Various Thoughts

Despite being terrible at action games, I decided to try Tokyo Xanadu eX+ based on its connection to the Legend of Heroes games… and ended up getting pretty far into it (currently in the middle of Chapter 7).

It’s half RPG and half action game. The action game aspects are a bit over-complicated (three super moves with three separate resources, two buttons to swap party members) but are easy enough to grasp that even someone with terrible reflexes can get S-rank stage-clear scores (on normal difficulty). The RPG aspects on the other hand are straight-forward but suffer from character behavior and storyline events that fluctuate between stereotypical and awful. That you have to continuously re-canvas the maps in order to collect the various character info pages and find hidden quests also quickly becomes tiresome, and the way it blatantly taunts you with content which can only be completed in a second playthrough is just plain annoying. I do like the way the upgrade system relies on loot rather than money though.

Overfall was recently bought on a whim and unfortunately ended up nothing like what I was expecting. Rather than being RPGish it’s more a strategy game (with the goal being to unlock new starting weapons/abilities/traits rather than winning). Worse is that only the battles are turn-based and each playthrough apparently has a time limit of, according to the tutorial/guide on Steam anyway, ~14 minutes. The time limit alone would be a deal-killer even without the focus on unlocking things solely to unlock more things.