Alright, so David borrowed Tales of Symphonia from a friend so I booted it up for about 2 hours today. Interesting game, I wish the damn skits had voices too them. Works like Tales of Destiny II from the Playstation if anyone remembers that one. The game is quaint, nice in its allowance of multiplayer, but not exactly bright. You start off with a 3 character party, quickly advanced to 4. So of course we jumped in David and Ian. Then it dropped back to two pretty swiftly, but Ian had bedtime anyways so we just unplugged the controller and moved on. Then it fell to one for awhile and David went to bed, so again I just dropped the controller and moved on. Turns out, that although there wasn't even a viable controller attached, the game left them in Manual mode and doesn't give me the option to swap modes mid-combat. In short because of the games own shortsightedness, I fought a rather nasty boss fight sans half my party who were merely standing in place doing nothing. My other major gripe is the Z axis. Like most games, there's a 3-d element to battles. Unlike Tales of Destiny where you had merely a forwards/backwards and an up/down, this game also has a z-axis, or relative depth. Unfortunately for you as the player, your selected target designates your z-axis, the direct line between you and them. What this means is that you cannot deal with the surronding enemies without changing targets repeatly. Logically you'd divide targets to avoid this in a full group, but even still, easier said than done, as such acts quickly bog down the pace of combat. I imagine that higher levels will eventually grant me more sweeping abilities to strike across the Z-axis rather than merely the X-axis, but that remains to be seen.
In other news, ingrown toenails are a major pain, good lord I didn't realize that they hurt quite so much.
The low res trailer released by Gonzo for Speed Grapher seems interesting, if way too low res. I can somewhat make out what's going on, but i've got to say, that was a damn tiny (size, not length, though that wasn't too great either) video.
Oh well, I ought to be sleeping, apartments to look at tomorrow, and they tell me I'm driving, so I'll have a report on that when I get back. Fortunately we have neither a pet nor an AnthroPC to worry about, so there shouldn't be any special complications with our search.
