Today I would love to tell you about the latest game I'm playing on my DSi. As you can tell lately I been playing Rondo of Swords published by the awesome Atlus and developed by Success. This game joins the ever so growing list of RPGs available for the DS library.
In this RPG you follow the journey of prince Serdic who must restore his fallen kingdom while gathering allies along the way. The twist is that the real prince Serdic dies in the opening act and you play as his double who must lead his allies to victory against the "evil empire". The general plot reminds me quite a bit of Fire Emblem The Sacred Stones for the GBA.
Rondo of Swords is a SRPG in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem, Disgaea and such. However this game has a different mechanic that sets it apart. In the mentioned games you move your allied unit next to an enemy and attack.
In Rondo of Swords on the other hand you move through your enemies. When you execute your movement you will attack all enemies on your path. If you pass through your allies you have the chance of receiving several stat bonuses. Both your enemies and your allied units have the change of stopping the attacking unit on it's tracks. Enemies as well receive stat bonuses when they pass through their allies.
In between missions you can send several of your allies on quests to to get rewards, become stronger, or change classes. During this time you can set your units skills, learn or power up new ones, change equipment or items and change formation.
Another thing that I really appreciate are the cameos from other Atlus published RPGs that you can recruit. In particular a certain unemployed ninja and her big sis.
This game is also on the long side with over 30 missions, two branching paths, and 4 different endings.
While this game gathered average reviews I find it really enjoyable. My only complaint is the difficulty, some missions are harder than they should be for no discernible reason. You can find this game anywhere from $15-30 USD. If you ever find on the lower end and have some money to spare or wanna try a new RPG for the DS give it a try.
Amazing I got 1000+ page views. I find it pretty impressive my past online endeavors stayed in the 2 digits at best. I hope that many more people will come and visit and leave comments.
Alright must continue to improve lay out and readability and produce more content.
Well, just as the title suggests this are a bunch of random pictures I took for one reason or another. Quite a few where for articles that I never got around to write. Instead I decided to dump them all here in this post. It's better than them gathering digital dust in my hard drive for sure. So, lets begin I will give you a short description about these pictures.
The first two pictures are experimenting with my lovely digital camera. My friend who likes to use and fool around with it showed that I could take long exposure shoots with it. These two are examples of that. Can't remember how long it was though, but at least I can tell you there is a yellow tint because of the light bulbs I have in my room.
Hopefully this guy doesn't need an introduction. If he does, I will feel old. I picked him up the other day at Wal-Mart. Nostalgia made me got it, not to shabby for being an American today. It's made by Bandai so I guess that helped.
I took the megazord to school to show it to my buddies and happened to have a figma with me like I always do. Yuki was my favorite for a while, and I decided she looked cool with light sabers. I want to find Mace Windu, I think Yuki would look lovely with purple light sabers.
Yuki was having a little trouble, the megazord to me kinda qualifies as a super robot type mecha to me. This is when Yuki decided to stop playing around.
She grew to megazord size, and wiped out a nice rifle, anybody recognize it? The remains of the megazord are to gruesome to show...
Next we have black haired Shana, when I saw her in stock in Play-Asia I grabbed her without a second thought. Flame Haze Shana is nice, I'll get her in my next batch of figmas. I think though she is cuter with the black hair.
These two pictures are from a trip to IHOP where she joined me for a nice breakfast mid afternoon. Do you comrades have them in your neighborhood?
I really like this picture, I think I was able to capture Nanoha's White Devil side. This was inspired by the Nanoha Betrayers doujinshi. Amazing work, go look it up get the translated version or the original Japanese even. Recognize the stuff in the background?
The next batch were going to be part of a 4-koma and what not. I got inspired by the SOS brigade vs White Devil and the Saber Lily ones. Too bad once finished and the other has yet to return.
In case you are wondering why Nanoha is dual wielding Raising Heart and Bradiche, it has to do with a picture I got from Gelbooru with her dual wielding both devices. I though Nanoha looked really amazing so I though I would recreate that.
Does it look like Saber is losing? My idea was having Saber be nearly defeated then show some of the battle and finish with a climatic comeback. No idea who was going to be victorious, since I really like both girls.
