All hail the glorious band of Kitase, Nojima, Nomura and their associated band of rascals who prevented the exact reason I bought a fucking PSP 3 long and arduous years ago from not completely wanging chung. While I enjoy defending Dirge of Cerebus, that’s mostly for silly reasons. Since the game is, unfortunately, not so good. That all said, Crisis Core is pleasing me deeply.
I got the game last Thursday and have slammed around 11 hours or so into it, not counting the times I died. Most of that time has been spent working on the available missions. These missions range from retardedly easy to “Fuck, I have to wait until I level up a bit more.” I thought I’d be all cool and do all the missions available to me before continuing on with the story, but the game made short work of that plan when the boss of one mission took me out in a single hit.
The missions are so far incredibly straight forward. Go to a savepoint, select “Mission” from the menu, choose your mission and then go kill some shit. The rewards range from “yay, a potion!” to summon materia, which really just add a chance of them being randomly summoned by the slot machine part of the game. If you’re tilting your head at a funny angle, don’t worry. Your neck will be fine.
But yeah, I looked at some screenshots of the game and saw the thing up in the left hand corner, but as I didn’t really feel like finding out too much about the game before I played it, I had no idea what the hell those pictures were. Turns out that this slot machine type thinger is actually what governs your summoning, limit breaks and even leveling. Yep. Get a 777 with the same 3 character faces and you level up. Get 2 same numbers on 3 faces and that number slot materia levels up. Otherwise, when faces don’t match up for triples there is a variety of bonuses you can get. And even bonuses for just a 7 in the right spot. It’s interesting and adds a nice luck variety to the game. You can’t really count on it, though, which can be annoying. But when coupled with a sound strategy on the player’s part, it allows for a damn good battle system.
The story, which I’m only kinda following (damn bad Japanese skills!) is fucking entertaining from the little I get. Definitely gonna replay this one day. I have no idea when it hits the states, but you folk there with PSPs better grab that shit fast!
Revenant Wings is a direct sequel to FFXII for PS2, yes. The title? I have no idea. Square Enix has a habit of thinking up subtitle names with no real meaning other than “sounding cool.” Then again, Revenant is kind of a dumb word.
rev·e·nant /ˈrÉ›vÉ™nÉ™nt/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[rev-uh-nuhnt] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1. a person who returns.
2. a person who returns as a spirit after death; ghost.
So basically, the title means “wings that return after being gone for a long time.” God knows if that has any significance to the story. Doesn’t Revenant Wings suck, anyway?