As I’ve mentioned before, I recently decided to marathon as many Final Fantasy games as I could. FF1 was my kickoff game, and yesterday I defeated Chaos and saved the world.
To say that it was the most fun I’ve had playing a retro game in months would not be accurate– that title goes to Sonic the Hedgehog 2. FF1 was, however, still a good deal of fun. Grindy and occasionally frustrating fun– this is an oldschool JRPG, afterall– but fun, nonetheless.
One of the things that really surprised me about this game was the story. Most people do not think of Final Fantasy I when they think of games with good stories. And obviously, the story is pretty simplistic. But the simplicity is largely what made it solid and endearing. You really do get the sense that you’re helping to save the world here. And you grow somewhat attached to your team– characters who show absolutely no snippets of personality throughout the entire game, allowing you attach whatever personalities you wish to them.
Another thing I liked was the ending, in which the game breaks the fourth wall and points out that, you know, the Warriors of Light weren’t the only ones saving the world. YOU saved the world. Everything the heroes did in game was orchestrated by the player, thus, the player is the true hero. It’s a personal touch that you don’t see in games all that often, and I thought it was neat.
Overall, it’s easy to see how this game spawned a massively successful series of games. It’s a solid piece of video game history well worth playing at least once.
Onward to FF2! I’ve heard that this is a game that will either make or break one’s desire to continue with an FF marathon, so that’ll be interesting, but I’m quite determined.
Dear readers I have the most dreadful of confessions to make.
I’m playing Baldur’s Gate.
Why is this so horrendous?
Because this is pretty much the first time I’ve played BG. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve had the games for years. I just… well, I sucked tremendously at them. I was hopelessly bad. Something about them just did not work in my brain and I was lucky to reach Khalid and Jahiera. I think I got to Nashkel once. Worse yet? I played actual tabletop D&D as a kid. I still remember my first adventure. I know all about hit dice and saves vs. breath and THAC0 and AC and all that stuff. But it just… it didn’t translate for me into the vidya, I guess. I am abominably small-time for not sticking with it but, thanks to this rather spiffy LP Vorgen is running over at Something Awful, I’ve finally managed to get myself into the right mindset for it. I’m actually making progress! I’ve got characters who are higher than level 1! I don’t die to individual Gibberlings who happen to stumble across my camp!
It’s pretty amazing, of course; there’s a reason the games are renowned so very thoroughly. I’m still barely anywhere in it and I’m completely engrossed. I just wish I’d managed to get my brain to understand how they were supposed to be played years ago.
Are there classics you should have played that just didn’t work out for you? Did that ever change when you tried them again? Do LPs and such help other people get into certain games like this?
This is how I react every morning when I realize I can play more BGT
I don’t really have a proper topic today, because insomnia is a lot of fun and has left my brain quite mushy and useless today! So I’m just going keep moving from topic to topic though it won’t be one long incredibly unbroken sentence and hopefully something will stick!
Let’s see then.
I finished Dead Island yesterday. My verdict remains much the same: It’s a buggy game from a developer who clearly has no idea what they are doing (The most recent patch broke the game entirely and they had to roll it back before fixing it; I don’t really know how you miss the “Nobody can play your game because it doesn’t even start” bug but there you go.) and it is a ridiculous amount of fun. You go to three major places in the game; the Resort, the City of Moresby, and the Jungle. Weirdly it’s Morseby which is the most hectic, tense, and meaty part; the Jungle was a quick and pleasant jaunt in comparison. Also as someone on SA said, the presence of an honest-to-god sewer level in a game in 2011 is personally offensive to me.
Mowen? More like BRO-en!
My efforts to give HoI3 another shot have failed because I keep playing Victoria 2 and EU3 all day. It’s not my fault, PDM keeps getting updated and I must also bring the Light of Islam to the world as a unified Arabia! I’ll try and play some HoI3 soon though.
I picked up MoO2 on GoG.com recently (I know, it’s shocking that it took me this long) and I can already tell it’s very much worthy of the praise it receives. That said I’ve more been messing around with GalCiv 2 lately, largely because MoO2 doesn’t seem to play nice in a window.
