Anyway, back on topic. I just finished a couple of
Ougon Musou Kyoku Cross, Ougon Musou Kyuoku's expansion, runs. What can I say? The game's truly fun. Fast, fluid, crazy fun. Mindless fun, too: If you have to think you are already dead. It is a delightful game to play.
The AI is still hit and miss. When it hits, it devastates you in a storm of unfairness. When it misses, you annihilate it in a hurricane of cheese. Ridiculously long combos make epic comebacks an actual possibility for you, and that the AI doesn't have to imput the sequences to activate the special techniques and attacks make for it to bet all in a single chain of overpowering abuse a very real risk. It falls back into xploits a lot more often now, though. Beato can basically spend entire fights doing nothing but throwing stakes of purgatory to you from the other side of the screen.
The new characters are both pretty awesome and pretty disappointing.
Black Battler is ridiculously overpowered, he's obviously going to be banned from tournaments. He also appears as a ridiculous bonus boss once you have met certain conditions. How ridiculous?
See for yourself.
George and Jessica are utterly boring and pedestrian characters in a game chock full of insanity and surrealism.
Erika is weird and I can't use her to save my life, but I actually enjoy playing her so I'm pretty much traumatized. Her attacks, as those from all the other witches, are surreal as hell, and her dress, like those from all the other witches, is totally beautiful.
Dlanor is, uhm, a melee rusher with red blade thingie. Meh. Like, Kanon all over again? I don't really know.
Rosa is awesome and really fun to use,
a kind of weird combination between a ranged character and a rush character. Her gun is utterly brutal and can break through all shields and barriers while still hitting the opposing character, yet she has to reload after every single shot. And all her meta specials are Rosa Musou references, so somehow the petite fashion designer is Cross', uhm, answer to Bang Shishigami. Wat? I don't know, leave me alone.
If you have been following the game you may ask, like, where are Will, Trollkastel, and Lambda. The answer is, like, screw you. There will be a patch later on adding those characters in. No, wait, that's kind of confusing.
There will be a patch later on with the sole purpose of unlocking three characters already on the disk.
… Le fuck? Really, is this a bad joke or something?
Also, when are we getting MARIA and Gaap? ¬¬ Really.
On to the new gameplay, now.
Mid air block is useful, though my mind simply forgets about it and so I never take it into consideration when thinking about "what should I do now?"
The amusingly named Princess Mode makes the game playable with a normal keyboard, as most specials and mechanics can be activated with no more than two key presses. It will be obviously banned from tournaments before you can even think of using it. It's good fun if you are in just for some casual fun in between doing serious thingies, though.
Also, now you can freely adjust the time and life for each match from the options menu. And the game now encourages you to kick and beat characters in the floor and rewards you for doing so, too. Thank you for raising the world's children so finely, Japan!
Anyways, I have been using mostly Rosa from the new characters. Her new endings are kind of awesome. Or, say, at least those I have managed to see so far are, which also are the only new ones I have seen so far. There's an "evil" ending for her if you pair her with Battler, there's a pretty funny ending if you pair her with the Siesta girls, and there's an utterly awesome ending if you pair her with Evatrice in which Rosa
finally becomes a witch and
forms a Mahou Shoujo team with Evatrice. Wait, what? Game of the year, every year.
So if you guys enjoy light fighting games you should give it a try. It isn't, say, BlazBlue, not by a long shot, but it is really creative, really crazy, and pretty lighthearted, with lots of weird stuffies, lots of imagination, lots of fast action, and some of the best music to ever grace a videogame. And, as you can see from the videos I posted above, it is a beautiful and colorful game.
@ ChibiMrowak
I believe it being mawkish and hammy is not something you can criticize about it. Like, that's the entire point! Kind of like italian opera it isn't about reasonable and downplayed people but about overflowing passion, about grander-than-life gestures and melodramatic declarations, about insane all-or-nothing bets and about the most irrational defiance of everything that's deemed absolute and ineludible. If anything, all of the themes and the soul of the story can be seen embodied in Kinzo himself. Subtlety? What's subtlety? Wahahahaha! On a crazy night like this…!
Also,
That's the kind of story the last chapter is.
If you are looking for something epic, touching, romantic, and totally KINZO, go ahead. If you got into it because you were a mystery fan… What can I say? My condolences.
Edit:
In any case, you know I'm not very pretentious about stuffies and tend to be more, like, "pop," so maybe that's the reason, but I think that two way relationship between writer and reader is a good thingie, and a fun thingie too. It is pretty interesting to read Ryukishi's interviews and the like to notice how his original vision and message went changing and evolving because of his own life experiences and the readers' own feedback and ideas, for good or ill.
I find it to be a pretty organic process, in retrospective, both for the narrative itself as well as for the ideas he was trying to express, from the stuff on anti-fantasy and anti-mystery to his understanding of several philosophical, occult, and just plain weird topics. There's a point towards the middle point of the story where it seems he just kind of switched lanes and went in a completely different direction than the one he was actually going to first.
ChibiMrowak said:
If that was directed to me - no I haven't yet. But since it's you who are recommending it I will take a peek at it over the weekend.
No, no! Wait, I haven't read it myself yet. All I know is that the visual novel is based on a horror manga by Ryukishi and some other guy, and what little I have heard of both the manga and the visual novel suggest it is truly depressive and deeply disturbing. Like, really disturbing.
So I'm kind of curious, but haven't read it myself yet.
ChibiMrowak said:
Now you are acting like my sister, out of the sudden.
She and I should establish a club for girls Mrowak is a super duper hyper mega meanie to. Yay, totally.