KaiserWarrior

Because Kickstarter is what all the cool kids are doing nowadays. Seriously. Kickstarter existed well before Double-fine made a boatload of money off of it. Very few people cared. But once they did, and it became a big news item, everyone and their dog that ever wanted free money sent their way without having to deal with all that "loan process" business hopped right on the bandwagon.

The amount of hate being posted in this thread for Squenix is pretty silly, to be honest. Look at how many Squenix property remixes are on OCRemix, and continue to be there today. Look at how many albums have been made for Squenix properties that are on OCRemix, and continue to be there today. Squenix was cool with it until they put up a kickstarter and raked in nearly a hundred grand off of Squenix's properties. They're just doing their job to protect their IP.

Rikimaru. All other supposed ninjas mentioned in this thread are just generic action heroes wearing ninja outfits. None of them employ any significant amounts of stealth and deception.

Toonami died a looong time ago when they replaced Moltar with Tom. Back in the good ol' days toonami was about showing new western action cartoons like Swat Kats. Back when CN was actually a good network and did cool things like... gah, I can't remember the name of the show because it's been a decade (lulz), but it was the original format of Cartoon Cartoons. A half-hour block that showed three new indy 'toons, where Courage the Cowardly Dog and Powerpuff Girls got their starts and had that one show with the rat and the fly (Rat on a hot tin can or something like that). Then they brought in Tom and brought anime to Toonami. And anime in and of itself was not bad (I like the stuff), but the gutted and censored versions they were showing were just embarrassing. They tried showing Tenchi but had to edit so much of the episodes. I can't remember if Outlaw Star was originally Toonami or Adult Swim, but they cut out the entire hotsprings planet episode which left all the viewers wondering where Gene pulled those two caster shells out of his ass at the end. The shows they were too lazy to censor got put on the original Adult Swim, and that's all it was at the beginning; stuff like Cowboy Bepop and its drug references and other such things. Even in those days, it was semi-decent with new and interesting shows like Big-O and Blue Sub 6, rather than picking up every Dragonball clone in the world and showing ten squillion episodes. Basically, CN stopped being what it got known for -- being an original, new channel that showed new and interesting animation -- and became a 24-hour version of the anime/action/comedy 'toon blocks of every other channel. They tried to be hip and show the popular series, but realized they couldn't do that and be kid-friendly so they neutered the shows. It's exactly like when that bullshit G4 channel bought out TechTV and turned a great technology-driven channel into "GAMES AND GIRLS AND ANIMU LOLZ". For fuck's sake, they had a THIRTY MINUTE show dedicated to having the hostess print out a bunch of pages from GameFAQS and READ CHEATCODES ALOUD. I gave up on CN and stopped watching long before they tried to show Evangelion on the network. Man that must have been some serious lulz, I'm almost sorry I missed it.

Having tooled around with the game, I will give credit where it's due for very nice visual design and most of the game design -- it feels good as a 2D game and has an appropriate amount of visual impact (characters flying back from explosions, bouncing and detonating more things is sublime) and some really good music. Story is interesting, if a tad cliched, but then everything is these days and that's not really a big fault. I will say it's in dire need of another balance pass or two though. In a game like this where the player is given a choice as to how to develop their character, the game must support every possible build of said character. Yes, it's a daunting task, but it's just part of the territory with a game as flexible as this one. The way you build your character can make the game very easy or nigh impossible. As an example, I'm the sort of person that took all the wrench upgrade tonics in Bioshock, and played through Resident Evil with just the knife. A minimalist that prefers utility over power, and saving the big guns for when they're really, really needed. So I spent sectors one and two maxing out strength, and sector three getting Cracking to six. This way, I could go anywhere as early as possible, and my kick/resonance were very powerful and had a lot of utility, while the Cracking-enabled reflector brought range when I needed it. Then I came up against the first boss and was faced with an essentially impossible fight. Built that way, all you have access to, weapon wise, is the shotgun, the resonator, and the reflector. But these weapons simply are not adequate for fighting the boss. The delay on the reflector is too long, and there is too much going on for it to be your only weapon in that fight. Even at 10 Strength, kicking does almost no damage while the boss melees you for 1HP straight out; meanwhile all the health gets absorbed for the piddling armor damage of the machine gun, and you're left with none when you really need it. You can kick the turrets into him, but the turrets are triggered by his health level, which means you have to hurt him to be able to hurt him. If they were simply timed, it would be much more manageable. If you could switch to the reflector on-demand and shotgun him to bring out turrets and do *something* while waiting for the next volley to quickly switch and reflect, that would work. But each time you switch, you have to wait for the cooldown, which means you either have to stick with only the reflector, or don't use it at all. This might not even be so bad if not for the fact that every enemy up to that point can very easily be defeated with nothing but kick and resonance/reflect. At no point do you get any indication that you need to have certain weapons level in order to succeed. Yes, you can just restart and rebuild. But you shouldn't have to. When a game presents choice, it should actually be a choice, and you should be able to succeed with whichever choice you make. It's a solid game otherwise, but as I said, it could really use another balance pass to make it perfect.