Summer 2012 in Games

The last section on my Summer 2012 to-do list was video games. Just for fun, I set aside five games I would have liked to finish. Just in case I fell into a time warp and found myself with infinite time and really needed some way to relax and keep myself entertained. Literally none of these got finished, and that’s okay. I don’t know what games I did actually play, unfortunately - it’s been too long.

• Final Fantasy VI Advance (GBA)

        I don’t think I played the game all year, still halfway through.

• Dark Souls (PS3)

        I set it aside when our PS3 died, and have yet to go back. I think I’m around Gapping Dragon…

• Nier (PS3)

        I’ve finished the first playthrough recently, and continue to be in deep romantic love with the soundtrack. It’s a beautiful gem of a game, albeit one with a lot of rough edges. Probably a few entirely rough, even unhewn sides if we’re being honest. I’ve forced myself to do all the sidequests, with only two left to finish (one of which is absolutely awful, and the other of which was couldn’t be completed after a certain point in my first game and has yet to appear in the second) so I’m extremely overpowered. Because of that, in a couple of hours I’ve nearly finished the first New Game+, which is really more like 60%-of-the-game+, and it’s done a few rather interesting things. I don’t want to spoil it, but you really do have to play it more than once.

• Xenoblade (Wii)

        About halfway through this one as well, and I think it’s probably the first true successor to what PS2 era jRPGs were trying to accomplish. Ni no Kuni (PS3) is another, but it’s newer so shh. Enjoyed the heck out of it, and I could generally be found grinning ear-to-ear as I ran around the world and completed stupid sidequests. The hour-at-a-time inventory management sessions were less joyous, but I suffered them gladly. Highly recommended.

• Last Story (Wii)

        A bit less far in this, but early impressions are good. I missed the days when jRPGs had stupid frog catching minigames (FF IX and Quina, ‘nuff said), or rewarded you for smacking your head on signs and slipping on oranges. The fact that you can hit your head on low-hanging signs makes me really happy. There are character animations for walking through tight spaces, and lots of other things. It’s very, very polished. However, in retrospect a lot of things in the first few hours were too simplistic to be fun… My brother and girlfriend have both finished it and enjoyed it, so I suppose I’ll go back to see if I can find what they saw in it.