Dazkarieh
To fold or to FOLD?
Player impression:
in http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=364411
Sounds good!!
So straight to the point, it really does seem to have the foundation of a Tales game, but just not Tales. Got a pretty typical story thus far, L'arc runs into a mysterious girl and JRPG antics ensue. Although like Tales, there's a lot of character interactions via skits. The battle system was a surprise though, maybe I didn't watch enough of the videos. Or maybe I'm not that far along. I originally thought it'd be a super tedious game with the animations. It is turn-based, but it's pretty fast paced. It uses an AP system similar to that of Skies of Arcadia. You can assign as many commands as you want with any character as long as you have enough AP. IE I could have L'arc attack 3 times and leave Refia to do nothing. Anyway, you have a few options to work with in battle, you can either: Attack, use magic, reposition yourself, or use items. Magic is limited in that not only does it use AP, but you also only have certain amount of MP per level, similar to that of the original Final Fantasy. The reposition bit is neat as it's pretty similar to Grandia's usage of it. Positioning will determine when attacks will hit, if they'll miss if the enemies already been defeated or trigger a combination attack if another ally is nearby. There's also an autocommand system if you want to just mash thru battles. I haven't messed with that function outside of having everyone just attacking endlessly. To sum up how a battle flows, once you assign all the commands, you let it play out and everyone will move out and attack at the same time. Battles breeze by pretty quick if you're really good about inputting the commands. It is slightly annoying though that it doesn't automatically move command selection to the next character, so you might accidentally input the same order twice. At least you can always cancel and redo.
Now onto the technical side of things, the game probably doesn't have the highest poly count out there, but the art direction helps save that. It's a pretty vibrant game in terms of colors, and there's tons of foliage and detail to the scenery. (Mind you I've only touched the surface of the game, this may change later!) Unlike a Tales game, the World Map isn't anywhere near as barren, there's literally trees everywhere. It's almost hard to navigate or see enemies. Oh and yes, that means onscreen encounters, not random for battles. Doesn't seem like you can change the on field character tho, or maybe I don't have the item for it? Also, load times seem nonexistent, be it from battle transitions or entering a town. Upon entering a town, you're treated to the usual camera pan and town name introduction. The towns can be explored with full movement, but buildings or shops tend tend to just be a stills like that of an adventure or visual novel game. As for options in the game, Arc rise supports all forms of controllers, Wiimote+Nunchuk, Gamecube Controller and Classic Controller. Using the wiimote myself personally, doesn't seem too bad. There's also message speed, command memory, demo movie skip, and sound volume. On the music side, I'm not quite sure how much Mitsuda is involved, but it's pretty damn nice so far. His name is plastered on the intro credits in the composer portion tho, and I didn't see anyone else mentioned or I forgot.
On the mechanic side of things, aside from how battles run, there's also skills you can learn from your weapons that you can trade around between the characters. I haven't seen the full extent of what you can do aside from stuff like damage up or magic +2. But you also have to position these skills in a grid. Each skill is a gem that takes up a certain amount of slots. I imagine weapons will get more slots later.
Alright, that covers it for now. Hopefully more as I dig deeper into it!
in http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=364411
Sounds good!!