Real quick, I thought it was too good to be true, and it is too good, but it's still true. As hinted at in the ending of the International FFX, we'll soon see a bit of troubling continuity in Final Fantasy. Not that these are true sequels, mind you, there's just more story to tell. I'm glad we'll be given the opportunity to continue, as I was despondent by the end of FFX. I really wasn't done playing.
Hunter, though. Yeah.
Hats off to the teams behind this game. The character designs are great, and every one has something unique that makes them enjoyable to play. This is not a game that needs a thesis written about it, in fact, anything that impedes your trip to the mall is a heinous, immoral act: it is practically non-stop, four-player simultaneous Goth Gauntlet (Gothlet?) action with characters that gain experience and level up as you progress. New outfits and greater difficulty await the victorious, as though slaughtering the undead in droves weren't its own reward.
I got a couple mails asking about Medal of Honor: Frontline, which is kind of a sore subject with me. Being on the PS2, the graphics might not be as good as the PC version, in raw terms, and controlling an FPS on a console has been difficult for me in any game but Halo. The reason it's a sore spot is that looking at it makes me jealous in many ways. Every level we saw at the show was uniformly great, but the details are like the work of a man with OCD, chained to a desk at EA, utterly fixated on the second World War. Instead of the beach explosions on the PC version, which were merely excellent, you get massive clouds of dust and smoke, which move and dance on a calculated breeze. The levels are full of tiny details which elevate the visuals in ways beyond resolution or bit depth. Before I saw it first-hand, I could see no reason to own it. I assumed it was a fairly mechanical, straight-up console exercise leveraging a known brand. In fact, they probably could have just done that and made a lot of money - but I'm here to tell you that they've done nothing of the sort.
(CW)TB
