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| not especially by FABIO 08/31/2003, 3:16am PDT | ||||
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| Totally lacks any of the options FFT had. You pretty much get no upgrades a you progress; the weapons you start out with are what you'll be using the whole game, and half of them are useless. There's the rifle, machine gun, flamethrower, 3 different melee weapons, shotguns, and missiles. One melee weapon is far better than the others (brass knuckles) so you'll never use the other two, rifles only have a 1 or 2 space range advantage over machine guns and miss so goddamn much you'll need the most accurate arms to have any chance of hitting with them (the more accurate your arms, the less hitpoints they have. If you want to have any more than a 50% chance of hitting with rifles you'll need arms that shatter with one or two hits), the flamethrower's range blows (obviously) and is only around 20% more damaging than a machine gun but costs TRIPLE the action points. Shotguns evenly spread damage out to each body part, meaning they're useless unless the enemy has one part that's already almost dead and you need to finish it off, but even then you're better off peppering him with a machine gun and still having a good chance of hitting that part while doing more overall damage.
So you're going to be using just brass knuckles, missiles, and machine guns the entire game. Every new weapon you get just does more damage than an earlier model, no new stuff. By mission 5 (out of like 50??) you'll be using all the weapon's you'll ever get in the game. Oh yeah, and new mech parts give you more hitpoints at the same pace that weapon damage increases, further adding to the fact that nothing new ever comes up in the combat the entire game. With no new weapons, combat never changes from "missiles long range, machine guns medium, melee close". Melee is hardly even worth it until you get a bunch of special skills that utilize it. I felt like I was fighting the SAME FIGHT over and over again the whole time (there may be more than 50 missions, definately longer than FFT, or maybe it just seemed that way thanks to the dull routine battles become). Oh yeah, skills. Every once in a while, you'll randomly acquire some skill depending on what body part and action you take during a battle, fuck if I could ever figure it out though. Once you get a skill, you can "equip" it. You can only have a certain number of skills equipped at a time. During battle, every time you perform an action related to that skill there's a random chance that skill will activate (punching someone may activate a melee skill, shooting a shooting skill, etc). So that's skills you randomly acquire and randomly activate; where the hell does strategy enter into this SRPG? The only strategy you'll ever need to use is "pepper enemy with missiles until one body part is near destruction, nail that enemy with machine gun fire (perhaps shotgun) so you take out that part. Melee sucks to start so dont bother with it until you get a bunch of skills for it at which point it's completely broken once you start pulling x3 double fist brass knuckle combos". The plot? Horrible even for a console SRPG. Your motly crew of characters may have even the Wild Arms 3 crew beat in the bumbling idiot department. Plot goes like this 1. Super nuke bomb gets stolen from Japan 2. Hero and buddies leave Japan hot on the trail of the villain who stole it 3. Party arrives at local area which is in the middle of a civil war. They find out the villain just left or was never there to begin with (imagine the whole chasing down Sephiroth in FF7 from town to town dragged out to about five times the length). 4. Party gets caught up in the local conflict and must temporarily team up with one side and fight their way through until they can leave. Get used to hearing "Looks like we'll have to fight our way through!". 5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 about one dozen times until the 50 hour mark, predictable villain backstab (so predictable it's not even worth a spoiler tag), game over. There's 2 scenario paths you can choose from near the beginning by answering a trivial question that you wont even guess is related to a plot branch. You'll get a different party in each branch but end up hating both of them in the end anyways. One branch you hook up with some chick, the other you bond with your sister. In one path you'll join the government side in each civil war you bumble into, the other the rebels. No matter which one you're on, the other will be portrayed as monsters and demonized. In both paths your main character will end up yelling "SCREW YOU DAD YOU'RE SUCH A NAZI!" a lot and you will want to punch him. There's some shitty internet mini-game thrown in who's idea of fun is guessing peoples' passwords by taking every single word that might have a connection with them (like "marines" to break into a military site) and converting them into various forms of l33t sp34k. Some people say this is fun. Those people suck. This game is pretty damn mediocre. Go replay FFT with a different party instead. |
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