A variety of events have conspired to cause my playthrough of Final Fantasy X-2 to come to a bit of a premature conclusion. I no longer have a PS3 (or access to my saved game even if I had one) so my second play capped out at 63% completion. That's not the 100% needed to see the final special cutscene. Which means it's probably time to wrap up that little segment of my marathon and look ahead to the next game, whatever that happens to be...
I was really looking forward to playing FFX-2 when I started this marathon up 3 years ago. (Uh... Jeez, I sure have been taking my time, huh?) But it didn't really pull me in. I think part of it is being jaded with the RTB system. I really liked the updates they did to it the first time I played (I can still remember the first time I used a megaphoenix, had my last character die while the item was in the air, and DIDN'T LOSE because the system let the megaphoenix resolve and bring the character that used it back to life) but I guess they didn't hold up so well. The big thing I think is how terrible anything that isn't an autoattack ended up being because attacking has a higher priority than using an ability or casting a spell. So you could get juggled out of doing your thing by enemies that attacked fast enough. Or if you were the one attacking, you could juggle them out of their things.
Just mashing attack is a thing I used to like doing a lot in RTB games. But somewhere along the way I wanted to do other things. I can remember being similarly jaded with FFIV in this marathon for similar reasons. I think there's a problem when the thing I most want to have happen is to have my characters get berserked so I stop having to input the only relevant command. If all I'm going to do is attack then the game might as well do that for me, right? But then you get into a state like I got into in FFX-2 here where I never actually played the game after I got the catnip. Rikku went first and killed one enemy guaranteed, and by the time someone else got an action and I could input a command she'd kill a second one. So really I could play the game, or I could not play the game, and the same thing would happen. Rikku would kill everything with no input.
The game remains incredibly pretty. I still like the concept of live swapping in what class your characters are on demand in the fights. I like the wide variety of abilities you can access. I really like the costumes and the character combat chat. But going to a RTB system meant most of that stuff was just a terrible waste of time. Sticking with the FFX system or tweaking it a little could have been really, really cool.
I often like minigames and this game is in a very real sense entirely minigames. The actual core plot is nowhere near as detailed or as epic as a normal Final Fantasy game, which I think has to count against it. Minigames are a great diversion from an epic plot, especially when they come with ways to become more powerful. Here it mostly felt like you were doing things just to have something to do. A way to raise that counter up to 100% to get the good ending. Which I didn't get.
I still do want to get that, and it's certainly an idea running around in the back of my mind to just do a run on the PS2 version now that I've looked up what it takes. There's a route to do it in one playthrough. I'm thinking that may be a thing I could do as a start to streaming if the internet here ends up being fast enough.
It feels like I'm pretty down on the game, but I think a bunch of things sort of conspired to make it feel worse than it really is. Taking 3 weeks off to go to WBC this year instead of 1 week put a big gap in my playing that made it hard to get back into things. Then hurting my wrist so I couldn't play at all for a couple weeks (and only sporadically after that) was not the fault of the game. And then needing to return the console/move across the country... None of those things should actually lower my rating here. And while going back to a RTB system makes me sad, it's mostly being compared to other RTB systems, and it wouldn't really be fair to ding this one more than those ones.
The character design is great, but that's leeching from the characters of FFX. Should that count against this one? The one new character (Paine) is actually pretty interesting. The new comedic villain on the other hand is just annoying. I think the real big strike against it has to be the lack of an epic feel. I get that the world is recovering from the actual epic evil from the first game but it does lead to a bit of a let down feeling when it's 'just' a single super weapon that is pretty easily destroyed that's threatening the world this time around.
All told, I think this game fits in around Kingdom Hearts on the rating scale. Awesome graphics and characters, but not really original ones. Fun enough gameplay, but not as good as it probably should have been. And I definitely enjoyed Kingdom Hearts more this time around, so it's going to get the edge here. FFX-2 will get slotted in at slot #9, just ahead of FFIX.
Next up is supposed to be FFXI, but with the World of Warcraft expansion hitting soon there's no way I'm going to be playing a different MMO. Which means I should probably be playing the handheld game Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which I actually just found in my move. I wonder if I can remember where I packed it...
Showing posts with label Final Fantasy Marathon Conclusions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Final Fantasy Marathon Conclusions. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Monday, June 23, 2014
Final Fantasy X: Conclusions
On the weekend I went in and took out Jecht and Yu Yevon inside Sin. I don't know if those fights are ever hard; my party didn't get attacked in any of the stages. It was actually pretty tedious having to summon in all of my aeons one after the other, watch the animations, and then have them die in one attack from Rikku. Over and over, 8 times. All told my saved game ended up with something like 94 hours played on it. In some senses this is less than my previous plays which is weird since I actually filled the sphere grid and killed extra challenge bosses this time. But it doesn't track time spent in deaths and I sure died a lot in long fights or by getting surprised by unknown challenge bosses. I do think I played a lot less blitzball than it previous games, and I didn't get Lulu's ultimate weapon which takes forever. But this playthrough was definitely well over 100 hours of actual time spent playing, which is really good for a single player console game!
Kimahri was in my party for most of the game, right up until I started really grinding out stats. Then the fact I focused him on magic first made him terrible. His ultimate weapon, which I got, doesn't have 1 mp cost on it and spells cost a lot of mana. I would definitely make Kimahri into a beater next time (or maybe a thief) and probably ignore magic entirely. It just scales so terribly!
Eventually you are going to get max stats on everyone, so the real differences between characters are their ultimate weapons and their overdrives. Yuna is the only one who can summon, which is a thing, and Tidus/Rikku/Wakka are required to use in some fights, including one of the harder arena fights. Tidus and Wakka have the multi-hit physical overdrives so they're the best. So for end game stuff I feel like you should be using 3 of Tidus/Rikku/Wakka/Yuna. Rikku's overdrive does some awesome things but it costs consumables and I hate using those even when it makes sense to do so. Lulu is terrible because her ultimate weapon is stupidly hard to get. Kimahri has bad mods on his weapon, but the counterattack stuff is actually useful on Penance so he's not a terrible option. Auron has the only ultimate weapon with first strike and he has a powerful overdrive (inflicts armour break with 100% chance on anything that isn't immune) so you can't really go wrong with him either. He definitely helps to grind stats.
I didn't like a lot of what changed in the international edition. I hate the way they implemented the dark aeons. They were often put into positions that blocked useful items and there was rarely any indication they existed. Dark Yojimbo was fine because you could run away once he spawned if you didn't want to fight him, but most of the others were game overs with no warning. I lost a lot of capture progress by bumbling into some of the dark aeons and that frustrated me. I did like that they added in really hard fights that took some planning to beat. I like ribbons.
I still like the story in this game. I guess I don't really understand why Yu Yevon wants Spira to be such a disastrous world. I guess he has everyone living in fear and worshipping him as a god so that's something. Praise Be To Yevon!
The combat system is really where this game shines. It is the best. The hot tag to bring in the right character at the right time is a really good twist. No real time element is awesome. You get to see the turn order, you get to make a plan, you get time to think.
The music is also very good. I don't think it's the best sound track of the series but it's very good. I was actually sad how fast I killed Jecht because his battle music is incredible. So much so that I'm going to link it here so you can take a listen.
I'm a little sad that the ending really seems to be the same as the last two games. The main character and the female love interest get separated right after the final boss fight... Will they ever see each other again? Then you get a normal ending cutscene where you see the cities and the other characters and stuff. Then it looks over... But wait! There's the main character after all! Hurray! You beat the game so you get handed the princess! It isn't quite the same here since Tidus doesn't reunite with Yuna. But he was supposed to disappear entirely and they do show him being alive at the very end.
The graphics in the original game were a big step up as the first game in the series on the PS2. The remade HD version, on the PS3, also has graphics that are a big step up. This game is gorgeous.
As far as mini-games go there are a ton of them in FFX. Some of them are really annoying, like chocobo racing and lightning dodging. Some of them are awesome, like catching monsters to build challenge bosses and blitzball. I still think the card game in FFVIII is the best mini-game they've ever done but FFX might well have the second and third best ones. There's a reason I keep playing this game and always end up with over 100 hours played, and it's the mini-games. And the combat system, which plays a big role in the monster catching mini-game.
I am sad that I didn't get all of the PS3 achievements for the game. I didn't dodge 200 lightning strikes. I didn't get 5 treasures in the chocobo race. I didn't play enough blitzball to get all of Wakka's overdrives. I didn't find all of the Al Bhed primers (some can be skipped if you don't find them in Home before it gets destroyed). I didn't fill the sphere grid on all 7 characters. And I haven't watched the video that bridges the plot between FFX and FFX-2. I will do that last one, but the rest get left behind for now. Maybe Byung will want to finish up the other tropheys? It is his PS3, after all!
Where should this game go on my list? Well, I know for sure it's going above everything except maybe Final Fantasy VIII. VIII has the better story, the better characters, the better music, and the better mini-game. X has the better combat system, the better leveling system, the better graphics, and has more gameplay depth with the two awesome mini-games. And it's not like each game is really bad at anything the other is best at... (Except maybe the draw system in FFVIII.) So I guess really it's going to come down to if I want to give the edge to the combat system or to the story. It turns out I just identify so much with Squall that I have to go with VIII as the top game. So Final Fantasy X gets to slot in at #2. I can't imagine it gets knocked out of that spot ever, but who knows!
Next up... Final Fantasy X-2! It's a little out of order, but I want to play it on the PS3 and keeping it extra time without using it just to play a GBA game seems pretty stupid.
Kimahri was in my party for most of the game, right up until I started really grinding out stats. Then the fact I focused him on magic first made him terrible. His ultimate weapon, which I got, doesn't have 1 mp cost on it and spells cost a lot of mana. I would definitely make Kimahri into a beater next time (or maybe a thief) and probably ignore magic entirely. It just scales so terribly!
Eventually you are going to get max stats on everyone, so the real differences between characters are their ultimate weapons and their overdrives. Yuna is the only one who can summon, which is a thing, and Tidus/Rikku/Wakka are required to use in some fights, including one of the harder arena fights. Tidus and Wakka have the multi-hit physical overdrives so they're the best. So for end game stuff I feel like you should be using 3 of Tidus/Rikku/Wakka/Yuna. Rikku's overdrive does some awesome things but it costs consumables and I hate using those even when it makes sense to do so. Lulu is terrible because her ultimate weapon is stupidly hard to get. Kimahri has bad mods on his weapon, but the counterattack stuff is actually useful on Penance so he's not a terrible option. Auron has the only ultimate weapon with first strike and he has a powerful overdrive (inflicts armour break with 100% chance on anything that isn't immune) so you can't really go wrong with him either. He definitely helps to grind stats.
I didn't like a lot of what changed in the international edition. I hate the way they implemented the dark aeons. They were often put into positions that blocked useful items and there was rarely any indication they existed. Dark Yojimbo was fine because you could run away once he spawned if you didn't want to fight him, but most of the others were game overs with no warning. I lost a lot of capture progress by bumbling into some of the dark aeons and that frustrated me. I did like that they added in really hard fights that took some planning to beat. I like ribbons.
I still like the story in this game. I guess I don't really understand why Yu Yevon wants Spira to be such a disastrous world. I guess he has everyone living in fear and worshipping him as a god so that's something. Praise Be To Yevon!
The combat system is really where this game shines. It is the best. The hot tag to bring in the right character at the right time is a really good twist. No real time element is awesome. You get to see the turn order, you get to make a plan, you get time to think.
The music is also very good. I don't think it's the best sound track of the series but it's very good. I was actually sad how fast I killed Jecht because his battle music is incredible. So much so that I'm going to link it here so you can take a listen.
I'm a little sad that the ending really seems to be the same as the last two games. The main character and the female love interest get separated right after the final boss fight... Will they ever see each other again? Then you get a normal ending cutscene where you see the cities and the other characters and stuff. Then it looks over... But wait! There's the main character after all! Hurray! You beat the game so you get handed the princess! It isn't quite the same here since Tidus doesn't reunite with Yuna. But he was supposed to disappear entirely and they do show him being alive at the very end.
The graphics in the original game were a big step up as the first game in the series on the PS2. The remade HD version, on the PS3, also has graphics that are a big step up. This game is gorgeous.
As far as mini-games go there are a ton of them in FFX. Some of them are really annoying, like chocobo racing and lightning dodging. Some of them are awesome, like catching monsters to build challenge bosses and blitzball. I still think the card game in FFVIII is the best mini-game they've ever done but FFX might well have the second and third best ones. There's a reason I keep playing this game and always end up with over 100 hours played, and it's the mini-games. And the combat system, which plays a big role in the monster catching mini-game.
I am sad that I didn't get all of the PS3 achievements for the game. I didn't dodge 200 lightning strikes. I didn't get 5 treasures in the chocobo race. I didn't play enough blitzball to get all of Wakka's overdrives. I didn't find all of the Al Bhed primers (some can be skipped if you don't find them in Home before it gets destroyed). I didn't fill the sphere grid on all 7 characters. And I haven't watched the video that bridges the plot between FFX and FFX-2. I will do that last one, but the rest get left behind for now. Maybe Byung will want to finish up the other tropheys? It is his PS3, after all!
Where should this game go on my list? Well, I know for sure it's going above everything except maybe Final Fantasy VIII. VIII has the better story, the better characters, the better music, and the better mini-game. X has the better combat system, the better leveling system, the better graphics, and has more gameplay depth with the two awesome mini-games. And it's not like each game is really bad at anything the other is best at... (Except maybe the draw system in FFVIII.) So I guess really it's going to come down to if I want to give the edge to the combat system or to the story. It turns out I just identify so much with Squall that I have to go with VIII as the top game. So Final Fantasy X gets to slot in at #2. I can't imagine it gets knocked out of that spot ever, but who knows!
Next up... Final Fantasy X-2! It's a little out of order, but I want to play it on the PS3 and keeping it extra time without using it just to play a GBA game seems pretty stupid.
Friday, March 21, 2014
Kingdom Hearts: Conclusions
Today I woke up and finished off the last little bit of Kingdom Hearts. All that remained was two more challenge bosses (the desert thing in Agrabah and the flying thing in Wonderland) and the final boss of the game. In what should come as no surprise to anyone they were exceptionally trivial. It turns out when you power up to the point where you can beat the super challenge fight everything else pretty much pales in comparison. It's like how Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII is a complete joke after you've killed Ruby and Emerald Weapons. I'm just glad Sephiroth finally got some redemption and got to be the challenge boss himself.
The core of the ending video felt very familiar. You've got the female love interest waiting sadly at home wondering if the male hero is going to reappear after his battle with the final boss. Exactly the same as the ending video from Final Fantasy VIII. And the ending video from Final Fantasy IX. And, actually... If memory serves, it's going to be the ending video from Final Fantasy X as well. Huh. I guess it's a good tension device if you're not just going for a full on happy video?