Oh, and if you’re playing any Gears 3 lately, make sure you give the mutators a try in Horde mode. Super Reload is amazingly fun.
Finally, I’ve come across a freeware RPG called Exit Fate, which apparently hews to the Suikoden school of game design. Will give it a try and report back on how true this is and so on.
I’m currently playing Final Fantasy. Just… Final Fantasy. The first one. The one with no numbers after it. It’s my kickoff for a goal to play (or replay, as the case may be) all of the FF games that I have access to, since I haven’t played most of them in ages.
It’s slow but steady going, for no other reason than the fact that I’m trying to squeeze my FF time in between things like writing, drawing, working, and playing other games. Still, I’ve reached a comfortable point where I’m playing for an hour or two a day, and having a whole lot of fun.
I actually named my white mage Rarity, but this picture will have to do.
And now for the Android’s Topic of the Day: Have you ever decided to “marathon” a game series, and how did that work out for you? Did you finish?
To the chagrin of FFVII fans everywhere, Square-Enix yesterday announced that they are remaking Final Fantasy X for the PS3 and PSV. Me though, I’m overjoyed. I might even get a PS3 one day now that it has a game coming out for it.
I love FFX. I wrestle over whether I like VII or X more, but I really think I have to say the latter is the better game. I love everything about it (Except certain moments of voice acting). The aesthetic, the setting, the architecture, the battle system, the Sphere Grid, the music, the characters, everything. So I’m pretty excited to see what they will do with this.
Though all these FF rereleases and such make it kind of hard to mock Nintendo fans.
It’ll be a delicate balance. FFX isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot easier to mess it up than to improve it. Of course we want more than just graphical updates; FFX has aged fairly well for a 3D game anyway. I must presume the stuff from the European/International edition will be included, but hopefully there will be more besides this, more monsters, more areas, just MORE FFX, without changing the core game.
I also hope they redo Blitzball. I don’t care what anyone says, it was the best FF minigame ever (With the possible exception of Mog House). But there needs to be MORE of it. Two dozen teams, thousands of players (Make every single person IN THE WORLD a potential Blizter), and make it into underwater FIFA in terms of gameplay, where the stats are hidden and things are more dynamic.
Also add a whole bunch of endgame content and more summons and change absolutely NOTHING about Wakka because he is truly a god among men.
What do you hope to see come out of this? And what games do you want to see remade, for that matter?
So as you may recall I’ve written about Dead Island before, but now that it’s out and I’ve had the chance to spend some time with it, I thought I’d give some of my opinions on it.
The very abbreviated version is: Dead Island is one of the best bad games I’ve ever played.
Let me elaborate. It’s a shoddy piece of programming. It slows down at times for no discernible reason; sometimes you’ve got a bunch of zombies and it goes smoothly, sometimes there’s two and it stutters horrifically. There’s noticeable pop up. Textures can vary wildly in quality. The controls were very obviously designed for the console, to a degree that kind of makes me long for Oblivion, because this is far worse and it gets very tedious very quickly.
There are some poor design choices as well. Everything respawns being the main one. Everything – zombies, vehicles, weapons, items, little stacks of cash tucked away inside people’s backpacks and stuff (More on money later). It doesn’t make sense. You end up just learning the game, and once you’ve been through someplace once there are no more surprises. Hardly making the best use of an open world. It also harms the immersion, both in the obvious ways (“Didn’t I kill this guy the last four times I went this way?”) and the slightly less so (People desperate for food/water/booze in a world where everything respawns within minutes).
Remember the previous DI post, where I talked about losing quest hubs and stuff? Yeah, well, there are safe zones in this game. Some infected (Running zombies, just like L4D) managed to get in because there’s a very conveniently placed rock for you to use, and apparently they can do. For a moment I thought “Oh shit here we go!” but they just charged directly at me, got their heads smashed, and elicited no response from the surrounding NPC survivors.
Pretty much my face when that occurred.
In fact, so far at least, it seems that there is no interaction between the living and dead aside from yourself and some scripted encounters. There are other survivors around the island, but unless you get an escort quest or something, they’re not going to be getting themselves bitten or cracking any heads. Worse, if someone isn’t an escortee or the like, you can’t give them a slap/hug/whatever and say “Yeah I know you had to do some bad shit, but we gotta get to safety, come with me.” They just sit there lamenting whatever they had to do to survive over and over.
