A Few Quick Reviews
In the past few weeks I’ve started playing a few more games… as usual.
At release, I picked up Etrian Odyssey III. I finally started it up and the class variety is much better – and class choice more significant, it seems – than in the original. I never played II, but I don’t think I’m missing out on much for not having played it. If you’re in the mood for a long dungeon-crawler with lots of cute art and frequent frustration, it’s probably right up your alley. I think it’s parallel to mine, but not quite exactly right.
More recently I picked up Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. Most any franchise that is inspired by Journey to the West (or Saiyuki, or whatever you’d like to call it) has at least the core of a good story. Enslaved has three decent characters, a lot of frustrating gameplay, and the occasional beautiful view. I finished it, and I’m convinced it’s really not worth release price.
Finally, I found a cool thread at NeoGAF that discussed an iOS game called Game Dev Story. Although it was briefly tempting to pick up an iPhone (why yes, I will consider it seriously for a dinky $4 game), there is a free-to-download PC version. The thread calls it a “sequel”, but it seems to be the same game with a slightly different feature set. Given it’s incredibly awesome (devoured most of a weekend), I made a quick guide for the layman English speaker.