mDuo13

Thoughts, Words, Works

Atsui~~~~ @

Ashley from Another Code: R

Well, the weather has been unbearably hot for the past two days, which is precisely the kind of warm welcome back from Hawaii that I was not hoping to encounter. It's made worse by how bad I was burned in Hawaii. How bad? Well, I may in the future blog about it, as I have something of an anecdote, but suffice to say I've been staying out of the sun as much as possible for the past week and I am still peeling.

During that time, I've been catching up on "being home" things - one of which is working on my job search. My good friend Rylee had some pretty insightful things to say about it, and although I don't agree with him 100% it has prompted me to do some major revisions to my resume. This has, of course, delayed the actual sending of applications because I don't want to send an incomplete resume to a job I really want.

In truth, though, those "being home" things have been a mix of productive and unproductive time spent. I made good progress on Tabi chapter 2 - the release will be coming as soon as I get LastElixir to help me translate some tiny, illegible scribbles - and yesterday was big, too. Spiritsnare and Tsubasa came over in the morning, so that we could cook breakfast (waffles, yum) and play Tales of Symphonia 2. Both were a huge success. We mastered our waffle iron timing on the third try, and made several successful waffles after that; Trader Joe's baking mix had a good, simple recipe in the right quantity and I happened to have an unopened bottle of real maple syrup in the back of the cupboard, so it was quite tasty. After that, we got in a solid 10 hours of ToS2 gameplay, not counting our breaks for lunch (snack foods from Nijiya) and dinner (Chinese food and delicious, delicious kimchi from Tsing Tao).

My take on that game is not entirely complimentary, but also not nearly as harsh as some people have treated it. It seems like it was made on a relatively low budget, which shows: the world map is a menu, the character animations are limited (Collette's wings don't flap), and cooking is a for-monsters, in-town only affair. The general design just makes it feel like a spinoff. The monster AI is unfortunately not very good (they are terrible at getting out of trouble when their HP gets low, and also poor at judging when is a good time to start casting) and the fact that monsters are not human-controllable means that for some long stretches of the game, the third player is simply left out. But at the same time, it has a highly entertaining party dynamic (Tenebrae is brilliant) and the localization is - much of the time - actually more palatable than Tales of Vesperia's. It's nice to revisit the old Symphonia characters, and the new ones are fun and likable, too, though admittedly the designs from the two games seem a bit mismatched. Johnny Yong Bosch does a surprisingly decent job as Emil's meek side, but I just wish his supposed-badass voice sounded even slightly different than his Nero voice, his Kuhn voice, or his Lelouch voice. So at least this is one of the better jobs I've seen of casting him, such that his presence in the cast is less a liability than usual.

Today my copy of Metroid II: The Return of Samus for GameBoy also arrived ($8.95 on eBay, shipped), so that's added to my to-do list, as is catching up on the variety of anime series on which I've been falling behind these past few weeks. K-ON was easy to finish, and right now I'm working through Shakugan no Shana (5 episodes to go), though the fact that Another Code: R (also known as Trace Memory for Wii) has released in Europe is distracting me. I didn't even realize the game had been out in Japan for almost half a year, though I've been looking forward to it since it was first announced, and am only getting more hype now. Thing is, the last game came out in Europe before America, but with the purportedly poor sales of Trace Memory on DS, and the lukewarm reviews of this sequel (28/40 in Famitsu), this one may or may not ever make it to the States. If it doesn't, I may have to figure out how to hack a Wii and import the UK edition, because forget the reviews, forget the lack of popularity, any game where I get to spend hours solving puzzles and staring at Ashley Mizuki Robbins is a winner. Which reminds me, I need to talk to Loktera and get my copy of the first game back...

 

User Comments

OverCoat @2009-06-29 00:00:45

Metroid II is the best Metroid game.

Add your thoughts...

Your email address will be kept private, and only be used to generate a Gravatar; if you enter a website URL, you will get a link to your site but no avatar.