Piledrive the Ocean!

As could be expected, matters are well in hand for Tales of Legendia.  I've handled the 'main' quest and now moved on to the 'character' questlines.  The final series of boss battles proved to be just plain mean this go-around, to the point that I believe that my party wound up underleveled somehow.  This wasn't that much of a problem, but thanks to the GRADE scoring system, I managed to get punished pretty good for daring to use healing items in combat, on top of being punished for succumbing to Final Boss Death Moves of Cheese.  But I got to throw and body slam the embodiment of the damn ocean, so it's all good.


The character quests...well, they're far from bad, but they feel like they've been tacked on more than anything else.  I've heard the reasoning.  They didn't have the budget to get everything polished just right.  They didn't think this was going to be primary plot material for a while.  They had deadlines.  Yadda yadda.  But what is comes down to that the character quests are by and large a series of sidequests, with attendant sidequest characteristics.  They're primarily unvoiced (outside of nice little animated cutscenes at the end of each).  They take you the all the same dungeons and locations you've already harvested your way through for often flimsy reasons.  While the final payoff is worth it, I can understand why a lot of player frustration comes from here. 


It takes a wonderful, quirky and thoughtful PS2 RPG and reduces it to a dungeon crawl from two or even three consoles generations prior with PS2 production values.  I happen to like old-school dungeon crawling, and I'm still getting my fun out of it, but I admit that it cheapens the experience somewhat.   At least I get all sorts of sweet shinies to play with and eventually get to beat the snot of out a goddess of despair.  The Harvest Never Rests!

That Bed Is Clearly Evil, Power Slam It!

Just a quick post this time.  After some minor shenanigans deciding on which game to unleash the Harvest upon, I went ahead and trotted out my copy of Tales of Legendia.


This game is a bit special to me since it helped kickstart my resurrected passion for RPGs and started the longest and most consistent string of video game victories, plus it introduced me to the wonders of the Tales series; a bit ironic since this supposedly one of the black sheep installments among fans.


Legendia is still proving to a blast to play.  The graphics and sound are absolutely gorgeous, using bright, almost toy-like pre-renders and some of the most serene and outright delicate scores I've ever encountered.  That's no to say there's no tunes to get your blood flowing; this game is home to In Pursuit/Pursuing Shirley, one of the funkiest pieces I've ever encountered (and the track seller, by the way), or locations that are awe-inspiring and crazy-awesome.


The combat is also still pretty fun, especially with a main character that actually tears around beat the snot out of the local freaks with martial arts.  The throw mechanics are especially amusing, leading to situations where you unleash the judo on things like dragons, whales, freaky battleship tortoise things, and giant maneating canopy beds.  That's not even going into the boss line-up, which includes the personification of a water-worlds entire freakin' ocean and a death goddess.  Yeah, welcome to Tales.  The Harvest Never Rests!

Another Day, Another Dragon

Well, it finally happened; Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is finally beaten.  It took a far bit of effort this go-around, but at least it didn't have that nasty event flag bug happen all over again.  I did encounter a few others, from the harmless (characters tend to load in standing and healthy, then kneel or flop over and start writhing like actors finding a mark), to the infuriating (a fair few broken sidequests -- more than the previous playthrough) to the unexpectedly badass (clipping and ragdoll physics left me buried in a pile of Jottun I just smashed).


Overall, there isn't a whole to be said for Amalur that didn't get said on the last campaign.  The final areas are actually fairly fun and great to look at.  There were lots of cool crystalline formations and freaky blue plants to gawk at.  It was distinct, and actually across as pretty alien.  It was marred a bit by having dungeons that came across as palette swaps except for part of the very final one.  I'll give it a pass for that anyway, since the game's dungeons actually have a good bit of visual variety anyway.


The final boss fight was...okay.  Somebody at the developer's office must have played Dragon's Dogma, since the (SPOILER WARNINGS) final boss shows up, squashed the main villain like a bitch, and then goes on about how it brought you back and fate and yadda yadda.  The cinematics and last bit of storyline are pretty fun, but the battle itself was somewhat underwhelming especially since you're fighting a bigass demon dragon that slurp the fate out of you.


In the end, Kingdoms of Amalur:  Reckoning  rates as a pretty damn fun game, and well worth the attention of the RPG enthusiast.  It's not perfect, and it's a damn shame that sequels of any kind are extremely unlikely (yay corporate shenanigans), but it's plenty of fun, has it's own distinct world and underlying mythos, and its pretty badass (dual wielding bat'leths, Tron Frisbees of Doom, getting to be Scorpion and Sub-Zero at the same time, oh and ripping fate out of baddies and smiting them with it 300-style).


We shall see what come next, but for now the Harvest Has Triumphed!