Magna Carta 2 (360)

[miir]

Just finished this up last night.
It was nothing extraordinary but it was a fun little game.

The story has many typical JRPG elements (amnesiac hero, saving the world, etc) but it was well paced and kept me interested the whole way through.

Voice acting (aside from Celestine) is above average.
Battle shouts/taunts can get a bit tiresome after a while.

Graphics are nice.
Character and monster models are excellent as are weapons and animations.
There is a pretty heavy blur effect distant objects in the environments which is probably being used to hide the pop-in typical to games built on Unreal Engine 3. It's not too distracting once you get used to it.

I love love love the battle system.
No random encounters, no switching to separate fight area... It's all real-time encounters in the game world.
If you just need to run through an area to get to a quest objective or a save point, you don't have to fight every monster along the way. You can just try to avoid them and run past!

The combat itself is more than just button mashing. You control a party of 3 characters.
Attacks use stamina and you need to watch your stamina usage or you will overheat and become unable to attack for a period of time... but if you use a special attack right when you overheat you can switch to another character and chain another special attack which will reset both character's stamina.
Each character has 2 weapon types they can use and each has it's own skill tree where you can unlock special attacks and stat boosts.

Each weapon type also has a reactive attack (AE attack, disarm, defence debuff, etc) that triggers when certain combat events occur.

There are also co-op attacks that require specific characters using specific weapons, having a certain amount of Kan and having really good timing.

You can enhance weapons with kamonds which can be purchased, obtained through quests, treasure chests or pulled from enemies using a reactive attack from the character Zephie.


I have a few complaints:
There is a LOT of dialogue. Most of the story is told using the old school style character portraits with text and voiceover.
Melee team-mate AI/pathfinding is atrocious. They will often try to reach the enemy via a straight line and get stuck up on a rock, monster or another player.
Some of the puzzles (specifically the switch puzzles on La Strada) are frustrating.
Co-op attacks have too many esoteric requirements but luckily are only required in two instance throughout the game.

[Fairweather Pure]

I saw you playing this a lot, so I assumed it wasn't complete garbage like some have said. JRPGs are really difficult when it comes to reviews. You either like the genre and "get it" or else it's lost on you. It seems most mainstream reviews flat out do not enjoy the genre at all. I've said before that I've slowly gravitated away from the genre, bit at one time it was my absolute favorite.

I do prefer turn based "old school" mechanics to the real time gauge based hack and slash. I still enjoy playing them though. Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey are great turn based games, while Tales of Vesperia was my favorite real time JRPG. I need to finish that one sometime. I'm pretty far into it.

[miir]

I saw you playing this a lot, so I assumed it wasn't complete garbage like some have said.

It didn't get too many bad reviews... most were either favorable or neutral. 69 on metacritic isn't too terrible.
Anyway, I've getting much better at playing games through to completion unless they are complete garbage

Magna Carta 2 was about 40 hours.

[Kluden]

I played 10 hours in to magna carta 2, hoping I would start enjoying it. I didn't. I'm just not a fan of the pseudo real time fighting mechanics. Not all turn based ones are good either, I absolutely hated blue dragon. Lost Odyssey was brilliant though, and I will replay that soon.

Unfortunately, turn based games are probably just a thing of the past.

[Sabek]

I enjoyed and beat Magna Carta 2, but I am I glad it was a Gamefly rental.

[Winnow]

Is this the game where you kill crabs on the beach? I have it somewhere. I have vague memories of tons of text or voice dialog.

[miir]

At the very beginning you have to kick crabs...

And yes, the game is a tad verbose.

[Canelek]

Having crabs would be a pretty gross way to start a game, or a morning. Hopefully, you are able to kick them rather quickly.

[Boogahz]

Kicking them does not take care of the problem...