This ending video also had little clips of various worlds getting 'fixed' after the final door was sealed. Pinocchio becoming a real boy, or Aladdin and Jasmine making out while Genie and Abu pretend to not watch. That sort of thing. One of them featured Cid (the one from FFVII) walking into a room where Squall, Yuffie, and Aeris are hanging out. (The four of them hung out together in the main town.) Cid brings in Cloud (who had been stuck in Hercules' arena trying to find Sephiroth) and there's a nice moment where he and Aeris react to seeing each other. If you were playing this game as a Disney fan I'm sure that clip meant absolutely nothing to you, but it was pretty cool from a Final Fantasy fan's point of view.
I also apparently completed all of the challenges required to unlock a special video at the end of everything. You need to rescue all the dalmatians, to have beaten the Hades cup, and to have locked all of the optional worlds. And maybe to have played the game on expert mode too? It's not clear. Anyway it turns out to just be a sneak peek at the start of Kingdom Hearts 2, which is nice I guess. It ended with a clip of a woman standing on a beach looking out longingly. The beach is clearly the one from the island in Kingdom Hearts and the wiki I found says it's the female love interest grown up (presumably indicating the main character never made it back, which is likely since the KH2 preview talks about going to look for him) but I thought the female character here was Rinoa who also looks out longingly from a beach in the intro/ending to FFVIII.
This game was a lot of fun. It had some aspects I didn't like (choosing a class changed the difficulty of the game to an extent similar to choosing a warrior or a hunter in the original World of Warcraft) but overall it was pretty good. The game controlled well, and it looked great, and it sounded fantastic. I don't know how much of the music was actually original but they had such a great library to adapt that it worked out pretty great. I hated the Little Mermaid world because it was 3D underwater combat which didn't mesh well for me, but I liked being in it because the background music was a take on the Under The Sea song.
They had a ton of material to mine for things like minigames and sidequests, and they made great use of it. Having Winnie the Pooh be a full fledged combat zone wouldn't have felt very good I don't think, but having a bunch of comic relief minigames that you unlocked as you progressed through the game was very good. The arena was excellent and sneaking in Sephiroth as the challenge boss there was a stroke of genius. Not everything worked out awesomely (the Tarzan minigame where you slide down a vine was just annoying for me and the gummi ship seemed pointless) but I think you need to accept that some stuff isn't going to work out in order to get a bunch of stuff that does.
Hooking up with Disney really worked out great for characters, worlds, music, and especially for voice acting. Square got a lot of real names for this game that I don't think they ever could have gotten on their own. I just went and looked up Final Fantasy X on IMDB and half of the 'stars' of the game had Final Fantasy X listed in their bio as their most known job. FFX doesn't really have bad voice acting, don't get me wrong, but they don't have anyone on the level of David Boreanaz, Gilbert Gottfried, Dan Castellenata, Mandy Moore, or even Lance Bass.
Where should this game fit on my ranked list? That's a really tricky question for me. I'm not even sure how I feel about this being a Final Fantasy game at all. It isn't a jRPG with turn based combat, though a lot of the other spin-offs I've played have been different genres too. It hardly has any actual ties to Final Fantasy. It uses some characters from FFVII, FFVIII, and FFX (why no FFIX I wonder). It uses the spell names too, I guess. But for most of the game you play a newly made up character teamed up with Donald and Goofy as you go to various Disney planets and play through riffs on Disney movie plots.
Most of the original stuff is pretty weak, actually. The plot tieing all the worlds together works well enough but it isn't very stirring. It's still not clear who Sora is or how he got stuck on an island with some FF kids. It feels like maybe the game was entirely a dream from a kid with an overactive imagination who watches Disney movies and forgot to play FFIX. But the stuff they pilfered from other sources is fantastic and there kept being little things cropping up as nostalgic throwbacks that were awesome and/or just there for the cheap pop.
But when it comes right down to it... This game was fun. The fights tended to have little tricks to make doing them easier which made me feel smart for figuring them out. The sidequests were pretty fantastic. It had legitimate challenge bosses. Awesome music and graphics. And I keep mentioning it, but the voice acting really does bump this game up some notches. But I think the less than stellar original story has to bring it down some, and I'm really not sure if I should be discounting it for not really being Final Fantasy. I don't think I should. Either it shouldn't be in the marathon at all, or it should be ranked on its merits once in. And 2011 me put it in. So I think it gets to go ahead of Final Fantasy IX for sure. How about V and Tactics? Kingdom Hearts is a really good game, but I don't think it's good enough at what it does best to push it over those job system games. So #7 it is!
Next up... Final Fantasy X (HD version) which is likely to push this down to #8. What else will it be pushing down? All?
The core of the ending video felt very familiar. You've got the female love interest waiting sadly at home wondering if the male hero is going to reappear after his battle with the final boss. Exactly the same as the ending video from Final Fantasy VIII. And the ending video from Final Fantasy IX. And, actually... If memory serves, it's going to be the ending video from Final Fantasy X as well. Huh. I guess it's a good tension device if you're not just going for a full on happy video?
This ending video also had little clips of various worlds getting 'fixed' after the final door was sealed. Pinocchio becoming a real boy, or Aladdin and Jasmine making out while Genie and Abu pretend to not watch. That sort of thing. One of them featured Cid (the one from FFVII) walking into a room where Squall, Yuffie, and Aeris are hanging out. (The four of them hung out together in the main town.) Cid brings in Cloud (who had been stuck in Hercules' arena trying to find Sephiroth) and there's a nice moment where he and Aeris react to seeing each other. If you were playing this game as a Disney fan I'm sure that clip meant absolutely nothing to you, but it was pretty cool from a Final Fantasy fan's point of view.
I also apparently completed all of the challenges required to unlock a special video at the end of everything. You need to rescue all the dalmatians, to have beaten the Hades cup, and to have locked all of the optional worlds. And maybe to have played the game on expert mode too? It's not clear. Anyway it turns out to just be a sneak peek at the start of Kingdom Hearts 2, which is nice I guess. It ended with a clip of a woman standing on a beach looking out longingly. The beach is clearly the one from the island in Kingdom Hearts and the wiki I found says it's the female love interest grown up (presumably indicating the main character never made it back, which is likely since the KH2 preview talks about going to look for him) but I thought the female character here was Rinoa who also looks out longingly from a beach in the intro/ending to FFVIII.
This game was a lot of fun. It had some aspects I didn't like (choosing a class changed the difficulty of the game to an extent similar to choosing a warrior or a hunter in the original World of Warcraft) but overall it was pretty good. The game controlled well, and it looked great, and it sounded fantastic. I don't know how much of the music was actually original but they had such a great library to adapt that it worked out pretty great. I hated the Little Mermaid world because it was 3D underwater combat which didn't mesh well for me, but I liked being in it because the background music was a take on the Under The Sea song.
They had a ton of material to mine for things like minigames and sidequests, and they made great use of it. Having Winnie the Pooh be a full fledged combat zone wouldn't have felt very good I don't think, but having a bunch of comic relief minigames that you unlocked as you progressed through the game was very good. The arena was excellent and sneaking in Sephiroth as the challenge boss there was a stroke of genius. Not everything worked out awesomely (the Tarzan minigame where you slide down a vine was just annoying for me and the gummi ship seemed pointless) but I think you need to accept that some stuff isn't going to work out in order to get a bunch of stuff that does.
Hooking up with Disney really worked out great for characters, worlds, music, and especially for voice acting. Square got a lot of real names for this game that I don't think they ever could have gotten on their own. I just went and looked up Final Fantasy X on IMDB and half of the 'stars' of the game had Final Fantasy X listed in their bio as their most known job. FFX doesn't really have bad voice acting, don't get me wrong, but they don't have anyone on the level of David Boreanaz, Gilbert Gottfried, Dan Castellenata, Mandy Moore, or even Lance Bass.
Where should this game fit on my ranked list? That's a really tricky question for me. I'm not even sure how I feel about this being a Final Fantasy game at all. It isn't a jRPG with turn based combat, though a lot of the other spin-offs I've played have been different genres too. It hardly has any actual ties to Final Fantasy. It uses some characters from FFVII, FFVIII, and FFX (why no FFIX I wonder). It uses the spell names too, I guess. But for most of the game you play a newly made up character teamed up with Donald and Goofy as you go to various Disney planets and play through riffs on Disney movie plots.
Most of the original stuff is pretty weak, actually. The plot tieing all the worlds together works well enough but it isn't very stirring. It's still not clear who Sora is or how he got stuck on an island with some FF kids. It feels like maybe the game was entirely a dream from a kid with an overactive imagination who watches Disney movies and forgot to play FFIX. But the stuff they pilfered from other sources is fantastic and there kept being little things cropping up as nostalgic throwbacks that were awesome and/or just there for the cheap pop.
But when it comes right down to it... This game was fun. The fights tended to have little tricks to make doing them easier which made me feel smart for figuring them out. The sidequests were pretty fantastic. It had legitimate challenge bosses. Awesome music and graphics. And I keep mentioning it, but the voice acting really does bump this game up some notches. But I think the less than stellar original story has to bring it down some, and I'm really not sure if I should be discounting it for not really being Final Fantasy. I don't think I should. Either it shouldn't be in the marathon at all, or it should be ranked on its merits once in. And 2011 me put it in. So I think it gets to go ahead of Final Fantasy IX for sure. How about V and Tactics? Kingdom Hearts is a really good game, but I don't think it's good enough at what it does best to push it over those job system games. So #7 it is!
Next up... Final Fantasy X (HD version) which is likely to push this down to #8. What else will it be pushing down? All?
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Final Fantasy IX Conclusions
Earlier this morning I plowed my way through the last two dungeons in Final Fantasy IX, beat up the final boss, and saved the world. Woo! It took me a little longer to beat this game than I would have liked, but that's partially due to watching a lot of Olympics coverage and it's partially due to being sick since the Olympics ended. Concentrating on manipulating the ATB system wasn't the easiest thing for my frazzled mind to do, so I kept pausing and wandering off to read pro wrestling recaps because that doesn't take any real thinking.
I really liked how this game went back to a more standard class based system. The last 4 games have featured essentially interchangeable characters with small differences. Sure, only Locke could steal, but everyone in Final Fantasy VI could learn all the spells and max whatever stats they wanted. In this game each of the 8 playable characters has a wildly different set of active and passive abilities to learn that make them all significantly different from each other. If you want to blow people up with black magic spells you simply have to use Vivi; there is no other choice. They have a good set of characters too, that interact in good ways, so there are a bunch of viable parties. This time I wanted to really max out Vivi so I built a party to make him better. So I used Freya for her mana restore ability, Zidane because I think you have to, and Dagger because she would also make use of the mana restore ability and having a healer had to be a good plan.
It turned out that I entered the final dungeon sequence with 81 ethers in my inventory so it's entirely possible I didn't need Freya at all. She did less damage than anyone else which seemed bad, but she did have the most health and the best defenses so that was probably a good thing. If I had to do it again I think I'd want my party to include Steiner and Amarant instead of Dagger and Freya, but they'd both be good parties. And I know the first time I played I put a heavy emphasis on Quina because that character is just plain awesome.
I really liked the art style used in the game. It took a step back from trying to use the hot new Playstation graphics to make 'realistic' people and went for a more cartoony feel. The resolution for the gameplay wasn't great on my tv, but I don't think FFVII or FFVIII would have faired any better (and likely would have been a lot worse). The FMVs were awesome. And I think Garnet may actually be the prettiest character in any of the Final Fantasy games.
The game had tons of little throw backs to previous games. Key items named after characters from Final Fantasy III that let you play music from that game. A dwarf village like the ones in Final Fantasy IV. Two planets merging to become one like in Final Fantasy V. Souls becoming a mist and feeding the planet like in Final Fantasy VII.
It wasn't all good though. The ATB battle system was even more frustrating in this game compared to previous ones. The fact that the optimal way to play was to have one of your characters never take an action and instead open the menu to pause time during animations was pretty terrible. Even worse was when I had auto-regen on my whole team and the best way to heal up was to cast a long animation spell and not open the menu. Bahamut should not be my best healing spell! It really made having a 'healer' pretty silly, though at least Dagger had a long animation spell to be a good fake healer on top of being a potential real healer, too.
The random encounter system is complete garbage. Normally in a game like this exploring a dungeon completely for all the treasure isn't much of a chore. Maybe you take 40% more steps, which gets you 40% more fights. That's fine! In FFIX the random encounter counter resets each time you change screens, and most screens are pretty short. So short, in fact, that it's possible to beat the game with only 5 random encounters total because you can run through almost every screen without getting a fight. Fights also take a long time to load in. Fully exploring a dungeon is probably more like 20 times as long, not 1.4 times as long. Which is frustrating now that I know it, and it really makes limited resource characters like Vivi terrible if you're getting into a ton of extra fights. My playthrough this time was a little over 34 hours, and there's a reward for making it to the final dungeon in under 12 hours, and other than putting off the chocobo stuff and card game stuff until later the main way to save time is to learn the path through each zone to minimize encounters. I don't like it one bit.
The game also put in an homage to Beyond the Beyond, and not in a good way. In the middle of the game Dagger gets stressed out and can't talk. You can put her in your party still but she loses her trance bar and about half of the time she gets distracted instead of taking the action assigned to her. Can't move... CURSED! This was not a good thing. In retrospect I think Eiko would be a better healer since she gets esuna, full-life, and holy. And you can keep using her in the middle of the game! Holy should have a long enough cast time to be a healing spell...
The card game was disappointing and most of the timing based mini-games didn't work on my tv. Chocobo Hot and Cold was still very good. And I don't feel like I should ding the game because it doesn't work well on a new tv. The card game was disappointing on every playthrough though!
One thing that blew my mind was the final boss... His name was Necron and you learned that he existed 10 seconds before fighting him. Kuja and Garland both could be the final boss from the story... But no. They both end up helping you after you beat them up. But then there's just this random dude after you beat the final Kuja form. A dude who wants to put an end to the entire universe, to be fair, so you sure want to kill him. But where did he come from? Why is he there? Who knows. Kill the scary thing and win the game.
The ending was nice and happy. I still want to know how Vivi had kids. It was nice to see that pretty much all of the characters had a happy ending. Steiner loosened up a little and ended up with Beatrix! I was watching a speedrun of the game and someone commented in chat about how Steiner always starts off as everyone's most hated character but eventually comes to grow on people. No one there disputed that assessment, and I think it's true for me too. It helps that he's probably the most powerful character.
Anyway... Where should this game go in my little ranking chart? I liked a lot of things about this game, and it's definitely a worthwhile play. But it has some pretty big flaws too, and it's never really stood out in my mind one way or the other. I think it's definitely better than the NES era games but I think it has to slot in as worse than the rest of the core series. And Tactics, for that matter. So for now it gets to be #7 on my list. That's still pretty good, and I really think the reason it's so low is that the games ahead of it are all fantastic games with fewer glaring flaws.
