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I didn’t buy it yet, but after clearing the first five campaign missions, I decided I will eventually. I’m completely broke right now, though, so it will have to wait a while. In any case, the game is awesome. The story is interesting, and the campaign is even more interesting. You can choose between multiple missions and earn credits after completing them. The credits can then be used to buy upgrades for your units or hire mercenaries. Also, some missions contain sub-objectives which grant you Zerg or Protoss research points which you can then use for unique upgrades or units for your team. Right now I have five Zerg points and I could choose between one of two unique upgrades. One increases the Bunker hit points and another adds an automatic turret on top of the bunker. I opted for the turret because, for now, my bunkers didn’t have health problems. After completing mission five and spending some credits, I decided to take a break. I will continue further tomorrow.

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I made some progress today. First I went back to the Deep Jungle and cleared it completely. First I had to find some slides for Jane so she could show them to Tarzan, so he can, in turn, possibly say he saw one of the things on the slides in relation to Kairi or Rikku. It didn’t help, but Tarzan took us to his Gorilla pack and asked them to reveal their nest to us. They refused so we continued back to the three house. There, we’ve found Clayton trying to shoot one of the Gorillas so we stopped him. As we came back to the tent, Clayton got pissed and left, and the Heartless started attacking.
 
After clearing most of the areas of the Heartless, I came back to the cliffs where I Clayton attacked us, being controlled by the Heartless. It was a pretty tough boss battle and I had to use a few potions, but we managed to beat it. As a reward, I got the Cure spell and Tarzan took us to his home behind the waterfalls. We found another Keyhole there and unlocked it, which granted us another Gummi part. As I was leaving the Deep Jungle, Tarzan gave me a keychain which increased the reach and damage of my Keyblade.
 
First I went back to Traverse Town and explored it for a bit, but then I decided to go try and kill Cerberus again. With the cure spell and the new Keychain, as well as a few more levels, I killed him easily in one try. I guess this is how the game is supposed to be played. Most of the times you have several options on where to go next and nothing is stopping you to explore another option if you get stuck somewhere. Anyway, this is where I stopped playing and decided to continue tomorrow, so I guess that is what I will be doing.

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All I managed to do today was to gain a few levels and complete the trial at the Coliseum. I tried defeating Cerberus a few times, but I failed. After that, I went to another world, this time the Deep Jungle, where I fought a cheetah and met Tarzan and Jane. There’s a lot of platforming in the jungle, which was very annoying, considering the controls of the game. All in all, I seem to be stuck. I will try my luck again tomorrow. 

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It was either this or Dark Cloud 2, but Kingdom Hearts seems to run better, so I chose it to be the next game I play. It really seems like a nice game if you ignore the Disney setting, so I’m having allot of fun for now.
 
The first hour or so, I’ve spent on the Destiny Islands with Sora’s friends, trying to build a raft to leave the place and explore “other worlds” as they say it. Pretty soon, though, the place was attacked and seemed to be destroyed by the Heartless, but not before I got the Keyblade.
 
Next, I’ve found myself in Traverse Town, where I was continued to be attacked by the Heartless. That’s where I met Cid, who is the owner of the Accessory Shop. After exploring Traverse Town and managing not to meet with Goofy and Donald, I was, in a way, rescued by Squall, or Leon, which is how he prefers to be called. He seems to be working with Yuffie and Aeris (I know it’s Aerith in this game, but I prefer Aeris). Leon explaind some stuff about the Heartless and the Keyblade to me, and then finally met with Donald and Goofy. We agreed to work together to save everyone and defeat the Heartless. We defeated a boss and then went to the next world – Wonderland.
 
In Wonderland, Alice was being tried for a crime the Heartless committed. I had to find some evidence to clear her, but even after I did, the stubborn queen refused to free here. Instead, she ordered her soldiers to attack and during the battle, Alice was taken by the Heartless. After that, I had to go to the next world – Olympus Coliseum. 

 
I tried to enter, but they wouldn’t let me in. Instead, they allowed me to enter some trials that involved destroying a certain number of barrels in a certain amount of time. Even after I passed those trials, they wouldn’t let me in, so I was about to leave. Luckily, on the way out, Hades gave me a pass, so I could enter the contest. This is where I took a break. 

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Hell, it’s about time…

 
I cleared half the levels of the gallery yesterday, and the other half this morning. It took me about one to two hours to do that. Then it was time to fight the genie. He kicked my ass, several times. I could only attack his hands that rose out of the ground for a second or two and only with one element, indicated by a symbol on the hand. He takes more than half my health with each hit, and I can hit him for about 100 or so damage. I believe I took close to 3000 and still nothing changed.
 
