Friday, August 24, 2012

Super Robot Taisen OG Saga Endless Frontier

Yep, that's seriously the game name. It's ridiculously long, but a great JRPG overall for the NDS.

The overworld is simple, and allows you to get from A to B. It only gets slightly tricky when they mention you should go to C, and you forgot where C was. I seriously spent at least 30 minutes trying to Google a solid map for this game to no avail. For some reason, the only map on the entire internets had all of the places labeled incorrectly. W.T.F.

The combats are a great blend of tactical planning and skill timing attacks. When it's your characters turn, you can cast as many spells as you want, so long as you have SP. You also have HP, and COM. COM is spent like time units, as far as how many things you can do in your turn. Each attack chain you use costs a specific amount of COM, and you only get 50 COM a turn, with a cap of 100 COM. Simple enough, but it gets really fun when you have to time your attacks and chain attacks with other party members to keep the enemy in the air, and do the most damage. Quite fun! You can also cancel your combos early to put extra points into the frontier gauge, which allows you to do a special attack once it's full.

Regretfully, the combats get a bit repetitive, and so I found that I could run away from most battles so long as I killed the bosses with a special attack, granting me an addional 30% experience. It also helped me explore the dungeons without spending 5 hours in random battles.

The characters are drawn well, and have their own personality and skills/attacks. I personally was using a party of Sazuka, Haken, Reiji, and Kaguya. Kaguya and Sazuka did most of the damage, while Haken and Reiji just fueled up the frontier gauge.

I'd highly recommend picking this up to play in your spare time, but take notes somewhere on where you're supposed to go, or you can easily spend your first while trying to remember, or literally wandering the world map. This is really only an issue in the later game, when you're backtracking, but still.

Infinity Blade

A while back I finished Infinity Blade, but forgot to blog about it. Overall the game was quite simple to learn, harder to master, and a great RPG to spend a few minutes on between other things. Took it on a trip and played it easily for a few  hours in bed, delaying my much needed sleep cycles.

The combats are everything in the game. Dodge is the easiest way to avoid getting hit, you can also block, which takes away your armor points, and you can also perry an incoming attack. Blocking is only useful for punches, which are un-dodge/parry-able. When you do a awesome dodge/block/parry, eventually they give you an opening, and you get to smack them back. Ideally with a 3 or 5 hit combo.

When your character levels up, you get 2 stat points you can spend on armor, health, magic, or attack damage. I spent all of my points in attack damage, because the harder I hit the enemy, the faster they dropped. This basically required me to spend all my time dodging, as my lack of skill in parrying attacks was all to apparent.


Eventually you fight the God king, who starts out level 50, and completely wipes the floor with you. That's okay though, because apparently he sends all of your equipment and levels to your next of kin and you repeat the process. What a nice guy! Eventually you will be strong enough to trod down the road paved with dead ancestors, and beat him for a change.

The main reason I forgot to post about this when I finished the game was because I had gotten myself into a RPG-grinding groove of killing enemies as fast as possible to die at the God king's hand and restart the process. Trouble is, I accidentally killed him on one of my run-throughs. Oops. Well, I guess that was the purpose, but it just kind of felt off to me. After you defeat him, he goes up by 50 levels and you repeat the process. Yeah, I'm good, next game!

Overall, I'm still glad I played it, and it was definitely worth the money spent. So far, this has been the most enjoyable game I've played on the iPad yet.