Next up would be Final Fantasy X, but I'm holding off on playing that game until the HD version comes out on March 18th. I'm going to skip ahead to the next game, which is one I've been looking forward to playing again and which is really only tangentially part of the marathon anyway: Kingdom Hearts.
I really liked how this game went back to a more standard class based system. The last 4 games have featured essentially interchangeable characters with small differences. Sure, only Locke could steal, but everyone in Final Fantasy VI could learn all the spells and max whatever stats they wanted. In this game each of the 8 playable characters has a wildly different set of active and passive abilities to learn that make them all significantly different from each other. If you want to blow people up with black magic spells you simply have to use Vivi; there is no other choice. They have a good set of characters too, that interact in good ways, so there are a bunch of viable parties. This time I wanted to really max out Vivi so I built a party to make him better. So I used Freya for her mana restore ability, Zidane because I think you have to, and Dagger because she would also make use of the mana restore ability and having a healer had to be a good plan.
It turned out that I entered the final dungeon sequence with 81 ethers in my inventory so it's entirely possible I didn't need Freya at all. She did less damage than anyone else which seemed bad, but she did have the most health and the best defenses so that was probably a good thing. If I had to do it again I think I'd want my party to include Steiner and Amarant instead of Dagger and Freya, but they'd both be good parties. And I know the first time I played I put a heavy emphasis on Quina because that character is just plain awesome.
I really liked the art style used in the game. It took a step back from trying to use the hot new Playstation graphics to make 'realistic' people and went for a more cartoony feel. The resolution for the gameplay wasn't great on my tv, but I don't think FFVII or FFVIII would have faired any better (and likely would have been a lot worse). The FMVs were awesome. And I think Garnet may actually be the prettiest character in any of the Final Fantasy games.
The game had tons of little throw backs to previous games. Key items named after characters from Final Fantasy III that let you play music from that game. A dwarf village like the ones in Final Fantasy IV. Two planets merging to become one like in Final Fantasy V. Souls becoming a mist and feeding the planet like in Final Fantasy VII.
It wasn't all good though. The ATB battle system was even more frustrating in this game compared to previous ones. The fact that the optimal way to play was to have one of your characters never take an action and instead open the menu to pause time during animations was pretty terrible. Even worse was when I had auto-regen on my whole team and the best way to heal up was to cast a long animation spell and not open the menu. Bahamut should not be my best healing spell! It really made having a 'healer' pretty silly, though at least Dagger had a long animation spell to be a good fake healer on top of being a potential real healer, too.
The random encounter system is complete garbage. Normally in a game like this exploring a dungeon completely for all the treasure isn't much of a chore. Maybe you take 40% more steps, which gets you 40% more fights. That's fine! In FFIX the random encounter counter resets each time you change screens, and most screens are pretty short. So short, in fact, that it's possible to beat the game with only 5 random encounters total because you can run through almost every screen without getting a fight. Fights also take a long time to load in. Fully exploring a dungeon is probably more like 20 times as long, not 1.4 times as long. Which is frustrating now that I know it, and it really makes limited resource characters like Vivi terrible if you're getting into a ton of extra fights. My playthrough this time was a little over 34 hours, and there's a reward for making it to the final dungeon in under 12 hours, and other than putting off the chocobo stuff and card game stuff until later the main way to save time is to learn the path through each zone to minimize encounters. I don't like it one bit.
The game also put in an homage to Beyond the Beyond, and not in a good way. In the middle of the game Dagger gets stressed out and can't talk. You can put her in your party still but she loses her trance bar and about half of the time she gets distracted instead of taking the action assigned to her. Can't move... CURSED! This was not a good thing. In retrospect I think Eiko would be a better healer since she gets esuna, full-life, and holy. And you can keep using her in the middle of the game! Holy should have a long enough cast time to be a healing spell...
The card game was disappointing and most of the timing based mini-games didn't work on my tv. Chocobo Hot and Cold was still very good. And I don't feel like I should ding the game because it doesn't work well on a new tv. The card game was disappointing on every playthrough though!
One thing that blew my mind was the final boss... His name was Necron and you learned that he existed 10 seconds before fighting him. Kuja and Garland both could be the final boss from the story... But no. They both end up helping you after you beat them up. But then there's just this random dude after you beat the final Kuja form. A dude who wants to put an end to the entire universe, to be fair, so you sure want to kill him. But where did he come from? Why is he there? Who knows. Kill the scary thing and win the game.
The ending was nice and happy. I still want to know how Vivi had kids. It was nice to see that pretty much all of the characters had a happy ending. Steiner loosened up a little and ended up with Beatrix! I was watching a speedrun of the game and someone commented in chat about how Steiner always starts off as everyone's most hated character but eventually comes to grow on people. No one there disputed that assessment, and I think it's true for me too. It helps that he's probably the most powerful character.
Anyway... Where should this game go in my little ranking chart? I liked a lot of things about this game, and it's definitely a worthwhile play. But it has some pretty big flaws too, and it's never really stood out in my mind one way or the other. I think it's definitely better than the NES era games but I think it has to slot in as worse than the rest of the core series. And Tactics, for that matter. So for now it gets to be #7 on my list. That's still pretty good, and I really think the reason it's so low is that the games ahead of it are all fantastic games with fewer glaring flaws.
Next up would be Final Fantasy X, but I'm holding off on playing that game until the HD version comes out on March 18th. I'm going to skip ahead to the next game, which is one I've been looking forward to playing again and which is really only tangentially part of the marathon anyway: Kingdom Hearts.
Tuesday, February 04, 2014
Chocobo Racing
Ok, calling it poorly implemented might not be completely fair, but it's not far off the mark. The controls are definitely worse than the controls in any Mario Kart game I've played. The attack items are certainly badly balanced in terms of making a fun game. One of the best things about Mario Kart is how the person in last place would get stronger power ups. It added a catch up mechanism to the game without being super blunt about it by having the guys in last just go faster or something. Chocobo Racing has no such concept. Each of the question spheres (they aren't really blocks) gives a random spell, or some of them just have the spell icon from the start so you know what you're about to drive over. You can hold up to 3 items at a time, and there's an added twist. Pick up the same thing you just picked up and instead of giving you a second copy of it they power up your first copy instead. One fire spell gives you a hard to aim green turtle shell. Two fire spells gives you a red turtle shell. Three fire spells gives you a red turtle shell for each of your opponents.
The problems here are three fold. First, everyone gets the same power ups so the person in first is apt to get a strangle hold on their lead. Next, they take some time to respawn, so while the person in first is guaranteed to get a power up from each section it's entirely possible other people won't get one and therefore the person in first actually gets more powerful stuff than the losers. The last problem is that the powered up attacks hit all players equally so the person in last place will get spun out just as often as the person in first. More often, even, since the guy in first is throwing out more attacks than the others!
One small mistake at the start of a race was the only difference between winning by a mile or getting stuck at the back. Front running is the only way to play this game, and that's unfortunate. Especially since the goal of every race is to win. If you don't come first you have to play it again. And again. And again. I actually gave up last night on an annoying castle that had a layout that punished the losers even more. (There was a cage that would go up and down blocking the road from time to time, but it seemed to get triggered when the first person got close to it. The timing was such that the first person would get under it, and maybe anyone really close to them, but everyone else would get stuck.) I played a little this morning to get a screenshot and beat that race in two tries because I managed to get into the lead heading into that section on the first lap and never looked back.
The other interesting thing about the game is each character can assign a super power. Mog can fly over attacks on the ground. Chocobo can dash fast. Goblin can mug items from other people. So on top of getting special abilities out of the question spheres you also get our own special ability that recharges with time. It adds more variety to the characters than just looks, which is nice.
The game has tons of modes. Story mode, which I was playing, was introducing the characters and tracks one at a time and had a cute little narration by Cid (who built the rocket skates and powered scooter). Mog sure is a jerk! Mog kept breaking kafabe by talking about other video games and once even talked about Squaresoft directly. (He was talking about how if he beat Chocobo in a race they'd have to name their next game Mog's Mysterious Dungeon 2. Apparently the games came out in a different order than I thought, or this release got delayed and there wasn't a chance to edit the text.) There are also grand prix and time trial modes as well.
I donno... This was an interesting enough game, but I feel like being set up to punish the losers and reward the winners actually makes for a terrible kart game. The whole point of variable powers is to let the losers think they can catch up. If only I get lucky and get that lightning bolt, I can win! That star man will give me a shot at 3rd place! It also makes multi player with people of different skill levels plausible. This game, not so much. I can't imagine playing this as a kid with a friend who was better than me, or worse than me. The better player would simply never lose. And maybe that's realistic, but it isn't what a kart game should be I don't think.
I'm not going to complete story mode, because learning the tracks enough to be able to jump out to an early unassailable lead without then ever making a mistake just doesn't appeal to me. Sorry Chocobo Racing. You are not good. In fact... You get to go right to the bottom of the pile thus far. Ehrgeiz was a poorly implemented fighting game, but at least it made decent fighting game design decisions. You did not make decent kart racer decisions.
Next up... Final Fantasy IX!
Monday, February 03, 2014
Chocobo's Abandoned Dungeon
It's been almost 6 months since I've made any progress in my Final Fantasy marathon. I keep thinking I'm going to start playing Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon 2 again, but it's been so long I feel like I'd need to start over entirely. It was actually a fairly interesting game, and I did a bunch of playing and reading about it since my intro post on the subject, but I never got around to posting what else I'd done or what I'd learned.
It turns out the game has a bit of a crafting system to it. You can throw stuff in a pot and new stuff comes out. It turns out the new stuff is entirely random and isn't based on what you throw in at all and none of it is useful so it's just kind of an annoying thing that exists but shouldn't be used. Then there's crafting weapons and armour and it turns out to be really intricate and require doing all kinds of crazy things. The game has one shot spell books but you get better at casting those spells the more you use them and there's ways to craft things that make the spells better.
Getting killed also isn't a game over in this game. Instead you respawn back in town with an empty inventory but you keep your levels. In some ways this was very good (it was the only way I found to unequip my cursed claw) but in other ways it meant it didn't really matter what I was doing. One of the key features on a roguelike to me is the fear of permanent death should you make a mistake. You died? Time to start over! Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon 2 seems a lot longer than something like FTL though. And it has a lot more RPG elements that build up over longer periods of time.
Was the game fun? Yeah, it was fun. But watching all these people shoot for world record times in games like Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy IX, and Final Fantasy X has made me really want to play more Final Fantasy. Not more random passable roguelike with Final Fantasy monsters. So in the interest of spurring things along I'm just going to call this one quits and move on to the next game in the marathon. Chocobo Racing. At least that sounds short. And then it's FFIX!
Finally, I need to rank this game among the rest of them. Well, I didn't finish it. So I think that means it has to go way near the end. It was definitely better than Ehrgeiz and I was so mad at FFLIII for letting me skip a mandatory item that this gets put above that one too. But I think it's got to go below FFL. Sorry Chocobo. Maybe your racing game will fare better.
It turns out the game has a bit of a crafting system to it. You can throw stuff in a pot and new stuff comes out. It turns out the new stuff is entirely random and isn't based on what you throw in at all and none of it is useful so it's just kind of an annoying thing that exists but shouldn't be used. Then there's crafting weapons and armour and it turns out to be really intricate and require doing all kinds of crazy things. The game has one shot spell books but you get better at casting those spells the more you use them and there's ways to craft things that make the spells better.
Getting killed also isn't a game over in this game. Instead you respawn back in town with an empty inventory but you keep your levels. In some ways this was very good (it was the only way I found to unequip my cursed claw) but in other ways it meant it didn't really matter what I was doing. One of the key features on a roguelike to me is the fear of permanent death should you make a mistake. You died? Time to start over! Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon 2 seems a lot longer than something like FTL though. And it has a lot more RPG elements that build up over longer periods of time.
Was the game fun? Yeah, it was fun. But watching all these people shoot for world record times in games like Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy IX, and Final Fantasy X has made me really want to play more Final Fantasy. Not more random passable roguelike with Final Fantasy monsters. So in the interest of spurring things along I'm just going to call this one quits and move on to the next game in the marathon. Chocobo Racing. At least that sounds short. And then it's FFIX!
Finally, I need to rank this game among the rest of them. Well, I didn't finish it. So I think that means it has to go way near the end. It was definitely better than Ehrgeiz and I was so mad at FFLIII for letting me skip a mandatory item that this gets put above that one too. But I think it's got to go below FFL. Sorry Chocobo. Maybe your racing game will fare better.
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Ehrgeiz: Conclusions
Ehrgeiz got tossed to the side when my Kobo died a few months ago and I decided I wanted to play Final Fantasy VIII on the bus. I feared doing so would mean I wouldn't play Ehrgeiz again, and it turns out I know myself pretty well. After finished FFVIII I tried loading Ehrgeiz back up again but I didn't really remember how to play and quickly found myself game overed. It wasn't much fun the first time around and I have no desire whatsoever to play it again from the beginning. So, that's the end of that.
How was the game? Well, the fighting game mode seemed almost reasonable. It was an early 3D fighting game, which is a genre I'm not a big fan of. I can play older RPGs and like them fine, but the flaws in an older fighting game really bother me. It's apparently seen as a top tier PlayStation game though (73rd best according to some Japanese magazine) so maybe it's just me who doesn't like it. The dungeon mode stapled RPG elements onto the fighting game, but it was still the fighting game at heart. Slow, awkward combat is not my idea of a good time. I actually do like some games in the fighting game/RPG genre, like Devil May Cry, but this one was just too slow, too incomprehensible, and maybe too hard for me to like.
I couldn't bring myself to plow through the game and finish it, so it can't get a very good spot on my chart. I think it has to fall down with Final Fantasy Legend III as games I didn't complete. Is it better or worse than that? I think for someone who likes older fighting games in the slightest it's way better than FFLIII, but I am not one of those people. So I have to put it all the way in last place. Yesterday brought a new best game to my list, today brings a new worst game. Huzzah!
How was the game? Well, the fighting game mode seemed almost reasonable. It was an early 3D fighting game, which is a genre I'm not a big fan of. I can play older RPGs and like them fine, but the flaws in an older fighting game really bother me. It's apparently seen as a top tier PlayStation game though (73rd best according to some Japanese magazine) so maybe it's just me who doesn't like it. The dungeon mode stapled RPG elements onto the fighting game, but it was still the fighting game at heart. Slow, awkward combat is not my idea of a good time. I actually do like some games in the fighting game/RPG genre, like Devil May Cry, but this one was just too slow, too incomprehensible, and maybe too hard for me to like.