You also have to pay cash money for stuff. I mean, I can sort of understand why you’d still care about money to some extent – it suggests there will be a normal world tomorrow to spend it in. But yeah, really having a hard time buying that people would hold back on helping you out when their lives are so acutely on the line. Nevermind the workbenches – you pay to repair and upgrade items, but there’s nobody there to pay! Apparently some ethereal miser demands payment in exchange for sticking your weapons back together.
Oh but cracking heads. Forget everything I’ve just said about the game, because really, what it’s about is cracking heads. And this, at least, it does well. Smacking a zombie feels great, visceral. Knocking one aside with a metal pipe is satisfying as hell. Cracking or entirely removing limbs? Yep, you can do that, and they’ll flail the jelly-like appendage at you without much effect. And this is before you start playing silly buggers and modifying the game files.
The game is pretty atmospheric, it does a great job of juxtaposing a tropical paradise with living hell. When you’re walking around and you hear a zombie breathing or roaring or whatever, it’s unsettling, even if you’ve killed a hundred of them already and one more won’t be able sort of problem. The evidence of what’s going on is grim and pretty omnipresent; one minute it’s a picturesque tropical scene, the next you come across someone whose skin appears to have all been eaten.
There are also a nice wide variety of weapons, and what is more, the weapons degrade and break at a pretty believable speed for once! The human skull is one of the toughest structures nature has devised, so you’re not going to be able to break thousands of them before you need to exchange your paddle for something better. Similarly, this is one of the best implementations of stamina I’ve seen in a game. You’ve got a lot of it and it recharges fairly fast so you can sprint a long way, but if you go around swinging madly you’ll run out faster than you expect, and then you’ll be in trouble. It works excellently in doing what it is meant to do: Making you fight with an eye on your tactics.
It should be noted I’ve not played a terrific amount of the game yet, and I’ve also not played multiplayer. I’m confident that messing around with some friends would make the game much better. It’s not a ‘good’ game, so I can’t in good conscience say to everyone “go out and buy it now”, but it is a fun game and once the price comes down a bit, if you see it when there’s a bit of a slow spell of other releases, or if you just want to crack a whole lot of heads and collecting way too many weapons that you then have to sell ONE AT A TIME with a confirmation message for EACH AND EVERY ONE, then yeah, Dead Island is a sound purchasing decision.
Please note this post will contain spoilers for Breath of Fire III.
As you may recall, I’ve been playing through Breath of Fire III lately. Well, last night I got to the end of it, and I did something I never have in the other times I played it – I chose the ‘bad’ ending. What you’re intended to do is fight and overthrow the Goddess, who is keeping the world in a static place, in the belief that change can only make things even worse. There are hints of this throughout the latter part of the game, and she admits as much herself – but in my adulthood I’ve found her case rather more seriously presented, and compelling, than I did when I played through when I was much younger.
Now, to be clear, the game suffers from what I would suggest are poor writing decisions. One of the characters is implicated as being very much more important than you presume, but they only actually reveal this when you are talking with the final boss before deciding whether to acquiesce or to fight. Therefore I can as a player understand it all and deduce that this character is probably speaking sensibly – but it should be rather less convincing to my character. Indeed, some of the other reactions to what they learn in the very last room of the game are a bit weak as well, though it’s somewhat more forgivable because the characters really couldn’t have time to develop more complex opinions at that point.
Also because one of the characters is still a freaking onion
It got me thinking about it all though. The ‘bad’ ending isn’t really presented as being all that terrible, as long as you keep in mind what the characters know rather than what you know about tropes. And what the Goddess said about the possibilities of the alternative mean it’s quite believable that they would be happy enough with the outcome. Despite this it feels a bit lacking – it’s clearly the “bad” ending because if nothing else, there’s a good deal less to it than the “good”. A lot of games seem to suffer from this sort of thing; sometimes an alternative ending is acceptably given less time, or is quite clearly the worse option to take, and very often it’s not left up to the player to fully decide whether their course of action was right. Games try to do this sort of thing, and for many “player choice” and the like is very vaunted, but a JRPG nearly 15 years old seems to make a better stab at actual ambiguity and leaving it to the player to decide the worth of what they did than a lot of modern ones with their binary DOUBLE GANDHI/EVIL LINCOLN dichotomy.
