Tales of Graces

GODDAMN SOPHIE IS HNNGGGG

I've been meaning to do this post for a while now, but I never really got around to it. Things like topics that I would find more interesting for you guys to read, or me just forgetting about it. So now that I remembered, I want to tell you guys about my experience playing my first Japanese game untranslated.

You see the whole reason that I modded my wii was to play this game. The tales series is probably one of my favorite JRPG series right now and when I heard that the new game was going to be on the wii, it convinced me to mod it. Well that was part of the reason to mod it. The other parts for me modding my wii was that the game looked so awesome, I had a horrible feeling that Namco would never localize it, and I had no money to import it at the time. So began my journey through playing this game.

I used the menu patch that I got from the official tales forum and began playing. At that time I had no knowledge of katakana, hiragana, or kanji. Just the knowledge I had from watching tons and tons of anime. I was able to get through how to battle and the title system just fine. It really helped that I played tales before so I knew the common items and their effects just by looking at the picture like life bottle, apple gel, etc. The only time that I used the spoiler-free walkthrough was when I needed help on where to go next, or if I got stuck in some stupid puzzle, but besides that, I used no help whatsoever and it was very satisfying! Thanks to my years of watching anime, I was able to comprehend (most) of the story, and from what I got out of it, It was average at best. But the game really shines not from it's story, but from it's characters as all of the tales series does. Asbel is suzaku 2.0 + I WANT TO PROTECT EVERYTHING. Hubert is Asbel's tsundere brother towards the party, Cheria is your average female herione + nagging mom, Sophie is HNNGGGGG (I'm sorry, dat Kana Hanazawa  was too much for me) Malik was the fucking awesome mentor role who can joke around once in a while, and Pascal was the lovable joker with the equally as awesome Kana Ueda for her VA.

I managed to complete the game with no major problems and clocked around 85 hours for my first playthrough. For my next playthrough, I plan on mastering all of the titles, defeat rock gagan the hard way, do all the sidequests and conquer the extra dungeon.

Tales of Graces is a really enjoyable game and is a good edition to the tales series. I would happily visit again once I finish learning hiragana and the japanese core 2000 series. Till then, I will patiently wait till Graces F comes out for the PS3. If you have the time, pick it up.

Backlog-a-thon

Hey guys sorry I wasn't able to post for a while, but it's mainly because of things like school and exams and whatnot. But now that it's over and done with, I'm a free man and I've been thinking of how to spend my vacation. The thing that came to mind was to finish all the games that I've put down and forgotten. It's not like I'm one of those people who buys a new game and forget the old one even existed it's just that there's so many good games and so little time. So basically I'm going to start from the old consoles and work my way up to the new ones. I'll give you an example of how much shit I have to finish.

For the ps2: Kingdom Hearts 1, Star Ocean 3, Devil may cry 3, metal gear solid 3, prince of Persia  two thrones, Persona 4, Radiata Stories, Odin Sphere. (1 more character's story)

Gamecube: Metal gear solid twin snakes, Prince of persia: warrior within.

Wii: Sonic colors, FF: Crystal Bearers, No more heroes 2, Super mario galaxy, Muramasa (Momohime's story)
The last story.

PS3: Resonance of fate, FF 13, Assassins creed 2, Valkyria Chronicles, Infamous.

360:  Tales of vesperia(at last area)  Mass Effect.

and this isn't even counting the games on my handhelds. I hope to finish at least a quarter before the summer but I think I'm off to a good start. Just yesterday I finished Bioshock.

E3 2010

Hey guys, It's been a while since I posted mainly because I really didn't have anything interesting to post about. So I thought about it and I came up to the conclusion of posting my trip to E3 2010.  Of course there would be pics.

I got the chance to go to E3 mainly thanks to the make a wish foundation. Since I'm a dying kid and all that jazz, they came to me and ask me what wish should I make. My first thought and wish was to go to japan, but seeing that my entire family is black, I thought that would be way too much trouble. So I wished for the next best thing that I wanted to do, which was to go to E3 in L.A.  and damn, they made my trip in style from the moment I left my house.

Warning, you will see a pic or two of me, or my brother. Try to guess which is which.

The reason why this pic is so dark is because we had to leave around 4am in the morning if we wanted to get to L.A. in the afternoon. Remember, I was traveling from Canada and it was my 2nd time going to the U.S.  They greeted us in style by sending me a limo to pick me up instead of us driving to the airport.

Inside the limo was really nice. Aircon, liquor for the folks, and some LEDs on the ceiling of the car  that lit up and made pretty little patterns when the car was in motion.

L.A. is a really beautiful place. The only problem I that have with it is that people there really like to drive recklessly. On our way to the convention center we almost crashed twice due to 2 different people trying to cut us off.

This was outside of the convention center. This was a fuckhuge poster of homefront and there were other ones advertising games like assassin's creed, PS move etc. By the way, when I was inside the convention center, there were 2 different armies inside the halls, opposite of each other. One was the US army, the other was the United Korean army. They were advertising homefront. It was pretty cool to see both of the uniforms in person.

Holy shit I was so tense when I took this picture. As you probably would've guess, this is day 1 of E3 and it just opened up to us. Everyone and their grandma was rushing the stairs and escalators to get in and try the things before anyone else. I took this picture from the escalator.

There was a real guy in that killzone suit. He must've been roasted alive because it was hot as hell in the showfloor.

Up where that projector is was the place where you were able to try the 3ds. Me and my brother didn't go in because the wait time to get in was 2 hours and he said "Fuck that shit" and left.

And now, I present to you, my spoils of war. These things that I got would probably never go on sale and when I die, I'll ask for these to be put in my casket.

The buttons name that's a little hard to read says Arc rise Fantasia. Got it from the ignition entertainment booth

 

 

Next up are the T-shirts.

The e3 one is actually a hoodie and comfortable as fuck.

The legend of zelda shirt I got as a reward when I went to the nintendo booth and tried out skyward sword. They gave it to me when I completed the demo.

The pic was cut off but it says player 1

The "guess who's back" was actually a sega dreamcast shirt, and the one with the animal is from phantasy star 0 for the DS.

I even got a blue chainchomp from nintendo. His name is chompers. He has the task of guarding my room all day.

Chompers fell over ;_;

The brown Shirt is from resonance of fate for the ps3. In my opinion, it's probably one of the best rpgs that came out this gen. Get it. I got the mortal combat shirt from waiting in line for 30 min to go inside a mortal combat castle where they gave us a closed theater of the game. It was cool and I got to talk to the developers making it.

The rockband shirt I got was being given out when I went to their booth. They were pretty cool guys and I had a try at rockband 3. It was terrible since I sucked at the guitar.

And that's it. It was a really crazy enjoyable trip from start to finish. The only issue I had was that make a wish only gave authorization to go to the showfloor so I wasn't able to attend the conferences. but they easily made up for it by sending me a huge package 2 months later which contained a xbox 360 elite and a bunch of games for it, ps3 and wii. I would never trade this experience I had for the world.

Solanin

Today is going to be a different blog post than what I usually do. It's a post that makes the title of my blog relevant. Today I'm going to give you a manga recommendation. Some of you might have read it, some of you might not, but I feel that this manga is a really good one. It's also one of my favorites.

The title of the manga is the same as the title of my post. Solanin. It's basically a manga that some people could relate to on a personal level. Deals with things like motivation and questions such as what do I want to do with my life, is there anything I can do with my life? It captures a pivotal moment in people lives. The early twenties. Asano Inio does a great job telling a story about doing shit we may or may not give to fucks about and about life in general. If you pick this manga up, I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did.