December #2 and last update
Last update of the month and year. Happy new year's eve to everyone. See you in 2017 :D
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</div>| Status | Achievements | Playtime |
|---|---|---|
| Beaten | Nope | 3.1 hours |
| Beaten | 96% (50 of 52) | 2.6 hours |
I lump this two together since it's basically one game cut in two. I admin, i am not a huge fan of puzzle adventures. They usually start with some basic connect the dot and end with "in order to open this door you need figure out that if you bring this pointy hat and throw it in a raging volcano under a full moon while you are baking a pizza with one hand and petting a trained hamster with the other a key will drop out of a magical tree on the other side of the island". Although it may just be me and everyone else has a mid set to jump at this sort of logical conclusions.
Aaaaanyway. Puzzle wise (eh), Puzzle Agent is right up my alley, the puzzles are the sort of enigmas found in a weekly magazine which i adore (at least i did, haven't bought one in years). A couple of them are weirdly worded or have oddly specific requisites so i had to use the built-in hints that the game provide, other than that they were small, immediate and fun to figure out.
I won't say anything about the story or plot, because it is so utterly out of the park that it has to be experienced first hand. Absolutely recommended.
| Status | Achievements | Playtime |
|---|---|---|
| Beaten and trashed | 30% (17 of 56) | 50.3 hours |
I tried to like this game, i really tried...the title of Zestiria is wrong imho, it should be "Tales of horribly wrong decisions". This game is utterly broken, boring and all around bad. I was going to prepare a lenghty analysis of every shortcoming of Zestiria, like the utterly broken difficulty system, or the on rail combat, the characters ripped of a random page on Tvtropes or even the stupid mess that's the equip stats and buff, but then i went and faced the final boss. Oh boy, oh boy that final boss is the epitome of the horror that is this game design.
</br>So the final boss. I'll keep it spoiler free if you are masochist enough to play through Zestiria. As far as final bosses go, it starts fairly standard, first phases is a classic boss encounter, you are in a small circle arena where you dodge stuff and hit him in the head. Same goes for phase 1.5. That phase 2 starts and everything crumbles. For the phase 2 i'll need a bit of visual aid so here it goes my mad paint skill. Couple of tidbit before we start, your party is composed by 2 humans and 4 seraphim, only 4 can be active at the same time and every seraphim active must be paired with a human. If a seraphim dies you can swap them out while they "heal" and if a human dies a seraphim che revive them given that they have any spare battle point.
As you can see the Boss pattern attack cover a cone in front of him, he will never move and every attack hits the exactly same spot every time. The red circle is the closer to the boss but also the deadliest, you are dead meat if you stand there. Orange will get you hit 75% of the time and yellow is kind of a safe spot for sniping if you keep guard for his long range attack. Blue spots are safest, you'll get hit once in a while but you'll sustain basically 0 damage compared to the rest of the battle arena. Strategy for this phase is standing in the blue spot and hit attack. That's it, you just stand there and hit the attack button over and over. What about your party companions? First of all let's start by saying that party AI in this game suck so you can guess what they will do the whole fight. Yep, they stand in the red circle, die, resurrect and die 5 seconds later. Meanwhile you stand in your safe zone chipping away the boss 200k HP with your manacing 1k dmg a hit. Not so bad right? The fun part hasn't started yet. When the boss health falls down a threshold it begin charing a OHKO move unless you can pass a dps check, and you need your full party for this part. Yay! And you can only use 1 item every 10-15 seconds, so your best bet is to hope that the active seraphim has at least 1 unused point to revive the human and that both of them will attack the boss. Best part? You have to do this 4 times, and after every dps check you lose 1 seraphim so you are stuck in the last parts with permanent dead allies. Keep it up for 20 minutes and you have beaten phase 2!
If anyone is interested in the characters and the story, i redirect you to the beatifully drawn anime which also made some much needed adjustement to the story so it makes sense
| Status | Achievements | Playtime |
|---|---|---|
| Beaten | 66% (39 of 59) | 53.1 hours |
I honestly didn't expect this game to have such a complex ending(s). "Final Battle" was just as epic as i thought it would be, even though this sort of games usually fail miserably to portrait a battle of that scale (things like the Dragon God from Demon's Souls).
Sooner or later i'll start New Game+ with hard mode to jump on the dlc since i haven't had a chance to get there in my first playthrough. </div>
Hm, I can’t decide if this isn’t normal for JRPG’s. I remember some fights which were worse than this. Well, nevermind, I gonna play the game nonetheless as soon as I have the mood for it. But looking at your playtime and achievement count it will probably take some effort before I will complete that one O.o
The tales series is an odd place, it wants to be played like a western rpg (think dragon age) but it has all game design of a jrpg. No need to say that it just doesn’t work.
Most achi require hours of farming and grinding. I barely had the patient to complete the game :/