PAX East

So I missed the inaugural PAX EAST this weekend. It would have been nice to go but with all of the traveling and car repair lately it was just not financially feasible. I'm planing on going to PAX10 in the fall though. Hopefully I'll have a new job by then that isn't hourly so I don't feel each tick of my off-time like a stab to the wallet. No I don't get vacation time. No not sick leave either. >:-(

Anyway I am going to the Triangle Game Conference next week. I don't know what kind of people attend this thing but let me tell you, if you aren't a student be prepared to shell out for this one. I got a one day pass for $25 but that was with my student discount AND my IGDA discount. Without those I would have paid $120 for a one day pass! Well I wouldn't have paid that but that would have been the price.

Stuff that's not Final Fantasy

Taking a break from Final Fantasy this week. I've been playing a few rounds of Modern Warfare 2 each morning when I get home from work. I feel like I'm getting better at it. I play mostly free for all deathmatch and I manage to get a "kill-cam" win about once a session now. It may sound noobish to get excited about such things but the feeling of improvement is one of the best feelings a human being can have and it's one that "1337" players seldom get to enjoy. I've found tremendous success with the care package and sentry gun kill counts. Using a care package as camping bait is an old strategy but I like the twist of planting a sentry gun and letting it do my camping for me. The 4 and 5 kills necessary to get these makes it easy to do.

I had to go to the doctor the other day which required me to drive to a part of town with a Play N Trade nearby. Proximity to a Play N Trade almost guarantees a purchase. I went in looking for SNES or PS1 games as usual but ended up with copies of KOTOR2 and Twilight Princess in my hands. KOTOR2 was less expensive but I've been eyeing the Zelda game for few years now. Damn Gamecube games are still hella expensive for their age but you know you're buying quality. Plus if they haven't gone down in price buy now they're not going to later, or get any easier to find. Although I'm not likely to play through the whole game (much like Metroid Prime) I'm glad I grabbed it and now I'm considering TLoZ: The Wind Waker and Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door to round out my GC collection.

...OK and Starfox Assault. But that's it!

So I had a scare the other day. I was tidying up and accidentally dropped my wife's 14 year old Game Boy Pocket. I guess the glue had worn out because the plastic shield over the LDC screen popped right off. There was a moment of panic but it turned on just fine. A light application of modeling glue and a few hours later the shield was back in place. My Spring cleaning endeavors also resulted in me moving my SNES and old 13" TV into the office. This opened up a lot of space on my dresser which is cool because I had some framed photos I needed to find a place for. I had to store all my modeling supplies to make room for the SNES and TV but I play way more video games than I do modeling.

Lastly I mentioned Brink in a previous post after seeing it at PAX last year. I saw the most recent videos for it yesterday and it looks like it's going to be a fantastic game. I have a feeling I'll be doing some campaigning among my friends come fall to get them to buy it.

Impressions: Final Fantasy XIII: Part 3

Warning, minor story spoilers!

40+ hours in:

So I've reached the part of the game where things branch out a bit. I'm on chapter 11 where the party has finally arrived on Pulse, the giant world that the much smaller Cocoon floats above. There is a very nice cut scene involving an airship just before the party gets there, and then another impressive one right after that. The second is a montage of Pulse with some voice-over exposition that showcases some of the world's more fantastic features. So that was fun. Pretty soon after getting to Pulse you get to the first real open area in the game. There are some monsters here that are gargantuan and are not meant to be taken on at this point in the game. It's cool to see what you have to aspire to in the late game. This area is also the first opportunity to take on a sidequest and go somewhere other than the next checkpoint. The game has missions that are a lot like XII's hunts. You track down a specific beastie, subdue it, and receive some high quality rewards. You can do the missions more than once but you'll only get the reward once.

In my last addendum I mentioned that at the beginning of chapter 10 you get to choose your party. Well right after I posted that I got a little further and the "crystarium" opened up so that all characters can learn all job rolls. This diminishes my earlier criticism of the linearity of the progression system but only a little. First it sucks that it took 30+ hours of play before I get to choose who does what. Second it's still pretty linear, you're just choosing between 6 lines now instead of three. Third the three extra rolls each character has are much more expensive to develop that their primary rolls, encouraging you to stick to the primaries. Finally each character's primary rolls offer a much better spread of abilities. For example, Snow is designed to be the best sentinel as he gets great stats and all of the sentinel abilities. However if you wanted to make him a healer and developed his medic roll you would find that he gets much fewer abilities than Hope does. The characters are designed to be specific things, so there isn't much point to developing their extra rolls until you've completed the primaries. So mad about that.

