Played some more
Dark Chronicle today. I'm getting a bit irritated with this game yet I can't seem to decide whether to quit it or not.
The game has some nice RPG elements in it, but the dungeon crawling is
so boring. Right now I'm at this dark mountanous environment (Chapter 5) and the dungeon levels look so dull and uninspiring, I thought I was going to fall asleep. To make matters worse these are randomly generated dungeons, so there's nothing particular to look at; it's the same hallways/rooms the whole damn time. Atleast the dungeons with the condor (Balance Valley) or those in the jungle (Sindain) were a bit more diverse. Even the sea caves (Vennicio) were more fun to look at than this.
Also, now that I'm talking about this game anyway, it really didn't live up to the expectations it itself created at the beginning. It started out with an interesting (enough) story but once you're past that initial part it's just dungeon crawling all the time. To make things worse, the dungeons only get bigger as you progress, so while it didn't bother me at first when there were like 5 "levels" in a dungeon, it really annoys me now, with about 20 levels in this one.
Once you get to the end of a dungeon in each chapter the story unfolds a little further, but because the dungeons take so much time it misses its effect completely.
It's like I would say to a person: "Hey, here's a movie I'll let you watch. But after the first 20min I'll pause the DVD and let you dig a hole outside for 8 hours straight. After that I'll let you watch another 20min of the movie but then you'll have to go dig outside again."
In other words the story feels like an afterthought the developers put in the game to disguise the fact it is a boring dungeon crawler from beginning to end. Sure there are upsides to the game like the graphics, the music, the georama and some of the side quests (like the fishing) that make it a less annoying. But with such a boring combat aspect of the game (that take up atleast 85% of the time you'll spend on the game) I've really lost all motivation to continue this grindfest.
Alright, that's it, I'm going to try out Persona 3 and/or Rogue Galaxy. I'm pretty sure they'll be worth my time more than this game.
And now I've written so much about this game anyway, I think I'll just go ahead and submit this as my review of it.
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