Time and Eternity

[NeoCracker]

And here is my review of Time and Eternity, done through Chat as I played in real time!

[10:36:36] UncleBigHands> Oh god, this is some smurfing aweful animation.
[10:36:57] UncleBigHands> The animated cutscenes from Xenogears looked less aweful.
[10:38:26] UncleBigHands> I have't even done any gameplay yet, and I'm about to quit. O_O
[10:38:54] UncleBigHands> Imagine the most stereotypical anime characters you've ver scene.
[10:38:57] UncleBigHands> And this is worse.
[10:39:00] UncleBigHands> So much worse.
[10:39:23] UncleBigHands> And this dialoge......
[10:40:13] UncleBigHands> Oh god the animation is getting worse.
[10:40:34] UncleBigHands> They didn't even try to properly lip synk this.
[10:40:40] UncleBigHands> synch*
[10:41:02] UncleBigHands> And the subtitles are near unreadable because of the color choices.
[10:41:14] UncleBigHands> I payed it off the day before the reviews came out, so I felt obligated.
[10:41:26] UncleBigHands> The Voice acting isn't.... that bad?
[10:42:02] UncleBigHands> This is like, a Parody of bad anime stereotypes without actually being a parody.
[10:42:13] UncleBigHands> Kind of like the Movie Movies.
[10:42:22] UncleBigHands> I think this is the game equivelant of that.
[10:43:46] UncleBigHands> IT's been a lot of bad dialogue, troutty animation, and.... Now I am asking her if she should call me 'honey' or 'daddy'
[10:43:57] UncleBigHands> Yeah, I think that's a good summation of the game thus far.
[10:44:06] UncleBigHands> Daddy it is!
[10:45:02] UncleBigHands> Okay, the way he delivered the line 'How about you call me daddy' was smurfing beautiful.
[10:46:09] UncleBigHands> And the girl who is suppose to be happy and energetic seems.... Earilly soulless.
[10:47:22] UncleBigHands> 70% of the time the expressions don't match the voice and dialogue.
[10:48:26] UncleBigHands> ....And I think they just made a dick joke about a baby dragon.
[10:49:53] UncleBigHands> ....And on the wedding I was able to asnwer 'I don't'.
[10:50:02] UncleBigHands> The Pastor basically told me I was wrong.
[10:52:21] UncleBigHands> And within two minutes of the actual plot starting, it has already caved in on itself.
[10:58:05] UncleBigHands> And oh god the camera.
[10:58:19] UncleBigHands> It actually hurts to watch this.
[11:12:07] UncleBigHands> You know those older RPG's like Wizardry that had the first person perspective when going through dungeons?
[11:12:21] UncleBigHands> The camera is like that, but in third person.
[11:12:45] UncleBigHands> Yet your character moves as if they were a character in an old animated FMV game.
[11:12:56] UncleBigHands> And doesn't seem like they are actually in the world, just animated in.
[11:13:10] UncleBigHands> It's almost glorious how smurfing terrible this game is.
[11:14:27] UncleBigHands> This may well be the troutiest game I have ever playe din my life.
[11:15:51] UncleBigHands> And I'm done.

1/10, cause at least the voice Acting isn't entirely trout, and two jokes were funny.

[DMKA]

If you thought the game was bad, you should see the trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rBltjcXIDJM) for the game.

[Skyblade]

You quit playing after half an hour? It was that bad?

Also, why were you playing this instead of Shin Megami Tensei IV?

[NeoCracker]

I wanted to get this out of the way. :p

The game is phsyically painful to watch. I have never quit a game after so little time before in my life because of it.

[Vyk]

Hopefully this was just a rental or something..

[NeoCracker]

....No. I had it pre-ordered. :(

However Gamestops current promotions allowed me to trade it in and pick up Soul hackers without paying any extra money! :monster:

So basically what happened is I paid 50$ for Soul Hackers, is what all this boiled down too.

[Bolivar]

Yeah this looked like the most stereotypical anime RPG ever conceived, but in a way that it could be glorious. Sorry to find out it's not :(

[Mirage]

Pretty glad I did not impulse-buy this a few weeks ago.