I couldn't bring myself to plow through the game and finish it, so it can't get a very good spot on my chart. I think it has to fall down with Final Fantasy Legend III as games I didn't complete. Is it better or worse than that? I think for someone who likes older fighting games in the slightest it's way better than FFLIII, but I am not one of those people. So I have to put it all the way in last place. Yesterday brought a new best game to my list, today brings a new worst game. Huzzah!
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Final Fantasy VIII Conclusions
I ended up deciding not to reload from a previous save in order to farm up the items needed to beat Omega Weapon. Instead I just pushed forward to Ultimecia who I took out on the first try. She has an interesting mechanic I'd forgotten about. Like in Final Fantasy VI they put in a way to use all of your characters in the boss fight, not just one party's worth. In FFVIII the way that works is you get given 3 characters at random. When one of them dies you have a short window of time to bring them back to life or they get lost in time and replaced by a different character. I hadn't set up for this, so I had 3 worthless characters and 3 awesome ones. I ended up losing all 3 worthless characters in time, and 2 of the awesome ones, but Squall managed to finish her off. It was an interesting final boss fight for sure, and I could have easily lost with the no-prep I put in. With a save point right outside the fight I like it.
The game ends with a pretty fantastic FMV cutscene. Switching to the PlayStation really was a great deal for the series as the extra room for movies like this is a big boost. I've linked it below. One great thing about the movie is they use the full song "Eyes on Me" which was apparently the first video game song to win a mainstream music award in Japan.
I like how the ending cutscene ties into the intro cutscene. At the start of the game you really don't know why the pretty dark haired girl is standing alone in a field of flowers saying she'll be waiting there. But the final dungeon of the game takes place in a time compressed area. Once you kill Ultimecia time goes back to being a normal continuum but the characters in the party need to find their way back to the right time. Most of them have no problem with this, since they have actual ties to their time. Squall does not. He's a perpetual outsider, emotionally detached from his world. So how would he find his way to the right time? He wants to go to the right time. He wants to be with Rinoa. But he can't figure out a way to do it. They tried to set up the flower field as the place to go, but he fails. She ends up having to leave the field and find him lost in the desert, but once together they end up in the field after all.
It's the sort of thing that gets me thinking. If I was lost in time, where would I end up? Would I end up back here? Sometime random? Or just lost in the void because I have nowhere specific to go? Throughout the game I always felt like Squall was doing things just like I would do them and this is no different. I would be lost. Probably forever, as I have no field to go to and no Rinoa to force me to go there. On the plus side I doubt I'm going to actually get lost in time!
As for the game itself, I had a lot of fun playing it. Playing without gaining levels didn't make the game any harder at all. It made a couple points trickier in terms of needing to run/card/stone enemies but it didn't make things harder. Overall it probably made things easier. Except Omega Weapon, anyway!
I'm still not a huge fan of the spell draw system. I hate consumable items and turning spells into consumable items is not appreciated. The plus side is it tends to be really easy to get more copies of the spells so that it turns the consumable issue from one of hoarding precious resources to one of wasting time hitting the draw command every fight. I actually like the junction system. Especially when you have one spell that's much better than the others, so you have to make a choice between getting lots of strength, intelligence, or maximum health. I like the GF system too, where you choose what skills you gain as time goes by.
The music and graphics are incredible. The FMVs are miles ahead of the ones in FFVII, and those were pretty great too. The sound track for this game is my favourite of all the games. I used to listen to the full OSTs for the different games at work and FFVIII was the best.
I like the story and the characters a lot. Quistis doesn't have much going for her but I like the interactions between Selphie and Irvine. Zell is crazy in a good way. Even the bad guys are pretty great. Seifer is a jerk and a bully and I hate him, but he actually seems like a sensible jerk and bully. It's not like Sephiroth or Kefka who just seem crazy and evil. Seifer feels like he could easily be a real person. The same with most of the sorceresses. I mean, super magic powers aren't real so I guess that's a strike against them acting like real people, but if you take as an axiom that magic is real the way they behave seems to follow. Cid reminds me of Robin Williams for some reason.
The card game is the best mini game in any game I've ever played.
Final Fantasy VIII is tops in practically every category I care about among all the games I've played thus far in this marathon. Music, graphics, cutscenes, minigames, characters, plot... It falls behind in terms of leveling system thanks to the whole draw system. Leveling systems tend to be the meat of an RPG, so is that failing enough to drop this game down in the overall list? No. I can understand how many people would feel that way, but I don't. Welcome to the #1 spot, FFVIII.
The game ends with a pretty fantastic FMV cutscene. Switching to the PlayStation really was a great deal for the series as the extra room for movies like this is a big boost. I've linked it below. One great thing about the movie is they use the full song "Eyes on Me" which was apparently the first video game song to win a mainstream music award in Japan.
I like how the ending cutscene ties into the intro cutscene. At the start of the game you really don't know why the pretty dark haired girl is standing alone in a field of flowers saying she'll be waiting there. But the final dungeon of the game takes place in a time compressed area. Once you kill Ultimecia time goes back to being a normal continuum but the characters in the party need to find their way back to the right time. Most of them have no problem with this, since they have actual ties to their time. Squall does not. He's a perpetual outsider, emotionally detached from his world. So how would he find his way to the right time? He wants to go to the right time. He wants to be with Rinoa. But he can't figure out a way to do it. They tried to set up the flower field as the place to go, but he fails. She ends up having to leave the field and find him lost in the desert, but once together they end up in the field after all.
It's the sort of thing that gets me thinking. If I was lost in time, where would I end up? Would I end up back here? Sometime random? Or just lost in the void because I have nowhere specific to go? Throughout the game I always felt like Squall was doing things just like I would do them and this is no different. I would be lost. Probably forever, as I have no field to go to and no Rinoa to force me to go there. On the plus side I doubt I'm going to actually get lost in time!
As for the game itself, I had a lot of fun playing it. Playing without gaining levels didn't make the game any harder at all. It made a couple points trickier in terms of needing to run/card/stone enemies but it didn't make things harder. Overall it probably made things easier. Except Omega Weapon, anyway!
I'm still not a huge fan of the spell draw system. I hate consumable items and turning spells into consumable items is not appreciated. The plus side is it tends to be really easy to get more copies of the spells so that it turns the consumable issue from one of hoarding precious resources to one of wasting time hitting the draw command every fight. I actually like the junction system. Especially when you have one spell that's much better than the others, so you have to make a choice between getting lots of strength, intelligence, or maximum health. I like the GF system too, where you choose what skills you gain as time goes by.
The music and graphics are incredible. The FMVs are miles ahead of the ones in FFVII, and those were pretty great too. The sound track for this game is my favourite of all the games. I used to listen to the full OSTs for the different games at work and FFVIII was the best.
I like the story and the characters a lot. Quistis doesn't have much going for her but I like the interactions between Selphie and Irvine. Zell is crazy in a good way. Even the bad guys are pretty great. Seifer is a jerk and a bully and I hate him, but he actually seems like a sensible jerk and bully. It's not like Sephiroth or Kefka who just seem crazy and evil. Seifer feels like he could easily be a real person. The same with most of the sorceresses. I mean, super magic powers aren't real so I guess that's a strike against them acting like real people, but if you take as an axiom that magic is real the way they behave seems to follow. Cid reminds me of Robin Williams for some reason.
The card game is the best mini game in any game I've ever played.
Final Fantasy VIII is tops in practically every category I care about among all the games I've played thus far in this marathon. Music, graphics, cutscenes, minigames, characters, plot... It falls behind in terms of leveling system thanks to the whole draw system. Leveling systems tend to be the meat of an RPG, so is that failing enough to drop this game down in the overall list? No. I can understand how many people would feel that way, but I don't. Welcome to the #1 spot, FFVIII.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Final Fantasy Tactics: Conclusions
I finally got back into playing Tactics on the bus after giving up on the Cloud quest chain. It turns out I was only about 10 story battles from the end of the game when I diverted myself to work on Cloud which I'm pretty sure was a big mistake. The 15ish levels I gained from random encounters coupled with getting all of the math skills pretty much trivialized the end of the game. Frequently I would win a fight before the enemy even got a turn. The final boss had a couple of different stages and his final super-powerful stage didn't even get to resolve an action. Ramza got 3 actions each of which was to attack with dual-wielded Ragnarok+Excalibur for about 800 damage per round. Add in a couple mathed up holys and it was all over rather quickly.
The combat in Final Fantasy Tactics was awesome. The combat in Final Fantasy Mathed Holy was really boring. Part of the strategic interplay in the early fights was working around the different attack ranges of people and trying not to get engaged on first. With the math skill you can kill anyone from across the map in one fast action. And by fast I mean no cast delay, not in terms of time spent in the fight. It took a non-trivial amount of time to pick the right math skill (I'd one shot my own guys if I chose anything that targeted any ally) and the holy spell animation wasn't exactly fast even with the PSP hack I was running. Often random encounters near the end of a Final Fantasy game get trivial but then you just hold down the attack button and win. Here it still took time and thinking but with no real rewarding payoff.
I love job systems, and this one is definitely better than FFV or FFIII. Character power levels kept fluctuating up and down as I'd switch to new jobs and get worse immediately but with the promise of getting better in the future. You learn new jobs not at predetermined plot points but as you level up other jobs which meant different characters would be in different spots on the power curve which was nice. It also meant you couldn't just switch everyone to a single job that trivialized a fight without putting in an awful lot of job point farming.
The plot was certainly different from a core Final Fantasy game, but was still interesting. There ended up being an ultimate evil dude trying to rise to power but it was buried beneath layer after layer of political subterfuge. We're talking fake princesses, patricide, manipulated wars, and backstab after backstab. For the most part you only get to find stuff out when the main character finds out, and he's a bit of a wandering doofus so he's pretty in the dark for most of the game. I guess Delita ends up actually being the remembered hero but for good chunks of the game he seemed to be either dead or evil. (And in a scene after the credits he's actually victim of a murder-suicide by his wife, the queen!)
The ending was nice and vague like all the PlayStation era games. The ending implies that Ramza and Alma survived the final battle where the gates of hell exploded around them, in an area with no escape. But other than one brief glimpse by Orran they're never seen by anyone ever again? And the rest of my party, which featured a lot of important people, also never turned up? I feel like they're probably all dead and Orran was hallucinating when he saw them wander by. And then when Orran tries to tell the truth and gets burned at the stake by the church because it might paint them in a bad light? So good. The game had a very anti-nobility/anti-church/anti-power theme running through it and it was nice to see it pay off in the end with even more murder for the sake of power.
Side quests were a big let down. Going on the Cloud quest and doing some of the errands made me frustrated with the game. The game seemed to time out pretty well in terms of hitting peak power right at the end of the plot assuming you didn't try to power up at any point along the way. But doing the side quests meant extra powering up which skewed the difficulty of the story missions, didn't actually accomplish anything of use, and weren't challenging in any way. I actually feel like the game would have been better without the errands in the taverns. Alternatively, remove random encounters from the world map entirely. You still want a place to go to level up for people who need it, so leave a couple spaces off in the wilderness to grind random dudes, but making me fight stupid fights over and over just because I want to go from Goug to Gariland was a really bad idea.
The music was pretty good, but unspectacular relative to the core games. Nobuo Uematsu wasn't involved, which may have something to do with it. Or everything to do with it. The music did feel like it fit the mood of a lot of the game, it's just missing that extra something to push it over the top.
The played time on my saved game was over 33 hours which is the most of any game thus far in the marathon. And that number is really deflated considering just how many times I died and had to reload on some of the earlier fights. And for the most part I was having a lot of fun while playing. Especially while dying! I think intentionally keeping my level down at the start was a good idea. I lost track of that plan in the middle when I started going crazy with shouting myself which eventually lead to being too powerful when I did those extra random encounters. I think the game makes a great puzzle game where you need to figure out how to possibly beat some of the fights. Like the fight very early on where black mages first show up! Or male thieves! I want to play again with a more strict rule set in terms of what I can do to make it really hard. I read one thing about beating the game at level 1, where pretty much you have to use a secondary character to spill off monk JP to your main party and then they run the counter strike ability to kill everything without gaining experience for it!
Now the big question... Where should it fall in my ranking? This is a tough one, and one I wasn't expecting to find tough at all. It's a spin off game, how can it compete? Well, it turns out I really, really like tactical combat. The level system and combat in this game were the best of any played thus far by a mile. Sure, powering up made it too easy but that's true of all the other games too. Maybe not FFVII because it actually had stupidly challenging side bosses to kill, but the main storyline of FFVII gets really trivial if you power up at all. So while this is a strike fresh in my mind for FFT it's not one that's actually any different from other games. The character development and epic plot are weak points, though. As is the fact I had to hack my PSP to play the game without massive amounts of graphical lag. So while FFT wins in some categories that feel like they should be the important ones I think the overall picture drags it down enough to keep it below the major contenders thus far. I think it beats the last game with a job system, and therefore slots in at #4 thus far.
Next up, whatever Ehrgeiz is. I need to go out after work to the vintage video game store and see about buying a copy of it.
The combat in Final Fantasy Tactics was awesome. The combat in Final Fantasy Mathed Holy was really boring. Part of the strategic interplay in the early fights was working around the different attack ranges of people and trying not to get engaged on first. With the math skill you can kill anyone from across the map in one fast action. And by fast I mean no cast delay, not in terms of time spent in the fight. It took a non-trivial amount of time to pick the right math skill (I'd one shot my own guys if I chose anything that targeted any ally) and the holy spell animation wasn't exactly fast even with the PSP hack I was running. Often random encounters near the end of a Final Fantasy game get trivial but then you just hold down the attack button and win. Here it still took time and thinking but with no real rewarding payoff.
I love job systems, and this one is definitely better than FFV or FFIII. Character power levels kept fluctuating up and down as I'd switch to new jobs and get worse immediately but with the promise of getting better in the future. You learn new jobs not at predetermined plot points but as you level up other jobs which meant different characters would be in different spots on the power curve which was nice. It also meant you couldn't just switch everyone to a single job that trivialized a fight without putting in an awful lot of job point farming.
The plot was certainly different from a core Final Fantasy game, but was still interesting. There ended up being an ultimate evil dude trying to rise to power but it was buried beneath layer after layer of political subterfuge. We're talking fake princesses, patricide, manipulated wars, and backstab after backstab. For the most part you only get to find stuff out when the main character finds out, and he's a bit of a wandering doofus so he's pretty in the dark for most of the game. I guess Delita ends up actually being the remembered hero but for good chunks of the game he seemed to be either dead or evil. (And in a scene after the credits he's actually victim of a murder-suicide by his wife, the queen!)
