leene_chan | Multiple Failures.

On Monday our phone line and internet went dead for the entire day! Apparently some underground cable exploded somewhere (I think in Hartford) and it couldn't be fixed right away because of the storms. The next day they came back. Then the phone stayed and the internet went away again. =_=

I think it's back for good now. It had better be!

How many games can I play at once? Last night my copy of Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria arrived. I ordered from NCSX, which I almost never do but they put the preorder up first. Plus, because they're in NY and I'm in CT, even if I ask for Standard shipping it always arrives the next day. XD Even though the game was harder to get into than the average Tales game (for this imperfect Japanese student, that is) I played for three hours last night.

The opening CGI is gorgeous. Once you're running around it's not nearly as nice and the font is hard to read. Texture-smoothing to the rescue! The music is impressive, especially considering the lackluster work Sakuraba has been producing for the Tales series lately. The battles are complicated but I haven't been wiped out yet.

Tri-Ace really knew what they were doing by not casting a starlet to play Alicia. I heard that when Alicia gets angry she sounds like Crayon Shin-chan! ^o^;

I expected not to like Rufus but I think he's all right. His reactions to Alicia's split-personality are funny. I'd like to make a drinking game where you take a sip every time a scene ends with a weird picture of his face.

I usually don't like the "huge" characters but at least Dylan seems like a decent guy...

In the first dungeon I materialized Mitra, Roland and Jessica. I haven't really used them though. I'd better get to work!

I think that Dalles(?) has a kind-of-ridiculous character design. Why didn't they just give him a feather boa? What is this, Final Fantasy? He was only in the game for a few minutes so far and he's already cried and cowered even more than Alicia has.

Holy crap Lezard's voice is higher than it was in the original VP! Thank god Koyasu's not doing that ominous monotone thing again. I would have been embarrassed every time I played VP2 with someone else in the room. I guess that's Lezard's evil voice but it sounded totally unnatural. Now Lezard is being a great big phony with his cute and innocent act. You can tell he's still a bastard from his battle quotes!

It's too bad that they don't pause the cut-scenes between each line. I have to watch them twice to understand them and sometimes that's not practical! o_o