Jan lent me the PS2 game Valkyrie Profile 2 and, try as I might, I just couldn’t get into it. The main thing was the horrible battle system. Talk about half-baked! The difficulty is supposed to scale in these games to gradually teach you tactics. Unfortunately, the game throws a three minute battle system tutorial at the player and then immediately ramps the difficulty up. Sorry, Square-Enix, I don’t want to waste 40+ hours in frustration. I play to enjoy my games, not to be aggravated by dying every five minutes.
It feels like the developers had what they thought was a good battle system idea but then fell in love with it too early and let it out the door half-baked. I really wanted to like this game (V.P. 1 was apparently a knockout-great game). I’m always disappointed when a game fizzles for me. Ah well.
Maybe I’ll take a page from Katherine’s book and go play Civilization.