The ending was nice and vague like all the PlayStation era games. The ending implies that Ramza and Alma survived the final battle where the gates of hell exploded around them, in an area with no escape. But other than one brief glimpse by Orran they're never seen by anyone ever again? And the rest of my party, which featured a lot of important people, also never turned up? I feel like they're probably all dead and Orran was hallucinating when he saw them wander by. And then when Orran tries to tell the truth and gets burned at the stake by the church because it might paint them in a bad light? So good. The game had a very anti-nobility/anti-church/anti-power theme running through it and it was nice to see it pay off in the end with even more murder for the sake of power.
Side quests were a big let down. Going on the Cloud quest and doing some of the errands made me frustrated with the game. The game seemed to time out pretty well in terms of hitting peak power right at the end of the plot assuming you didn't try to power up at any point along the way. But doing the side quests meant extra powering up which skewed the difficulty of the story missions, didn't actually accomplish anything of use, and weren't challenging in any way. I actually feel like the game would have been better without the errands in the taverns. Alternatively, remove random encounters from the world map entirely. You still want a place to go to level up for people who need it, so leave a couple spaces off in the wilderness to grind random dudes, but making me fight stupid fights over and over just because I want to go from Goug to Gariland was a really bad idea.
The music was pretty good, but unspectacular relative to the core games. Nobuo Uematsu wasn't involved, which may have something to do with it. Or everything to do with it. The music did feel like it fit the mood of a lot of the game, it's just missing that extra something to push it over the top.
The played time on my saved game was over 33 hours which is the most of any game thus far in the marathon. And that number is really deflated considering just how many times I died and had to reload on some of the earlier fights. And for the most part I was having a lot of fun while playing. Especially while dying! I think intentionally keeping my level down at the start was a good idea. I lost track of that plan in the middle when I started going crazy with shouting myself which eventually lead to being too powerful when I did those extra random encounters. I think the game makes a great puzzle game where you need to figure out how to possibly beat some of the fights. Like the fight very early on where black mages first show up! Or male thieves! I want to play again with a more strict rule set in terms of what I can do to make it really hard. I read one thing about beating the game at level 1, where pretty much you have to use a secondary character to spill off monk JP to your main party and then they run the counter strike ability to kill everything without gaining experience for it!
Now the big question... Where should it fall in my ranking? This is a tough one, and one I wasn't expecting to find tough at all. It's a spin off game, how can it compete? Well, it turns out I really, really like tactical combat. The level system and combat in this game were the best of any played thus far by a mile. Sure, powering up made it too easy but that's true of all the other games too. Maybe not FFVII because it actually had stupidly challenging side bosses to kill, but the main storyline of FFVII gets really trivial if you power up at all. So while this is a strike fresh in my mind for FFT it's not one that's actually any different from other games. The character development and epic plot are weak points, though. As is the fact I had to hack my PSP to play the game without massive amounts of graphical lag. So while FFT wins in some categories that feel like they should be the important ones I think the overall picture drags it down enough to keep it below the major contenders thus far. I think it beats the last game with a job system, and therefore slots in at #4 thus far.
Next up, whatever Ehrgeiz is. I need to go out after work to the vintage video game store and see about buying a copy of it.
Tuesday, January 01, 2013
Final Fantasy VII Conclusions
So I wasn't sure if I wanted to power up really hard or just go kill Sephiroth. I knew that a piece of materia I needed for twinking out was found in the final dungeon (it would let Yuffie morph all enemies with one attack which is useful for maxxing speed and luck) so as soon as I got to disk 3 I went into the final dungeon. I figured when I found the master all materia I'd decide what to do at that point since I'd need it for either of my paths. And then I ended up running into Sephiroth before finding the materia. I guess I missed a turn or something. At any rate, despite him using the most over the top move in the history of over the top moves, I won easily. Yuffie attacked for 20k each turn. Since it turns out he only has 80k health the fight didn't last very long. Pretty sure the animation on super nova was longer than the rest of the fight combined. And yes, the move super nova does cause the sun to go super nova and destroy the solar system. I don't know how we keep fighting at that point, but fight on we did.
I guess I had twinked out a little since I did farm up 50ish power sources for Yuffie and got her ultimate weapon but it's nothing like what I could have done. I didn't even get enough AP into my 2-cut materia to turn the ability into 4-cut! At any rate I beat the final boss so I guess I'm done? I still had a bunch of stuff to write about, but I guess that's what a conclusion post is for, eh?
I did manage to date Yuffie in the amusement park. She was so cute... And Cloud was such a jerk. Made me feel bad for her. Yuffie is awesome, though. Tifa would be awesome if she wasn't so... disproportioned? I've never been a fan of Aeris but maybe that's just because I know she's going to die so there's no need to get attached? Also she's terrible at beating down and my default mode in these games it to attack first and cast spells later.
I didn't get around to raising or racing chocobo. I didn't play in the battle square. I only got one ultimate weapon and didn't learn any of the level 4 limit breaks. I didn't kill ultimate weapon, emerald weapon, or ruby weapon. I hardly did any of the fort condor battles. I left a lot of stuff on the table here, and still got a lot of play-time in on the game. Around 29 hours worth. That's a fair bit more than I put into either IV, V, or VI and I did practically everything in all of those games. I'm sure I had at least 10-20 more hours of other stuff I could have done in VII.
Of course, you didn't need to do any of that stuff to beat the game... But they put in challenge bosses to make powering up mean something. That's always been one of the annoying things about IV and VI. I could get to max level and manage my stat growths and such but at the end of the day it didn't matter. Tight play could beat Zeromus and Kefka at practically any level and they were pretty much as good as it got for bad guys in those games. The same is pretty much true of Sephiroth in terms of how easy he is to beat but not in terms of the side bosses. Emerald and ruby weapons are hard. If I hadn't beaten them the first time I played I'd feel more obligated to reload before I went into the final dungeon and go beat them up. As is, I think I'm ok with skipping them.
As far as the ending goes, I remain convinced after beating it again that the humans actually lose. I don't know how Red XIII's race manages to come back to life and regain control of the planet but I don't think any humans survived the clash between planet, holy, and meteor. I wouldn't be surprised if the planet needed to kill all the humans to generate enough spirit energy to beat off meteor. The humans could then all go to the promised land and live in the lifestream of the planet where they couldn't build any more mako reactors going forward.
The question of where to rank this game on my list is a tricky one. I feel like FFVI did absolutely everything it could have done with the constraints of the SNES hardware and cartridge. I feel like FFVII did some things less well than FFVI did. But I feel that the extra power from the switch to the PlayStation really helped it out. I prefer the music in VI to VII, but it sounds better through the PS. The addition of FMV sequences really made my day, but I think I would have preferred FFVI FMVs if they'd existed. The skill system in FFVII is awesome, though having some materia be missable sours me a little bit. I never could get the added effect materia because I missed it the one time I was allowed into cosmo canyon's dungeon. The plot and bad guy in VI were better than the ones in VII. But VII has so many extra things! It's a longer game just in terms of the game itself and then it has all this extra stuff you can go do. FFVI couldn't have had minigames the way VII did. But is it fair to take that into account? I feel like I should be looking at the game as a whole here and that includes all the stuff VII could do that VI couldn't.
I never really liked VII in the past, but I think that was my contrarian behaviour shining through. I was living with a house full of people who loved VII and found VIII annoying. I saw VIII before VII, liked it, and therefore took the opposite stance. But when it comes right down to it VII is a pretty fantastic game. There's a reason VII remains the highest selling game of the Final Fantasy series. 14 year old Nick is really mad that I'm putting any newfangled PS game ahead of the awesome FFIV and FFVI, but I think I'm going to have to. Welcome to #1, FFVII. I don't know how long it's going to last, but you've earned it for now.
Next up, Final Fantasy Tactics and then whatever this Ehrgeiz thing is. I don't own that second one yet, so I guess I should probably get searching.
I guess I had twinked out a little since I did farm up 50ish power sources for Yuffie and got her ultimate weapon but it's nothing like what I could have done. I didn't even get enough AP into my 2-cut materia to turn the ability into 4-cut! At any rate I beat the final boss so I guess I'm done? I still had a bunch of stuff to write about, but I guess that's what a conclusion post is for, eh?
I did manage to date Yuffie in the amusement park. She was so cute... And Cloud was such a jerk. Made me feel bad for her. Yuffie is awesome, though. Tifa would be awesome if she wasn't so... disproportioned? I've never been a fan of Aeris but maybe that's just because I know she's going to die so there's no need to get attached? Also she's terrible at beating down and my default mode in these games it to attack first and cast spells later.
I didn't get around to raising or racing chocobo. I didn't play in the battle square. I only got one ultimate weapon and didn't learn any of the level 4 limit breaks. I didn't kill ultimate weapon, emerald weapon, or ruby weapon. I hardly did any of the fort condor battles. I left a lot of stuff on the table here, and still got a lot of play-time in on the game. Around 29 hours worth. That's a fair bit more than I put into either IV, V, or VI and I did practically everything in all of those games. I'm sure I had at least 10-20 more hours of other stuff I could have done in VII.
Of course, you didn't need to do any of that stuff to beat the game... But they put in challenge bosses to make powering up mean something. That's always been one of the annoying things about IV and VI. I could get to max level and manage my stat growths and such but at the end of the day it didn't matter. Tight play could beat Zeromus and Kefka at practically any level and they were pretty much as good as it got for bad guys in those games. The same is pretty much true of Sephiroth in terms of how easy he is to beat but not in terms of the side bosses. Emerald and ruby weapons are hard. If I hadn't beaten them the first time I played I'd feel more obligated to reload before I went into the final dungeon and go beat them up. As is, I think I'm ok with skipping them.
As far as the ending goes, I remain convinced after beating it again that the humans actually lose. I don't know how Red XIII's race manages to come back to life and regain control of the planet but I don't think any humans survived the clash between planet, holy, and meteor. I wouldn't be surprised if the planet needed to kill all the humans to generate enough spirit energy to beat off meteor. The humans could then all go to the promised land and live in the lifestream of the planet where they couldn't build any more mako reactors going forward.
The question of where to rank this game on my list is a tricky one. I feel like FFVI did absolutely everything it could have done with the constraints of the SNES hardware and cartridge. I feel like FFVII did some things less well than FFVI did. But I feel that the extra power from the switch to the PlayStation really helped it out. I prefer the music in VI to VII, but it sounds better through the PS. The addition of FMV sequences really made my day, but I think I would have preferred FFVI FMVs if they'd existed. The skill system in FFVII is awesome, though having some materia be missable sours me a little bit. I never could get the added effect materia because I missed it the one time I was allowed into cosmo canyon's dungeon. The plot and bad guy in VI were better than the ones in VII. But VII has so many extra things! It's a longer game just in terms of the game itself and then it has all this extra stuff you can go do. FFVI couldn't have had minigames the way VII did. But is it fair to take that into account? I feel like I should be looking at the game as a whole here and that includes all the stuff VII could do that VI couldn't.
I never really liked VII in the past, but I think that was my contrarian behaviour shining through. I was living with a house full of people who loved VII and found VIII annoying. I saw VIII before VII, liked it, and therefore took the opposite stance. But when it comes right down to it VII is a pretty fantastic game. There's a reason VII remains the highest selling game of the Final Fantasy series. 14 year old Nick is really mad that I'm putting any newfangled PS game ahead of the awesome FFIV and FFVI, but I think I'm going to have to. Welcome to #1, FFVII. I don't know how long it's going to last, but you've earned it for now.
Next up, Final Fantasy Tactics and then whatever this Ehrgeiz thing is. I don't own that second one yet, so I guess I should probably get searching.
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Final Fantasy VI: Conclusions
Yesterday on the bus in to work I made my way to the end of Kefka's crazy tower and put an end to his insanity. He was pretty easy. One of his four stages managed to kill off one of my characters, but only because of bad timing on my part. I had entered in the command which killed off the stage and then he attacked 10 times and killed Terra before it resolved. I didn't get a change to cast life on her.
I remember talking with James about this game many years ago and he was annoyed that you couldn't solo Kefka. One of the stages finishes off with an instant death attack that kept trying to resolve even if you dodged it. You could become completely invincible but would get stuck in an infinite loop as the boss stage would use it's death attack, get dodged, and then repeat. Turns out in the PSX version they changed the way it worked. He only tried to use it twice before giving up. Now, I certainly wasn't invincible and pretty much just got lucky that Setzer dodged it twice.
I was a little sad at how easy pretty much everything was, actually. Some of the fights right at the start of the ruined world were a little rough but I scaled much better than the boss fights did. I didn't even twink out very hard at all. I didn't switch in espers right before leveling to make sure I got optimal stat ups. I didn't grind out extra levels. I didn't even bother finishing off the paladin shield. Even worse, I didn't bother taking it off... Setzer kicked the snot out of Kefka even with a cursed shield on. My mages were casting flare or meteor instead of ultima because I took the ragnarok sword and didn't finish the paladin shield. In short, I could have been a lot more powerful. I'm a little sad that there was nothing to do that needed such an absurd amount of power.
I was feeling a lot of ennui with regards to finishing the game. It took about two and a half months to get done which is pretty comparable to what it took to grind out Final Fantasy IV. Don't get me wrong, I think both games are incredible even after all these years. I think the problem is just that I've played them so many times there really wasn't any exploring left to do and that's one of the great end game features of these games. FFVI in particular has so many little cutscenes you can find depending on who you have in your current party. Did you know Shadow is actually Relm's father? Wandering around with different party compositions was a ton of fun back in the day. But now? I didn't really have a great desire to watch Gau interact with his father again.
That said, this game has my favourite villain from any game. And thinking about it more, I think it actually has my top three player characters as well. Setzer, Locke, and Celes are all awesome in their own ways. I like me some Kimarhi, don't get me wrong, but I don't think any character in any game passes any of those three.
I love the battle system. Adding in something as simple as the 'pass' command which lets the active character skip their turn is such a huge improvement. I still think I prefer the more tactical system of FFX but as far as the ATB system used from IV through IX goes, this is a pretty good iteration.
The leveling system is pretty great, too. I like how just playing the game normally will get you plenty of spells and stat ups but that you can really twink out if you want. All that's really missing is a reason to twink out. An emerald weapon to go beat up, that kind of thing.
The music is fantastic. The graphics are state of the art for the SNES. You can really tell that this is a later generation SNES game and that Square learned from making FFIV and FFV. The sound in the PSX port was tinny which was annoying, but the original console game didn't suffer from that flaw at all.
Going into this whole marathon I was pretty sure FFIV was going to stay on the top of my heap. If anything was going to challenge it for supremacy I was thinking it might be X or VIII. But no... FFVI is the new king. The characters, character development, plot, gameplay, music... It's all here. This game is the complete package.
I remember talking with James about this game many years ago and he was annoyed that you couldn't solo Kefka. One of the stages finishes off with an instant death attack that kept trying to resolve even if you dodged it. You could become completely invincible but would get stuck in an infinite loop as the boss stage would use it's death attack, get dodged, and then repeat. Turns out in the PSX version they changed the way it worked. He only tried to use it twice before giving up. Now, I certainly wasn't invincible and pretty much just got lucky that Setzer dodged it twice.