Also a little irritated by the eidolons. In order to get them you have to fight them. Nothing new there, it's a standard of the series. Only now you're not so much fighting them as you are auditioning for them. It's like a summoning tryout. You have to figure out which abilities they like and then use those abilities in the battle to fill a Gestalt gauge (this game is big on gauges). Fill the gauge and hit the X button and it transforms into these awkward "vehicles" that look like they were made from K'nex, and you get to ride them. That's a cool idea in theory but there's nothing I hate more in a game than not knowing what to do. Maybe it's just my personal psychology but I don't want to fight a battle AND solve a puzzle, that's not fun for me. I realized that the whole thing is kind of like a mating dance. You're trying to discover how to attract this strange and wondrous creature to you before it bites your head off. Of course I was never good at that sort of thing... WHICH IS WHY I PLAY VIDEO GAMES. Or maybe it's the other way around. My failings at social interaction aside I like the idea but it still feels a little to trail-and-error-ish to me. The last one I fought I more or less knew what I had to do, but finding the perfect paradigm to fill the gauge in time (did I mention there was a time limit?) took me about seven tries. I was at the controller throwing stage by the end of it.

Did I mention this game is hard? It's freaking hard.

Impressions: Final Fantasy XIII: Part 2

I'm at 30+ hours now, and at the beginning of chapter 10. Just got to the point where I have everyone together and I can choose who is in my party, so I'm excited about that. Got to pick who I wanted for the boss fight at the end of chapter 9. I decided I wanted to switch out Fang and bring in Sazh to join Lightning and Hope. This allows me to have a Commando and two Synergists for the openings, a Commando and two Ravagers for offensive chaining, Two medics and a Synergist for when I get in trouble, and two Commandos and a Ravager to finish things off. It's worked out pretty well so far.

In my review I don't think I made it clear just how gorgeous this game is. I don't usually care to much about graphics but it's hard not to be impressed by every environment and model. The battles are really spectacular. They did a great job with the spells, which are flying around constantly. The fights are chaotic and because of the speed at which they progress and the prevalence of flashy spells and attacks they are a joy to watch.

Impressions: Final Fantasy XIII: Part 1

So It's been out for 10 days. I've had it for 9. A lot has been said about it in that time, some have spoken praise and some have spoken words of derision, including people who's opinions I hold in high esteem. But now I'm going to have my say. The following is my initial impression of the game. I'm currently about half way through the main story (chapter 8 of 13) and have logged 24 hours of play time.

The curse of the Final Fantasy series is that it's never really final. There are 13 of them (including X-2 and excluding XI) and every new installment has to been held up to all those that have come before. As perhaps the most celebrated RPG series in the world, living up to your predecessors is no small challenge. There is folly in comparing the games however because each one stands alone as its own complete experience, the installments having only token similarities that are really more like traditions than rules. Perhaps the greatest Final Fantasy tradition is to break with the standards of previous games. What makes a Final Fantasy game then isn't so much what it has in common with the others but what it does differently. Invariably fans will cry foul, declaring that the series has been ruined, screaming of sacrilegious changes to familiar formulas and calling for designers' resignations. I believe the whole point of Square Enix's flagship series is to push the company to produce something that is both familiar and totally new at the same time. Well with Final Fantasy XIII they have certainly done that.

So I know it's ironic given what I just said, but I'm going to start of by comparing XIII to another game. More than anything else this game reminds me of FFX. The story is similar. It’s about a small band of people who's mission will likely spell their doom whether they succeed or not. They both have a progression system that abandons traditional levels in exchange for a branching path that increments attributed one at a time. They are both highly linear games with limited opportunities for sidequests or exploration. Finally, they are both the first Final Fantasy games for their respective console generations, setting new standards for graphical excellence.

So there's that comparison. Now lets talk about what makes XIII unique, and we'll start with the obvious, the battle system. Back in 1991 Square put out FFIV and with it a new battle system called the Active Time Battle system. ATB changed the way we fought battles from a turn based system to one in which time "flows" and characters act when their individual ATB gauges fill, usually a function of their speed stat. Since FFIV every game since has had some variation of the ATB system (with the exception of FFX).

FFXIII's variation is the most radical yet. Your character has a bar that fills like normal only now the bar has segments and different actions use up different numbers of filled segments. This means that you don’t have to wait for your bar to fill completely before executing an action. For example a basic attack only costs one segment. If you had a bar with two segments filled you can hit a button and use up the first two segments to instantly perform two attacks. If you had the third segment half filled it would carry over to the first segment, so you it wouldn’t be wasted. This can be useful if you know an enemy is only going to take two more hits to kill. You can finish it off quickly and move on to the next without having to wait for the bar to fill.

It doesn’t stop there. Did you notice before I said “your character” has a bar? It’s singular for a reason. In battle you directly control one lead character. The other characters in your party (max party size is three) are controlled by the computer and their actions are dictated by whatever their paradigm roll is; more on rolls in a moment. So what happens if your one controllable character dies? Game Over. This means that paramount to anything else is your lead character’s health.