This is way I’ve spent most of the day leveling my weapons up. I did some fishing until I ran out of bait, exchanged the points for gems, then went and cleared some of the back levels of the Shipwreck for more gems and Abs. points. It took me the entire day to level Toan’s sword into a 7th Heaven and to level Ruby’s Crystal Ring to a Secret Armlet. I pretty much maxed out all of the attributes on most weapons. I did this from around 10 in the morning, to about 30 minutes ago (17:00).
 
My second attempt against the genie went much better. I sold all the gems I had left and spent it all on premium chicken and repair items. It turns out the genie had three phases in total. The first one with the hands was where I noticed the nice change. Instead of doing 100 damage at a time, I did around 1100.  It took me just a few hits to go to phase two. The genie stopped attacking me with his hands and instead started shooting some giant beam from a third eye on his forehead. I had to dodge the beam and shoot at the eye when the beam stopped.  A few 1000 damage hits later, phase 3 started. He turned into some giant insect like thing and summoned to skeleton monsters. First I tried to kill the skeletons, but then their corpses kept blocking me and he resurrected them again. I decided to ignore them and focus on the genie. He would send a shock wave in my direction by stomping his foot, so I had to dodge that. Right after the shockwave, he opened his mouth and something came out that I had to hit. Every now and then he would also shoot a tracking laser beam at me, this time a bit stronger than in phase two. A few hits at the thing in his mouth, and he was dead.
There was a big ending scene where I resurrected the king’s wife and then Toan disappeared. The credits started rolling and after that there was a scene of Toan running towards his village where a party was happening. I got the “The End” screen and a notification about unlocking a new dungeon. I guess the point of that one is to do more grinding, but that is not something I’m looking forward to.
So, what do I think about the game? All in all, I would give it a 6-7/10. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun game. Some of the humor was decent and the weapon system looks good on paper, but there were a lot of things that could’ve been done better. First of all, the controls are really bad. The camera spins like crazy and it’s really hard to hit anything properly from melee without taking damage. Most of the difficulty in this game comes from bad controls. Also, the forced grinding is just bad game design. All the other bosses in the game could be killed with minimal leveling in advance, but the last one took 6-7 hours of grinding before I could kill him. The fact that the last dungeon had 25 levels instead of the usually 16-17, including levels where you were forced to use each of the characters is not even worth mentioning.  The story itself could have been good, but the presentation was just bad. At times I wasn’t sure if the game is supposed to be funny, serious, bright or dark. It’s just completely inconsistent.
 
All in all, if you like grinding and don’t care about the story to much, go for it. Just don’t expect that you will like it nearing the end just because you liked the beginning. The game tricks you like that. Oh well, they say Dark Cloud 2 was way better, so I will try that one next.

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I haven’t played anything for the past few days, but today I had a Dark Cloud marathon. I’ve been playing this game for majority of the day.  Last time I stopped playing at the Sun & Moon Temple, so this is where I’ve found myself when I started the game today.
 
I decided not to leave the dungeon after every level and instead to go through a few levels at a time to make things faster and less annoying. I managed to rebuild most of the city, including the house of the three sisters. Ungogo was in love in one of them so when I did this, he stopped being emo and joined my team. One of the levels after that was a Goro only level, and a few levels after that an Ungogo only level if I recall correctly. Anyway, after all this I managed to rebuild most of the city, get the keys needed to open the king’s tomb and defeated the boss which was extremely easy compared to the last one. I had to use Ungogo to beat him, but he barely did any damage to me.
 
I managed to start the Moon Ship and then continued to the Moon. In the process, I’ve discovered that the moon people are actually space bunnies, so that’s what I’m going to call them now. When I arrived at the moon, one of the space bunnies was waiting for me and told me he will be my guide. Five seconds later he got a call from his girlfriend and realized he forgot about their date, so he left me there.  I explored the city myself and found out that they have a factory that can build anything. Their boss built some giant machine and went to cross the Moon Sea.
The Moon Sea is actually a dungeon so that’s where I had to go next. Around level 8 or so, I’ve found the boss of the space bunnies and he joined my team. His name is Osmond, and he can fly and use machine guns.  Osmond told me they all forgot how to seal the Dark Genie, but also mentioned that his giant robot machine could probably defeat the genie if he gets a special power source which is available for victory at the nearby Coliseum. A few levels later, around level 15 or so, I arrived at the Coliseum and easily defeated the boss named Minotaur Joe. He wasn’t easier than the last boss, but he was pretty close.
 
I managed to rebuild the giant robot thing called the Sun Giant, so Osmond, me and the rest of the piloting team went on to fight the Dark Genie. He got his ass kicked but then something terrible was discovered. The Dark Genie isn’t the Dark Genie at all. It was just a mouse that was near the urn when the genie was freed. The real Dark Genie was actually possessing the general during all of this and controlling everything. He destroyed the Sun Giant and that would be it for all of us, but Dran, the Divine Beast arrived at the last minute and saved us all. He took us to the castle where we met that grey haired guy. He told us that he was the one who created the Dark Genie and has been trying to destroy him for the last 400 years. Now the Genie is about to take control of him so we have to travel back in time to stop him from ever being created.
 