I was a little sad at how easy pretty much everything was, actually. Some of the fights right at the start of the ruined world were a little rough but I scaled much better than the boss fights did. I didn't even twink out very hard at all. I didn't switch in espers right before leveling to make sure I got optimal stat ups. I didn't grind out extra levels. I didn't even bother finishing off the paladin shield. Even worse, I didn't bother taking it off... Setzer kicked the snot out of Kefka even with a cursed shield on. My mages were casting flare or meteor instead of ultima because I took the ragnarok sword and didn't finish the paladin shield. In short, I could have been a lot more powerful. I'm a little sad that there was nothing to do that needed such an absurd amount of power.
I was feeling a lot of ennui with regards to finishing the game. It took about two and a half months to get done which is pretty comparable to what it took to grind out Final Fantasy IV. Don't get me wrong, I think both games are incredible even after all these years. I think the problem is just that I've played them so many times there really wasn't any exploring left to do and that's one of the great end game features of these games. FFVI in particular has so many little cutscenes you can find depending on who you have in your current party. Did you know Shadow is actually Relm's father? Wandering around with different party compositions was a ton of fun back in the day. But now? I didn't really have a great desire to watch Gau interact with his father again.
That said, this game has my favourite villain from any game. And thinking about it more, I think it actually has my top three player characters as well. Setzer, Locke, and Celes are all awesome in their own ways. I like me some Kimarhi, don't get me wrong, but I don't think any character in any game passes any of those three.
I love the battle system. Adding in something as simple as the 'pass' command which lets the active character skip their turn is such a huge improvement. I still think I prefer the more tactical system of FFX but as far as the ATB system used from IV through IX goes, this is a pretty good iteration.
The leveling system is pretty great, too. I like how just playing the game normally will get you plenty of spells and stat ups but that you can really twink out if you want. All that's really missing is a reason to twink out. An emerald weapon to go beat up, that kind of thing.
The music is fantastic. The graphics are state of the art for the SNES. You can really tell that this is a later generation SNES game and that Square learned from making FFIV and FFV. The sound in the PSX port was tinny which was annoying, but the original console game didn't suffer from that flaw at all.
Going into this whole marathon I was pretty sure FFIV was going to stay on the top of my heap. If anything was going to challenge it for supremacy I was thinking it might be X or VIII. But no... FFVI is the new king. The characters, character development, plot, gameplay, music... It's all here. This game is the complete package.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Final Fantasy V: Conclusions
I finished up Final Fantasy V on the bus yesterday. X-Death was a complete joke. I'm not sure but I think he got to take one action across both of his phases. Maybe he autoattacked and I just ignored it? I don't know, but all I remember is one petrification attack. Having a cutscene with a phase change but letting me keep my buffs was a little silly. It meant each of my characters got to attack twice before he got to go in phase 2 which was very bad for him. Double Bahamut, mimic the double Bahamut, and two people with flare enchanted weapons attacking 4 or 8 times. Kaboom!
The game was fun. I don't know if the original game was as campy as the PSOne translation but there was some really cute/silly moments. Faris talking like a pirate the whole time was an odd but nice touch. The sprites had some good animations (similar to Mystic Quest, actually) especially in the scene where Butz and Krile leave Faris behind in a princess outfit. She catches up to them and they try to pass the blame off on each other solely with finger pointing and head shaking. I liked it.
As far as the plot goes it was decent but not spectacular. There's a pretty constant big bad, he has a pretty reasonable take on being evil, and he isn't excessively stupid with letting the party live. The first part of the game has him waking up from a 30 year sleep/prison sentence and I can convince myself it took him some time to power up and he couldn't have just murdered us at level 20. The whole two worlds become one thing was interesting but again, not mind blowing.
The music was great but it doesn't quite stay with me as much as the music from FFIV or FFVI. I'm not sure if that's a nostalgia thing with me having played those games a lot as a kid or what. Way better than Mystic Quest, though!
Gameplaywise this is hands-down better than FFIV. They tweaked the ATB system enough to make it really great. Job systems in general are awesome and they really improved upon FFIII's take. Being able to mix and match abilities from different jobs, especially in end game, is really powerful and really fun.
Not being able to pick up sidequests you missed in the end game is annoying. I couldn't summon Shiva because I didn't learn the spell on the first world and that castle just didn't exist in the third world, for example. I'd forgotten that some of the cities were going to get sucked into the void or I probably would have done something about that before I left for the second world.
The important question is, where does this game fit in on my ranking scheme? I enjoyed myself more playing FFV this time around than I did FFIV. I had no immediate desire to replay FFIV when I finished it but I want to play FFV again for a couple of different reasons. I'd like to play a mage-centric party and maybe use some of the jobs I skipped this time like dancer and bard. I'd like to play again at level 2. I liked the game system more in FFV, but I really liked the music, plot, and characters more in FFIV. The characters in FFIV actually developed over the course of the game. Cecil went from the hand of evil to a pure paladin. His relationships with Rosa, Kain, and Rydia evolved as the game went on. Even Edge had some character growth moments and he joined the party pretty late. By contrast, Butz started the game as a free spirit on a chocobo. He ended the game as a high level free spirit on a chocobo.
I'm going to have to give the edge to FFIV I think. It's a worse spreadsheet game and I honestly may have played it too many times to really love playing it anymore, but the fact I played it so many times does say a lot. And it's not like the game system in FFIV was bad or anything. It's actually pretty good and was a huge evolution at the time. FFV definitely gets to slot in at #2 thus far. I fear it's going to see that position tumble in the coming games though...
Next up: Final Fantasy VI!
The game was fun. I don't know if the original game was as campy as the PSOne translation but there was some really cute/silly moments. Faris talking like a pirate the whole time was an odd but nice touch. The sprites had some good animations (similar to Mystic Quest, actually) especially in the scene where Butz and Krile leave Faris behind in a princess outfit. She catches up to them and they try to pass the blame off on each other solely with finger pointing and head shaking. I liked it.
As far as the plot goes it was decent but not spectacular. There's a pretty constant big bad, he has a pretty reasonable take on being evil, and he isn't excessively stupid with letting the party live. The first part of the game has him waking up from a 30 year sleep/prison sentence and I can convince myself it took him some time to power up and he couldn't have just murdered us at level 20. The whole two worlds become one thing was interesting but again, not mind blowing.
The music was great but it doesn't quite stay with me as much as the music from FFIV or FFVI. I'm not sure if that's a nostalgia thing with me having played those games a lot as a kid or what. Way better than Mystic Quest, though!
Gameplaywise this is hands-down better than FFIV. They tweaked the ATB system enough to make it really great. Job systems in general are awesome and they really improved upon FFIII's take. Being able to mix and match abilities from different jobs, especially in end game, is really powerful and really fun.
Not being able to pick up sidequests you missed in the end game is annoying. I couldn't summon Shiva because I didn't learn the spell on the first world and that castle just didn't exist in the third world, for example. I'd forgotten that some of the cities were going to get sucked into the void or I probably would have done something about that before I left for the second world.
The important question is, where does this game fit in on my ranking scheme? I enjoyed myself more playing FFV this time around than I did FFIV. I had no immediate desire to replay FFIV when I finished it but I want to play FFV again for a couple of different reasons. I'd like to play a mage-centric party and maybe use some of the jobs I skipped this time like dancer and bard. I'd like to play again at level 2. I liked the game system more in FFV, but I really liked the music, plot, and characters more in FFIV. The characters in FFIV actually developed over the course of the game. Cecil went from the hand of evil to a pure paladin. His relationships with Rosa, Kain, and Rydia evolved as the game went on. Even Edge had some character growth moments and he joined the party pretty late. By contrast, Butz started the game as a free spirit on a chocobo. He ended the game as a high level free spirit on a chocobo.
I'm going to have to give the edge to FFIV I think. It's a worse spreadsheet game and I honestly may have played it too many times to really love playing it anymore, but the fact I played it so many times does say a lot. And it's not like the game system in FFIV was bad or anything. It's actually pretty good and was a huge evolution at the time. FFV definitely gets to slot in at #2 thus far. I fear it's going to see that position tumble in the coming games though...
Next up: Final Fantasy VI!
Tuesday, June 05, 2012
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest Conclusions
I wrapped up my playthrough of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest last night with a little over 8 hours on my save file. I spent more time than that playing the game given the large number of party wipes and reloading that occurred. (I think? I guess the game doesn't actually reload so it could keep the clock running when you retry a fight.) Here are my final thoughts on the game:
I enjoyed the final dungeon. It had a floor for each of the elemental zones which was guarded by a souped up version of the boss of the earlier dungeon. Each floor made minor use of the puzzles used in the original dungeon. (Sword to open the special statues, hook shot, falling down pits...) What I didn't like is how they didn't run a full palette shift and upgrade of the monsters from those zones so I would sometimes run into trivial monsters.
The ending cutscenes were surprising to me. You beat the big bad, you save the world, and you have two pretty young ladies who helped you save the world. I'd think the story would have the hero want to settle down with one of them. You know, really celebrate? Instead the hero asks the captain of the boat if he can 'borrow' it for a while. Defeating the big bad wasn't enough adventure for our hero and he sets out all by himself on the open sea. Then it turns out someone stowed away on board the ship to be with him... Was it Phoebe? Kaeli? Turns out neither! It's Tristam the treasure hunter who just wants adventure too. I'm not saying I don't blame the hero. I'm just surprised that the final cutscenes don't feature romance.
The game is _really_ easy. Monsters frequently had instant death attacks (petrification in particular) and those are a real problem for a two member party. Except when I got hit with one I'd just lose the fight and get to try it again. The difficulty of individual fights was actually pretty unbalanced and was really only salvaged by getting to redo a lost fight immediately. To make things even easier apparently a lot of the bosses are tagged as undead and can be killed with a single life spell. I didn't do this so I can't verify the authenticity, but it is what I read.
It turns out you don't need to run the battleground for the Gemini crest. I think it just lets you warp around the map to cut down on a lot of the excessive walking I ended up doing. I wanted to test the veracity of the wiki article I read stating it was mandatory. It isn't. The two pieces of armor you can get from them aren't really mandatory either since they do get superseded by a purchased item later in the game.
The monster AI was pretty good in some spots and thankfully not too good in others. An enemy with a heal spell could be counted on using it every single time there was an enemy below half, which was good. I did run into two enemies that liked to spam sleep spells. Thankfully they didn't intentionally abuse the power they had, though the did sometimes randomly do it. First round sleep both my party. Second round punch one person and then put them back to sleep. If I ever wake up on my own, sleep both people that round. I'm pretty sure they have a near guaranteed victory if they do that (I was underleveled and therefore slow so I always went last each round). It did get boring when they opened with a sleep on both people and then continued to spam sleep for no reason.
I think a mark of a good game is how much I want to immediately play it again. Final Fantasy III, for example, I wanted to try again with a different job focus. I actually want to play Mystic Quest again with the goal of avoiding absolutely all combat that isn't directly needed to advance the story. I want to see just how low a level I can be and still win. I'm pretty sure the restricting factor isn't going to be power level since my buddy can handle everything I think. It's going to be how much experience I can skip by avoiding fights. (Possibly which side treasure I absolutely need to get? Having access to the top end armor could be clutch.)
On the other hand, I had no such desire upon completing a game from the Final Fantasy Legend series. I think that means I should be ranking Mystic Quest higher than them. Is it better than Final Fantasy Adventure? Final Fantasy II? I think the innovation of cycling items with L/R instead of needing to go into multiple menus pushes it over the top of Adventure. I suspect if I'd played the original version of FFII that Mystic Quest might even come out on top there, too. But I don't think it quite has enough to get there. It's just too short, and too linear, and too easy. But I definitely don't regret playing it. It slides nicely into the #5 slot as the best offshoot I've played thus far.
I enjoyed the final dungeon. It had a floor for each of the elemental zones which was guarded by a souped up version of the boss of the earlier dungeon. Each floor made minor use of the puzzles used in the original dungeon. (Sword to open the special statues, hook shot, falling down pits...) What I didn't like is how they didn't run a full palette shift and upgrade of the monsters from those zones so I would sometimes run into trivial monsters.
The ending cutscenes were surprising to me. You beat the big bad, you save the world, and you have two pretty young ladies who helped you save the world. I'd think the story would have the hero want to settle down with one of them. You know, really celebrate? Instead the hero asks the captain of the boat if he can 'borrow' it for a while. Defeating the big bad wasn't enough adventure for our hero and he sets out all by himself on the open sea. Then it turns out someone stowed away on board the ship to be with him... Was it Phoebe? Kaeli? Turns out neither! It's Tristam the treasure hunter who just wants adventure too. I'm not saying I don't blame the hero. I'm just surprised that the final cutscenes don't feature romance.
The game is _really_ easy. Monsters frequently had instant death attacks (petrification in particular) and those are a real problem for a two member party. Except when I got hit with one I'd just lose the fight and get to try it again. The difficulty of individual fights was actually pretty unbalanced and was really only salvaged by getting to redo a lost fight immediately. To make things even easier apparently a lot of the bosses are tagged as undead and can be killed with a single life spell. I didn't do this so I can't verify the authenticity, but it is what I read.
It turns out you don't need to run the battleground for the Gemini crest. I think it just lets you warp around the map to cut down on a lot of the excessive walking I ended up doing. I wanted to test the veracity of the wiki article I read stating it was mandatory. It isn't. The two pieces of armor you can get from them aren't really mandatory either since they do get superseded by a purchased item later in the game.
The monster AI was pretty good in some spots and thankfully not too good in others. An enemy with a heal spell could be counted on using it every single time there was an enemy below half, which was good. I did run into two enemies that liked to spam sleep spells. Thankfully they didn't intentionally abuse the power they had, though the did sometimes randomly do it. First round sleep both my party. Second round punch one person and then put them back to sleep. If I ever wake up on my own, sleep both people that round. I'm pretty sure they have a near guaranteed victory if they do that (I was underleveled and therefore slow so I always went last each round). It did get boring when they opened with a sleep on both people and then continued to spam sleep for no reason.
I think a mark of a good game is how much I want to immediately play it again. Final Fantasy III, for example, I wanted to try again with a different job focus. I actually want to play Mystic Quest again with the goal of avoiding absolutely all combat that isn't directly needed to advance the story. I want to see just how low a level I can be and still win. I'm pretty sure the restricting factor isn't going to be power level since my buddy can handle everything I think. It's going to be how much experience I can skip by avoiding fights. (Possibly which side treasure I absolutely need to get? Having access to the top end armor could be clutch.)
