Maelle is beautiful and Jennifer English embodies her with a perfect voice performance. She carries herself with a fencer's grace and has a lively ponytail. Her red hair and blue eyes are striking. She's also way stronger than my other characters, running amok with special abilities no one else can attain. I should go ahead and formally induct her into my fictional character hall of fame. She'll receive Le ali del principio (from Baten Kaitos II) as her wonderful theme song due to it being French like her.
Clair Obscur can also enter my video game hall of fame, because it's at least better than Phantom Brave. Phantom Brave Lost Hero was such a chore to play, but Clair Obscur was fun. Not perfect, but fun from start to finish. I especially like how satisfying it was to build up my perfect 'pictos + luminas' ability combinations and how great it felt when I successfully parried or dodged all of an opponent's attacks.
The gameplay was addictive, both on and off the battlefield. The environment was gorgeous and extremely creative. The fact that anything goes because it's a 'fictional, created world' let all sorts of crazy things happen, like random objects floating in the sky without any support, or it looking like it's underwater despite there being no water. My biggest complaint is with the plot. In the end life and death aren't real in this world, people can be unmade and then regenerated freely, so the entire dispute starts feeling phony and pointless. It's actually quite sensible that you can side with either side of the dispute at the end of the game, because there's no moral weight to one side or the other. I guess some people like complicated situations like that and think the game is improved by it, but from my point of view I just struggled to become stronger for 50 hours in order to settle a quarrel between siblings. Oh well.
I still have a dozen other games to play -- Xenoblade Chronicles X, Lunar 2 Remastered, Sea of Stars, Fantasian, Octopath Traveler 0, etc., etc. I plan to play plenty of video games this year, with Clair Obscur only the beginning. I'd like to at least play more games than I acquire, so the backlog will actually shrink this year.
There isn't much time for gaming, though. A new Parchment and Wolf book is coming out soon, as well as the visual novel Ren'ai 0 Km. Then there's the winter Olympics.
Dead Account is dropped on account of it being a Jujutsu Kaisen ripoff. I already dropped Jujutsu Kaisen so watching a ripoff of a show I've already dropped doesn't make much sense. The winter anime season is still 25 series in all, though, thanks to Prism Rondo. Kimi to Idol Precure ended today but that's okay, because Star Detective Precure begins next week. I'll be very interested to see whether it too becomes a great season of Precure, or is relegated to the 'good' level like Delicious Smile Precure. Of course, the first ep won't be enough to determine things one way or the other, but it will certainly provide a good hint.
No comments:
Post a Comment