It’s Month #3 already! I’ve really got to get more posts happening! I apologize for the relative inactivity lately, I have been very busy, but I promise you I have lots of things to blog about in the coming weeks. I have been finding it somewhat difficult to find things to talk about that I deem truly worthy of actually being blogged about. I like quality over quantity, but I’m wondering what sort of middle ground there is on it. I don’t want to be posting once or twice a month, but I also don’t want to be posting about things that are already fairly known or things that aren’t really that interesting. I think a poll is in order! Anyway, this month was better than last month, but not by much. I have noticed that the visits have stabilized somewhat compared to previous months that were all over the chart. That peak at the end is from my recent post about Revenant Wings, which is rapidly catching up with the all time top posts despite being so recent. It was on the front page of Reddit’s gaming section for an entire day!

Top 5 Posts:

How To: Make Crysis even more freaking amazing!
Revenant Wings – Portable roleplaying done right!
Dark_AleX is back with a custom 3.71 FW!
Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep – A glimpse into the futu…err…past.
Moetan is lolitastic.

Top 5 Referers:

Reddit
Danny Choo
Digg
TotalFark – Your guess on why I got referrals from that is as good as mine. :S
Otaku.fm

Those three traffic spikes, in chronological order are; the back end of the traffic my Crysis post got me, the Dragonaut post and the Revenant Wings post. It looks as if you readers like video games and adventure stuff so I’ll see what neat things I can come up with to blog about this month. Trust me, I’ve already got some neat stuff coming and I’ll do what I can to find more awesome stuff for you readers to discover here. I’m always trying to shorten the gap between my readers and the hidden gems they would appreciate as much as I do. I’ll have some big things to talk about in the coming months, but for now, check out the new post on Sin & Punishment, that game is crack in video game form. It’s so much fun.

I picked up Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings when it came out and man was I ever surprised by this game! I’ve come to expect pretty much everything with the Final Fantasy name attached to it to be an instant classic, but even so, I still felt some skepticism of a roleplaying game on a handheld. Good handheld RPGs just plain don’t exist–or so I thought until I plugged this little plastic cartridge full of win into my DS.

Now before you start attacking me for making the generalization that all handheld RPGs suck I’ll just say that there have been some pretty good handheld RPGs, but nothing that you could actually call a truly epic RPG, nor that you could call anything more than good. Minish Cap, for example, was fun, but it was by no means as awesome as Twilight Princess or Ocarina Of Time. RPGs just don’t tend to lend themselves to handheld gaming.

Revenant Wings sought to change that, and it succeeded tremendously. Most handheld RPGs are basically time-wasters with a storyline, while Revenant Wings is an epic adventure with a quick and modular gameplay system, so you don’t have to play through hours upon hours of grinding to walk across a single map to the next story segment. The first FFXII was an excellent game, albeit plagued with the never-ending grind gameplay of FFXI.

Revenant Wings basically structures the game into ‘mission’ segments reminiscent of Tactics with it’s victory conditions system. Each map usually starts with an intro event where the characters talk a bit about what is going on, then there is a bunch of enemies to fight against and after that, a victory event where they talk about what they are going to do next.

The dialog is cleverly written to remind you where you left off in the previous mission and providing some depth of what will happen in the current mission. It has a powerful and intriguing story while still maintaining the handheld gaming style of being able to pick up where you left off easily without losing track of what was going on.

The graphics were also very beautiful. the DS isn’t as technologically capable as other handhelds in the graphics department, but many games like this more than make up for it in graphical style. Everything looks so cool and unique in the game and the epic landscapes from the first game certainly were well represented in this one.

The music, as with any Final Fantasy game, was fantastic. But I found the soundtrack to this game had a slightly different and powerful allure to it. It wasn’t just another rehash of the same soundtrack that has been used in every FF since the dawn of time. Much of the music was more radically expanded upon than in the previous games, which was rather refreshing to listen to.

If you have a DS and are a fan of RPGs I very highly recommend giving this game a try. I enjoyed every minute of it. I liked it so much that I made that nice shiny wallpaper for at the top from some of the awesome concept art I found for it on the net.

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