Thoughts on Pokemon Black 2

I've been with Pokemon since the beginning,and I'll be there always,checking the main series and occasionally picking up some of the spin offs.Pokemon Sapphire was the game that I constantly had with me as a kid,I don't have it now,but I probably spent around 150 hours on it.After this phase of "being too old for Pokemon",I picked up Pokemon Platinum and that's when I REALLY got into the series.I learned about the physical/special split,competitive bettling,EVs and other crap and while very recently,I'm not into it as much,I still know of it.

This game is not really a "Must Play" but worth checking out at some point during a game drought.
This is the most polished Pokemon game yet and I'm writing this to gush about it.

Here comes Black 2,a year after I played Black 1,a game that I really enjoyed because it did some different things from the norm.Not major changes but enough that it's noticible.
Black 2 continues that by starting you in a new place and resuming the story of N and Team Plasma.
The story is concluded ok,there's still some unresolved stuff but this is Pokemon,characters from the series tend to appear in random games for a random cameo,so whatever.I loved the rival Hugh,he might seem like a typical jerk character in Pokemon,but he soon opens up and becomes more developed than you might think.


Visually,this is the best looking entry in the main series yet,the attack animations received an upgrade from Black 1.Outrage looks more powerful,Aerial Ace cuts once then cuts again,Water Pulse has more detail,and so on.
The overworld basiclly looks the same but the game is set 2 years after Black 1,so there's some new stuff in old locations but not enough to feel different enough.

BW1

BW2

BW2's Aerial Ace



Aerial Ace in BW1



BW2's Water Pulse



Water Pulse in BW1









BW2 Outrage



BW1 Outrage

The music is mixed,the wild battle theme got worse,and the towns in Black 1 that reappear here have the same music.I like the music for all the towns,they just sound good.

The Gyms have their own specific remix according to the Gym Leader,so the Normal Gym will have the theme from Black 1 while the Water Gym will be a more soothing take on it.This is unexpected,and a welcome surprise for people that don't generally like the gym music,like me.

The Gym Battle track has been remixed,and I love it,Team Plasma has a remix that I enjoyed(unpopular opinion apparantly),Ghetsis feels more menacing with his and the Champion music hands down beats the Black 1 champion music.





The moment I saw this,Nintendo had my money.This is all they needed to convince me.

There's this Pokemon World Tournament,where you can fight Gym Leaders from Brock to Volkner.
The Kanto Gym Battle is pretty good,more of a throwback to Red in terms of intruments used than FireRed ever was.
Johto's Gym Battle is pretty good,I prefer this one than the one in SoulSilver as well.
Hoenn's Gym Battle is even better here as well.It's actually my favorite Gym Battle music in the game.
Sinnoh's Gym Battle is actually tied with the original Diamond one surprisingly.

Anyway,after 10 victories (Which is very hard,even with Ev trained Pokemon),you get to fight the champions from all the games.Fucking.Hard.To.Win.
I should mention that winning in this tournament is hard because it's going to come down to luck,there's so much type variety with these battles,that you'll end up being at a disadvantage sooner or later.

Blue/Green/Gary's theme is good,I guess,I never thought too much of it except in Pokemon Stadium.I should mention his theme is better remixed when you're fighting downloaded trainers from the Nintendo Wi-Fi.
Red/Lance's theme feels lacking in this game,past games sounded better.
Steven/Wallace's theme is my favorite Champion theme in the series.This remix is just so good!
Cynthia's theme keeps getting better and better,a very close condenser for my favorite champion theme.

As you can tell,this part of the game,while often frustrating,has some amazing music and worth losing so you can hear these again.Game Freak knew that this section of the game would be amazingly nostalgic for fans like me,and I could do is thank them for doing this.

You also have quite a selection of Legendary Pokemon to catch after the Elite Four and that's always appreciated.Trying to catch them all is actually fun,due to the new Habitat feature in the Pokedex.I never cared about trying to catch all the Pokemon prior to Black 2,but I really enjoyed searching for them.I didn't suceed,but I had fun catching what I caught.

Another cool thing is that you're able to link your old Black 1 file to Black 2 through the Unova Link feature.This gives some extra backstory on what happened during the 2 year gap,gives you the chance to capture N's released Pokemon and fight with Cheren and Bianca using their same team from Black 1.