We can do this by traveling through the gallery of time and collecting time fragments to recreate memories. This means that the Gallery of Time is the new and hopefully final dungeon. I managed to clear the first six levels of this dungeon and this is where I took a break. There is no city building in this part. I can just use the fragments of memories to recreate events from within the dungeon. 

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Aside from Warcraft, I didn’t play much of anything else for the past few days. This is a game I stumbled into while reading some blogs. Basically, it’s a watered down roguelike. You only get one level, filled with monsters, spells, gold, shops and a boss, and the only way to regenerate health and mana is to explore blaked out areas of the single screen map. This turns it into something closer to a resource management puzzle game than a real roguelike.
 
I get mixed feelings about it. On one hand, you die allot and unwinnable levels are really commonly generated. On the other hand, I keep coming back to it for some reason. As of right now, I managed to clear the Normal quest with a Fighter, and a Warlord, and that’s about it. I have a plan on how to clear it with a mage, but it involves finding a special altar really early in the level.
 
This isn’t a game you really complete, but there are unlockables you can collect so I guess I can call it completed when I get all of them. Not sure if that’s going to happen though.

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I continued to explore the shipwreck and reached level 17. There was no hook on this level and what was supposed to be the level transition area only contained a musical box. I decided to leave the dungeon and go back to Queens. I realized I have all the parts I needed to completely rebuild it, including the random requests from the villagers so I did it. As a reward, the sheriff gave me the macho sword. After that, I went to the cathedral, where the cleric told me about a curse that causes everyone that marries there to split up eventually.  There was a queen ruling Queens (!?) 100 years ago that fell in love with a commoner. They agreed to secretly marry at the cathedral but he stood her up. Because of this, she threw herself in the ocean and that is how the curse began.
 
The cleric told me to go to the fortune teller so I went and did that. I asked her to tell me about the curse and I’ve found out that the man the queen fell in love with was the harbor merchant. I went to his store and found the key to the musical box. This allowed me to go back to the shipwreck and open the box, transporting myself to the boss level. You know that one “hell hath no fury”? Well, indeed it hath none. This was definitely the hardest boss yet. First she traps me in a block of ice and then she throws another huge chunk of ice on my head. Her spells are homing and extremely fast, and she gets immune after I hit her a few times, forcing me to switch characters.
 
In the end, I used Xiao to hit her with a wind based slingshot for 7 points until she went immune, and then I switched to Ruby to hit her with a shot from her fire based ring. This would cause her to go immune immediately so I would have to switch back to Xiao. It took me a while, but after I took about 400-500 health, the fight was over. The merchant entered the room and told me he had the moon orb all along and was just using me to get to La Saia. I can’t really be mad at him, because, if I really think about it, pretty much everyone is using me.
 
I got the orb and went back to the Moon People village. They tried to use it to control the ship, but it didn’t work. It turns out, the ship was stored at the Sun and Moon temple, but they didn’t’ really take care of it at all so now I have to fix that. I went there and, of course, it’s filled with monsters and the nearby village is completely destroyed. I also met a new potential ally, so at least that’s a plus.

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For some reason, I haven’t played at all yesterday, but I somewhat made up for it today. I managed to clear a bunch of levels in the Shipwreck and reached level 16. The town is now almost completely rebuilt. Also, I have spent some time training Ruby on the back levels. I started looting some decent gems from the chests there, so I’ve been using those for upgrades. Still, I think I need to build up one of her rings before I can do some real damage. Among others, I have freed the fortune teller. Can you say “Pumpkin Panty Fortune Telling!”?  Don’t ask…

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You know that awesome sword I was building up from the start of the game? Well, you probably don’t, but I was and it was awesome. It’s gone! I was going through a dungeon, my sword got to 10 WHP, and I was going to do a few more hits before I repair him. I had to leave the game for a minute, so I suspended the game, and when I came back, I completely forgot about it and proceeded to smash it on the behind of some mimic. Know what I did next? It took the next best sword, the Serpent Sword and did the exact same thing.

Short story; Xiao is now my strongest character. The good news is, you can actually buy the back level key for the shipwreck in Queens, so I might actually do some grinding here. Anyway, I cleared a few more levels, including a back level or two and now Xiao is really kicking ass. Also, after doing some more rebuilding, I got Ruby, the Genie to join my party. She’s pretty much just like Xiao, except she uses rings and casts spells with them. I think I’ll find a nice level in this dungeon and just grind away until I really up weapons on all of my allies. Also, I will make it a habit to buy some of those auto repair items. It seems I’m too stupid not to use them.