Sorry Darksiders fans, but the guide got pushed aside for now due to the release of White Knight Chronicles, a JRPG I have been eagerly waiting for for well over a year.
The game itself has been…interesting to say the least. I’ve never played a combat system like it before, and I’m still trying to figure out why I created an avatar for it to have no real relevance to the story. Maybe it will come to me later. But for now, it’s just a created being that I have taught all magic to and kept it in the back for healing while I control the main protagonist and his—I can’t believe I’m going to say this—MECH.
But as for the guide, I’m not a huge fan of its design. It doesn’t flow very well and its blocks of text make it somewhat difficult to quickly find out 1) where you are and 2) what information you need. But considering that the guide’s design earned the Uncharted 2 strategy guide a 4/5, and this guide was written by the same group, I’m not surprised.
As for what advice it gives, I have to say that when I do use the guide, it has been most helpful. As I said earlier, the combat and skill system is quite strange, and the guide gave very sound tips for manipulating the system. It’s also a lifesaver when it comes to prep, from basic battle prep to boss prep. However, I do find one thing about the prep to be funny: it expects your levels to be quite low at certain points, and my party has had far higher levels than the guide predicts. On the one hand, it makes me wonder how hard the writers made things on themselves, but on the other, such low expectations are nice, because they tell you things like, “Yulie is probably around level 3, so don’t go too far north until she’s level 6.”
I haven’t used the guide at all for boss fights yet, because I’ve found the bosses to be somewhat easy and straightforward. But when I read the strategies after the fact, I laughed at how complex the strategies were. They would tell me to order this character to do magic or make sure I had this combo learned, and I was able to get the job done with little struggle. Maybe it’s because my levels were higher than suggested, or maybe the writers really did make things hard on themselves.
It’s going to be an interesting ride, for both the game and the guide, methinks.
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