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Some scattered thoughts having finished it like 30 minutes ago. Kurt enters some sort of boring singularity that would make the likes Gaius* and Zin blush that is almost sort of impressive in its own right, it's like they drew him up to get it across. Ash has nothing going for him that is not grating until maaaaybe the very end and even then it's very much a "wait and see what they do with him in the next game" so both of these blokes broadly speaking get a thumbs down. I waxed and waned on Musse but in the end I guess she's basically just repeating the beat for beat same role that Emma did in CS1, but just with more smugness rather than awkward deflection, which I guess is an overall improvement? All in all I'm pretty ambivalent. Juna and Altina though more than carry just about everything else and them alone probably makes the entire game just about. They're real good kids and they make the Rean-as-a-teacher subplot land perfectly. Just about everyone else in the game, such as the old Class VII, fulfills their role very satisfactorily; if I were being negative about it I'd say it wasn't really surprising but all in all it's about what I wanted out of those returning characters both major and minor. I hope Becky fucks Hugo up!! Ranking the CSs in relation to one another is so loving weird and hard to do. The formula and structure of these games is almost painfully obvious from the word Go, and on one hand that sort of familiarity when paired with the story Falcom is telling is still quite compelling, and on the other hand whenever you step back from them you really start to see the seams from everything getting stretched. I guess if I were to put it one way, the individual chapters are often great, and I love all of the downtime story bits and the characters just like interacting with one another, and I ALSO like the big story beats and reveals, but the second I look at it from a storyboarding standpoint it feels I keep thinking "wait they only got through THAT much in that entire game?" It feels a little silly when they are as long as they are. Like for all the grief Sky FC gets I feel that it is a much tighter experience and gets across a fairly complete story that only evolves into the behemoth that is SC by necessity at an appropriate time. If nothing else this third game feels like a strong entry but it makes me look back on the first two and REALLY wish they had found a way to squish those first two games together. I'll probably feel less miffed about it once CS4 is out and I can just look at the whole picture. Finally, I can't loving believe they actually had the balls to pull the same "the weird professor you keep bumping into throughout the game is secretly evil". *I like how people were like "No THIS time it's Gaius' time to shine" and it's the most predictable and on-brand boring development for him and not even because he's really special, he just happened to be there when his priest-teacher died and got the buck passed to him. Oh, Worzel.
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Nov 28, 2019 04:56
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 14:51 |
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"Initiate cooking mode" is the best cooking line and it's not even close (and there are some real good ones, too!). Also re: bikes I love Altina's "Go! Go! Go!  "
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Nov 28, 2019 05:26
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Watching the opening movie and Trailer/PV for CS4 (because there was never going to be a way I was just going to sit on them for a year+) it seems the answer is something along the lines of fully embracing (even more than before) the mecha and going with what feels like a Code Geass revenge story, combined with a "And everyone is here!" with all of the heroes from the previous games. "The End of Saga" and "The Legend of Heroes" indeed.
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Nov 29, 2019 17:52
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I feel like people are forgetful of how Sky FC actually wraps up, what was at stake at the time, etc. Like yeah that game overall has a very meandering pace but it still manages to build to its final chapter just fine and you have more than enough justifications for why things matter at that point; you don't at all have a feeling looking back on the previous chapters that "well, none of that seemed to really matter for that finale". At the very least I think Sky FC did a better job of being subtle about what hints and tidbits revealed in that game would come into play into the next game, whereas Cold Steel 3 goes frequently in the opposite direction at times and makes it fairly clear/implicit that "yeah none of what we're doing at the moment is going to really matter for a whole another game."
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Dec 11, 2019 01:25
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