New Year’s Resolution 2015

The Last Story

Beat: January 25

Time: 28 Hours

The game features some weird, but interesting combat. It had me moving with one analog stick and attacking with the other. There’s also a cover system and players can call out commands to their party members to have them attack certain enemies or structures to gain an advantage in battle. There’s a huge city with many things to do. It has kind of a boring love and war story. It was well told, but just kind of normal. The ability to customize characters’ armors was really neat. It let me change the appearance of the armor they wore without affecting stats. I could also change the colors. For the sake of keeping everyone easy to identify in battle, I gave each character a specific color as the core of their outfit. This kind of lead to my party looking like a fantasy version of the Power Rangers. Tipping over a crate of oranges in town was fun. It makes them scatter all over the place and NPCs will slip and fall. This is actually used to escape pursuers at certain points in the game, but I used it a lot more for messing with normal NPCs.

Wild Arms

Beat: February 11

Time: 24 Hours

I’m really glad I finished this game. I enjoyed the wild west theme mixed with fantasy elements. I’m honestly not a big fan of westerns (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid being the exception to this rule), but I do love when it’s mixed with other genres.The story was interesting. It’s also got some solid combat for a JRPG from its era. All of the heroes, and some of the villains, were likable. Mother was really freaky and made for a good antagonist. There are also puzzles spread throughout dungeons that kept the game interesting and helped mix up the typical JRPG gameplay.

Darksiders

Beat: February 13

Time: 14 Hours

It’s like a lite version of Devil May Cry and Legend of Zelda. The combat isn’t too complex and the puzzles aren’t too hard. It also likes to borrow a lot of elements from other games. A portal gun is one example of this. The story is fun and interesting, even if some of the characters lack a feeling of depth. War especially comes across as dull. However, it does have a really cool ending scene with the other three Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding in to help War.

Metro 2033

Beat: February 26

Time: 9 Hours

Sucked. The story was so freaking boring. The characters were so freaking boring. The stealth elements were lacking and didn’t seem to work most of the time. However, the towns actually had a lot of detail to them and felt alive. There were also a lot of neat concepts in the game, such as the pneumatic weapons and flashlight, and the gas masks. I keep hearing that the second one is much better, but I don’t think this is really a world that I want to see more of.

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate

Beat: February 27

Time: 408 Hours

Dang was this a lot of fun. Love the grind of getting all the different armors and weapons. Okay, I didn’t have all of them, but I had quite a bit. The armors and weapons look amazing and upgrading them gives the player a notable increase in power or defense when compared to the previous version. It’s great that to get further in the game the player must get better at learning monster tells and there’s no real handholding in the game, which is a win. The final monster of the game, the Dire Miralis, was a bit of a letdown when it came to challenge. Of note, almost all of my time spent playing this game was with friends or my wife. This game is so large and was one that I frequently played, which is why I didn’t restart it. I will mention that about half the time I put into it was in 2015 and I played it for another 30 hours or so after beating it to get different armors and weapons.