In online battles,as long as you don't disconnect,you get 1 Battle Point for each battle that you participated in.This makes it easier to get some useful Tms and discourages the little kids from throwing a tandrum whenever they lose.
There's also Medals,basically Achievements for Pokemon.I didn't worry too much about them,but there are some funny ones in there like using Splash with Magikarp continously.

There's other new features like a Shiny charm that makes it slightly easier to find Shiny Pokemon and a Shiny Haxorus if you catch enough Pokemon but I don't care about those enough to get them myself.
As you can tell,I really enjoyed this game.I think we're almost done with 5th Gen now,only 2 years and they already gave away all the Event Pokemon and the anime is already in the Pokemon League,so 6th Gen is close,real close.

Pokemon on the 3DS is worthy of another post in the near future.So that's that.

Took me a week to clear the main story,32 hours and 32 minutes to be exact.

Tales of dlc

Tales of Graces was a game I bought even before I even had a PS3,hell,I even preordered it.
After I got a PS3 and played through other action games,I finally started the game and around 90 hours later,it became my favorite PS3 game.That was back in the summer,and now at the end of November,after playing a handful of more games,I still stand by that.

Naturally,I checked out some Downloadable Content for the game,this being a niche series,I wanted to throw some money at Namco Bandai.
Only problem is that the dlc is mostly overpriced costumes,while there's interesting stuff like being able to buy more inventory space and buying your characters 10 level ups in case you really suck at the game.

23.94 bucks to see this your copy.

There's alot of costumes to buy,alot of them are pretty nice,but you have to buy them individually.They all cost 3.99 and there's 22 different costumes!
You can unlock costumes as you progress in the game,but not these costumes,so it feels like they're pulling a fast one on the fans with this move.
They could sell them in packs like with the school costumes,but nope,they want 87.78 dollars from us if we want these costumes.

That costs more than the game when it first debuted,even more so now that a few months passed since the release,so what the hell?

The .hack//Link manga came out here,no excuses.

We didn't even get all the costumes that Japan had and at least the Japanese exclusives ones are from various anime.
Code Geass and .hack have english releases over here,so I doubt there would be any licensing issue holding these back.


Graces+Code Geass=so much fangasm.
















Even the Wii had some exclusive costumes.

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Tales of Xillia is coming out 2013,and I hope the Dlc is better priced,but it probably won't be.
Saint Seiya had the same problem only there were 4 costumes and each were priced  £3.99,which is pounds.Guess who published the game in Europe?Namco Bandai,the publisher that has alot of anime games under their localizing belt.

The thing that blows my mind is how all the Dlc of Dragon Ball Raging Blast is FREE!Sure it's just a stronger copy of the characters with good stats,but regardless,why are you giving us rpg fans grief with these games?We want to help this series grow and get more games but wanting us to buy overpriced trivial items is not the way to do it.

Namco,get your act together,you've been pretty good with bringing japanese games to our shores  and that's why you have fans.If you want more money,be fair to your fans and we'd be glad to empty our pockets.

Saint Seiya Sanctuary Battle review/thoughts on

Saint Seiya is an anime that's obscure over here in the United States,but since I live close to Mexico,I go there and visit my family and go to anime cons.While there's not any Saint Seiya cosplayers,it seems pretty big other there,being at least on level of DBZ back in the day according to my cousins.

Problem is,no one here seems to know about it,so I guess it's expected for this game not to get released over here.(though a PSN release would've been nice).Anyhow,I imported this game,and here I am.

It starts off in the Sanctuary Arc,gives some basic general exposition,not touching on events that happened on in the previous arc.If you haven't seen or read the series,some stuff won't make sense,so this is primarily a game for fans.Speaking of which,voice acting is Japanese with English subtitles.
I enjoyed hearing it,except for the "condensending" sounding generic grunt that pissed me off while playing through a couple of a stages.

Story starts off with Very Easy,Easy,Normal and Hard.I went with Normal my first playthrough.
If you beat the story on Hard,you unlock Bronze,Silver and Gold difficulties.