These days I would normally load up a save towards the end of a game and see the other ending(s) just for completeness. I’ve decided not to with this playthrough. It feels satisfactory leaving it where it is.
So recently, I’ve been playing through Breath of Fire III again. It’s not the best game ever made, it might not even be the best BoF (II is pretty damned great after all), but it really is simply, good old-fashioned fun that just emanates nostalgia from every orifice. I’m just going to copy-paste what Pike said in her SMRPG post:
a relic of a different time: a time when RPGs weren’t about who has the fanciest cutscenes or who has the most photorealistic hair or who has the most immersive fantasy world. Rather, they were about traveling from weird town to even weirder town, beating up random enemies for gear, and saving the world. No nonsense. Just beating the big bad guy at the end with all of the epic loot that you had to cross the universe to find.
It sums it up pretty well. One of my party members is an ambulatory onion mutant thing.
He's also the toughest sumbitch in the game
It’s all around just a solid, fun game that knows what it is, doesn’t try to hide it, but sometimes throws something subversive in that makes you stop and think “Wait a second…”. Like when you come across the disabled guy who has been placed in a chair by a window, the sun streaming in. He just mumbles, but if you talk to another person in the room you learn that he was injured in an attack by a dragon years earlier. That is to say, he was one of the first people in the game you fought, and he was just a guy doing his job, mining to make his living. Every so often it’ll hit you with something like that, something brutal or just a bit cruel, never hammering it into you too hard, just letting you think about it.
I’ve dropped hints about this game before but never actually dedicated a post to it. I didn’t even do a Classic Video Game Monday about this over at Clockwork Hare because I wanted to wait until the time was right, and then I never got around to it.
Okay then. Here, I’m going to talk about my favorite RPG game of all time, my favorite Mario game of all time, my favorite Super Nintendo game of all time, and my favor– okay, do you see where I’m going with this?
The only game I like more than this is SMAC. And that’s saying a lot.
It’s hard to pin down what, exactly, makes this game special for me. I can give you an idea, though. Think of mid-to-late-90s Squaresoft. This game is the epitome of that. Now either you know what I’m talking about here, or you don’t, so here’s a quick rundown, in case you need a refresher:
Music that can be beautiful, haunting, or fun
Characters with real personalities, stories, and motivations
A long and convoluted storyline that takes you all over the world and has you visiting a variety of cultures
Minigames
Hundreds of random items that you may or may not need during the course of your game
Final bosses that have two or three different “forms”
Magical attacks that look like they should wipe out everything on the screen but actually only do seven hit points of damage to this one guy in the corner
And so on. But, above all, I think, you have that story. THAT STORY. This was the first RPG I ever played. Back then, I had never, ever, seen a story this deep before in a video game. And it left an immense impression on me.
A small sampling of the characters you will meet on your journey.
In other words, it was all that old-school Square quirky charm combined with a solid story and characters that really drew me in.
Okay, now I’m going to tell you about an optional boss in the game, called Culex. Culex is hard. Really hard. He’s like the equivalent of Mewtwo in Pokemon; he has nothing to do with beating the game, but you go after him as an extra challenge.
Culex has this whole mysterious presence going on that really has nothing to do with the rest of the game, and so he’s a bit of an anomaly. He’s a self professed Dark Knight with a a bunch of Elemental Crystal companions; he’s certainly nothing like we’ve seen in a Mario game before.
…that is, of course, the point. Culex gets a special boss battle theme that you don’t hear anywhere else in the game. It goes like this:
…sound familiar? No?
How about now?
Yup.
That’s not all Culex gets. You get a special victory fanfare when you beat him (three guesses as to what that fanfare is), and you get yet another special song after that. It is at that point that Culex breaks the fourth wall and says “Thank you, brave knight. I will treasure this memento of my journey here. Perhaps in another time, another game, we may have been mortal enemies… Let us part as comrades in arms.”
