Current Events > I am Setsuna

(+) Yeah! (+)

I mean the game. I am not literally Setsuna.

So I was very excited to hear about this game when it was announced but when it came out reviews were pretty poor and I lost a lot of enthusiasm, I figured I'd just get it when the price dropped. Well, the price never really dropped. So instead I just added it to my Amazon wishlist and eventually I got it for my birthday and I finally got around to playing it.

This will probably be a case study for why ideas that sound good on paper aren't always good ideas in the future.

First, the all piano soundtrack. While the soundtrack is beautiful in its own rights, having it as the background music potentially playing for hours at a time sounds less like a soundtrack and more like your annoying neighbor's kid is practicing his piano while somehow piping the sound directly into your ear. With effectively no real instrumental variety, all the songs end up being blurred into one really long monotonous song that is on endless repeat and when it goes on for multiple hours at a time, you just end up wanting to turn it off, so now the game is this lifeless frozen wasteland with no music to boot.

Secondly, this game seems to miss so many elements when it comes to dealing with what made Chrono Trigger great in the first place. While it did an excellent job recreating the combat system, it wholly fails at recreating anything else. Instead of the vibrant and fairytale-esque world of Chrono Trigger, we've got a dire frozen wasteland with Diet Squall for a protagonist and none of the characters or any plot points have a sense of humor.

Furthermore, the spirinite system is both pointless and heavily flawed as it requires you to grind enemies found in specific areas or else you may end up not having loot that you need to sell to get techs later--and you don't always know what loot / enemies you need to grind ahead of time. And backtracking isn't always an option.

Then, there are so many small annoying nuances that just weren't very well thought out. For example, instead of having an inn, or save points that heal you or something, you have to buy tents in the village, go outside, and then use the tent. You have to talk to every NPC multiple times because they give food recipes, but you don't know what ingredients they want until you actually have all the ingredients.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, really. There are a lot of other issues with this game.
---

It's s***.
---

How you feel about the soundtrack is how I feel about Persona 3's soundtrack. I rarely mention it though as Persona fanboys treat me like I'm the Antichrist.
---

fusespliff posted...

How you feel about the soundtrack is how I feel about Persona 3's soundtrack. I rarely mention it though as Persona fanboys treat me like I'm the Antichrist.

Is that one of the ones with a noisy jazz soundtrack? That shit really gets to me.
---

ChromaticAngel posted...

fusespliff posted...

How you feel about the soundtrack is how I feel about Persona 3's soundtrack. I rarely mention it though as Persona fanboys treat me like I'm the Antichrist.

Is that one of the ones with a noisy jazz soundtrack? That shit really gets to me.

Yeah and Jpop/rap
First 2 minutes you're thinking "Hey, this game has a pretty unique sound". Then you realize there are maybe 6 actual songs (some of them with Engrish lyrics), you hear them constantly in a loop as you're forced to visit the same few locations over and over again for the entirety of the game
---