Kami no Rhapsody: Second Impression

Ok, for those who read my first post on this game, you probably have a good picture of how I see the gameplay in this game. There are hints of really excellent possibilities in the actual battle system... if you can ignore the fact that you have to equip skills (as medals) - even the personal ones - and the fact that many of the characters you get access to later are at one of two extremes... either way too weak or way too strong for the time in which you get them. As an example, the angel is way too strong when you get her, and Tsumugi is really weak when you get her... it generally goes that way throughout the entire game, as you get various characters. Making it worse is the fact that all the advantages of the game system go to the characters you got earliest, meaning that evolving your party past a core of characters you got relatively early on is fairly difficult... Another issue is that the orbs you get as you go along are way too slanted in how they appear (each map completion gets you a certain orb or two), and this means that characters whose own ability grids are slanted in a different direction - mages in particular - are pretty much screwed as far as growth goes. A final issue with the battle system is actual skill use... all magic skills have to be activated without movement and archer attacks are the same. Of course, considering the way some of the environments are put together, the ability to use high level magic or archery after moving would be a bit of overkill, but for large time-limited maps, this pretty much eliminates the usefulness of mages and archers entirely. This unbalance is a huge problem in making mages useful at all...

As for the story... it takes a really, really long time to get going, you have to choose one of two heroines relatively early on (neither of which is all that attractive, in comparison to some of the non-human girls)... but things do start to pick up a bit about the seventh and eighth chapters. Unfortunately, considering that means there was nothing but hints of what might happen and repetitive fights with predictable 'oh Eld is such a mysteriously great guy despite being weak' events. To be honest, that gets old really quickly...

Edit: Understand, I'm not hating this game. However, considering how good they did on the side-events (many are amusing, some are exciting), you would think they would have done a better job with the main story so far... There just isn't that much impact to it, and the atmosphere just isn't one conducive to emotional involvement as well as intellectual, which is a big downer with a high fantasy setting.

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