Man, fuck Breakdown on the Xbox. What an unfinished piece of shit that was. Horrible design ideas and a weird fucking story all mixed into one title that is barely playable, or fun. I gave up on it and just watched the ending on YouTube. It leaves room for a sequel, but considering that it had an incredibly high budget and sold less than 10,000 copies worldwide...
As for some other games!
Soul Calibur IV:
I have liked the series enough so far to warrant buying another release, but everything about this game just turned me off. Everything from the over-sexualization of everything, the major loss of tons of basic modes, Star Wars not working with the IP at all, adding guest fan characters in... The list goes on forever.
The first thing I really got into was the Story mode. Which is like five fights long so is a pointless addition even if you care about the characters stories. From that I moved onto the character creation, which I must admit I spent dozens of hours fooling around with in Soul Calibur III. This too has been worsened as you now cannot purchase most of the items and instead have to win them in 'The Tower of Lost Souls', usually by sheer luck as you are never told how to win any of the items. Incredibly horrible idea.
The Tower of Lost Souls is like the mission mode in this release, but it is by far the worst in the series yet. It is basically just survival mode with with no special goals other than usually just having to fight tons of guys in a row. It is not fun and is tedious.
There are a bunch of other really, really bad ideas that could keep me here for hours, but with all of that said, the first time I played the game I did not turn it off for about seven hours (seriously). The music is stunning as always, the graphics are some of the best I have seen on anything even two years after release and well, I just think it is quite good simple-minded fun. It is the worst in the main series, though.
My only complaint of the Star Wars stuff outside it not fitting and the pay-for DLC of Darth Vader making me RAGE is that I do not know why they chose Yoda (who is not fun to play as) instead of Luke Skywalker or even Obi-Wan for the Xbox 360 release.
Dark Cloud 2 (Dark Chronicle outside of America):
Now here is a game on PlayStation 2 I have been wanting to play for about eight years now. It started out really slow, but man, what a gem of a dungeon explorer this is!
The main idea of the first game was to go into dungeons and find orbs that held pieces of a town that you could then paste wherever you want on the outside. It was a neat gimmick for the time, but is not really worth playing anymore. In this, everything is expanded upon in the best ways possible. You can customize little details to the buildings how you want, and it is not even the main draw anymore. You can build all of your own items and vehicles however you want, and changing up your towns effects what happens in the future, so you can go back and forth between the two and see how what you did effects everything.
Even more impressive is how enjoyable the battle system is considering how simplistic it is (largely based on one button, kind of like Comix Zone). A lot of skill mixed in with brains and time spent to work on your tools and stuff. Your close range weapons will break, your guns need ammo etc etc, so you need to keep them in good condition, especially considering that the game is very challenging, though so far I think it has been very fair, in when I have been known to shout obscenities when a random bird in the forest can kill me in three hits (which is my fault, because I could see it coming and I could have blocked it with no issue if my mind was clearer).
It is not for everyone, but if you would love a very very enjoyable and long RPG with an expansive set of things to do and without an annoying story or whiny characters, then you could not go wrong with this!
[youtube:39l6wi5b]U_QNJT24Dnw[/youtube:39l6wi5b]
---
Why did this post come out so long??!!?!??!!?
