Share this article: Digg.comFacebookGoogle BookmarksN4GGamerblipsdel.icio.usRedditSlashdot.orgStumbleUpon this is a fair review. Its always fair reviews on CVG, I am glad you agree! Guess I'm about to find out whether I agree with this review or not as this game is well on its way to my mailbox. Some gamers have given it high praise while others, such as CVG, have panned it. Business as usual then. This was reviewed by xbox360 world and not by CVG in-house. Doesn't bode well. Still, if you enjoyed the other tepid JRPG's of late, I am sure you will find something to like about this one. When it comes to JRPG's, it's best to make up your own mind. I feel it's one genre that hasn't made a big enough leap since last gen, thus putting off some gamers, hopefully FF 13 can change that. I'll give this a try though, as I've seen it get some good reviews. So it's like FFXIII, but in space? And it got a shocking review?
Nice. Every JRPG I've played has seemed stilted, naff and cumbersome ever since I picked up Morrowind last gen.
JRPGs have aged very badly in my opinion:
The random fights that occur in the wild between towns;
Finding yourself unable to progress the story due to being under-powered and the subsequent grind due to a lack of interesting side missions to make levelling up actually fun;
The turn-based combat and a bunch of other bizarre stats based systems wedged together with painfully basic and inaccurate real-time fighting; a half-hearted attempt to drag the genre into the 21st century;
The on-the-rails fashion in which they force upon you their always epic, yet inevitably vague (or poorly translated if you're being kind) tale of "courage" involving a group of irritating blue/pink/green-haired adolescents you have no hope of ever identifying with or caring about.
JRPG's need a massive overhaul if you ask me. They're really just interactive anime. This guy is an idiot I'm not even sure he's played this game and not seen someone else playing it for 10 minutes.
The combat system is nothing like FFXII in that you push a button and then watch as the game fights for you, this game is more like Kingdom Hearts or FF Crisis except better as you can switch characters to preform more specific tasks and Y is for a paused menus so you can use skills and items without being panicked, the battles can also be won by skill if you are a low level as the enemies may never touch you.
The graphics are beautiful and as for the future not being Mass Effect that might be because not everything evolves at the same rate we have a few space faring races and other species that are closer to our history of a few hundred years ago, which is ofcourse understandable by anyone with a brain bigger than a monkeys.
This "reviewer" seems to have mor of a problem with JRPG's instead of this game in particular and he doesn't appear to be a big fan instead of making observations and comparisons with other games in the genre he compares it to ME which has nothing to do with this game.
The battles are true realtime unlike FFXII "real time" and aren't random encounters the cut scenes are short and often and are funny and usually well written, and Lymle the "annoying little 6 year old" is 15 so maybe this reviewer should go play an hour of the game before saying unrelevent blabber.
On things he didn't touch on the item creation and the room system are amazingly deep and fun.
put basically I have told you more relevant facts about this game than this moron and the failure that is this review is down to the Games Radar Network giving this game to someone who has no interest in the JRPG genre or this game and should stick to reviews of FPS games. I would give this game a 9 out of 10 as it is fun, deep and has no faults except for the voice acting. i agree with TheKraige here...the game is pretty damn great,i have been loving it
this game in no way deserves to be as low as 5.9
sure the kids are way to young(although the main character is 20 years old,which i would think makes him the oldest lead character in recent JRPGs)..nearly every JRPG has way too young characters
i would give it a 8 or a 9,definetly a 9 if you like JRPGs or liked Star Ocean 3
and just incase,here are some more review scores,that IMO seem to be more on the ball
Gamespot-7.5 Gametrailers-8.0 (user score-8.4) IGN-8.0 G4TV-4/5 Square Enix come back to the Playstation and start making top RPGs again (and a profit)! You know the 360 fanboys only love their FPS and racing games *wink wink* This review simply says to me that Square Enix couldn't give a rats hoot about RPGs on the 360. Damn straight. The PS3 can keep this tosh. Works for me. I haven't played a JRPG since FF7, and a few hours on a friend's copy of FF10, so I'm making a multi-generational leap here. According to the manual the "six year old girl" is actually fifteen... 'kay.
Can't say I agree with this haven't spent 28 hours playing through it so far, yes the space setting is a thin disguise for the usual generic backdrops but at least they've made an effort to add some variety which is more than other franchises have done. Yeah PS3 fans hate FPS's... like Killzone 2, Resistance, Resistance 2, Haze... and racing games, like Motorstorm, Motorstorm 2, GT5 Prologue...
We'll see what Square can do with an RPG when they release one on the 360 they've done themselves rather than where they act merely as publisher... Tri-Ace have knocked out the poor Infinite Undiscovery (which looked so rushed it was horrible) and this where they seem to have made a much better attempt at a complete game. Another average review for a JRPG what a surprise :D I will be getting this regardless. Loads of these RPG's have got average press scores this gen but I have still enjoyed them immensely each to their own. Now are you sure you knew you reviewing a JRPG and not Mass effect? :lol: Very good post and I earlier described JRPG's to a work colleague as being just like your last paragraph. Although I must admit I do love thme all the same. To add to what Suivatam109PS3 is saying PS3 owners also love JRPG's such as Disgea 3 and... erm.. well I guess you get the point that there aren't any JRPG's on PS3 now atleast that havent been on 360 first which just shows that the times are changing. I'm currently playing atleast 5 JRPG's on 360 and am waiting for Square to bother enough with the PS3 to realise that they havent brought out the Trophie update or DLC for Disgea untill I play that again. I think both consoles are almost matched accept PS3 has more Racing games and 360 have more JRPG's. Oh and thank you very much but I think I would like 360 to keep this game as it's awesome, seriously if your not a fan of JRPG's then don't look at the pages and then tell Sony to "take it back". the fights 'between towns'..aren't random,you can see the enemy on the field,you can even easily avoid them
i have 10 hrs in now(still on first disc),and loving it..and i have even laughed at the cutscenes...laughed along at the cutscenes that is,not at
if you love JRPGs you are gonna lap this up Granted, the fights in most JRPGs aren't as random as they were back in the days of stuff like Phantasy Star 2, but all the same, enemy encounters in this genre can all to often be a case of working on automatic. You enter a fight, hit 'A' several times to select your commands beat the baddies, get your xp etc... job done.
I really loved JRPGs back in the day (Suikoden on PS1 is still a personal favourite) but the swathe of JRPG releases this gen are highlighting a serious need for a genre overhaul. Its clear they're trying to implement new ideas, but so far most have fallen short.
For example I read Tales of Vesperia offers plenty of exploration, but when I played the demo on the 360, the realtime combat was like a poor mans' Devil May Cry. Thinking about it, DMC quality combat in an RPG would be frickin cool! The Tales demo was poor, not much in the way of helping you "learn" the game and how it plays... and I've read that the boss battle they included is one of the hardest one's you come across in the early part of the game.
I've got 32 hours on Star Ocean, and with my obsession for fully analysing the creatures I'm still on Disk 1... man it sucks when you land on a planet and to get full analysis of a creature you have to kill 100 of them. »
Must admit the Tales demo did not sell it me from the strength of what was shown, I would have to hear a lot more about that one before buying it. |