LoKuS said:
Yeah or get a card
Herm I didn't really say much about this gane before just that I loved it
I remember when I first got it the lady who served me at the shop asked me if I'd rather have that or Ehrgeiz, at the time I had never heard of Ehrgeiz before but decided to come back another day and get that becuase it sounded interesting. A good decsion on my part becuase Vagrant Story is far better imo.
When I got home I booted up the game not really sure what to expect becuase I didn't know anything about the game other than who it was by (already being a square fan at this point in my life that was the attraction). It wasn't like any other game I had seen or played, it had a dark and serious European medevil look to it, the mood about this game was strong and to that effect but some of the characters had that designed by the Japanese look to them (mainly Ashley, the hero).
It wasn't long until I was thrown into action against my first foe...huh? Whats this? The game also has an unusual battle system, when you go to attack a large grided circle comes up and if any enemies are within the circle you can choose to attack the parts of their body you want. When you flick through the various body parts you can currently target on your foe you get two sets of numbers, one is the % chance you have of laying a sucessful blow on that body part and the other is how much damage you are likely to do. Pretty simple really but there are handicaps;
one; your risk - as you attack your "risk" goes up and as your risk goes up the harder it becomes to hit and do damage to your attacker.
two; when you get your weapons they are always good against a certain monster type such as "beast" or "human" and if your weapon is really good against say humans then it won't do much damage to dragons, however you can train your weapon to be good against the types of creature you want it to be good against.
I think that's enough about the battles which are probibly more fun than I make them sound.
The scenes in this game are prehaps what makes it so great, I found them to be both well written and well directed and they look good to (maybe not so much by todays standars but I feel they still look nice), there is a strong sence of style and mood to them, the music is also nicley done. Over all this is a more mature game than most around with a good mixture of fantasy and gameplay. It also has good replay value as there are things you can only get the second time around and your character gets to keep his stats from the last play through (which is needed really because you can't become all powerful in your first play through

There are also special titles you can gain only by playing through twice and the sort of gamer who likes to get everything will probibly find him or herself playing through a fair few times to get all those.
The only things I could complain about are the timed puzzels but the timer can be turned off so that's fine, the other thing would be is that this game is pretty short, if you skip the scenes and don't muck about the game can be finished in under five hours, but then why have quanity when you can have quality?
I could go on but I'm lazy and I have things to do. My advice is if you see this game you should get it becuase these days youc an probibly pick it up for like £5 and a lot of people agree this is a mighty fine game, more than well worth its current cost in my eyes (even worth more than what I payed for it back in the day when PSX games were still expensive in my eyes!

).