So I bought this thing.
Quick description of the first hour:
The music is amazing.
There's a great SF opening sequence but then I'm dropped into JRPG-Cliche-Land.
Now I am in a town that is larger than it really has any reason to be, populated by townspeople who take paragraphs to say about as much as your typical 8-bit JRPG townsperson.
In other words: I seem to be playing a game whose title begins with "Xeno". HEYO!
Still, so far so good. It looks and sounds as good as any Wii game I've ever played, and it appears to be one of those JRPG's that has taken some notes from western RPG's: you can save anywhere, there don't appear to be any forced random encounters, and there are things like quests, trading, and reputation.
On the minus side, it seems to have that disease that every Japanese developer has developed where it has to explain even the most minute and obvious aspects of gameplay to you at every turn. "Move the D-Pad to select things on the menu. Press A to select, and B to cancel." (Oh, and yeah we're back to SNES-era button-mapping. I wish devs would make up their fucking minds. And no, I can't just remap because that would put jump on the A button, which is even more unacceptable.) Remember when Sonic didn't have a little helper to follow you around and tell you that if you fell in a hole you would die, and when Zelda figured you were smart enough to connect the acquisition of a blue rupee with your rupee-count being incremented by five? If Super Mario Bros. were made today, the opening would be ten paragraphs of text explaining what the A and B buttons did, that you should jump on that Goomba but not that Piranha Plant, and that Mushrooms make you big.
(And yeah you can turn off the tooltips, but it's always that line where I don't want to lose the ones that explain actual esoteric battle-system things that are more complicated than "When a thing is grayed-out, you can't do it. (more) When it is no longer grayed-out, you can do it again!" This is, after all, a Xeno game, and I think there may be some less-intuitive things coming down the line.)
Anyhow, so far I'm enjoying it. I wish it wasn't $50, but under the circumstances I think if you've got a Wii you should probably suck it up and pay full price, because it's probably going to be one of those things that disappears in a hurry.
