Kirby's Rainbow Resort

I've played through Dawn of the New World twice and watched friends play through it another two times. And I plan to play it again soon. It's really fun.

Abyss has the best character work in the games that have made it outside of Japan. It's also the first game to implement things like free run during battles and facial expressions, so it feels a lot more modern than the more outdated games like symphonia and legendia, despite not being that much older. Really, my only two problems with abyss are the lack of voice acting in skits (but symphonia didn't have that either sadly) and the section of the game towards the end that is mostly backtracking (but the story stuff during that part is fantastic so I didn't mind it that much). It also has Luke fon Fabre who is legit the most dynamic video game character I have ever seen.

Some review sites have complained that the 3d effect on abyss 3d is not very good, so I guess that would be another problem with it? But I can't vouch for that one way or another so...

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Repede is in the mail! So excited.

Been playing Graces F with a friend, so we haven't had as much time with it as I'd like but we're still pretty decently far in. Just got to what I think is probably the major plot twist.

I don't like the new gameplay as much as the past games; the lack of TP throws off character balance a lot. For example, the healer's stats are almost all terrible, but if she had great TP it would make up for that. As it is, though, she's just a bad unit.

Once you finally have unlocked most of their A artes and enough B artes that you have four good ones, and have the CC to use them without having to stop every couple of hits, the gameplay flows pretty well, but it takes too long to get to that point and until then battles are jerky and not fun.

The story and characters are great, though the voice cast isn't as good as in vesperia or abyss. They're all fine, though. Reviewers seem to like complaining about the prologue section, but I really liked it. It was so good from a storytelling perspective, the way they were so happy and innocent and then everything just fell apart.

One thing I'm confused about, though, is that reviewers are like "the story is very cliche" or talk about how it is chock full of cliches but then only really seem to mean that a character has amnesia or that a friendship is important to the story. Not only is that exaggeration, but you only seem to get complaints like that with JRPGs. People don't go around complaining that a shooter is cliche because it has maps in the middle east, or that a western RPG is cliche because it's swords-and-sorcery or because you create your own character for it. Reviewers don't go around saying "you know what I'm tired of? Platformers that have open grassy areas for the first level" and I haven't really seen anyone whining that Resident Evil has zombies. So why is it that a JRPG plot that obviously subverts a trope by giving a character amnesia twice is instantly written off as bad? Makes me wonder if people think Luke's amnesia in Abyss makes that plot too cliche because anyone who's played through that game knows his situation is something that hasn't been done before. I dunno...it just bugs me...

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Chiming in to say that Graces F owns but the battles are really not that fun at the beginning like Mamthew said. I think once my characters started having enough CC to do their level 4 A-Artes regularly it became fun. I'm waiting on a friend to be available so we can finish it off but I feel like we are getting near the end, at least the end of the original (Wii version) story.