Be Excellent To Each Other

I can't bloody stand RPG's. Boring, tedious and appeal to the base addictions of the hard core gamers. Stats, you squee! My attack is +145 better than your golden crystal thingymabob, you coo! I have been playing for 349 hours already, you burble!

But against a background of hate there's been a few games that have snuck past my wall of distain and nestled right up against my groin where I've cradled them warmly. Demons Souls in recent times, Dark Souls, naturally, Dungeon Master of course but I can't think of anymore. Ive taken to these mainly because you didn't need to know about the stats unless you wanted to delve into them. These games suck you in and let you enjoy yourself first before asking you to open up the bonnet and stare at the inner workings. They don't thrust their stat laden phallus into your face like you're trapped on a seat on the tube during rush hour.

I might be adding Xenoblade Chronicles to this list of RPG's I like. It seems very similar to the Final Fantasy XIII-2 demo I played insofar as this is one of 'those' RPG's where you get stuck in a bubble to duke it out with your enemies before moving on. You select your move, move about a bit, land a couple of blows without any input and knock off a random number.

I like it though! The fights are simple enough to start with for a novice like me, but better than that is some terrific story about the world you live being a large behemoth that was locked in an endless battle that, um, ended. Your world is the corpse.

The music is natty, the story is pleasant enough so far, the fighting simple and the voice acting is utterly and hilariously bad. The camera is terrible. But the world is drawing me in though. Slowly, I'm enjoying the vast expanses, busting through the green pastures, running about smacking stuff upside the head.

I've done two hours and its sucked me in nicely.

Dark souls

I picked this up last week but have not even tried it yet, can't get away from friggin Skyrim !!

/tired old "all games are RPGs" comment

What role are you playing in tetris then?

The role of the person who can move the blocks, durr.

I think Grim... means all modern games have some RPG aspect in them, from CoD's levelling, to customising your avatar, to making choices in games that affect the storyline, etc.

No, I meant it literally.

So the role you're playing is yourself?

Tautological - I like it!

Yourself but with the ability to move "magic blocks", yes.

I couldn't think what to call these particular types of RPG. The type where you have the static fight: the Final Fantasy, Pokemon, other game on megadrive I can't remember the name of, that SNES one an' all, Phantasy Star? And the Japanese one they all seem to love over there in Japan; something like Elephant Story or summats. I'm not great with names....

Oh what about JRPG's then?

Dragon Quest! That was it.

S'alright, everyone knows what you mean. I think JRPG is the accepted term for "let's take it in turns to hit each other"-type RPGs.

I call the a TB RPG (turn-based)
A J-RPG to me is something that is obviously made in Japan & has characters with big boobs & spiky hair

I've heard this is fantastic, but I don't got a Wii no more. Never mind.

I've hit a bit of a wall with this.

Apparently you gotta topple the robot with the face by doing a chain attack. Can I get my guys to do a chain attack? Can they fuck.

So I rush in to meet robot face and all the guys start laying the smack down. Robot face does some moves and before the chain attack bar has filled up, robot face has killed off one of my men. I revive him but this empties a big chunk of the chain attack bar. Guy gets up and I use every single move to keep energising him but robot face eventually turns round and kills him again way before I can get the chain attack bar anywhere near the top so I can do the topple move.

Hnnngh.

There too much going on for me to keep track of: 3 sets of energy numbers for my guys, moving about to pull off location based moves, filling up the moves, bleeds, cancels, topples, numbers on screen etc, its information overload.

Plus there's loads of stuff to kill but I can run past it if I want to. But should I be stopping to kill shit? I've no idea. Then there's massively overpowered enemies that I think I can take but actually fuck me up good and proper. I'm either shit at fighting or this is some Dark Souls shit. Probably the latter but I'm struggling to understand the fighting I think. Or maybe I should be struggling since I've only been playing 6 hours.

So, erm, robot face anyone?

No worries. Done it now. Somehow managed to plough in and activate the chain combo thingy.

Good this, init?

Crawled up the giant's knee and now I'm rummaging around on its inner thigh.

