Dolce is One Mean Cookie

Recently, I've been working at two gaming objectives. The first is to make my way through my second playthrough of Eternal Sonata, the second to make progress of any kind in the turd known as Xmen. Seriously, how can any game make Wolverine suck? He does in this one... Seriously, he goes down faster than my old high school football team. And how bad was my high school football team, you ask? Well, surely some stats from my senior year's team will help that joke make sense:

Shakopee Football at its finest:

Overall

Win %

PF

PA

1-8-0

0.111

183

288

Home

Away

Neutral

League

1-3-0

0-4-0

0-1-0

0-7-0

Rankings:

National

State

6490

165

In Eternal Sonata, I was making pretty smooth progress, until I hit Dolce's pirate ship in chapter 4. That place sucks! First, I'm stuck with my total B-team (Salsa is the only character in the party at this point that I use when I have the choice) and everyone else stinks. No Viola. No Allegretto. Absolutely no Jazz... and somehow I'm supposed to take out Dolce, who is truly one mean cookie. When I reached her the first time, she wiped me out so fast I don't know what happened. After grinding out a few levels and selling a ton of photos to finance the obscene healing item bills this place is giving me, I tried her again. While the fight was more competitive, she still kicked my ass. She's super fast, and likes to attack from behind where I can't guard. I've ended up blowing my wad of healing items waaaay too soon in the fight, and thus lack the stamina to finish (yes, those metaphors may have been inappropriate... moving on...). I can hardly even build up my harmony chain with these losers (not you Salsa... I still love you). So, I'm probably going to be stuck in Dolce's ship for another couple hours grinding levels, so I can take her down. It's a horrible place to have to grind, since there is only one type of enemy, and the dungeon design is so bland. I'll just have to suffer through this bottleneck I find myself in so I can get back to enjoying the rest of the game.

Viola, Jazz... I miss you!!!

Xmen... what can I say about you? You have no checkpoints, so if I die I have to start the whole mission over! I love that! Thanks for making Wolverine a total wuss, and making the combat system for Nightcrawler that Jumper would totally try to rip off later. Thank you for back-loading all your points, and requiring me to track down asinine collectables. Thank you for not straining my eyes with your PS2 graphics. Thanks for your bottom budget "cinematics," and taking everything cool about Xmen and making it lame. I love you so much right now. I'd take you off my card, but I've done that once before already. Now I have 20 points in you, which makes us buddies for LIFE.

(Sigh) LAME...

So yeah... it was a dicey day of gaming. Hopefully tomorrow (and GSL Week III) will be much better.