Why I dropped Lord Of Magna : Maiden Heaven

Don't be fooled. The blue haired cutie is NOT going to be the main attraction. 

Okay, so I first pre ordered this game when I caught a glimpse of the cover art. The beautifully drawn characters plus the title 'Maiden Heaven'  was what pushed me to buy a copy of the game. The summary sounded pretty interesting too.

Summary: Residing on the outskirts of town as the proprietor of a quiet, rustic inn, Luchs has lived through much of his life proudly clinging to a code of honour passed down from father to son for generations:

"When our cherished guests finally arrive, think of them as nothing less than family."

Unfortunately, the inn has not yet had even a single guest since its foundation, leaving Luchs no choice but to excavate and sell crystals - the islands most valuable fuel source - in order to make ends meet. It is during one such routine excavation that he happens upon a beautiful maiden encased inside a massive crystal, and her abrupt awakening triggers a series of unexpected events that include foul fiends, astonishing abilities, and miraculous mysteries... 

So fast forward like one or two months later. Yippee, the game was here! The limited edition set was better than I'd even imagined, consisting of a nice OST cd and the 3ds box actually had the chibi characters instead of the usual plain, white background. I was pretty pumped, to be honest.

The opening was so - so, the animation was fairly well done for a JRPG. The track which was played at the title screen, however, was FANTASTIC! Everytime i booted up the game up, I'd always spend two or three minutes listening to it at least. Now, with where this is going, readers are probably wondering why I'm clearly praising the game when the title of the post says differently. Whelp, the only reason I'm starting off with the good points is that this game wasn't that bad. It has a 3.5/5 score on Metacritic (a decent rating) and for what it was worth, the time I had spent with the game was not soul shatteringly horrible.

The game's selling point (what they kept advertising about) was its unique combat, namely, striking down your enemies by 'bowling' them over (aka. knock them over like a stack of dominos). The gameplay is quite good, in my opinion. Its fun and challenging, you really have to plan your movements before hand so you don't get stuck in a pincer attack, or getting into trouble when one of the characters in your party dies.

But unfortunately, Lord of Magna: Maiden Heaven experience is bogged down by its tedious cut scenes. I don't like how the game shoves the plot down your throat. I had thought that it was just the prolouge kind of thing, but after continuing with the game, I realized that it wasn't. Its like reading a book which throws a large chunk of exposition at you. What was originally interesting and fun suddenly became boring and downright frustrating. It got so bad that i actually searched for a 'SKIP' button, which I used all too often.

Something is definitely wrong if you continuously skip about 2/3 of the dialogue.

This feature did nothing help the plot, either. The premise and story was very generic to begin with, and having to sit through 10 minutes of doing nothing but stare at the 3ds screen makes the story seem MUCH more idiotic. I give the game props for trying to be all 'foreshadowy' and dramatic by having these segments where a narrator asks rhetorical questions, but that brings me to another reason why I ended up dropping it.

The main character (Luchs) is about as interesting, as a piece of cardboard.

He was so generic and cheesy that I really couldn't stomach much of him. Okay fine, just because he's that way doesn't mean that he's a bad character. Fine, I agree on that point. But come on, why would I play this game, when I could play a thousand other games just like this one?! How are is LoM going to keep its players engaged, when the main character is so predictable, so boring, that made me skip most of the cut scenes? Heck, even his best friend was much more enjoyable to watch! Luchs has almost no character traits outside of  being 'Kind hearted' and 'Nice' and that is why I find myself yawning when he comes on screen.

I know this sounds quite harsh and may seem like I'm bashing on him, but to be honest, Luchs is not the main reason that I dropped LoM. Everything bad about the game culminates into one giant, glaring con and it was what turned me off.  Another thing I noted, was how the game was trying to 'pair' up Luchs and Charlotte. And let me say this, I would rather watch paint dry than watch Charlotte being awkwardly forced to bond with Luchs. Their conversations are not interesting, or even remotely witty. By the time the prologue was over, I found myself desperately wishing to shut off my 3DS. Not liking her is just my personal gripe, however, because many people have expressed that she was quite the cutie. I guess that this is just a personal preference thing.

+Nice art
+Soundtrack
+Visuals
+Gameplay

-Cut scenes are too long
-Voice acting is tolerable at best
-Characters were too one-dimmensional for me
-Bad pacing

I'm not saying that you shouldn't buy the game, but I would recommend getting it when the price drops on when it goes on sale. I wished I liked it, but unfortunately, nothing ever goes as planned.

First Episode Mayhem - Gun Gale Online (SAO II)

After an insane amount of time spent writing fanfiction and generally lazing around, I finally got around to watching the sequel to one of my guilty pleasure animes: Swort Art Online II.

The episode starts off with a scene from some 'seedy' bar in Gun Gale Online. After some brief exposition in the form of a guy getting shot on screen and THEN dying offscreen, I liking it so far. What I was worried most about was the lack of stakes in GGO. What I mean is that Sword art online made things interesting because of its permadeath and it makes viewers more interested in what will happen through out the show.

This was clearly SAO's selling point, in that it makes fans scared of the fact that their favourite characters can be killed off. Alfenhiem online didn't have that, and as such fans of SAO were more inclined to be bored because seriously, what happened to all that exciting 'I'm gonna die' stuff we were promised? In my opinion the second arc was pretty okay. It's the fact that they try to fatten up a series clearly fit for 12 episodes into 26 (or was it 24?) episodes that makes me kinda mad, Have some self control people!

Ahem. I got off track there.

So yes, at this point i was rather liking the whole premise of the anime. It had the potential to be very very interesting and I just sat back and relaxed as the episode continued on its merry way.

And then I saw this .

Let me go bleach my brain. 

Wow. What a fucking train wreck.

That picture over there marked the end of the scene I am dubbing 'The Duitful Waifu' because that is what it literally felt like. What happened?! Where was the Asuna of SAO? What happened to that brave, determined, smart girl which we all fell in love with in sword art online? The character in this scene is NOT Asuna. It felt like a two dimensional picture copy and pasted into the scene, while a voice recorder just played "Omg Kirito-kun I wove you so much!! Look at us so fab!"

Haha, oh hey, remember when Asuna had a PERSONALITY??

Just....wow. The first episode and it's already making me angry with how they portrayed Asuna. There is no longer any depth to her. She feels and acts like a literal piece of cardboard who had merely took the form of Asuna. Yeesh...what a rude awakening. Kirito is still his normal standoffish self and even I felt that he had much more character! Are you kidding me? And this is only the first episode! Sufficed to say, I am not looking forward to see how much they destroyed Asuna's character and what kind of nonsense inducing headache they'll be giving me in the episodes to come.

The fact that they make references to SAO gave me a whole bucket full of sarcastic musings too. No really. It was just that upsetting.

And of course, I leave you all with this joke :

Er...is it just me?

Is this one of those hints that eventually come true? Because you know, canon and cannon. Great jumping jellybeans. The KiritoAsuna couple is fucked.