faridmon said:
Can you post your final impressions, please? Or do you know one who posted a lengthy final impression about the game after finishing it?
I'm quite drunk, but I'll try...
A good friend of mine used to import anything seemingly worthwhile from Japan. Every once in a while, a few friends from the "old days" (we used to work at a mom and pop store selling Japanese and US import games more than a decade ago) met to drink and play the latest and greatest from Japan, without understanding a word. That's how I played it for the first time. He lent me the game the next day, and I played for sixty hours. Without understanding a thing. A few months later, when the PAL localization was announced, I lent the copy once more, and restarted from the beginning just to recall the game. Still not understanding a thing, I've played for another 50 hours. I was
that hyped.
Then I got the PAL copy two days early, thanks to my old connections. Being self employed, I worked harder prior to the release, to have time to actually play the game without any distraction. And I played for more than 120 hours in less than two weeks. Even though I've already played the first 50 - 60 hours twice. It was well worth every minute.
Enough with the boring background, let's talk about this fucking awesome game:
I'll start by saying it's by no means perfect. It does an incredible amount of things right, and many of them better than any other RPG ever, but there are issues. So lets get over it quickly: Shitty animations outside of "real" cutscenes, no bestiary, bad inventory design and equipment management... Those are real issues, but those are also pretty much the only real issues. Pretty much everything else is awesome. The world is huge and imaginative, probably bigger than the world of Oblivion after some research. The technology is simply incredible, with an insane draw distance, tons of foliage, a lot of stuff going on, hardly any load times. The world is simply incredible, the characters mostly likable, and the story is actually a lot more complex than it seems at first. The stuff most people consider big spoilers happen early, and while they are turning points, they're nothing compared to the shit going down late in the game. The big reveal is mysterious and looks like an asspull, but it's not. It makes perfect sense once you think about it (some background knowledge helps, especially in German philosophy - we all know how fond Takahashi is of Nitzsche, but it seems he also loves Leibniz and Kant).
And then there's all the optional stuff. Lots of which is incredibly subtle and deep. Nopons are cute and fluffy? Well, they probably are, but it's all facade. And that's not my personal interpretation, it's a fact. The game tells you as much, and shows you what's going on, if you really want to know. The whole High Entia issue? Same thing. There's a plot point seemingly going nowhere, but that's wrong. It gets resolved if you want to resolve it. It simply becomes optional the moment the plot point isn't relevant for the main storyline anymore, but it's still there, and it still gets resolved if you
want to dig deeper.
I really can't write much more without spoiling anything, not to mention most of that post was probably some incoherent fanboyish rambling considering the bottle of Vodka I just had, but I
love this game so much. Simply incredible.
