Tales of Fridays!

Last semester a portion of CAINE decided to get together every Friday and play the Tales of Vesperia beta for the 360.  I wasn't involved in this, but after they finished it was decided the next one would be Tales of The Abyss on the PS2, but a multitap was needed.  I could provide, so I said so.

At first I got kind of stuck with melee class characters.  I can play melee to a certain extent, but the Tales series' guard mechanic is like lolwut.  Finally we got to the point where we got another ranged character, Honya switched over to Anise, and I got to play ranged support.  There hasn't been a problem with me dying too much since.

The ranged support in the Tales series is a weird class, because they have attacks and party healing.  I'm used to both of course, but only one at a time.  Plus the healing spell I have takes about four years to cast, and my target could very easily die during its casting time if we're on a boss fight.  It heals for a lot though, so I just have to fire it off a little prematurely. (LOL THATS WHAT SHE SAID)

The rest of the time I pwn things with my bow.  Seriously.  There's a guy in Cheesedonia that takes random bullshit from you and then offers you the ability to craft stuff.  The amount you pay him directly affects what you have a chance at getting.  We decided to craft a bow, and paid the largest amount we could.  From the available selection of items at the time (yay GameFAQs) I got the best bow possible, which put my attack power up to being 300 or so higher than the rest of the party's.  Coupled with the fact that the crafter is in a low level area that we had to go through to progress the story, and a lot of encounters were ending in one second because I fired a single arrow.

The world needs more offline co-operative RPGs like the Tales series.

The only real down points of Abyss are the load times on the world map.  Whenever we go out to it, get into a fight, or come back to it from a fight, we get to look at a black screen for several seconds.  I'm taking my PS2 over there (armed with DMS4 Pro modchip, ToxicOS 0.41, and 200GB Maxtor hard drive) and we're going to see if installing it to the hard drive improves those load times at all.

You'd think it would, because optical drives are slower, but the amount of improvement in load times when installed to the hard drive varies greatly by game.  Guilty Gear Isuka has these crazy load times whenever you select anything from the main menu, start a fight, etc. that completely disappear when installed to the hard drive.  The Guitar Hero games, however, still take a fair amount of time to load, though it is slightly faster.