So. Rogue Galaxy has some faults, to be sure; the mooks are nasty, the dungeons tend to be internally repetitive in their layout, it really could've used at least a limited after-combat healing (or a regeneration mechanic). But damned if isn't a blast.
Then it happened. Somebody has finally come up with the next level in item crafting concepts. They up and gave me a factory. I get to make assembly lines and watch widgets do stuff to materials and fiddle with power lines and stuff. I actually haven't had much chance to fiddle and play with it yet, but it was pretty fun once it got going.
We shall see how things go, since we've seemed to have some really cool stuff coming (which is how it should be for crafting), including ancient legendary artifacts and hi-tech harbingers of doom. How we make things that are supposed to be legendary relics of antiquity is beyond me, but RPGs have been doing this forever (probably since frickin' Angband) so whatever.
One of the things that makes this system (and the game as a whole) interesting is that they openly mix futuristic technology with magic, without even really calling attention to the fact. This is space fantasy at its finest; you don't need to sit there and be all "ooh we got magic and spaceships." Show, don't tell, eh? It's like this throughout the whole game, just giving us patently ridiculous things and concepts and running with them without pedantic poking at the seams, never letting you really spot the thread.
The characters are mostly your average RPG fare, you got your standard protagonist (type A 'cheerful'), your usual demure love interest, the dark-and-totally-not-a-spy mercenary, and some other cliches. They're fairly well-done overall; you get a standard robot buddy that is pretty much C-3PO with some ball bearing upgrades, the jaded veteran is a literal dog soldier (that one was nicely done). Then there's Simon.
Simon is pretty much Character of The Game, in my opinion. Somebody at Level-5 wanted a space dwarf, but blended the usual stereotypes (stocky, big nose, Scottish accent) and subsumed them by making the guy wander around in a space-trenchcoat and a freaky mask that more than compensates for the lost beard. What we wind up with a boisterous, badass space Womble that tears around with a flamethrower pistol (with elemental variants even) and a multiple-missile launcher that unleashes explosive doom upon the unworthy. He even gets a special attack where he lobs a volley into the air and does a dance with a little paper umbrella. Best. Womble. Ever. Group him with Flashbang Poe, Salvador the Gunzerker, Bacchus D-79 (SPESS ELF ROBOCOP) and watch the forces of badness become meat smoothie flambe!
The guide for this game has a hilarious inconsistency, in that they flat out tell you to not fight all the random mook battles so you can conserve your items for the bosses. Then the rest of the guide goes and tells you about how you need to kill lots and lots of freaks for a bounty hunting sidequest, and then goes on to tell you that you should be farming mooks for rare random drops (instructions to farm drops shows up near constantly). So, we totally don't want to smack a bunch a random critters because we need to keep our potion stock up (by the way, basic heal potions and resurrection potions are sold in infinite or near-infinite quantities everywhere, including inside most dungeons), but we want to smack random critters for a bounty quest, and we want to smack random critters for random bitz. The Harvest may never rest, but it sure gets confused sometimes. It might have worked a bit better if they said that we shouldn't really farm until the boss is dead and we can keep our fancier healing items in reserve. Instead we have literary schizophrenic kleptomania in the guide. To be honest, I only buy guides for maps and to stare at something during lunch at work anyway.
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