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| okay change this one to negative by FABIO 08/28/2004, 12:04pm PDT | ||||
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| I've given up on this game.
I've reached the point where I absolutely cannot take bullshit plots with stupid heroes in RPG's anymore. The final breaking point for me in this game was when my party decided that they needed some old history book in order to gather more clues on where to find shrines on their quest (never mind that they already received blindingly obvious clues of where to go next at every shrine). The problem is, the book was stolen by con artists pretending to be you. You run into these dopplegangers talking about pawning off "some book" RIGHT AFTER you here about them and the theft, and your party is unable to put 2 and 2 together and watches them leave. The idiot main character figures it out after they're gone and you have to go visit the book collector they sold it to. The book collector, who is a nasty, decrepit old man, will only let you LOOK at it if you bring him some holy diamond statue. Instead of just taking the book from the dirty fence, your party agrees to take time off from their quest to save the world and rip the statue off from the local church. Oops, turns out the statue at the church is a fake and the real one was lost near some gyser, so you have to go on a quest to some far off gyser. But in order to safely travel through the gyser your mage needs to know ice magic, which he doesn't yet, so you have to find a way for him to learn ice magic. That's it, I quit. Power button: off. It's just like a bad horror movie where all the trouble is caused by the characters' extreme stupidity rather than any monster or ghosts. It's even more like Wild Arms 3 where your party forgave the people trying to kill you (which also happens often in ToS) and let them get away over and over again. I also got sick of the combat. I thought I'd get used to its faults, but I haven't. It's a less refined version of the superior Star Ocean 2 combat. The camera focusing in on player 1 makes fights where you have to spread out and pin down mages/archers while fighting melee guys in the middle becomes impossible. Then there's the completely unforgivable fact that you CANNOT SWITCH WHICH CHARACTER YOU CONTROL IN COMBAT SHORT OF PLUGGING THE CONTROLLER INTO A DIFFERENT PORT. Boss fights usually amount to the boss saying "fuck you" as he points and a massive area effect spell erupts right in the middle of your party and cripples it. Non-combat aspects are also sub-Star Ocean 2. SO2 gave you skill points you could put into dozens of different combat and non-combat skills. ToS has a mishmash of non-intuitive, convoluted stats and levelling techniques you're not going to figure out without pouring over a FAQ (SO2 was completely intuitive). There are a bunch of "personalities" you can pick for your characters that increase different stats every time they level up. I guess this is to customize them, but one personality is always much better than the others so there's only one clear choice. SO2 let your party split up whenever you visited a town (if you chose to) where you could bump into them for some amusing bits. ToS has event conversations pop up which you can access with a button press. The game promises "amusing skits", but it's just Super Nintendo quality character portraits moving their lips to completely pointless, boring filler dialog. The only point to playing this game to the very end is getting a chance to see how they can possibly cram yet another RPG cliche or blatant Final Fantasy X ripoff into the story. I thought they were completely saturated by hour 4, yet they kept cramming in more. It'd be pretty amazing to watch if actually playing the game weren't so tepid. Final verdict: 5/10 - Worth playing only if you have absolutely nothing else to do and there are no better games around, which would make it the equivalent of a waiting room magazine. |
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