So what are rolls and paradigms? Rolls are like the job classes of the past, only instead of a job with a mix of actions that could span attack and defense the rolls are strategic foci and are highly specialized. When assigned to a roll a character will do one specific thing; a commando attacks, a medic heals, a sentinel defends, a synergist buffs, etc. There is no crossover. A medic cannot do a simple weapon attack for example. The paradigms are pre-set roll assignments for the characters in your party. Paradigms can by shifted on the fly during battle. So you can go from having a commando and two ravagers (a second attacking roll used to drive up a chain gauge, more on that in a moment too) to having a sentinel, medic, and synergist with the push of a button (OK two pushes and some stick work). This would be useful if you were low on health and needed to shore up your defenses.

So what then is a chain gauge? Each enemy you fight has a chain gauge along with their health bar. Buy damaging the enemy their chain gauge will fill up. When the gauge is full the enemy becomes staggered and will take more damage. Staggering enemies is a vital part of FFXIII’s battle system. The whole thing works like this. Enemies have weaknesses that when exploited will drive their chain gauge up faster. Ravagers can cast elemental magic and perform elementally charged physical attacks. You either use a librascope (an item) to scan the enemy’s weakness or let the AI figure it out by trail and error. The ravager’s pound the enemy with its weakness element while a commando, just by being there, slows the chain gauge’s recovery. The enemy gets staggered and the commando starts doing beaucoup damage until it is dead or it recovers from the stagger. Rinse, repeat. And that’s your combat system folks.

So I mentioned that the progression system is like FFX’s. There are no character levels, just stats that are boosted one at a time. FFX had the sphere grid which let you occasionally choose which path you wanted your character’s development to take. FFXIII is similar but instead of a grid you have this weird crystal lattice thing. Each character has three rolls that they can be assigned for the main portion of the game (you get more after you beat the story). Each roll has a path with stat nodes on it. Spend Crystal Points (experience points basically) and you can move along the path from one node to another. Occasionally you can choose whether or not to branch off the main path but this usually only leads to one side node and then you’re back on the main path again. At first glace it has the appearance of giving you a choice but it’s really pretty linear. The only choice is deciding which roll to level up first. The crappy thing is that you can’t power level at all in the main story. Your crystal paths will come to an end and you have to wait until the next chapter of the game before more of the path opens up.

The third big change is the way you get equipment. Every save point is also a store. It’s like a futuristic shopping terminal. You can access stores virtually through the terminal… and I guess they beam you the products you buy Star Trek style. It’s a neat idea that doesn’t make a lot of sense but whatever. There are no traditional stores in the game, you just use the save points. You can equip a weapon and at least one accessory to protect you or confer some ability. Weapons and accessories have levels, and herein lies the true method of power leveling. Enemies you kill drop loot instead of money. You can sell the loot or you can use certain types of loot called components to upgrade your weapons and accessories. This is a game in and of itself with a complicated system for determining how much a component improves an item. Since you can keep fighting enemies and collecting loot you could theoretically build up a really strong character early in the game. However, because of how long this would take it’s really not worth investing a lot of time on loot farming until later in the game.

Well there’s the synopsis of the game. So what are my impressions of FFXIII? For starters let me just say that bottom line, it’s a good game. Is it an amazing, perfect 10? No. What I think Square Enix was trying to do was create a more cinematic and action-oriented game than Final Fantasy games of the past. The battle system is designed to be streamlined and fast moving, and it is! There are times when the flurry of attacks and the rapid shifting of paradigms create a truly exciting game play experience. The thing I don’t like about it is not being able to control all three characters. It was a cool idea and most of the time I dig the paradigm system. But sometimes I just want a character to do a very specific thing and I can’t tell them to do it. All I can do is paradigm shift and prey the AI figures it out. I wouldn’t mind it so much except you can’t dictate who your leader is, that’s determined by where you are in the story. I’ve always found it annoying in FF games when I’m stuck with a certain group of characters but at least in past games I could control those characters. So, it’s an interesting idea SquareEnix but next time no thanks.

The second problem I have is the pacing of the game. Like I said, they made it very cinematic. There are tons of cutscenes! These scenes tell the story at regular intervals throughout the game. The trouble is that they tend to break up the action too much. In past FFs you would enter a new area, have a cutscene, play through the area having many battles, get to the boss, cutscene, boss fight, cutscene, next area. In FFXIII you’ll have a cut scene at the beginning and end of each area but you’ll also have three or four during passage through the area. That could actually be pretty cool except that you only get two or three battles between each cut scene. At first this was OK but as I got towards the middle of the story I found that both the cutscenes and the battles were getting tedious. The battles would get really long because the enemies were stronger but they weren’t interesting enough to justify the length. The cutscenes stopped being impressive around chapter 6. I wish they would just put it all in one big scene and sum it up so I can get back to playing the game. I’ve read elsewhere that the momentum picks back up in the latter third of the game. We shall see.

