Special guest appearance by Mega64.

Today I bucked my tradition of just kind of sitting on the sidelines spectating to actually get in line and demo some stuff. Wound up spending a good chunk of the midday in line with Square Enix waiting to play I Am Setsuna and Star Ocean, but still made time to finally get some hands on AEGIS time and got a PAX-exclusive robot card.

I Am Setsuna is a pretty sweet looking RPG with shades of Chrono Trigger in the play style, but rendered in kind of an HD Bravely Default visual style. The demo section had the hero’s party wandering around a snowy area and town where people were talking about a failed pilgrimage attempt. Not really a whole lot to bite into story wise, but just enough to make it sound interestingly bleak. I wonder how many psuedo-throwback games like this until Squeenix decides to shift focus away from supermodels beating on really busy CG monsters and blaming Eidos for losing money.

Star Ocean was a pretty darn long wait to play, possibly because the ‘demo’ was really just them loading a random save and letting people play through a boss encounter with a bandit boss and his cronies. I haven’t actually played a SO past the second one, but I liked playing it more than watching it, which I think speaks well.

Finally playing AEGIS was nice, if a little daunting for a first match. It’s a game about combining super robots battling it out. Energy management plays a big role, as does being careful to avoid/make interesting use of friendly fire (for instance, I got a tentacled robot who could pull or push other units that could be used to offset the lack of mobility on my missile launching unit. I lost pretty handily, but I think I get the idea.

Hit a couple panels, a meh one about comedy in games writing, and a board game panel that turned things over to questions a little too quickly for my liking, but still had good info. I’ve already got some thinking to do about how to make Irrgarten more quick and fun to play. The “oh shit” moment came not when I realized I left HP off some hero cards but looking in the pouch at all the counters and chits I’d cut out. Maybe I should go with a different angles and treat items like resources/energy for special attacks and ditch the coins as another *thing* to count.