Christmas party! And BBS update

Going to be in Chicago for the next three days to celebrate the holidays with my extended family. Wishing everybody happy gaming in this post-Christmas season. ;D

Also, I beat the first campaign of Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Terra's, and I'd like to share something I noticed. Remember how everybody complained Kingdom Hearts 2 was too easy? Well, Square listened.

Oh, boy, did they listen.

The difficulty of the game is actually very fair, up to a point. The difficulty spike of Terra's final boss (not going to spoil much here) is ludicrous. He's basically a copy of you, and has all of the abilities you had prior to entering the fight. In this regard, whatever preperations you had for the boss can be used right back at you, including your limit breaks, shotlocks, and healing spells. The ONLY way to do serious damage against him is to block and counter his attacks (which, by the way, if you get caught in one of his combos, you are DONE), deflect his ranged attacks back at him, or abuse your own shotlock and constantly recharge it with Elixers. Now, it's only natural that a final boss would be hard, but this one seemed overly so, especially compared to everything we'd fought prior to him.

Terra's story, at least, was interesting. I'll be starting Ventus' campaign next.

Game Informer WKC2 Review

I'm not the kind of person to get hung up over review scores. At least, not for the reasons most people would. If I'm looking forward to a game, no amount of bad press or word of mouth will prevent me from trying the game out for myself.

Recently, however, I have noticed a disturbing trend with modern video game reviews. Specifically, I have a problem with 'JRPG's getting noticeably lower scores than their western counterparts, for no genuine reason. People often say that JRPGs are stagnating, that they don't provide the innovation that WRPGs apparently provide (which simply isn't true, more on that some other time). However, there seems to be something uglier than that afoot- a simple refusal by so-called 'game journalists' to give these games a fair shot at all, only begrudgingly giving a good game a decent score (see Gametrailer's review of Disgaea 4 for an example), and jumping on the smallest possible flaw. These games are criticised unfairly, plain and simple. A recent example I found was Game Informer's review of White Knight Chronicles II, a PS3 exclusive RPG that came out last month. Now, the original White Knight Chronicles was an average-at-best affair, which was dissapointing coming from the great developer Level 5. I can safely say that White Knight II is a vast improvement on it's predecessor, and in a gaming generation that lacks too many great JRPGs, you can't go wrong with a game featuring a giant midieval robot. Game Informer isn't known for particularly great reviews, but their review of White Knight Chronicles 2 is such an unfair piece of writing, I feel it is worth discussing. I'm going to pick out some lines from the review, and say why I feel they are wrong.