Hands down, the weakest part of the game is the crystal leveling thing. Like I said before it doesn’t give you the freedom to develop your character as you might think it would. Really it just feels like work. Instead of leveling up my character automatically they make me do it, but the experience doesn’t have any appeal or feel rewarding. I’m just holding a button while watching a line and some crystals light up. On top of that the whole thing is presented in this 3D crystal model which is pretty to look at but unwieldy to use. It’s just too much trouble when I have to use the thing every ten minutes. Something like the sphere grid from FFX or even better the license grid from FFXII would have been a better choice.

That’s the bad stuff. On the plus side the graphics and amazing; even on my dinosauric standard definition TV. The story is pretty good. It’s your standard Final Fantasy story. It’s not going to win any awards but it’s engaging none the less. It’s interesting enough that I’m anxious to see how it turns out. OH! And they get a big thumbs-up for putting a story summary in the game that you can read at any time. I love it when RPGs do that, and they really went all out creating an encyclopedia with people, places, history, and the game summary that updates as you go. The characters are your typical Final Fantasy characters. They can be annoying but none of them are as obnoxious as Brother from FFX/FFX-2 so fear not.

I really do enjoy the battle system despite its flaws. The paradigm system is fun and exciting. The biggest impact of the new battle system is that it increases the difficulty of the game. Having the loss of one character end the game creates plenty of opportunities for failure. I don’t think I’ve ever died this much in a Final Fantasy and that’s a good thing. Finally, I like the weapon upgrade mini game a lot. It’s fun the way the bazaar from FFXII was fun, but it’s a little more straight forward too which is nice. I just wish it played a bigger roll in the early game.

I don’t give games number ratings because I think they’re misleading. All I can say is that I have had fun with the game and plan to spend a lot more time with it. I would recommend it to fans of Final Fantasy and RPG fans in general provided they take into account the negatives I mentioned. If you’re too much of a traditionalist you may just want to go back a play an early FF over again. I can’t say that I’d recommend paying $60 for the game either. It’s $60 worth of game no doubt, and I don’t feel like I wasted my money. However, I’ll bet most folks could stand to wait a while longer until the price drops. If you’ve never played an RPG before this may be a good place to start. It’s simpler than a lot of other RPGs out there, and it might appeal to a more action oriented player.

As I continue to play the game I’ll add updates and let you all know how I enjoyed the latter half of the game.

It's Been Four Years, I Can Wait Nine Hours

So It's 0100 on Wednesday the Tenth of March, which means two things. First my Dad is an hour into his birthday, Happy Birthday! WOOO! And second Final Fantasy XIII has been available in North America for a day and an hour. Due to the cancer in my life that is my job I have not been able to pick it up yet. The Universe is testing me... but I shall prevail. I've been waiting for this game since 2006, I can wait until GameStop opens at 1000 this morning.

A Public Service Announcement

::Attention::

If you are a dirty redneck slut and you are at a party stoned out of your mind, please do not randomly bite me or my friends. Seriously, it will just work out better for everyone if you don't.

Great, now that we've got that out of the way I can tell you about the weekend, or rather three weekends ago. Last weekend contained very little video game time. It did contain a trip to Texas, a last minute wedding, being awake for 56 strait hours, and a strange series of events which prompted me to make the above statement. And that's all we need to say about that weekend.

Three weekends ago I had the pleasure of driving up to my old home town in northern Virginia to see some old friends and play some old games. Er, new games. When I arrived the host (who I shall call "David") was busy pulling a new TV out of the box. This modest 46" was going to go in his bedroom eventually, but for the festivities we set it up on his kitchen table. In the dining room (or what was intended to be a dining room) there was a second set-up. Will brought a projector from work and aimed it at the blank wall. The host had his own not-so-modest TV in the living room and Will's little brother had yet another spare TV next to him. We all had 360s and the 5 of us (my other friend who I shall call "Vlad" was there but systemless) spent the next 48 hours playing all sorts of shit. Highlights included Modern Warfare 2 (which is great when you have everyone in the same room), a rousing 4 player run through I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT, and a 2 hour push into Gears of War 2's horde mode.

I also found time to play a little Forza 2 and over the course of those sessions I finally reached career level 50. So that was cool. Got to try out the first 15 or so minutes of Bioshock 2. It seemed like a great game but considering I've spent the same amount of time with its predecessor I wasn't inspired to go out and grab a copy. I did however pick up Red Faction Guerrilla, which is hella fun. It has some issues no doubt but played about 15 hours of it over 2 days so they must be doing something right. I'll put up an Impressions post about it later.

Needless to say that weekend kicked ass despite the drive and sleep deprivation, which is becoming old hat for me at this point. I'll try to throw up some pictures once I figure out how to pull them off my phone.