Last one for today!

61. Record of Agarest War 2 (PlayStation 3)
A.K.A Agarest Senki and Agarest: Generations of War 2
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Agarest War 2 is the story of Weiss, an amnesiac man who killed a God, and has to make up for it by essentially giving his own life and also involving his child and grandchild because this is an Agarest War game and your debts never end with you.

The gameplay for this game is pretty unique and complicated and rather hard to explain. The easy part is that this game has a dating sim aspect. The game spans 3 generations. The first two generations can end up with one of 3 ladies and their child will be the next generation's hero. The last generation can be paired with any remaining female party member. One way to improve relationships is your decisions in conversations and the other one is an unspeakable evil that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole and also one of the reasons this game ranked lower than its already fanservicy enough predecessors. In this game you can have 4 characters in battle, and your formation will depend on which character you select as a sort of “lead”. Then you'll have different attacks depending on which button you press (Triangle, Square, O, or X), and can also activate special attacks when you build up a certain gauge. I could go in to linking and all of that but just trust me when I say its easier to understand when you play it.


General impressions:
So I wasn't sure what to expect with this one. I loved the first two (yes, Agarest War 2 is actually the third one both in release and timeline) but I'd heard this one switched stuff up a good deal. In some ways this was a good thing because battles in the other two were tedious and this game made huge improvements in that regard, but on the other hand the characters and story were less interesting and this game took it way overboard with the fanservice to the point where I was genuinely uncomfortable. And for this series, that's saying something.

Story:
While there wasn't really anything wrong with the story, in fact some spots were quite interesting, it lacked the same charm of the other two games. It wasn't told in the best way and it didn't really live up to its potential. But it did have its moments and it wasn't a bad story either.


Gameplay:
The best thing about this game and a huge improvement over the other two. You can actually walk around the world map, battles were made faster (but not easier if you're used to the other system), there are a lot more story events and a lot less fights to do. Even towns were made more explorable. It's an improvement on the series gameplay in almost every way.


World:
The world is pretty interesting and it has it's good spots. It's still not graphically the best game but it still had some neat areas and places to explore. The battle maps do get a bit repetitive though. But the best thing is that you can actually explore the map in this game.


Characters:
The characters lacked the same depth as they had in previous games and became more cliche than ever. There were still some good ones but they just didn't have as much personality to them and some of them were just downright unlikeable. But there's still a large cast so there's bound to be someone I like.

Favourite character: Aina X44ude3.jpg
Honourable mention: Fiona 6TCB80z.jpg

Aina was just such a sweet woman, very soft spoken, very caring. It was nice to see, especially in contrast with the main character, Weiss, and she did soften him up a little. Same thing with Fiona. Fiona also tugged at my heart strings because can you imagine being a kid and suddenly waking up and no one you know is around and your parents are gone and everything is strange and different?

Overall this game is a huge improvement on the series in terms of gameplay. The maps are explorable, battles no longer take forever, there's much more scenes and story. But the game doesn't have the same charm and depth, the fanservice is WAY over the top, and it just isn't as interesting. But it's still a fun game for fans of the series.

And tomorrow we finish up the 60's and head in to the 50's yaaay~~