Star Ocean: The Last Hope

I finally finished Vesperia a few weeks back. I know, it was out forever but my HD got corrupted (bye, gamerscore) so there, I have to forget the story and start a new game. The game was absolutely mindblowing, everythings it upper tier. Top notch. And it's safe to say that ToV is at par with the old scool JRPGS of the yesteryears. 

Gaming is like food - when you have your favorite, you can't seem to get to try a new one. This is what happened with Star Ocean: TLH. I was blown away with my ToV experience that I seem don't want to try any JRPG anymore. So I was pretty slow in playing SOTLH, I was playing for 30 minutes, save and do other things like catching up on my reading, or watching the sucky latest Heroes arc.

But after observing that SOTLH kept its save points scarce, I found myself trying to complete a frigging hour dungeon just to save. At first it was a chore, then it became fun. I was never a fan of big dungeons because I always want to find out what happens next, story-wise. But when you digest the fact that SOTLH will never give you a dungeon which only has point A to B, you'll realize that you can and will enjoy an RPG like this.

Cliche-wise, SOTLH has that everywhere you look - Tale of war, friendship and betrayal, Palom and Porom knockoffs, spiky yellow haired hero, innocent leading lady, androgynous magician, hulky robots, aliens, magic, scifi wars fought with frigging' swords, summons (eidolons, GF whatever it's called nowadays)... the works. But that is overriden by the fact that though cliche ridden, the manner of how everything is brought together works. You get to overlook everything. Yeah, even the shitty voice acting. Never I heard voice acting shitty like this. There's no Japanese voice option so you have to endure 40 mins of cutscenes of pure shittiness. Yeah, the cutscenes is kind of Metalgear4-esque, also as beautiful but with voice acting like that... good luck.

The game spans 3 discs which is most likey because of lengthy cut scenes and the huge world. You get to collect spaceships, travel vast planets and when I say vast - I mean VAST. Good thing you have your dashbutton because it sure is annoying to have scarce save points and running to your next destination in a dungeon as huge as SOTLH dungeons.

Annoying shits aside, SOTLH is an JRPG game worth the time, effort and annoyance. Not as perfect as Vesperia but one of the contenders of this gens JRPG greats.

Killing time with this useless post.

I just realized that you cannot cross-post from Blogger to Multiply anymore? Anyway, I don't get to log in to Mulitply much these days because of Facebook but it was such a nifty feature in Blogger that it's pretty close to alarming. (Though there's an app in Facebook which lets you cross-post to your FB boxes in a jiffy.)

Ok, what to write... yeah, this morning I while I was prepping up to go to the office, I was watching my usual morning news (besides my morning TV, I don't watch TV anymore, because even Cable programs suck nowadays - except for NBA, UFC and my weekly dose of Mythbusters.)

On the 2 morning shows, there was an interview with Bong Revilla regarding the Hayden incident (it was synchronized because after the interview with 7, another interview with ch.2 was done). It was pretty annoying to watch how brutalized this Bong Revilla feels with what happened. Yeah, it's sick and all but to pay local TV to air your side? (Hate to burst your bubbles but sometimes, people pay the stations to air what you feel) And this Hayden dude I think was apprehended at the airport or something and he looks surprised that he was actually being sued by Katrina. (Yeah, that's what you get when messing with a public figure, asshole.) 

Ok, I am not being a hypocrite so I'll say that I downloaded Hayden's videos  and it was sick like the Edison Chen dude. He also records sexual encounters with girlfriends or one night stands. There was this chick from his UST school days (says the forums) which looks familiar so I scoured the net to find out that this was to modess ad model. There was also this foreigner chick and of course, Katrina. 

Bong Revilla, on the interview, said that there *might* be a minor girl with a video with Hayden which urged Bong to a file a bill against pornography. Come on, pornography has been around for ages and why the hell did this dude got to idea of passing a bill just after the Katrina incident? Beats me.

Yeah, and I before I go the shuttle bound for Makati, I saw the papers today with headlines like: "Keps ni Katrina, nilafang ni Hayden." Ok... I was like, what the hell? That's why I given up on reading daily papers nowadays with trash like that, even the Big Papers are trash too - Politics, scams, sports-celebrities wanting to join politics, sports-celebrity mom dating a D.I. - what the hell?

Ok, the boss just saw me blogging. Got to go.