier, the voice acting can be bad at times and although it’s not Game Arts’ fault, I wish they could have gotten people like Tara Strong or Steve Blum for some of the characters. It is also a tiny bit tedious to level up your weapon and magic skill, since you have to keep using those spells and weapons to power yourself up, but there are certain ways to easily level yourself up, so this is just a minor gripe.

This is one of my favorite games of all time and one of my top 10 favorite RPGs. I wish it wasn’t such an overlooked, but pretty popular classic Japanese style RPG. It will cost you a bit to get a hard copy of this game, but you can easily get this game off the PSN store for 10 dollars, which is an easy steal for such a long and memorable RPG. This has been part one of the Game Arts tribute and the 199^th review from me. Get ready for the long awaited 200^th review and the final part of the Game Arts tribute.

This game gets a 9 out of 10

Gaming with Killatia Final Fantasy 13

Today on Gaming with Killatia he takes a look at the much debate Final Fantasy 13, a rpg that had potential only to be hold back by game play choices by the developers at Square Enix

Also my good friend Cam's Eye had posted his own revire of FF13 before I could upload my own review. If you want to see what he thought of it just click here and check it out.