On the other hand, I had no such desire upon completing a game from the Final Fantasy Legend series. I think that means I should be ranking Mystic Quest higher than them. Is it better than Final Fantasy Adventure? Final Fantasy II? I think the innovation of cycling items with L/R instead of needing to go into multiple menus pushes it over the top of Adventure. I suspect if I'd played the original version of FFII that Mystic Quest might even come out on top there, too. But I don't think it quite has enough to get there. It's just too short, and too linear, and too easy. But I definitely don't regret playing it. It slides nicely into the #5 slot as the best offshoot I've played thus far.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Final Fantasy Legend III: Defeat
I have reached the point in Final Fantasy Legend III where I believe I can no longer make progress. My ship which was once able to travel between time periods broke and stranded me on another world. This is normal. The game was designed taking this into account. You're supposed to be able to get things done and complete the game from this point. Unfortunately you run into a strange race of beings blocking the way. The only way to get up the stairs they're guarding is to cast the morph spell. A spell you can only obtain in the future. Which you don't need to get to the other world. Which I don't have. Which I can't get.
I was thinking this game was better than the previous ones in the series. They mostly got rid of consumable weapons. They switched to a MP system. They allowed you to swap between character types on the fly so you could experiment without getting permanently screwed. Robots still seem like the best and monsters feel a little underwhelming but it wasn't way out of whack. Every fight felt like it moved the party closer to being powerful. The story felt a little more coherent but still pretty surreal.
And then it took a page right out of the Manders' RPG. I didn't pick up an item I didn't know I needed and can no longer beat the game. Maybe I should restart from scratch. Maybe I should check to see if I still have a save state from before I left the future. Maybe I should try to hack the game and add the morph spell to my inventory. But I just don't care enough to do so. I want to move on to the next game in the marathon. I'm playing through all the games and can no longer make progress in this game thanks to terrible game design and I'm going to count that as good enough. And give this game the worst rank thus far.
I was thinking this game was better than the previous ones in the series. They mostly got rid of consumable weapons. They switched to a MP system. They allowed you to swap between character types on the fly so you could experiment without getting permanently screwed. Robots still seem like the best and monsters feel a little underwhelming but it wasn't way out of whack. Every fight felt like it moved the party closer to being powerful. The story felt a little more coherent but still pretty surreal.
And then it took a page right out of the Manders' RPG. I didn't pick up an item I didn't know I needed and can no longer beat the game. Maybe I should restart from scratch. Maybe I should check to see if I still have a save state from before I left the future. Maybe I should try to hack the game and add the morph spell to my inventory. But I just don't care enough to do so. I want to move on to the next game in the marathon. I'm playing through all the games and can no longer make progress in this game thanks to terrible game design and I'm going to count that as good enough. And give this game the worst rank thus far.
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
Final Fantasy IV: Zeroedmus
Last night saw the conclusion of my Final Fantasy IV game. I cleared out most of the final dungeon (I don't know of any paths I skipped but I didn't get all the treasure so I must have missed something) with relative ease. I did almost die to the mini-boss which puts a 10 second Doom timer on the entire party but I barely took him out with 1 second left. Hurray for the Nuke spell!
Zeromus himself came close to winning once but ultimately the fact he has no physical attacks spelled doom for him. He was beating the tar out of Edge and Cecil with his spells but was barely hurting Rosa and Rydia and they're the ones with the healing spells. Cure4 wasn't good enough to keep up but Asura was a full heal. Edge didn't even run out of ninja stars to throw at him before he died and I didn't buy more of them so I just used what I found in chests over the course of the game. I would have been annoyed if I'd died since the save point was so far away but ultimately the fight wasn't all that hard.
I think the game clock in the game was around 14 hours when I finished. I died once to Bahamut but that means I couldn't have spent more than 15 hours total playing the game. 82 days to put in only 15 hours. That's a long time to plow through what I've always said is my favourite game. This time around I often found myself falling asleep while playing! I got frustrated with the ATB system multiple times as well. Did the game just not age well? Have I been spoiled by the iterations that came later?
I don't know. It's been around 8 years since I last played the SNES version but even then I'd played FFX and all previous games. Maybe I've been subconsciously comparing it to the DS version?
Maybe there's just nothing new to experience? There's no console RPG I've played anywhere close to as many times as I've played FFIV and there's not exactly a lot of deviation in how the game plays out. There are a few side quests that can be done but the characters are always the same and I mostly do everything in the same order.
That said the story is awesome. The music is awesome. I love the character and enemy designs. It was my first RPG as a kid and will always have a special place in my memory as a result. I'm slotting it in as #1 on my marathon page so far. But will it be able to hold that spot for long? Coming up shortly is a run of games featuring V, VI, VII, and Tactics which all could compete for the crown I'd just assumed would stay with IV when I started this up last year. But first we have Legend III and Mystic Quest!
Zeromus himself came close to winning once but ultimately the fact he has no physical attacks spelled doom for him. He was beating the tar out of Edge and Cecil with his spells but was barely hurting Rosa and Rydia and they're the ones with the healing spells. Cure4 wasn't good enough to keep up but Asura was a full heal. Edge didn't even run out of ninja stars to throw at him before he died and I didn't buy more of them so I just used what I found in chests over the course of the game. I would have been annoyed if I'd died since the save point was so far away but ultimately the fight wasn't all that hard.
I think the game clock in the game was around 14 hours when I finished. I died once to Bahamut but that means I couldn't have spent more than 15 hours total playing the game. 82 days to put in only 15 hours. That's a long time to plow through what I've always said is my favourite game. This time around I often found myself falling asleep while playing! I got frustrated with the ATB system multiple times as well. Did the game just not age well? Have I been spoiled by the iterations that came later?
I don't know. It's been around 8 years since I last played the SNES version but even then I'd played FFX and all previous games. Maybe I've been subconsciously comparing it to the DS version?
Maybe there's just nothing new to experience? There's no console RPG I've played anywhere close to as many times as I've played FFIV and there's not exactly a lot of deviation in how the game plays out. There are a few side quests that can be done but the characters are always the same and I mostly do everything in the same order.
That said the story is awesome. The music is awesome. I love the character and enemy designs. It was my first RPG as a kid and will always have a special place in my memory as a result. I'm slotting it in as #1 on my marathon page so far. But will it be able to hold that spot for long? Coming up shortly is a run of games featuring V, VI, VII, and Tactics which all could compete for the crown I'd just assumed would stay with IV when I started this up last year. But first we have Legend III and Mystic Quest!
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Final Fantasy Adventure: Conclusions
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| Jo, the Baby Tree of Mana! |
Keys are a real problem in the game. In two different dungeons near the end of the game I ran out of keys and was stuck with a locked door between me and the boss. Early game a lot of enemies dropped keys which got me into the habit of ignoring my key count. I even vendored some keys at one point because I was looting too many from the mobs. But dungeons went from being filled with guys who dropped keys to having maybe one enemy who might drop keys.
I certainly could have solved this problem by just going to a town and buying a lot of keys. I had limited inventory space but I ended the game with my bags full of elixirs that I didn't need to use so I could have afforded the space for a few more keys. I'd advise anyone playing this game to carry around 5 or so stacks of keys at all times. If I play again I know I will.
The puzzles were interesting the first couple times around but it felt like they ran out of ideas and just recycled the same tricks over and over. Needing to bust down a wall to make a secret passage is fine and all, but having to poke every wall of every dungeon in case it's the way I need to go got tiring. I eventually resorted to a description of the last couple dungeons on gamefaqs instead of bothering poking walls. Needing to turn enemies into snowmen to use as weights on pressure plates is the same thing. Really neat the first time. Interesting when it comes up a couple more times as they keep you on your toes. But it felt overdone by the end. I eventually put a few points into wisdom in order to have more mp to cast ice spells for these puzzles.
The blood sword is stupid. It lets you heal when you do damage with sword swings but it seemed like the numbers were off. The big scary dragons at the end of the game would hit me for 1 with their fire and maybe 6 with their claws. I had 503 health. Each time I attacked I gained 13 health. So as long as I hit the dragon once for every 2 times he hit me I'd stay at full and he'd be dying. Follow the boss around mashing attack? Doesn't seem like a very deep strategy but it worked.
Some enemies were immune to physical attacks. Others were immune to magical attacks. So I was forced to constantly switch between my thunder spear and my morning star if I wanted to keep killing enemies. This required a lot of menu interactions which was annoying. Secret of Mana improved on this game greatly with the advent of the menu ring system. Hit one button to show a ring with all your weapons on it. Use the d-pad to rotate the ring so the weapon you want is on top. Hit one button. It also has item rings and magic rings which really worked.
The music was better than the music in the Final Fantasy Legend games I've played thus far but it was still a little tinny. I'm pretty sure the blame for this is with the Game Boy's primitive sound capabilities but that doesn't make my head hurt less. Having to keep the sound on so I could find the hidden walls was annoying and is part of what led to turning to gamefaqs for help.
The plot existed and made sense. There was an obvious villain that you grew to hate as the game progressed, you had a rough idea what he was trying to do, and the stories of the main characters wrapped up in the ending.
Overall this was a pretty good action-RPG game. You can tell it was made 20 years ago for old hardware but it was fun. I don't think it was better than any of the core games in the series thus far but it beats out the Legend games thus far for sure.
Thursday, December 01, 2011
Final Fantasy Legend II: Conclusions
I finished playing FFLII last night. I have a bunch of random thoughts about the game and I'm not going to hold anything back with regards to the plot so bewarned. If you've been holding off playing a 20 year old game and don't want the ending to be spoiled you should look away!
The character 'Dad' is odd. My main character was a robot but NPCs on different worlds kept commenting on how much I looked like him. He's obviously a human with a pretty cool hat. I'm a giant metal box with random stuff glued on to me for stats. Maybe the box shape is just how my sprite is represented and really I'm an android? But then how can I put on 7 pairs of gloves? 'Dad' is also living at least three lives. He has families on two worlds and a job high up in the military on a third. And can apparently pass through the magi-restricted gates without having enough magi.
At the end of the game I manage to convince him to come home to mother. And then in the ending sequence he gets bored and wakes me up in the middle of the night to say goodbye before he jumps out the window again. He's going to look for the Lost Ark. (I'm also pretty sure he was equipped with a whip when he first joined my party...) My character decides to go with him and then so does the mother. And they all jump out the window instead of using the door despite there being no one to sneak away from anymore!
In all it seems like 'Dad' is a crazy mix of Dr. Soong, James Bond, and Indiana Jones.
Item balance in the game is way out of whack. Near the end of the game I was able to buy dragon armor from the store. It gave immunity to the 4 elements! I'd started encountering monsters that would hit everyone in my party for elemental damage. Each attack would do about 70% of my max health. I'd run into groups with like 10 guys who could cast these spells. Surviving those fights was practically impossible without dragon armor. And completely trivial with dragon armor since I took no damage at all from them. It really feels like the enemies should be scaled down a little so they can't just insta-gib you. And then the gear should be scaled down too so it doesn't make you completely invincible.
In one of the last dungeons I found the weapon Excalibur. In most Final Fantasys this weapon is pretty sweet. In the original FF, for example, it had 13 more and 5 more hit than the sun sword. It was a pretty reasonable damage boost, especially if that 5 hit gave you an extra swing. But since a lot of your damage came from stats and level it wasn't really unreasonable. (Masamune was a much bigger boost in that game, especially since any character could use it.) In FFLII, however, Excalibur is really over the top. Most weapons in the game require you to have high agility in order to hit and high strength in order to do damage. A couple weapons did damage based on agility and is what my human was using. The best one in the game does damage equal to agi*13. Xcalibur does damage equal to str*15. Ok, not such a big jump. Very reasonable even, especially since it uses a new stat and you still need agility to hit with it, right? Turns out no. Xcalibur is guaranteed to hit when you attack with it. So even with 1 agility you'd be hitting every time. Oh, and if your strength stat is less than 70 it's actually treated as being 70. The max stat for a human is 99. My human didn't even have 70 agility and had spent the entire game attacking with an agility weapon! On top of the weapon not being able to miss, it also can't be blocked. And if that wasn't good enough it also does AE damage and hits all enemies in a group! Oh yeah, and it has infinite uses. The only such item in the game.
My human used to do around 300 damage to one monster, sometimes missing, and sometimes being blocked if they used a defensive ability. Each time I did that it cost me 220 gold. And I had to spend inventory space lugging around extra weapons for when the current one broke. With Xcalibur she started doing around 800 damage to a group of monsters. Every attack. No way for them to avoid the damage. She pointed at one group of monsters and they died.
I'd say a 14-fold damage increase from one weapon on top of quality of life increases from unlimited uses is a bit of a problem. Certainly not balanced!
The final boss was really random. He has three phases. The first two essentially do nothing. The third casts an AE spell on your party that hits for anything from 70-700 with no way to mitigate the damage. That's a damage range that is way too big! My characters had between 600 and 900 max health so the weakest one could just get killed from full if the boss got lucky.
I ended up being sketchy in order to win. I made excessive use of save states in order to play the fight through using my very limited amount of healing at opportune times. I felt like this wasn't really cheating since I could have just gone back to town, bought more healing staves, and won with ease. (I filled my inventory with them but the second last boss had me use up almost all of them. I should have gone back and bought more but I was lazy.)
If I play again I'm going to drop the human from my party. She seemed to gain stats faster than the mutant but not having any non-consumable actions until I got Xcalibur was really annoying. Robots were definitely cool.
The character 'Dad' is odd. My main character was a robot but NPCs on different worlds kept commenting on how much I looked like him. He's obviously a human with a pretty cool hat. I'm a giant metal box with random stuff glued on to me for stats. Maybe the box shape is just how my sprite is represented and really I'm an android? But then how can I put on 7 pairs of gloves? 'Dad' is also living at least three lives. He has families on two worlds and a job high up in the military on a third. And can apparently pass through the magi-restricted gates without having enough magi.
At the end of the game I manage to convince him to come home to mother. And then in the ending sequence he gets bored and wakes me up in the middle of the night to say goodbye before he jumps out the window again. He's going to look for the Lost Ark. (I'm also pretty sure he was equipped with a whip when he first joined my party...) My character decides to go with him and then so does the mother. And they all jump out the window instead of using the door despite there being no one to sneak away from anymore!
In all it seems like 'Dad' is a crazy mix of Dr. Soong, James Bond, and Indiana Jones.
Item balance in the game is way out of whack. Near the end of the game I was able to buy dragon armor from the store. It gave immunity to the 4 elements! I'd started encountering monsters that would hit everyone in my party for elemental damage. Each attack would do about 70% of my max health. I'd run into groups with like 10 guys who could cast these spells. Surviving those fights was practically impossible without dragon armor. And completely trivial with dragon armor since I took no damage at all from them. It really feels like the enemies should be scaled down a little so they can't just insta-gib you. And then the gear should be scaled down too so it doesn't make you completely invincible.
