Rainy Day Blues

Alas, it's only 5 PM and I'm sitting at home, relaxing. It's unusual for me, but certainly not an unwelcome change of pace.
I've had an incredibly eventful weekend that hasn't exactly provided me with too much time to play video games, but that doesn't mean I haven't used the free time I have had to engage in some (moderately) casual gaming with a few friends.


Allow me to introduce you to the wonderful world of Dokapon Kingdom. A fantastic place where you and three of your friends can battle enemies (or each other!), discover treasure, save towns, rob stores, and...piss each other off tremendously with a slew of humiliating options. Essentially, it's Mario Party with experience points and a full game takes a considerably longer amount of time to complete. (hell, we haven't even finished our first game) Don't get me wrong, though; Dokapon Kingdom is anything but some sort of clone game. The concept of a board/party game mixed with more conventional RPG elements, such as turn-based battles, character classes, the whole nine yards is fairly innovative to say the least. While it's a formula that could use perfecting, my friends and I haven't had this much fun with a game in ages.


I think the whole humiliation aspect of the game really just adds to the overall entertainment level; I mean, really, who doesn't want to steal their friends' hard-earned cash and goods (not IRL! lolololol), rename them with embarrassing words, or turn their hair into a pile of poop? At $25 used, this game was an absolute bargain and I'm confident my friends and I will all be spending quite a bit of time with it. The worst part is the fact that I have to wait for them to be around to play! (Well, there IS a single player mode, but honestly, I feel as if that kind of destroys the whole point.) Atlus scores another home run!




In other news, I've decided to basically give up on Breath of Fire. My saved game, for whatever reason, has disappeared and reverted back to an earlier point in the game and honestly...I really just don't care enough to bother with it and catch back up to where I was. Oh well, it just leaves room for another game to take its place!

My laptop stays with me at almost all times and since often I'm not in a place where I have a game console at the ready, I decided to start playing through the first game in a fairly prominent RPG series since I had never attempted to before.


Breath of Fire is old-school JRPG to the tee. (lol at the silly American boxart) World maps, turn-based combat, traveling from town to town and buying new equipment along the way, etc. The whole shabang. Honestly, despite the overall simplicity of the title, I think that might be the charm I found in it. It's so rare to find a simple, basic, turn-based RPG these days and every once in a while it's nice to relive the wonder of the 16-bit era. I've completed the first two or three dungeons and I just spent the last hour or so level-grinding and collecting money to buy new armor before advancing on to the next main event.
While I hardly plan to spend as much time with this title as the other games I'm playing, it's nice to have something to do when I've got nothing to play outside of what's on my laptop.

It's good to be able to spend most of my free time enjoying the things I've enjoyed since I was as young as three years old. It just reminds me that no matter how old I get, I'll still have a snippet of my childhood stuck to me for as long as I live!

Now, speaking of replaying first installments in popular series, who else is excited for the PSP remake of the original Persona? I'm personally stoked to finally get to experience this game (on the go, at that!) without having to hunt down and pay large sums of money to obtain a copy of the PSX original. Here's to hoping for a US release! (and with the brimming popularity of Persona 3 and 4, there's no reason there shouldn't be!)