Rogue Galaxy (PS2)

There was a bloody postal strike for the past week and I only just today got my copy of Rogue Galaxy. It arrived just as I was leaving for work! Typical!! I was trying to keep myself busy all day so that the time could pass faster so I could go home and give it a go ^^

I’ve been playing it for a couple of hours now. It’s really cool. In terms of graphics, I really like the cell-shading style on it, it works really well. The dialogue is pretty good too. The thing that caught my eye the most though, is the animation flow of the cut-scenes. They’re really well animated, greatly directed, very entertaining and the action felt believable, even though it’s a bit over the top. It was mainly the pacing that helped. Nothing is rushed. It felt like I was watching a movie, one I could interact with.

It’s an action RPG but it still requires you to think and keep an eye on your health and allies. It keeps a lot of the original features of a regular RPG game, in that you level up, have to equip items, you have to choose what abilities you want to use during the fight, all done via a menu option that pauses the game while you select what changes you want to make, but this doesn’t take away from the action aspect of the game. You still need skill to know when to block, when to move, when to slash with your sword, or shoot with your gun, when to jump and how to aim for the weak spots.

The voice acting is spot on too, it’s really weird hearing the mix of accents in the game (American and a few random English accents), but after the initial ‘wtf?’ the voices grow on you and they really do suit the characters.

Over all, so far, I like the balance and I’m really enjoying the story and role play. Definitely a good buy!