Link Lovin’

I haven’t been suggesting blogs to read for quite some time now, mainly because I’ve been alternating between being extremely busy and extremely grumpy. I promise it’s rarely both! I’m doing this again today because I’ve been feeling generous. Or maybe just bored.

Meet Shelly. No, not that girl who wrote Frankenstein (and yet Nightdreamer’s pretentiousness rears its ugly head!) and I would think that authoring horror books is not on the top of her aspirations. She is, however, a very good artist, and by artist I mean someone who draws. I’ll give you an idea of how good she is at drawing. She drew Elena, a female Street Fighter who does capoiera with her lissome body. The artwork was so flawless that Udon Entertainment published it in their Street Fighter tribute artbook, compiled along with comic industry giants like J. Scott Campbell, Jo Chen and Adam Hughes. That’s like being considered the same league with people who drew Gen 13 and Runaways. If that doesn’t impress you I don’t know what your problem is, so I’m just going to blame it on poor taste and Arroyo.

Her blog has more of those great illustrations, plus it’s a refreshing place for those who want to read from the more artistic kind of people! She also writes about makeup, which is also a good topic (err, as I was told by my female friends). Plus, she just really likes videogames and has been playing since the Atari days. How can you not like her?

Still not convinced? Okay, how about this: she draws sexy pinups. Go ahead and tell me that that didn’t have you curious.

Vesperia

When it comes to role-playing games made in Japan, quite a few series can be considered staples of the market. There’s Dragon Quest, which is where it all began. There’s Final Fantasy, which is RPG’s equivalent of blockbuster movies. There’s Suikoden, which always tells a political story and always involves recruiting 108 characters. There’s Wild Arms, which often has a Wild Western setting.

And then there’s the Tales of… series (or Tales series, what it will henceforth be referred to), which has the players battling like they do in fighting games.

When I first heard of the Tales series – and this happened in the early stages of the PlayStation life cycle when Tales of Destiny was just released – I liked the idea. I liked that unlike most RPG’s it wanted my involvement by having me go through all the dirty works of combating instead of flipping through menus. And so, I got Tales of Destiny, played it, and was disappointed. Sure, it does have me running around battlefields and hacking my enemies till next week, but it isn’t done very well. The fighting isn’t fluid: what I can do is run and slash, and then my character automatically runs back to “recharge” so that I can run forward and slash again. Imagine Street Fighter playing as jerky as that. Plus, the game is ugly. I’m not really much of an aesthetics junky when it comes to videogames, but then I don’t ignore this flaw when said game is obviously being lazy. Not only does Tales of Destiny look like a SNES game, it’s also uglier than its predecessor, Tales of Phantasia. The colors are so washed-out the game ends up looking like Chrono Trigger projecting out of TV covered with white cloth. And then there’s the unrelenting encounter rate: I understand that Namco is enamored by the battle system, but belaboring its brilliance by bombarding me with a battle everytime I walk 3 steps is infuriating, especially whenever I try to solve puzzles. It didn’t take long for me to shelve this game.

Wanting to give other Tales game a chance, I got Tales of Phantasia for the SNES. Nope, that didn’t click either, since it also had the random encounter issues. Tales of Eternia (Tales of Destiny 2 in North America) mitigates those and improves the combat, but the story and the characters are uninspiring, so I didn’t go far. Having decided that the Tales series is just not my type, I skipped all the sequels that came for the PS2 and Gamecube.

Being an owner of X360, the one thing I don’t like with its library of games is that it doesn’t have enough of Japanese RPG’s. I imagine those who buy X360’s get it for the Halo and the shooters; I got it for those games too. Still, I soon grew tired of shooting tons and tons of aliens and thugs on many gritty wastelands, and I wanted a change of scenery.

I wanted a more colorful landscape. I wanted to warp back to the days when I was that valorous guy who wanted to save the world, without needing closed-up shots of me sulking or being macho.

After hearing Tales of Vesperia as having all the qualities that I’ve enumerated, I decided to buy it, despite being wary of being let down like I was with the previous games of the series.

I’m 5 hours into the game, but I can already conclude it as the best Tales game I’ve ever played. The fighting feels very natural because I’m not forced to run back and forth just to hit anyone. It’s much closer to playing like a fighting game than the preceding games of the series, since I can jump, combo, connect normal attacks with special moves, dash, and move closer or farther from the screen (i.e. z-dimension - the previous three Tales games I’ve played only allowed me to move forward and backward). In fact, the RPG element can be taken away and the result can still be a decent fighting game.

The encounter rate is more forgiving this time. Enemies still come out of nowhere, but now I can see them, such that if ever I decide not to fight, I can just avoid running into them. Not that I’ve ever done that though – I like the battle system so much I actually want to fight, rather than dread it.

I can’t comment much about the story yet, but I suspect that it won’t be the most original one. I don’t mind that, though, because all the characters that I have met so far are interesting. The dialogues are often funny, and the characters do have multiple-dimensions, even if they first come across as archetypical. The game also has beautiful environments, and I can say that of all the games I’ve played, this one resembles an anime the most. The designs, all done by Kosuke Fujishima (renowned artist of Oh My Goddess! and You’re Under Arrest), further reinforces the anime vibe.

Other than my few gripes with the non-rotatable camera, the game is generally well-crafted and endearing. So, yeah, here in Vesperia I am sticking around. Watch the anime-like intro movie here and hear the cheesy bubblegum-pop with the accompanying engrish lyrics: