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Jan 31st, 2007 at 17:37:41 - Final Fantasy XII (PS2) |
All right, another entry. Since I finished with the lighthouse, I decided to catch up on my Hunts and not advance the plot for awhile. (I still had to finish a few Rank III hunts. So behind) So I went to take care of the Gil Snapper and Roblon.
Since I'm doing Hunts, it seems a fine time to talk about the gameplay and how it differs from the numeric FFs from VI to X. (IV as well, I suppose)
One of the things about FFXII is that it's not really about the characters, or the plot. It's about the gameplay, and breaking it right open to do whatever you want it to. This is another common feature in Matsuno games, having to spend a lot of times in menus and tweaking things to get the best results. In this way it shares more with FFI, II, III, and V (plus Tactics and Vagrant Story, obviously) than the post-VI world that most players are familiar with. The main point of FFXII isn't to advance the plot as much as it is to kill enemies and make your characters to be powerhouses. The main game is about running through dungeons and getting those LP to get that next level of magic or weapon, figuring out how to best set up your Gambits to take advantages of enemies weaknesses, and in general playing the game to break it in half. It's not nearly as exploitable as FFV or FFT, but the idea is the same. It's the first numerical mechanics-based FF since FIVE, which is a pretty big break from what most people see as FF nowadays. But it's not that FFXII isn't a Final Fantasty, it quite clearly is, even if it's more of a stepchild than pureblooded. It's a bit of a throwback, though, and even worse, it's a throwback to games which never came to America except recently. I mean, be honest. How many people who got into FF with VII went back and played the SNES ones? And poor Tactics never got a good reception, even if it was the best PSX FF.
Now, one of the problems with this that FFXII runs into is that the earlier mechanics-based FFs have all been incredibly exploitable. Maybe not FFIII, because that was an NES game and they were made to hurt, but between FFVs Blue Magic and Chemists and FFTs Ninja and Calculators, they could EASILY be broken in half once you knew how. FFXII tries to get around this by giving the bosses tons of HP, so even with Quickenings and exploiting weaknesses, it still takes time and effort to bring them down. They also add things like Palings and Magic Walls to add some strategy (know when to attack and when it's not doing any good), but it mostly comes down to lots and lots of HP. This comes with it's own set of problems, namely that long fights, such as mine against the Roblon, just come down to keeping half an eye on the fight to make sure everything's going like it should, and letting Gambits take on the rest. While it is nice to not have to mash attack constantly like in the older FFs, it would've been nice to have some variety in fights. I'm not sure if adding a hidden exploit would be the best way to do this, and they did their best with Palings to keep you on your toes, it still feels a trifle boring. Just not as bad as some of the super boss fights in previous FFs.
One nifty thing that only tangentially relates to the gameplay, but adds a lot of value to the game for me, is the Bestiary. This is easily the best Bestiary I've ever seen, and what it lacks in cold stats about the enemies it makes up for in world-building flavour. Due to it FFXII probably has the best and most fleshed out world in any FF, and best of all, it adds tons of references back to older games, especially FFT and Vagrant Story. This adds a good deal of hidden continuity, which is really nice to see. It gives the sense of a larger world than you can usually do in the FF series, which reboots the entire universe every game; and lends a more Phantasy Star feel of finding things you remember seeing previously. One thing that I really got a kick out of was in an entry for a particular Rare Game, the Tower in the lighthouse. It says that the Tower is: "Babil considered the most sacred of its kind."
Not too exciting, huh? At first glance it seems to be a mistranslated reference to Babel, which isn't too surprising, given the Japanese pop culture tendency to appropriate Western religious symbolism. And it essentially is. But that particular spelling is also a reference to the US version of FFIV, where the plot points of the Tower and Giant of Babel were censored by Nintendo at the time to Bab-il. (later fixed in FFIV Advance) That little sentence contains not just an overdone religious reference, but a reference back to a previous game in the series, making the older fans smile. References like this abound in FFXII, from the Red Wings (another FFIV reference) to hunts straight out of FFVI, magic and weapons we haven't seen since Tactics, and dungeons and churches lifted from Vagrant Story. FFXII not just has its own deep and engaging world, it connects other worlds in the series. Not enough to drag them together, but enough to make the fans smile. It's an underlooked at aspect which really gives the game some extra appeal to me.
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Jan 31st, 2007 at 14:44:17 - Final Fantasy XII (PS2) |
Well, I didn't really want to do FFXII for my Gamelog...I'm already well into the game and am not doing anything really interesting right now, much like everyone /else/ who does FFXII Gamelogs, and I have some pretty vicious feelings to people who don't get that this isn't just another FFVI/VII rip-off like they were expecting and is something a lot better. On the other hand, I found out through Gradius once again that I just all out SUCK at horizontal shooters, and there isn't much worth in a Gamelog where the player can't get past the first half of the first stage either. (Not kidding. Guardian Legend is a classic too, you know! And a vertical shooter! Go get some carts for it!)
So. FFXII. As I said, I'm well into this game, since I've been playing it since it came out. (since I'm a very slow gamer, though, I'm still only about 65 hours into it) I recently got back to it after taking a long break and finished up the damn lighthouse. While I greatly enjoy most of the game, the last bit of the lighthouse with the coloured waypoints and nasty punishment for screwing up the order is pretty mean, and fighting Hashamal without a save point is pretty vicious too. My current party was out of mana and at half health from fighting their way up from the last save point, so I switched to my other party, leaving myself without backup if they should fail. Luckily, Hashamal took lots of damage very quickly and I soon Floated my way to victory. Go go Earth Dragon tactics.
Luckily, that was the worst of the lighthouse dungeon. It was interesting from a puzzle-based dungeon standpoint, and most of the ideas worked pretty well. Dark Stones were easy enough to collect, since you'd be committing wholesale slaughter anyway, and even the green/red bridges weren't that bad, even if my Gambit set-ups tended to require lots of fleeing. The Sacrifice...was less-well done. There's no reason to choose anything BUT the mini-map to give up, especially after the Great Crystal, which made both maps useless, as opposed to just having to hit Select all the time. Taking away the main map as well would've been better, but even then Items and Map are a lot better to give up than Magic or Weapons. On the other hand, Matsuno games do tend to lend themselves well to people doing stupidly hard challenges for the hell of it, which would make the other two very useful.
The waypoints, on the other hand, are just kind of there and punishing. When did I use red again? And the already-mentioned Hashamal. The boss at the top was also interesting (hey! enemies don't get summons!), even if I did have to keep manually telling my characters to attack the right guy. But that's my fault for not wanting to go mess around with Gambits as opposed to a flaw in the game itself.
Winning the lighthouse got me quite a bit of plot, so I suppose here I'll defend FFXII's story-telling style. I've seen some complaints around about how you just fight through a dungeon, get some story, repeat. First off, isn't this how every RPG works? Unless you want a pure movie or a pure dungeon-crawler, that's how it works. What I think they're getting at is that the story bits are too short and infrequent, to which I reply that A) it's a game. Don't buy it if you don't want to actually play it, and B) go play Vagrant Story or FF Tactics. All these games are pretty much done by the same guy (FFXII has a bit more drama associated with it, but that's mostly the way), and they all display the same tendency of making you actually PLAY the game to get to the story bits, in which you have to actually infer what the bad guys are doing, since a lot of times the main character(s) are on the side-lines, trying to do their thing and learn the "truth". It's a valid technique, just not one often used in the main FF games, which appears to be where the problem is, people who expected another rehash of FFVI and got the bastard son of Vagrant Story and FF11 instead. Personally, I think the story sequences are well done, the plot is actually interesting for once, and I rather like having to actually do something to get to the next bit of plot instead of just letting the game take me along.
Hmm. From looking the above entry...yeah, I wish I was better at horizontal shooters too.
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Jan 20th, 2007 at 01:43:28 - Phantasy Star (SMS) |
There's no entry for the Sega Master System on the console list? Shameful! Not that anyone but me would probably even know what it was...
Anyway, Phantasy Star. The first RPG I ever played, it's hard to believe it's only slightly younger than I am. The SMS was a more powerful system than the NES, and it shows in the beautiful graphics and sound, especially in the Japanese version. (which I'm finally playing, thanks to the retranslation effort found at SMSpower.org) The story was also very unconventional for the time, and in a way remains so. There just aren't that many fantasy/sci-fi RPGs out there. FF comes close, especially in VII and VIII, but the PS series is still one of the only truly sci-fi RPGs I know of. To be fair, the first one doesn't show that as much. While there are spaceships and guns, Alis still swings around a sword, and main planet Palma has a distinct green countryside feel. Then again, there's always the desert planet Motavia and the ice planet Dezoris...
Even still, Phantasy Star is also one of the only RPGs to star a heroine out for vengeance along with a surprisingly non-irritating cat, the typical strongman (who can use guns in addition to axes) and the pretty boy magician. It's not a deep story, and like all 8-bit RPGs character development is light on the ground, but it gets the point across effectively with story segments in a first person view or in the comic-book style PS would later become (slightly) famous for.
I've got a lot of fond memories of this game, and so I finally decided to get off my butt and grab the retranslation, allowing me to finally experience smoother translation than the choppy, typical-of-the-time, original version. This also required getting the Japanese version, with the extra chips to give it extra sound and (I think) graphics. With this in mind, I set off to save the Algo Star System again.
The first thing that struck me was how much more toned and nuanced the music was. PS has always had some of my favourite 8-bit music, and hearing it changed up was...different, to say the least. It's definitely better, though not quite the stuff of my memories. The spaceport music especially is slightly deeper and less tinny. I can't wait to hear the music for the Landeel later.
The intro was much the same as ever, just cleaned up. Alis' brother is killed for being a rebel, so she takes up his sword to assassinate the evil king herself. Of course, as this is an old RPG, first she has to level grind. A friend will give you free healing, which allowed me to get up to level four just by walking around outside of town and fighting enemies for 2 and 4 exp a pop. Later I realised I could've bought a better sword about halfway through and made my job a bit easier. I don't remember as much about this game as I thought...
I still remember the sequence of events that you need to pull off to get to Odin, though. There's very little in the way of guidance here (I have to ask three times for the "secret thing" before the shopkeeper will stop screwing around and sell me an illegal roadpass? How was I supposed to know that?), and you have to all the way to another planet before getting your first companion. After that, though, the game becomes significantly easier, as Alis has gained several levels and there are three people to help lighten the load. It's a nice feeling to go cruising through things that you had to tip-toe around just a little while ago. That's not a feeling you get as often in today's RPGs, I feel.
One interesting thing about PS' gameplay is that while all the battles are first person, much like Dragon Quest, the dungeons are first person as well, much like Wolfenstein 3d. Except Phantasy Star has even LESS differentiation in the walls. You'd better break out the graph paper, since there's no such thing as a map in the game. (one thing they fixed in the PS2 remake...which we will never see over here ever) It's something they dropped for the later games, which is probably a good thing, though it was pretty interesting at the time. Especially so when monsters would just suddenly appear before you in battle...or when you ran away, since you'd backtrack a few paces in the dungeon when running.
...there are more things I'd like to say, but this is getting pretty long. I think I'll cut it off here for now.
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Jan 19th, 2007 at 00:48:20 - Kirby's Adventure (NES) |
Well. Another trip into Kirby got me almost to the end of the fourth world, Grape Garden, which neatly fixes most of my complaints about palette and levels from the previous entry. The familiar old sets were changed up nicely with sky levels and a cooler tone. Quite nice, and I feel I should revise my earlier comments on design. Consider them stricken from the record.
The controls, however, haven't gotten any better, as I learned to my chagrin at the end of world four, where you must use the (previously rarely-used) ablity Hi-Jump to damage the boss, after a long jumping spree as warm-up (and to get you a few Hi-Jumpers in your belly). I often found myself floating after a jump, which left me easy prey for the quicker boss, and also jumping rather short if I didn't press the button quite hard enough. It was a rather frustrating experience, and eventually I gave up. The concept is quite good, jumping through the vertical level while the boss chases you from below to result in a confrontation in the clouds. More bosses should have run-up levels. If I had a bit more skill in not hitting up after a jump the fight itself would be great too.
Oftentimes throughout the world itself the control slipped from slightly laggy to downright sluggish, which takes away from the experience. While fighting the controls was an integral component of many NES games, (see: Castlevania) it's a day I'm glad we have left far behind us.
Other than that Kirby continued to be a fun and well-put together game, with an astounding amount of variety. (and easy, until the thunderbolt boss) I am impressed, and left with rather less else to say.
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MarsDragon has been with GameLog for 17 years, 11 months, and 10 days |
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