Beaten game number 10-14

There have been some intense gaming lately and here are
some short summaries. I had to borrow a few of the pictures
from the INTERNET but hopefully no one will mind.

-10 Energy Breaker-

Ah, I have been looking forward to play this for years. Ever since I found out
that it includes a song from Lufia…and since I saw the gorgeous graphics to.
It is always a good sign when you see a SNES game released in 1996,
the few people who still made SNES games by then knew what they did.
I am so glad that the fan translation got completed for this game, it was
quite a large task to do since the text often shows up in “bubbles” of
different size and there is a lot of text outside of the story that is
easy to miss, great work!

I don’t feel like explaining the combat in detail but it is a classic
isometric strategy game with a somewhat odd system to learn new abilities,
once you understand how it works, it works fine.
Story is good and also remind me a bit of Lufia (both made by Tatio),
music is also good to great, hehe. The only real problem with the game
is the turn limit on battles… every battle have a limited amount of
turns and if you don’t beat the enemy within that limit, it is game over.
This not a problem in the first half of the game but by the end it is a
real pain and I am thankful that I played on an emulator, phew.

-11 Ittle Dew-

A small Zelda “clone” with an interesting twist. The references are of course
everywhere and they make no secret about it. The interesting part is that you
can beat the main “temple” of the game in more than one way depending on
how good you are at solving the puzzles.
Not much to say really, a nice little game and for me the best part was the
option to play in swedish, you never get to visit Fiskbulleberg in
other games, haha!

-12 Metal Saga-

Another PS2 RPG bites the dust! I actually had no idea what to
expect in this game, it is quite rare to see a copy of it in Sweden,
VERY few imported it and I don’t know anyone who has played it,
if so they have not mentioned it at least…

Starting the game you will be greeted with a quite strange intro,
nothing new in RPGs though, so I hit new game, watch a small conversation
with my mom and get to choose between two options, apparently I choose
wrong since the credits begin to roll… hahaha!
Next time I pick the other option and soon realizes that this is an
open world RPG… made in Japan… on the PS2…
AND released in english. Quite a surprise.

The world is open and you can go where ever you want but the
process is like this: Find a town, fight monsters until you can afford
the best tank parts the town has to offer (yes, you mostly drive around in
and fight with your tanks), buy the parts, equip them and find “outlaws”
which are wanted bosses that give a lot of extra cash for the next upgrades.
Repeat.
Somehow this is quite fun and once you understand how everything works it
is a very solid RPG. Sure the graphics are not great, no voice acting etc
but it does have a FAST FORWARD button for all battles that makes
Bravely Default battles look like a snail, haha.
The battles are classic turn based RPG battles with the addition that you
can go in and out of your tanks (a bit like Xenogears).

This game almost need a full review to cover everything, at least you get some
kind of picture from this… managing your tanks and searching the world for
outlaws is basically what you do until you stumble upon the little
“main” story there is.

I did like the game but since there is just so many good RPGs on PS2 I
can’t really recommend this unless you have played them all…

-13 Dragon Quest Heroes-

I thought that this would get old and repetitive fast but I did enjoy it
all the way to the end, the battles worked really well and switching instantly
between characters is the best, the only sad part is that you can’t bring
them all at once, only four at a time and since the main character, Yangus and
Jessica where a must for me it only left one spot open for
experimenting with the others…
oh well, the worst part for me was not being able to zoom out when you fight
larger enemies, the best part was Healix the cureslime, I can’t believe
he got to me…

-14 Uncharted 4-

I didn’t expect to play this anytime soon and I already felt done with the
series but then my sister bought it and of course I had to borrow it!

First of all, the environments are just crazy both from a technical and
aesthetic view. I never thought I would see the level of detail that is put
into especially the vegetation of the game, this is as far away you can come
from the classic “MMO grass” where you just put to textures of
grass in a cross, haha.
If you are standing among the bushes and grass in this game and look down
you will first see a layer of plants with large leaves that overlap and think,
what a clever way of hiding the ground, but no, if you look beneath that
you will also see hundreds of actual grass straws blocking any view
from a boring ground texture!
It may seem a bit specific but seeing this and moving around in that
vegetation was just a level of detail I never thought we would see
in anything other than a tech-demo.

The environments alone is probably reason enough to put this
as number one in the series after all.
The pacing of the game and especially battles are much
better than in previous titles but without spoiling anything it felt like
something was missing in the story, it did have some really good scenes
but I was expecting something more from this “last” of adventures.