Gameplay is a standard beat-em-up,kill around 20 or 30 enemies in a small section then progress to do the same in the next until you beat a mini boss and end the stage.It's repetitive,I was ok with it at first,but after it's all said and done,I didn't enjoy them.

There's 24 characters that you can use,most of them feel different enough to not be a clone of each other.


The Circle and R1 buttons are for special attacks,L2 is for the 7th Sense which slows down time,R2 raise your Cosmo (energy),Square is for basic attack and Triangle if for strong attacks.
If you hold down R2 and either a basic or strong attack during the 7th Sense,it does this stronger version of that attack.
If you hold down R2 and a special attack button while a blue sphere is by your health bar,you activate a Big Bang Attack (Which usually look pretty cool).Big Bang Attacks can only be used on bosses.

Bosses are the Gold Saints,there's 12 in total and these stages are pretty fun.One on one is refreshing after fighting about a million grunts.

After either a beat-em-up or boss stage,you get experience for Hp,Cosmos,Attack,Defense and Luck.
I heard that Attack was the best stat to dump the Xp on,and I have to agree.To get the best score,you need to finish stages quick,and while defense could be helpful against bosses,it won't help you beat the stages quicker.
You can also spend Xp on skills that you can equip,intially,you can only equip 1,but as your levels increase,you can put up to 3.

You go through the story and it unlocks some more story chapters and a music player.The story chapters are pretty short compared to the Sanctuary,but do kinda help with some of the events behind the scenes.

Mission mode and survival is just there to "round out" the package,all they are are the same stages,but without any story dialogue.There's a single mission mode and a tag-team mission mode.which you can play with a friends or a brother(like me) and both have online and offline versions,effectively giving the illusion of four modes.Seeing on how there's around 12-15 beat-em-up stages and 12 boss stages,the game will quickly get repetitive,ESPECIALLY if you want that Platinum Trophy.
Some mission stages have a God level of difficulty and it feels more cheap than anything,bosses seem to take away around 50% of your Hp,regardless of Defense.
The "Watermelon" skill,which gives you unlimited continues and a free Big Bang Attack if you get lucky,is practically required.There's no way you can beat those stages with just 3 continues.

Extras include character models (Because there's SOOO much variety),a cutscene
viewer that includes story events AND the playable characters' Big Bang Attacks,the music player after beating the Story,and a toy viewer.
You can view the real life toys of the Saints in this game,I think this is the most innovative thing the game did,I don't think I've ever seen anything like this.

The music is lacking,and feels generic,even though it's suppose to be remixes of the anime ost.
There's only like 2 or 3 songs that I liked,and even then I can't remember what they sounded like,thankfully,you can play your own music.Sure helps to be listening to the actual Saint Seiya music while playing this repetitve game.

Not sure on how graphics are though.They get the job done,but they won't blow anyone's mind.
The characters look like they have dimension to them,like the first DBZ Budokai,and look a little shiny,but this is probably for the Cloth the Saints have.Bland at worst,pretty pleasing at best.
The areas tend to look boring,I know it's in Greece and it's ruined and shit,but still.
The exception is Rose Road,which is exactly what it sounds like.

I recommend this to Saint Seiya fans who don't mind an average game,fans that just want to play with the Saints in a video game,it;s worth the import.Getting a Platinum WILL kill whatever desire you have to touch this game again,no matter what kind of fan you are.

For everyone else,I say it's not worth the import.I don't know WHY you'd want to import a game based of an anime you' probably never seen,but don't get this one.


Took me 39 Hours and 56 Minutes to get the Platinum that I could never stop bragging about.
Got it on November 13,shelved on November 19 after I was done.
Characters levels at the end.
Ikki-Lv76
Shun and Shiryu-Lv26 and 27 respectively
Hyoga-Lv28
Seiya-Lv31
Might go to Gamestop to see if they'll let me sell a European game.

The guide I used.
http://www.justpushstart.com/2011/12/saint-seiya-sanctuary-battle-trophy-guide/

The place I imported it from.
http://www.play-asia.com/Saint_Seiya_Sanctuary_Battle/paOS-13-71-bp-49-en-70-4lm3.html




Here's some of my favorite shots,background worthy I'd say.