WoottWinds
Senior Member

Awww, thanks for the bday wishes, M. My birthday was indeed spent away from the office and fun was had. I'm back at the desk now, though, and slaving away to give you more gaming delights. ^_^

I'm glad I have a fan, it's just that I felt it was necessary to fight rage with sillyness with a touch of seriousness.

Uh, thanks. I was just doing what I felt was natural. I simply could not stand the guy's attitude. It felt like he was completely blocking out every point that the opposing side made, and I get really stubborn when people do that. I know he probably won't listen to reason, but it makes me feel a bit satisfied knowing I at least tried. Glad you liked my posts, though. XD

Added you on PSN and 3DS!

Oh hey, you're on dA. XD *stalks*

I've come to the conclusion that we have eerily similar taste in games, and that automatically makes you cool in my book.

*bro-fist*

It sounds like you have a lot of cool games lined up. I'd love to play the Zweii games eventually, though I remember being a bit disappointed with Odin Sphere. Don't get me wrong; it was a fun action game, a competently told story and certainly an aesthetic experience, but I just felt it got rather repetitive to be playing very similar missions multiple times with different characters. Because of that aspect, I don't think it compares too favourably to Murumasa. You might completely disagree with me though! Let me know what you think when you get round to it.

Sorry for the triple post. I didn't realise there was a rather stringent word limit!

Right now, I've started replaying TitS on nightmare mode, which is enjoyable partly because of the rather brutal difficulty (party members being 2 shotted by regular enemies can be rather frustrating when there are more than 10 of them!), but mainly to spot foreshadowing and hints. A lot of the dialogue has quite a changed meaning the second time around, if you'll excuse my being mysterious. ^^ Afterwards, to continue my masochistic drive, I might give Star Ocean 3 another go on a higher difficulty, as I can barely remember much of it apart from the rather famous main plot twist.

My clear save clocked in at 43 hours, but I could certainly have spent more time than I did. I also spent quite a few hidden hours in the first chapter playing missions over and over again. XD While Wild arms XF is undoubtedly a great SRPG in its own right, I would be hesitant to make comparisons with the other WAs simply because of the genre divide. I also think there was a bit of tension between the quality of the plot and the length of the game. How many "epic final showdowns" with Weisheit did we end up having? The repetition would have sucked the drama out of it without his awesome OST to compensate.

Hey Wootwinds.

I just polished off Wild Arms XF. Despite enjoying it a lot, I now agree with you that it is a somewhat flawed game, simply because of the bizarre difficulty curve. Apart from the introductory missions and a plateau at the end, the game has probably the purest reverse difficulty curve I've ever seen! I was loving the challenge of the first chapter, so I was rather disappointed when the game steadily devolved into a standard SRPG "Kill everything with your awesome units" fest. Presumably, they couldn't reconcile tightly tuned, interesting missions with open-ended character customisation and therefore had to err on the side of simplicity. Oh well. I still loved the OSTto bits and thought Charlton's final stand was magnificent.