[Skyblade]

Ok, so after some long and careful deliberation, I decided to go ahead, pay off my preorder, and pick this up.

And, I actually otterly like this game.

Which is odd, because it is not otterly that good. It has a list of a couple hundred things wrong with it, but I find I otterly don't care.

I find the graphics nice (there are a couple of odd moments where animations play at an odd tempo, and the lip-synching is horrible, but neither otterly bugged me past the first ten minutes). I find the story absolutely hilarious, as it just goes so over the top almost instantly. I mean, you start out by hunting down a group of Assassin's Guild FAN CLUB MEMBERS. It's just absolutely hilarious. The characters are absolutely clichéd as all heck (and the main character makes you otter just smack the hell out of him about a quarter of the time he's talking), but they're still fun, and interesting. They keep me engaged, even if for some of them it's a sort of "train wreck" engagement.

And I otterly, otterly like the combat. The one-foe-at-a-time, tiered battles are otterly fun. At least, once you understand it. The first "boss fight" three round fight I thought came too early, because you don't otterly have the hang of the system. After that though, it opens up and you learn how combat otterly works. Essentially, it's a game of studying your enemy, and knowing their moves. When you first encounter a new foe there's about a fifty percent chance it's going to lay a beatdown on you. But then, once you know how it fights, and how it attacks, it becomes almost a ballet of unleashing precision attacks and dodging. You otter see just how many fights you can make it without being touched (and you seem to get Exp bonuses for not being hit, which helps incentivize this).

Further, the Customization options are otterly strong. You've only got two characters (and only use one at a time in battle), and they both share essentially the same ability tree. Toki has Rifle boosts and Fire attacks, while Towa is Sword based and uses Lightning, but other than that, they share a tree. However, the Gift Points you need to advance these trees come at a nearly perfect rate. You keep getting more, but you don't get enough to just max everything. So, while you can just shoehorn them down the same route, you could also split them into wildly different paths.


I can totally understand the problems people have with this game. I have a pretty large list of things I would otter adjust or fix about this game. But I find that I still otterly, otterly enjoy its core. There are concepts and mechanics here that are otterly, otterly solid. The criticisms out there, well, they're valid. This is not a great game, or probably even a "good" game in any technical sense.

The camera is horrible (born of the art style, they can't shift it too much without requiring far more hand drawn artwork), the loading times can get annoying when exploring the city (though the map thankfully helps you avoid places with no quests or subquests once you understand it), the fanservice is blatant and far too common, the main character is an annoyingly horrid sleaze (especially at first, but basically whenever you start to like him, it comes back), and the enemies are mostly palette swaps.

But, to me, it's a fun game, and that's what I was looking to it for. It is definitely not for everyone (as NeoCracker demonstrated), but I get the feeling if it is for you, you'll love it, in spite of its flaws.

Personally, if you have any interest at all, I'd go grab a Let's Play (here's one: Rident Plays Time and Eternity (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IxPTFbzDTg&feature=c4-overview&list=UUdZpBb7biA1dVnyHTXQ_YmA)), and watch it. If you are still interested after seeing what the game's like, pick it up.

If you're not sure, well, wait a month. This thing is getting butchered so much by critics for its (otterly real) flaws, that I'm sure the price will drop like a stone. But I'm actually glad I decided to get it. It's a fun game, and I'm having a blast with it.

[Bolivar]

Hm.

I guess Neo just wasn't hip enough for this one...

:monocle:

[NeoCracker]

...I find myself surprisingly okay with that.

[Skyblade]

I'm going to talk about this game a bit more.

I really, really like the Gift system, and I want to bring it up in further detail, because it has some really interesting applications, especially in regards to the game's New Game+.

A "Gift" is essentially a job. Each one is a pack of abilities that you can unlock for GP. When you unlock one, the next time you level up, you will learn all the abilities that the Gift allows that you are within the level range for. So when you first unlock "Black Mage", you'll probably learn the Eclipse spell the next time you level up, but not much else for a few levels (do it anyway, Eclipse is non-elemental, and is a very reliable, extremely powerful attack that you'll probably use for most of the first chapter, at least). And if you have seven gifts unlocked, you can probably pick up multiple abilities on some level ups. Or, if you go back to unlock one you skipped, you can pick up all of its previous abilities the next time you level up.

The result is that you get a fairly nice degree of control on all the systems. You choose which jobs you get, but each job progresses at a steady rate with your levels, so you have a really easy time implementing each new skill as you get it (of those that you choose to implement).

A really interesting facet of this, though, is that even some of the higher tier Gifts have skills that unlock at really low levels. So, while you don't have a chance of picking up Mathematician anywhere near level 7 (unless you straight for it on a side-quest heavy, low level speed run), it still has a fairly powerful passive unlocked at level 7. Why is this noteworthy? Because the game's New Game+ carries over Gifts and GP, but not levels. So, while you still have to work your way up level-wise, you'll still be more powerful due to more passives, and have a much wider degree of customization at lower levels due to the higher rate of skill acquisition from all your old Gifts, and you'll get to try some new combinations of lower level abilities and such. Not sure how it will play out once I get there, but I find the concept quite interesting.

Which is pretty much this game in a nutshell. It has a lot of concepts I find very interesting. From the Dual Soul relationship between Toki and Towa and how it has played out in their life and relationship, to the time travel and paradoxes and how they effect the story, to the concepts of how they've built their gameplay mechanics (which actually remind me a lot of the previews I've seen of Lightning Returns), to even the hand-drawn artwork. I find a lot of this game incredibly engaging, and surprisingly deep, at the core of it.

But, at the surface? Problems. From simple things like poorly implemented subtitles (white text with thin border and no backgrounds can be hard to see sometimes), to the frustrating camera issues, to the really awful parts of the writing (which have, fortunately, been diminishing in number, so we'll see if that keeps up), to the problems with the animation (while the hand drawn artwork is fantastic, there are plenty of animations in the game which simply don't have enough artwork to smooth them out fully or make them realize their full potential, or where they're forced to use a pre-existing animation that doesn't quite fit the scene), to the camera which I really don't like (L2 zooms out! It only took me something like 5 hours to realize that!).

And I know, from the tone and presentation of the game, that it isn't going to fully explore some of the things I'm interested in. Some of the depths and nuances available in this plot are, simply, too deep for this game. Nevertheless, it's also clear that they are going to be addressed more, and I'm looking forward to seeing how things play out. I'll list some of my suspicions and hopes below.

If you don't care about spoilers, or merely want some discussion on some of the good parts of the game, feel free to take a gander.

Time Travel is integral to the plot, and I'm fairly sure it's important to the murder as well. I'm thinking that whomever set this up is a time traveler, which seems to also mean that they're a member of the royal family, and one of TokiTowa's relatives (why they can time travel has yet to be explained, but supposedly time travel is something closely tied to the royal family). I'm hoping that it might be Toki or Towa herself, from the future. It actually makes a lot of sense with the issues they've brought up about the two living together.

See, while the two live in the same body, for a long time, Towa was repressing herself, because it was too confusing and lacking in continuity for them to keep switching when dealing with interactions, especially of a personal nature. For this reason, even though your protagonist was engaged to Toki, he didn't know Towa even existed (and Toki was afraid to tell him). The two share memories, however, and both of them know the protagonist, and Towa's feelings are rather odd. While she has some romantic feelings for the protagonist, she also has feelings of jealousy and, in a way, violation. She doesn't know how many of her feelings are Toki's, and which are her own, or how Toki's feelings and views, through their shared memories, are influencing her own.

Or, if your protagonist chooses Towa over Toki, you have the former lead being passed over for her other self, being judged as less worthy by the man she loves, and relegated to the sidelines. Either of them run the risk of being stuck into a life they can't control, going through actions they don't agree to, or even being with the one they love while at the same time being trapped into it. Plenty of motivation to end things there, and it would explain why sorting out the relationships is also a pretty important part of the game.

But, that may be too deep for this game. I'm definitely suspicious at this point, however, that with the paradoxes involved with the murder, that some time traveler outside of the protagonists is interfering.