Now Playing - "Conqueror of the skies"

I've been away for the weekend, so I didn't have much time to write this Now Playing up. Anyway, here is what I've been playing and my thoughts.

I played lots more of Final Fantasy IX (PS1) before Friday, got to where I think is the end of disc 2, seeing as how it feels pretty climatic. Kuja and Queen Brahne etc are fighting it out, and we are just about to head into the fray for some stupid reason. Garnet's fault....Then again, Kuja and Brahne are quite important characters, so I would imagine we would need to fight them at some point anyway.

I just did the cutscene where Brahne unleashes Bahamut on Kuja and his silver dragon. Bahamut's design is quite cool in IX, perhaps apart from the slightly strange oversized claws on it's wings. The above pic is unrelated, well...its not from FFIX, per se. Its one of the Bahamut forms from Crisis Core if I remember right. I can't remember the name...which annoys me.

Bahamut is featured in a lot of the Final Fantasy games. Along with Leviathan and Odin, its one of my favourites. It has really cool design a lot of the time, which I like. Link

Other than FFIX, I've been putting a fair bit more time into Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (DS) which I picked up not too long ago. I played a couple more hours over the weekend, but died a LOT, so my actual game time reads around 8 hours or so, despite me only playing that for the weekend when I was away. 

OOE is the last metroidvania I need to finish, and man...it is HARD! It changes quite a few things as well, which i really like. It ditches the manga style characters and cutscenes of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin, the earlier DS incarnations of the series, instead taking a darker, more sombre and well drawn style. It lets you go to other areas via a world map, you aren't confined to Dracula's Castle like a lot of the other games. It also has a female protagonist, the super sexy Shanoa =p. I think this is the only castlevania game that has one, excluding characters like Maria and other unlockable characters.

I'd definitely recommend Order of Ecclesia, but newcomers to the series might not want to start with it. I've had to use quite a few tricks I've picked up from other games in this to survive, like cancelling dodges with attacks and cancelling attacks with dodges, similar to the idea from Super Smash Bros Melee, and a lot of other fighting games. The difficulty is definitely one aspect that might put people off.

I gotta get back to FFIX now, before my screen gets burn in ;o lol. Things are getting interesting in it.