Each week I'll try to post the new games (or old ones!) I'm going to be playing, along with some reasons why I'm excited to be playing them. There's two great games coming out this week that I'll be diving into: Dark Souls 2 and Atelier Escha and Logy. Except in the increasingly-rare case that a game is an original IP, I'll often refer to improvements or changes from past games under the assumption that the reader is familiar with them.
Dark Souls 2- After the huge leap forward of Dark Souls over Demon's Souls, I was unsure that the third game in this trilogy would be able to keep things up. Reviews so far suggest that it's just as good, with only tiny missteps or regressions. The map overall isn't as intricately wound together as in Dark Souls, but the world is larger overall and you get to teleport among bonfires immediately. The barrier to entry (as in, dying over and over immediately and not making any progress) is lower for this one, so more people who quickly gave up on the prequels without getting to the good bits will hopefully be able to become engrossed in this one. Finally, I like the idea of having many of the grunts respawn only a limited number of times-- it wears down the roguelike elements a little bit more (in a way I prefer), and (minor spoiler) it's something later on that you can tweak, apparently. Related and also a minor spoiler, there's a way to reallocate your level bonuses somewhere in the game. This will also be the first of the games I'll be mostly online to play, so I'm looking forward to the community aspects, and willing to go offline if the PvP elements annoy me too much. (EDIT- forgot I need XBox Live account to get online-- oh well, so much for that).
Atelier Escha and Logy- We're now on the fifth PS3 Atelier game, and this is the second one since the shift in developers. Reviews have been great, basically saying it takes what worked best from Meruru and dropped what didn't work from Ayesha. Plus, there's new conveniences-- once a party member joins, they are always part of the party (even if not in the active party), so you don't have to juggle allies to access the friendship events. The alchemy system is streamlined a bit, but not oversimplified-- we'll see how this works in practice. Battle items are made, then re-stocked automatically when you return to base, which eliminates one of the things that kept me from using them as much as I should have in previous games (scarcity and having to use your limited time allotment to replace them). Finally, there's a cute cowboy ally (and a cute scholar of some sort too), which never hurts!
Hopefully next week I'll have interesting things to say on these-- as always, what cool things did the reviewers leave out and "what the games got right."
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