There are a lot of theories as to what Square was trying to say here, ranging from Culex being a reincarnated Final Fantasy enemy to simply being a mere fun homage. Well, I dunno about you guys, but the whole Culex thing and his conversation at the end always just gets to me. There’s something touching about it. It’s Square giving you this whole special enemy and boss fight because they know it’s what you want. It’s their one last huzzah before leaving Nintendo for years to come– this was the last game they produced for Nintendo before hitching up with PlayStation. It’s a genuine thank you from the game developers to the players, a respectful handshake between both– all done through the interface of the game itself.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Who knows? It still gets to me, though.
Meanwhile, Pinkie Pie proves that she would be the ultimate Final Boss
Now Super Mario RPG came out to largely rave reviews toward the end of the Super Nintendo’s lifespan and then promptly disappeared and no one heard from it again. There have been no sequels (beyond its spiritual successors in Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi), there have been no rereleases except for one on Virtual Console, and most of the original characters made for the game also have not been seen since. The typical explanation is that Square and Nintendo have some sort of weird copyright drama preventing either of them from really doing anything with it in the future.
Perhaps it’s better that way. Super Mario RPG is a relic of a different time: a time when RPGs weren’t about who has the fanciest cutscenes or who has the most photorealistic hair or who has the most immersive fantasy world. Rather, they were about traveling from weird town to even weirder town, beating up random enemies for gear, and saving the world. No nonsense. Just beating the big bad guy at the end with all of the epic loot that you had to cross the universe to find.
Oh, and Geno is the greatest character of all time.
In the old days, before your time, there was a company called Blizzard. Yes yes, I know, they’re still around today, but they’re not the same Blizzard. Back then, when they made a game, you sat up and took notice. Back then when they made an expansion, it added a great deal of content.
I remember it clearly. I had just awoken, the sleep barely rubbed from my eyes, when Pike came with grim news. Blizzard. Diablo III. I thought perhaps that they had bowed to the silliness about “too much color”, and made it all brown’n’bloom. But no. Diablo III, I learned to my endless horror, would be subject to the following;
1) There would be no offline play. You must be connected to b.net to play the game.
I saw this and I was mad. It is monumentally stupid. It encourages piracy rather than reducing it. It has consistently proven to be a poor idea when previously implemented.
2) There will be an auction house where you can use real money to purchase in-game characters and items from other players.
I saw this and I was leery. I can understand Blizz’s desire to undermine gold farming and so forth, and legitimizing something we all know already happens anyway is not such a huge deal. Still, it seems dreadfully crass and overwhelmingly all-encompassing in this instance. I just don’t want to log into a game, play for awhile, decide to look for an item, and be presented with real-world prices. I’ve enough money woes as is without my escape being filled with constant reminders of it too. Still, I play single player for the most part, and this doesn’t provide anything that some grinding and luck won’t get you anyway – it’s optional, and I can tolerate it despite the bad taste it leaves.
(Though given that Diablo is essentially Grinding for Gear: The Game, my solution would have simply been to make players unable to trade anything except to people in their group at the time the item dropped. I imagine this would have caused plenty of rage too though.)
3) No mods allowed. You read that correctly.
Now let me be quite clear about this. This doesn’t mean Blizzard won’t be supportive of modders or include any tools that make life easier for them. What they mean, in fact, is that the EULA will specifically forbid them. They are not merely not officially supported, they are avowedly not permitted. And because you have to be online to play, even if someone makes a mod, you’re likely going to have to do something like download a crack in order to actually use it. Suffice it to say, this is a truly mindboggling step to take from the company’s whose modded games have spawned such things as DOTA and Median XL. I have waxed lyrical about the virtues of mods previously, and I really cannot quite wrap my head around who at Blizzard thought this was a good idea, why anyone agreed with them, and why the nice gentlemen with the wood-paneled station wagons have not yet carted the whole shower of them off to get the help they so patently require.
In short, I cancelled any notions I had to ever purchase D3. Which is a damned shame, because I loved the first two, and I love most of Blizz’s games, and I actually anticipate that if I did play it, I’d enjoy it immensely. But I simply cannot sanction this sort of nonsense with my patronage.
