Sometimes I don’t understand my 360. It finally got some more use when my brother was over since he likes watching me play while he works on other tasks. The system says it can’t read my Assassin’s Creed disc, pushing me into starting Eternal Sonata instead, but when I’m back on my dashboard I have 0/1000 point for AC. Make up your mind, machine!

I haven’t made up my mind about ES yet since I’m only in the second chapter. The English voice acting doesn’t entirely make me want to stuff pineapples in my ears, so that’s a nice start. I like the graphical style and the music, yay Chopin, is predictably wonderful. My biggest praise for the game thus far comes from all the lush and beautiful the environments!! It’s nice to not be wandering around wastelands and poorly lit caves all the time. I’m not invested in the story at this point but that’s more because I am enjoying smacking around monsters in the light and shadows too much. Basically, I miss being able to just read the story by pressing ‘A’ to continue so that I don’t have to hear them drone on and on for 30 minutes while I make pancakes. I’m not even sure why I am so into the combat. See, it works like this. If someone gave you two buttons and one said “poke them with a stick” and the other said “annihilate every molecule of their existence”, which would you use? I’ll tell you what you’ll use. You’ll first poke them with the stick just for funsies and then you’d wipe them off the planet. This makes combat not terribly difficult even as you increase your party level but it does make it a tad repetitive. At least you can have fun trying to devise the most creative way to use light and shadow to make the baddies go boom. They do explode with pretty colours :)