I again was playing with long time exposure. So much detail in the kimono I wish my camera would pick up. Whenever I get a better camera, I will sure redo my Shiki and Kos-Mos photo shoots.
Can you tell, this time the shoots where taken during daylight.
I also played around with Shana, I really need to do a photo shoot for her too someday. I wish I had a beach, would make the perfect backdrop for Shana and Kos-Mos.
Remember that picture of the balancing Harhi and Yuki? I tried to do something like that when I got bored at school one day.
Behold, Yuki's balancing act!
Hmm...that didn't end too well for Yuki...
She was quick to recover though. No figmas where injured in this act.
I love this picture, they look so cute. I saw this pose posted by a comrade, just had to copy him a bit.
I wasn't a big fan of Kagami at first, more of a Konata guy. Then I got the figma, and started carrying her around. She became and instant favorite.
Kagamin is been a little dere here, don't peek!
I got Yuki once more, couldn't resist getting her with the guitar.
This is when I first got here. She had a nice duet with everybody's favorite vocaloid. I should get more vocaloids. The Chibi Miku 4-koma made me a fan of Rin.
I got bored wainting for my team in the library. I asked Yuki to play for me a tune while I waited. Ahh...too bad you can't see 3D Yuki in the screen too well.
There you have it, a bunch of unrelated pictures. Some are from last year even newest ones are froma month or two ago. Kinda wish I had written those articles that where supposed to go with them and the others from their sets.
Please, leave your comments about the pictures, or anything in particular. I you are bored enough, go read the other few articles >_>;
See ya soon, hopefully I will write a gaming article I been itching to write for a while. So hard deciding on what game to write about.
Can you tell where Haruhi is? This is right before boarding my plane, when I discovered Haruhi had snuck in with me. I will do a post in the near future about Haruhi's exploits on New England. Athough I wanna do a game related post first.
Before there was small brigade of figmas and scaled pvc figures in my room. Before I learned of Danny Choo, before I knew the "cartoons" I watched where anime and came from Japan. There was one passion I had, video games, in particular JRPGs, likewise I had no idea there was such a surprising difference between western and Japanese RPGs.
My new found understanding of the English language opened a whole new genre of games to me. My first taste came with Golden Sun on the GBA, since then JRPGs in general became my favorite genre. Sometime later I kept reading about a new RPG from the creators of another one, that people kept referring was one the PSOne's greatest RPGs.
Can you guess which well known RPG was that? I turned out to be Xenogears, and game that I wouldn't get to play for another few more years. However, there was a spiritual sequel being developed by the team at Square Soft that developed Xenogears and had formed Monolith Soft. This was the game that became Xenosaga and was the first PS2 game I ever purchased.
Playing Xenosaga led to another "first", my first 2D love...er I guess technically 3D... You can probably tell that first love was Kos-Mos. Ever since then I became a little obsessed with her and ended having a "thing" for robot girls or girls with long blue hair and crimson eyes. I can't really pinpoint why I ended liking her so much.
My love for Kos-Mos led me to yet another first. The first scale PVC figure I would end up importing. I always regretted not being able to get my hands on that figure that came with special edition Japanese release of Xenosaga Ep. I. That's why when I found out about this figure and saw it, I knew I had to get my hands on it.
This version of Kos-Mos was released by Alter in a 1/7 scale I believe in the summer of 2006 if my memory serves correct. As my first PVC figure I was extremely impressed by the amount detail, the sculpt, and paint job and her translucent hair, much like Alter's other Kos-Mos releases.
Now days, I know Alter always does such a high quality work on their releases so it's no surprise this figure although being about 3 years old turned out so well. I have to mention it also has been able to survive 100 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures with no damage at all. Probably this was what made me become an Alter fan.
There you have it, that's the story behind the first figure I ever bought. I wonder if I should do another "first"? This time about my lovely Yuki my first figma. I would love to hear about you comrade's first figure you bought too.
You can find the rest of the pictures I took of Kos-Mos along with many other's here.
Can you tell, this time the shoots where taken during daylight.
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