Guilty Gear 2: Overture for Xbox 360 only just came out here recently, and I found it half price. It seemed curious, so I picked it up.
I started up this game today and finished all of Campaign Mode on easy, with the console handling all the RTS elements after I tried them and couldn't deal with handling both the action and strategy at once. So I suppose that's no real achievement for me as a player, haha! I mostly wanted to see what this game has to offer, running through it today.
3D action + strategy is how it's advertised on the box, so I was expecting it to be like a Dynasty Warriors series game, but the strategy play is actually... there are bases on each map - your main one and then lots of minor ones, and you try and capture the enemy's main base.
There are other styles of play in the levels of campaign mode, so it's not too repetitive - where you dash around as though you had Gundam thrusters on your back (well, my boyfriend has been talking to me about building Gundams all day, so that's what I thought, haha!), one where you seek out treasures on a map by given photos, boss fights - including one which played out in top-down view, dodging projectiles while fighting (a bit like "Wartech: Senko no Ronde"), etc.
It's actually not so bad. Well, considering that it's average review score on metacritic is 58%. It's got some interesting ideas. I really can't see myself coming back to the game time and time again, though.
The story... ah. The story was really difficult to follow! For about half the game each cutscene is one huge headache of in-game jargon and vagueness. Sentences contain words which individually make sense in English - including musical terminology and digital world type language (think: .hack) but together, they are just placeholders for you to look up in the in-game world glossary in the menu options...
Maybe it's something which will be easier to understand if I replay it again... though I'm not sure if I really want to...
The relationships between characters ended up being the only intelligable part of the story for me, and even then, a small amount of that was difficult to follow. The characters seemed kind of bland, overall. The only two carried over from Guilty Gear are Sol Badguy and Ky Kiske.
The character designs and stage scenery are nice though.
The music is mostly orchestral, with some electronic and some tribal styles too, which for the most part fit scenes, though there are a few "Guilty Gear like" rock tracks in there too. I thought the best track in the entire game was an arrangement of Ky Kiske's theme "Holy Orders (Be Just Or Be Dead)", it's rock + classical string instruments - the interesting thing is that the strings are played more in the style of Irish folk than orchestral.
I want to write a Guilty Gear rock song in honour of the game's strange story jargon and call it "That guy is going to do something with a cube in the back yard (and it's not making gravy)".
I guess it sounds more like a country song title though. :P
