Rogue Galaxy: First Impressions.

[Dexie Oblivion]

Having beat Zelda recently, and wanting a nice RPG to play, I picked this up this weekend. It's Level 5's new title (Dark Cloud, Dark Cloud 2/Dark Chronicle, Dragon Quest 8), so I was expecting something good out of it.

A few hours in, and there are several things both good and bad worth noting...

The Good:

-Music is nice. No stand out tracks so far, but overall it's good work.
-The graphics are absolutely fucking fantastic. Level 5 does totally stunning cel-shaded work, and this is definately their best so far.
-Battle is real time, like Tales of series, 'cept it all happens on the map. You'll walk around, and suddenly a big WARNING siren will ring, as the enemies drop in/warp in/burst out of the ground around you. All special attacks have to be activated from the menu, though, which is a tad annoying.
-All party members have two weapons they can equip at once: A main and a sub. Main weapons are the close range stuff, and sub are long range. Sub weapons have a limited amount of ammo per battle, though.
-Enemy design is varied and neat.
-The voice acting is pretty much awesome. Steve Blum as a space pirate? HELL YEAH!
-Weapon Synthesis is an easy, simple, process. Feed two weapons to Toady, get a new one in return.

The Bad:

-The story is waaay too Star Wars-ish for my tastes, and it's starting to rip off Skies of Arcadia a bit, too. (See below.)
-The second planet, the jungle world of Jaraika: Reminds me far too much of SoA's jungle area.
-Second gripe about Jaraika: Why do these isolated tribespeople that hate everyone and kill all outsiders speak perfect english? :P
-Third gripe about Jaraika: Why the hell does every other chest in the jungle contain a Mimic? It's annoying as hell, since I have two choices when they appear: Let it rape my party and get game over, or blow through my entire item stash trying to fight it. Mimics should be rare enemies, not seen every two minutes early in the game, yeesh. >_>;
-This is a fucking SPACE game. Why, then, do two of my party members use fucking SWORDS, a weapon overused already in games, as weapons?
-The system for learning new abilities and stat boosts and whatnot? It's called Revelation Flow. Really name lame. It's pretty much a weaker version of Final Fantasy X's Sphere Grid, but instead of needing various sphere to activate squares, you need different and specific items to do it.  It's kinda of a stupid system, and doesn't make much sense to me.
-The game is pretty challenging at this point.  I'll seen the Game Over screen countless times already, and have blown through a good portion of my inventory in several random battles so far.

Overall, it's not bad so far, it's just easy to spot the flaws, and they sadly overshadow the good points quite a bit.

I'll give it more time, though, and have a full review up later.