In one of the last dungeons I found the weapon Excalibur. In most Final Fantasys this weapon is pretty sweet. In the original FF, for example, it had 13 more and 5 more hit than the sun sword. It was a pretty reasonable damage boost, especially if that 5 hit gave you an extra swing. But since a lot of your damage came from stats and level it wasn't really unreasonable. (Masamune was a much bigger boost in that game, especially since any character could use it.) In FFLII, however, Excalibur is really over the top. Most weapons in the game require you to have high agility in order to hit and high strength in order to do damage. A couple weapons did damage based on agility and is what my human was using. The best one in the game does damage equal to agi*13. Xcalibur does damage equal to str*15. Ok, not such a big jump. Very reasonable even, especially since it uses a new stat and you still need agility to hit with it, right? Turns out no. Xcalibur is guaranteed to hit when you attack with it. So even with 1 agility you'd be hitting every time. Oh, and if your strength stat is less than 70 it's actually treated as being 70. The max stat for a human is 99. My human didn't even have 70 agility and had spent the entire game attacking with an agility weapon! On top of the weapon not being able to miss, it also can't be blocked. And if that wasn't good enough it also does AE damage and hits all enemies in a group! Oh yeah, and it has infinite uses. The only such item in the game.
My human used to do around 300 damage to one monster, sometimes missing, and sometimes being blocked if they used a defensive ability. Each time I did that it cost me 220 gold. And I had to spend inventory space lugging around extra weapons for when the current one broke. With Xcalibur she started doing around 800 damage to a group of monsters. Every attack. No way for them to avoid the damage. She pointed at one group of monsters and they died.
I'd say a 14-fold damage increase from one weapon on top of quality of life increases from unlimited uses is a bit of a problem. Certainly not balanced!
The final boss was really random. He has three phases. The first two essentially do nothing. The third casts an AE spell on your party that hits for anything from 70-700 with no way to mitigate the damage. That's a damage range that is way too big! My characters had between 600 and 900 max health so the weakest one could just get killed from full if the boss got lucky.
I ended up being sketchy in order to win. I made excessive use of save states in order to play the fight through using my very limited amount of healing at opportune times. I felt like this wasn't really cheating since I could have just gone back to town, bought more healing staves, and won with ease. (I filled my inventory with them but the second last boss had me use up almost all of them. I should have gone back and bought more but I was lazy.)
If I play again I'm going to drop the human from my party. She seemed to gain stats faster than the mutant but not having any non-consumable actions until I got Xcalibur was really annoying. Robots were definitely cool.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Final Fantasy III: Second Time's A Charm!
I plowed my way through the final dungeon to the final boss who behaved differently than every other boss fight in the game in ways that made my initial plan bad. Unfortunately it took me a few rounds to figure out what was going on and by that point it was almost too late. It turns out the final boss has two tentacles which take actions as well and aren't taunted along with the main boss by my viking. They still follow the rule of one spell per monster no matter how many actions they take in a round but there are 3 monsters so they can cast three spells. One of the tentacles always seemed to cast a spell which did about 80% of my black belt's maximum health. The main boss sometimes cast a spell which did about that much as well. Eventually I realized the tentacles existed, just let my black belt stay dead, put a shield on the ninja, and just threw shuriken at the tentacle casting lightning. I managed to kill it but then timing worked out poorly and the boss got two turns in a row, used the massive AE both times, and managed to kill everyone.
I did learn that the protect spell is actually also the shell spell in this game. (It wore off of my viking in the middle of the fight and he started taking a much larger amount of damage from the AE spells.)
Ok, 3.5 hours gone... What to do? I decided I probably wanted to get my job level high enough on the viking to get into the 90% chance to land taunt bracket. So I spent a couple hours yesterday watching a Criminal Minds marathon on A&E while grinding on random idiots that couldn't possibly kill me. Then I started killing them off before my viking even got to take an action so I just decided to put him in tanking mode and taunt all the time. (Vikings are very slow so they go last but taunt is rigged to always go first so it isn't useless.)
I also knew in advance that my ninja was going to take a beating if he wasn't wearing a shield so I put the shield on and put him in the back row from the start. I also used protect casting consumables in the first round to try to cut down on the number of insta-gibs on the black belt. (Probably I should have changed to a different job entirely but I thought I could win as is.)
I get into the fight and it turns out the boss only starts casting his AE spell after he's taken a bunch of damage. Since I started the fight this time by killing the tentacles that never happened so they never actually cast enough spells in a single round to kill anyone. I had one scary turn where taunt missed and the boss almost killed my ninja (good thing he was in the back row) but other than that the fight was actually really easy.
There were a bunch of cutscenes after the final boss where we learned what all of the NPCs we met along the way were going to do with their lives. Nothing was learned about the four actual player characters. As far as I know they're just brutally powerful killing machines with no lives to return to. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them took over the world at some point. (Probably Bung...)
In all, a really great game. Part of me actually wants to start over again with a different party setup (all casters the whole way) instead of moving on to a different game. Also there's apparently a challenge dungeon that gets unlocked via the Mognet thing I didn't do so I kinda want to do that too. This is going to move to the top of the list of games played so far but I wonder how much of that is because of the changes made on the DS compared to the original game...
I did learn that the protect spell is actually also the shell spell in this game. (It wore off of my viking in the middle of the fight and he started taking a much larger amount of damage from the AE spells.)
Ok, 3.5 hours gone... What to do? I decided I probably wanted to get my job level high enough on the viking to get into the 90% chance to land taunt bracket. So I spent a couple hours yesterday watching a Criminal Minds marathon on A&E while grinding on random idiots that couldn't possibly kill me. Then I started killing them off before my viking even got to take an action so I just decided to put him in tanking mode and taunt all the time. (Vikings are very slow so they go last but taunt is rigged to always go first so it isn't useless.)
I also knew in advance that my ninja was going to take a beating if he wasn't wearing a shield so I put the shield on and put him in the back row from the start. I also used protect casting consumables in the first round to try to cut down on the number of insta-gibs on the black belt. (Probably I should have changed to a different job entirely but I thought I could win as is.)
I get into the fight and it turns out the boss only starts casting his AE spell after he's taken a bunch of damage. Since I started the fight this time by killing the tentacles that never happened so they never actually cast enough spells in a single round to kill anyone. I had one scary turn where taunt missed and the boss almost killed my ninja (good thing he was in the back row) but other than that the fight was actually really easy.
There were a bunch of cutscenes after the final boss where we learned what all of the NPCs we met along the way were going to do with their lives. Nothing was learned about the four actual player characters. As far as I know they're just brutally powerful killing machines with no lives to return to. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them took over the world at some point. (Probably Bung...)
In all, a really great game. Part of me actually wants to start over again with a different party setup (all casters the whole way) instead of moving on to a different game. Also there's apparently a challenge dungeon that gets unlocked via the Mognet thing I didn't do so I kinda want to do that too. This is going to move to the top of the list of games played so far but I wonder how much of that is because of the changes made on the DS compared to the original game...
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
The Final Fantasy Legend: Melt!
Last night I reloaded an older save state near a town and filled my inventory with elixirs. Then I headed back up to Ashura trying my best to turn into a pudding or a sandworm on the way up. I didn't turn into a sandworm but I did get a pudding and I figured I'd give the fight a shot with one pudding along with the rest of my team.
I don't know the math behind it, but melt seemed to do around 5 times as much damage as a normal attack and more than twice as much as the best attacks I could find. It has no damage type and isn't a melee attack so it can't be halved or negated by any resistances so on Ashura it would do about 10 times as much damage as some of my other characters and 4 times as much as my best attacks. Couple that with the fact the pudding has 20% more health and takes half damage itself from any melee attack and you can start to see how a team of puddings could win. But one pudding? How did that happen? I mean, he needs to attack probably 6 times to kill Ashura and likely dies in 3 swings. A couple of his attacks do nothing so I could maybe see getting lucky but this seems worse than some of the solo thief fights.
Wait, what's that? Melt heals the pudding for an amount equal to the damage done? So not only does he do 10 times as much damage as some of my damage dealers he also heals for 180% of what my healer can do? Oh. Ok, yeah, I can see how the pudding can trivially solo Ashura.
It's like I was playing vanilla World of Warcraft with a party of 3 fury warriors and a ret paladin healing between fights. And then a death knight showed up and was bigger, tougher, did way more damage, and had a silly amount of self healing. He was going into the dungeon to solo some bosses and decided to let some of the other people tag along for achievements.
I then plowed through the final dungeon leveling each of my guys up to tier 14. (The level designer apparently went on strike during the creation of the final dungeon since it consisted of the exact same floor repeated over and over.) I ended up just fooling around and got stomped by the final boss since it turns out he hits the team for about 400 damage every round. So I had to reload a little earlier and build some tier 14 monsters that had melt which made him trivial.
Overall I was not a big fan of this game, but I think the problem is more with how I chose to play the game than it is with the game itself. Random encounters that can't help you progress in any conceivable way are annoying and the 4 monster party is pretty much set up to play the whole game that way. I didn't want to wander around in dungeons to look for treasure because I couldn't use the treasure and it only hurt to get into fights... And if you're not going to look for treasure and kill stuff why are you even playing a jRPG?
Monster balance is atrocious. Melt in particular is a real problem. It was rare to find a random encounter that was not either trivial or dangerous which isn't terribly fun, but with consumables the dangerous ones weren't so bad. If there was a reason to fight them it might have been ok.
I don't know the math behind it, but melt seemed to do around 5 times as much damage as a normal attack and more than twice as much as the best attacks I could find. It has no damage type and isn't a melee attack so it can't be halved or negated by any resistances so on Ashura it would do about 10 times as much damage as some of my other characters and 4 times as much as my best attacks. Couple that with the fact the pudding has 20% more health and takes half damage itself from any melee attack and you can start to see how a team of puddings could win. But one pudding? How did that happen? I mean, he needs to attack probably 6 times to kill Ashura and likely dies in 3 swings. A couple of his attacks do nothing so I could maybe see getting lucky but this seems worse than some of the solo thief fights.
Wait, what's that? Melt heals the pudding for an amount equal to the damage done? So not only does he do 10 times as much damage as some of my damage dealers he also heals for 180% of what my healer can do? Oh. Ok, yeah, I can see how the pudding can trivially solo Ashura.
It's like I was playing vanilla World of Warcraft with a party of 3 fury warriors and a ret paladin healing between fights. And then a death knight showed up and was bigger, tougher, did way more damage, and had a silly amount of self healing. He was going into the dungeon to solo some bosses and decided to let some of the other people tag along for achievements.
I then plowed through the final dungeon leveling each of my guys up to tier 14. (The level designer apparently went on strike during the creation of the final dungeon since it consisted of the exact same floor repeated over and over.) I ended up just fooling around and got stomped by the final boss since it turns out he hits the team for about 400 damage every round. So I had to reload a little earlier and build some tier 14 monsters that had melt which made him trivial.
Overall I was not a big fan of this game, but I think the problem is more with how I chose to play the game than it is with the game itself. Random encounters that can't help you progress in any conceivable way are annoying and the 4 monster party is pretty much set up to play the whole game that way. I didn't want to wander around in dungeons to look for treasure because I couldn't use the treasure and it only hurt to get into fights... And if you're not going to look for treasure and kill stuff why are you even playing a jRPG?
Monster balance is atrocious. Melt in particular is a real problem. It was rare to find a random encounter that was not either trivial or dangerous which isn't terribly fun, but with consumables the dangerous ones weren't so bad. If there was a reason to fight them it might have been ok.
Friday, September 02, 2011
Final Fantasy II Conclusions
Well, I finished off Final Fantasy II last night. It turns out there are only 3 dungeons left in the game after getting flare and ultima so those spells really are terrible. There's simply not enough time to level them up unless you cheat or grind for hours and hours. I feel like they needed to either start those spells at a higher level, make them so powerful that even at level 1 or 2 they're good, or really ramp up the leveling formula so low level spells would improve quickly in the end game. Oh well.
The final dungeon was both a let down and rather scary. I never really felt like I could get wiped out, or even like I could lose a party member (other than the new 4th guy). But it really seemed like just a little bit less twinkage and I wouldn't have stood a chance. As it was I had to use all of my elixirs to get to the end. The final boss didn't even land an attack (I think he tried to blind someone) before he fell over dead to the might of my berserk spell.
Some final thoughts:
The final dungeon was both a let down and rather scary. I never really felt like I could get wiped out, or even like I could lose a party member (other than the new 4th guy). But it really seemed like just a little bit less twinkage and I wouldn't have stood a chance. As it was I had to use all of my elixirs to get to the end. The final boss didn't even land an attack (I think he tried to blind someone) before he fell over dead to the might of my berserk spell.
Some final thoughts:
- Leila didn't actually die when we got swallowed by Leviathan. I guess she fell overboard and drifted to the capital or something? My party seemed about as interested in her being alive again as they were when she went missing: not at all.
- You start the game by naming four characters, and then you immediately lose the fourth one. (The four people are main male character, his girlfriend, their dimwitted friend, and the girl's brother.) In the third last dungeon of the game you end up killing the evil emperor and it seems like all is well... Until your fourth guy suddenly reappears and picks up where the emperor left off. The second last dungeon has you invade his castle to kill him... But when you get to the end the evil emperor comes back from hell to conquer the world. Your random jobber commits suicide to stall the undead emperor (pretty sure I could have just killed him there, but whatever...) while the rest run away. Fourth guy decides he has nothing better to do so he tags along to kill the undead emperor. And then after you do? His sister wants to be friends again but the fourth guy is all "everything has changed, screw you guys" and walks off. And you don't try to stop him! He tried to conquer the world, of his own volition, and it's clear he hasn't repented... But you let him leave to scheme a new plot to conquer the world? Kain in FFIV turns evil for a while but at least he had the excuse of being 'mind controlled'.
- In order to get into the emperor's castle you need an airship. You go to visit Pavel who has been taking care of Cid. As soon as you walk up to talk to Cid he falls into bed, gives you his airship, and dies. I guess Pavel is a lazy jerk and was feeding him the slow fish.
- I was trying to hit for 9999 damage but it looks like berserk actually has a cap. I'm guessing attack is limited (maybe at 99 or 256?) since it didn't seem to matter how often I cast berserk on my guy, I was stuck doing around 3300 max. I bet if I cared I could come close to 9999 though, by maxing weapon skill and haste.
- Mental note: get osmose for all of your characters, not just the black mage. I was stuck chugging elixirs to restore my healer's mana.
- All told it took 15 hours and 44 minutes to complete. Before the final dungeon I was thinking I'd wasted a lot of time and would really be able to shave time off next time around. I'm not so sure anymore, since I think the final dungeon might actually be a problem. Though maybe with multiple copies of osmose it won't be...
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