Messed up my page

I’m so depressed >_< I completely deleted my page through an ill-advised series of plugin updates that I won’t go into now. Anyway, now I’ve lost every single thing I’ve written in the past year, including all the comments and images.

Luckily Google cache has most of the pages saved, so I’m going to copy and paste those few articles it salvaged wholesale. However the order is going to be completely messed up.

The latest post I made, about getting Junpei in TMGS3, is here.

I’m still working on seeing if I can reinstall the backup I made yesterday on cPanel, but since I know, like, zero about that sort of thing I’m not holding out too much hope.

Let this be a lesson to all of us. Don’t mess with what you don’t know.

Finished SaGa 2

Yippee, I finally finished this game! I hate leaving games unfinished, so even though I’ve started several other games in the meantime, it was nagging at the back of my mind that I still hadn’t finished SaGa 2: Goddess of Destiny.

The ending? You, your mom and your dad jump out of the window to go have another adventure. Apparently it’s the same ending from the GBC edition. I was hoping for something a little more exciting after all the effort I went through, but whatever. I’m just glad it’s over, honestly. Will it ever get released in English? Hmm, on one hand it IS from Square-Enix. On the other hand, it’s not very user-friendly and the story is decidedly bland and out-of-date. The updated graphics are very blocky and the battle and levelling system will leave a lot of new users scratching their heads. I’m not even sure I’d recommend it to anyone I know. I enjoyed it but I won’t be playing this again. So…yeah.

SaGa 2: Goddess of Destiny

Also known as Final Fantasy Legend II in the West, SaGa 2 was remade for the Nintendo DS earlier this year. I never played the original but I’ve played some of the other SaGa games and liked them a lot, so I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this game. I’ve got a team of two humans, a robot and an esper. The male human (Seamus) and the robot (Kannon) focus on power attacks while the female human (Liruka) and the esper (Mokochan) focus on magical attacks. It’s been working out great so far. I just beat Odin by the skin of my teeth but the random battles in that area are brutal!

The nice thing about SaGa 2, and other Saga games is that stat ups are random, so you can just move on with the story without worrying too much about leveling up. You’ll get stronger when you get stronger, pretty much. Wikipedia claims that “unlike the original, where a character’s stat increases through gaining levels was largely randomized, characters now become stronger in a “less opaque” fashion, with more defined growth tables for each playable character,” but a casual player like me doesn’t want to mess with tables and figures and stuff like that. And of course if you run into an area where you’re having problems, you can always go back to the first town, equip your weakest items and grind a bit. You gain stats the same, whether you’re fighting in the final dungeon or the first dungeon. Money’s a bit tight in the early stages, but at this point I have 350,000g to play around with so I don’t have to suffer to get stronger.

The only thing that’s been bothering me is my defence. It’s terrible! I hear you can train it by using shields, but I’ve got to wonder about that. I haven’t had a single defence level up in my whole game,my only defence comes from the equipment and magi I put on. Will I be okay for the Final boss like this? ‘Cos all the boss battles so far have been reaming my buttocks, first Venus, then Odin, now who’s next? Hmm…to go back and grind a bit or not to go back and grind a bit? I think I’ll go a bit further till I hit the next boss and see what I’ll need to do to take him out. Hopefully I’ll run into a store that has uber-equipment so I can buff up a bit more.

Anyway, that’s how it’s going. I think I’m almost done with this game, and then I’ll be able to concentrate more fully on Dragon Quest 9 and Harvest Moon: Innocent Life (PS2) and the other dozen games I’m playing right now. Go, go Seamus!

Harvest Moon Twin Villages: Marriage candidates 1

As I said in an earlier post, I’m assuming Marvelous is going with 4 marriage candidates each for its main characters. Unless they announce any more, it looks like it’ll be 2 girls each from Bluebell and Konohana, and 2 guys each from Bluebell and Konohana. Of course I could be wrong… Anyway, time to compile the details I have so far on the potential partners from Bluebell.

GUYS

“A quiet guy, doesn’t talk much about himself. Has a great sense for flower design (?) and stuff along those lines. His dream is to someday win a  flower arranging contest (!). Likes cats.” Okay, not to perpetuate stereotypes or anything, but that doesn’t sound very manly to me. Flower arranging!? He’s even called “Camille!”

GIRLS

I’ve also seen the name romanized as Leah, but I think Lia is cuter. “She’s very popular in the village because she’s cheerful, considerate and organized. She likes to make tea and candy. She wants to open a shop in the city one day so that people can enjoy the sweets and tea she makes.” Not bad, not bad. She’s a bit bland, but not bad.

“Blunt, lighthearted, doesn’t discriminate against anyone. She’s usually optimistic, but she does get depressed sometimes. She can also be quick-tempered. She moved to this village as a child, but she still has the accent from her hometown.” Kyoooot! Even her name is cute, and I like her design and outfits. Looks like I’m playing as a boy this time round. Based on the one screenshot they showed of her, it looks like she speaks in a Kansai accent.

Looking good, Marvelous! Keep me posted!

Xenosaga III: Worst…security…EVER (spoilers)

Security in all the installations in this series has been bad, but I think Labyrinthos in Xenosaga III takes the cake for WORST ever in video game history. It’s a very important building handling all kind of top-secret experiments and materials, and they’re expecting an attack from the Federation at any moment! They even said there were Federation moles around, didn’t they?

So from the second we took those guards out on the first floor, every single door, lock, window, everything in the building should have been locked down tight and a non-stop flood of security should have poured in. Labyrinthos shouldn’t have keycards just lying around for people to pick up, and every elevator should be guarded tightly, especially in an emergency. And haven’t they heard of fingerprint and retina scanners? Well actually they have, because Kevin had some in his room, so why don’t they bloody use them!!!? Haven’t they heard of encryption? How can I just stroll casually up to the Vessels of Anima, enter a few commands and have full access to the system? And when I do that, they still wait till I’ve stolen 3 of them and outfitted the E.S. before having any sort of reaction to my intrusion. Ridiculous.

I was flabbergasted all the way through the dungeon. I was expecting some sort of trap or ambush at the end, like “We saw you coming all along, now die!” ‘cos they have to have security cameras in a place like this, right? I know they do because I saw the footage, but somehow they’re incapable of tracking us on the cameras and blocking us off, or setting traps for us? Who runs this installation, Sesame Street muppets? No wonder they got wiped out, with intelligence like that.

Anyway, I’m having fun finally finishing this series off. It would help if Shion wasn’t such a stubborn, whiny bitch, but that’s what the Mute button is for. What an annoying bitch.

Xenosaga III needs more chaos!!