The music's ace an' all. Lovely plinky plonky.

This is totes awesome, people. I've kinda figured out how to fight (well, I'm getting by and dying less) and I'm progressing nicely. The music is still awesome with the main theme as you rush across the vast plains sounding like something one of the Outrun tracks. Summer Breeze perhaps.

Plus points: No gesture controls. At all. Ever. If that doesn't convince you I don't know what will.

Passing Breeze, even. It's the only one I remember. And Digital Soundwave? Anyway, it's like one of those.

It's bugging me now.

It reminds me of this one around 9:30 whatever the hell that one is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEz1BVeG ... ata_player

Bloody game has kept me up way past my bedtime improving stats, arts and changing equipment. I've not moved more than 5 feet in twenty minutes.

I have little to add to this thread other than I absolutely loved every minute of it and the music is superb, first time I've downloaded a game's OST since FF10.

Up through the back, in the third lung and along the trachea. Damn this game is aces.

I'm sure they'd be widespread praise of a Dark Souls kind if it weren't on the bloody stupid Wii that everyone has packed away and stored in the loft already. Tch.

Awesome sauce.

20 hours in and I've traversed a load of the big monster thang that is the world. I'm on the back and heading towards the head. It's great.

The world is fabulous: the environments are ace, the monsters are varied, the music is just terrific, I'm enjoying levelling up my arts, changing gear, making gems and whacking them in stuff, the story is pretty good too and the voice acting seemed bad but, um, is somehow perfectly fine now for some reason I can't fathom.

The graphics are bloody lovely, the size of the world is amazing, the vistas often spectacular, the cut scenes are few, the variety of the landscape from desert, sea, jungle, plains, floating lands, futuristic city, dungeons, towns, temples ... it's got it all, the variety of characters is great (cept for this cunt called Ricky-a typical Jap character who is just a floating blob that's annoying)(seriously, why do they bother, this game doesn't need a 'comedy' character), the interplay between the characters is nice, and often gloriously subtle, etc.

Story-wise, it's all kicking off. The good guys live on the dead body of a giant monster that fought another giant monster to the death - both died. The bad guys live on the other giants corpse.

Where I'm at now: the good guys world is, somehow, resurrecting. The world will wake up and, presumably, epic catastrophic death for all the good guys. Ace. Also, a bit weird.

I doubt I'll be converted to the RPG genre but I certainly won't shy away from any more of these games if they're as good as this is. And running on ancient technology with a shitty resolution an' all.

The Wii finally has a game to get excited about. Shame it's dead already.

Story just got interesting. To Sword Valley!

This game is right up on my fav games list suddenly.

This is the greatest Wii game on the Wii.

Well, 's'only cause Mario Galaxy is a piece of piss and this is actually a rock hard challenge.

I've fallen off the world onto a lovely picturesque beach below (turns out it's a dismembered hand of the giants that I've landed on) and looking up, back at the world, is awesome sauce.

The story is actually interesting and the characters entirely likeable.

Melia is going to be heartbroken when she finds out that Shulk loves someone else and she'll never ger panty-draw raided by him.

I'm glad you're enjoying it, sounds great.

Shame I'll never own another Wii to try this out on.

BOTH TITANS ARE AWAKE! IM, LIKE, TOTALLY FUCKED!

Did I happen to mention I frickin' love this bad mutha crusher.

It did go a bit Japanese with a dream sequence, talk about fate/destiny and making your own destinies and even some talk about gods. Oh my god, like that's never happened before. I'm amazed the Japanese haven't figured out the meaning of the world given the amount of times they ponder this shit. Oh, and one woman with bouncy tits.

Anyway, Shulk's bird is going to die which might give Melia a chance for some guilty sex. Here's hoping he nails that posh bird. Give it a day or two after the other ones dead, mind.

You ain't seen nothing yet.

The Titan fight was aces. I loved it when a shitload of folk were unceremoniously dumped off the sword to their death and the High Entia were wiped out in one ace twist.

Glorious glorious game is glorious.

Oh and the bad guys being the good guys? Awesome.

This is officially (as far as I'm concerned) the greatest Wii game made.

I love the way it twists and turns throughout so you never know what's coming next, and you want to carry on playing to find out.

I so want to play this game. I've owned a copy for nearly a year, but only played 45 minutes worth. Two things demotivate me: one, the huge time investment required by the game, and two, the low-res Wii graphics. If only the Wii U was going to be enabled to up-res Wii games, eh?

You've damned it with the faintest praise possible, there.

It's one of the best things I've played this entire "gen" on anything.

Yeah, it's had me hooked to Dark Souls level of obsession. It's a cracking game and massive too. I've been ploughing into the main story throughout and I'm 47 hours in (and at the Bionis heart) although theres apparently 480 side missions if you never want to play another game again.

I can't see why someone would avoid playing it because the screen resolution isn't HD quality (unless you're AE of course). It's beautiful throughout and the scope of ambition is tremendous and awe inspiring. Resolution snobbery can fuck right off.

Tempted, but it's not cheap, and as ever, I'm worried about the wii controls.

What kind of control scheme does it use?

No swinging, waggling or gestures ever.

Just the nunchuck for moving and controller for selecting stuff. I think you can even use the wavebird controller.

It works fantastically with the original classic controller, which is what I used from start to finish. It had no need of novelty control mechanics so they didn't bother tacking them on for no reason, which is yet another tick in its favour.

I picked it up from Amazon for 23 quid in Jan but would not have felt ripped off if I'd paid full whack given the amount of gameplay and enjoyment I got out of it.

Seems I'm not powerful enough to kill the boss in the Bionis heart. Cue 2 hours mashing up stuff in Satorai Swamp wasting away the hours discovering loads of stuff. I'd forgot what I was supposed to be doing after all that. Aces.

Last boss ahoy! Also, frustration.

Once you head off to the last boss area you can't save. This is cunty. First of all, there's a big dragon boss before the lift to the top of Prison island and the autosave spot is just before that boss fight. If you don't save before the last boss and don't manage to complete the game then you'll have to fight the dragon again. And let me tell you, it ain't easy.

Plus that last boss, he ain't the last boss either. You have to fight no less than 5 bosses. The first takes place over 2 fights and ain't easy. The second the fourth are Capcom-esq rehashes of previous fights and are easy. The last takes place over 3 fights which is ridiculously hard especially the second fight which I can't sodding complete.

So every time I have to turn it off I've got to fight all 5 of the shits all over again.

HNNNGH!

I'm at level 76. Do I need to be any higher to stand a chance? Anyone? Anyone!? ANYONE?

(I love this game by the way.)

I have to congratulate you on actually making me want this game, even though JRPG's drive me mental at the best of times. Hope you can finally finish it after all this!

Just checked my last save and I was level 80. I have no idea what is doable, though. Think the last boss killed me a couple of times from what I remember, I think I mostly spam healed then did ridiculously long chain attacks on everything.

The only thing I found a bit annoying was getting side quests off people and not being able to find them again to hand in due to the person wandering around town or disappearing at certain times. This is somewhat mitigated by being able to wait until a specific time. Even worse in places you get sent to find another npc that you may or may not be given a clue about. You can sometimes dig out where people are via the affinity chart which lists times active and locations for people but it's a bit cumbersome.

Cannot. Do. Final. Boss. Hnnngh.

Just going to leave myself some notes for tomorrow:

Shulk, Sharla, Riki.

Sharla: all healing, remove attacks

Riki: all the breath moves and healing.

Phase 2: two attack angels whilst I attack the boss. Don't stand near the team.

Right, I'll try that instead. There's a fair amount of moaning about how unfair this boss is from a google search. I shall persist.

This guy's freaking impossible.

I get about a quarter down and he pulls out Titan Bazooka and we're fucked. I've had more goes at this than Smough and the other cock on Dark Souls and it's challenging my patience. I don't want to give up but this is ridiculous.

"side-kicks finish fight..."