Final Fantasy XIII: Chapter Twelve

LiveJournal Tags: Final Fantasy XIII,games

Hating on Final Fantasy XIII is my new favourite hobby. That’s because Final Fantasy XIII is awash with nonsensical gibberish and exceedingly long cutscenes that do nothing to further the plot.
Case in point: The big baddie in Final Fantasy XIII’s master plan is to destroy the world of Cocoon in order to resurrect some ancient god. His complicated plan to achieve this goal is to turn his worst enemies into living weapons. Yes, he gave his enemies super-powers, then told them to go and blow up their home: the place where all their stuff is. They of course attack him instead, but he behaves as if this is all part of his plan. The entire time while they’re becoming more powerful: he’s trying to kill them. Like straight up murder them before they can do what he wants them to do.
…
The fact he’s a triple-agent/magic space-alien monster doesn’t help make his plans any less confusing. He wants to destroy Cocoon, but he’s it’s leader. He’s gone to great lengths to protect his identity as a giant monster, then he drops his disguise and kills his lieutenant, who’s helping him with his evil plan. As president, he was also responsible for seeking out and killing his own kind, who are also helping him with his evil plan. He also secretly controls a faction that’s trying to kill him. When the leader of this faction goes rogue and dies, he brings him back to life and gives him his old job as president.
The guy’s fucking bi-polar as hell.
At the beginning of Chapter Twelve, there’s a long cutscene where the gang drops in on a flying motorcycle race after they crash their ship for the sixth time. They proceed to fucking wreck the race and start messing people up. Now bear in mind: they’re trying to save the world, but they decide to just start killing people at random. The whole scene looks cool, but it makes no logistical sense with no semblance of story.
I’ve also apparently made it through the best part of the game: which is this semi-open world filled with mini-quests which equate to: Go here, kill this. Plus you’re given these very clear map markers showing you where to go, so there’s no sense of mystery, or exploration, really.

Final Fantasy XIII: Crash That Bird

LiveJournal Tags: Final Fantasy,games

Okay, so I’ve just reached Chapter 11 in Final Fantasy, and I can tell you this much about the game’s plot so far: they’ve crashed three to four airships so far. Every time one, or several of the character jump onto a flying vehicle, they proceed to crash that vehicle. Snow crashed his flying bike, Hope crashed his, and Sazh has crashed three consecutive airships. The average flight time is about two minutes before crashing. Once, during the middle of the game, they crashed their airship through the planet itself into a hidden underground city. That’s what I call an Epic Fail: crashing so badly you find a secret world. Yet, no one in the game has yet realized they shouldn’t really be flying. They say that any landing you can walk away from is a good one. Those people should talk to the F.A.A.

The worst is that every time I get on a ship I hope that it’s going to lead to me being able to physically fly that ship with my controller, instead of watching an exceedingly long cutscene. No such luck. I think I’ve reached a more open area of the game, however. The sight of a 500’ tall lava monster eating a 30’ tall turtle monster whole was pretty promising.

Every achievement in the game so far has been progressed based. There’s about 20 or so achievements you can’t unlock except by reaching the latest stages of the game. I unlocked one 80 point Achievement for Loremaster, basically by using the spell Libra on a 100 different enemies. I was surprised to learn that I had fought 100 different monster types so far. A lot of them are just different coloured versions of the same monster, so it’s a lot like Pokemon in that regard. For getting the Loremaster achievement, I also unlocked a Sazh’s profile picture, which I’m down with. Now I can have more people call me a “nigger,” when I play GTA IV online.

Final Fantasy XIII: Smack My Bitch Up

I’ve reached disc three in Final Fantasy XIII. Shortly before this came to fruition, I was given the option of picking and choosing my own team of three players. Yes, it takes 2/3rds of the game before you can assign your own group. That’s 20 hours and 11 GB of gameplay. I’m reading now that things improve after Chapter 11 of the game. In fact, some people in forums are saying you can’t even rate the game properly until Chapter 11. There’s only thirteen Chapters in the game. You are therefore expected to base your assessment on the game based on 3/13ths of it.

At the end of disc two, I had to fight this guy:

Yes, he’s wearing a veil. Yes, he’s the big baddie in the game.

*SIGH*

He was actually a bitch to beat. It took me about three tries, fifteen minutes each. He transforms into some kind of dragon with multiple faces which each use a different spell. Once you get him down on the ropes, he pulls out this devastating attack that can wipe out your whole party if you’re under-levelled. I had to upgrade a bit and get the timing down before I could win. At the end of every battle, however, you’re rated on how much damage you do, how fast your were, etc., and you’re given a star rating out of five. I got 0 out of 5. I took fifteen minutes and I was supposed to beat him in nine.

Seriously, Japan, fuck you. I don’t need your shit.

I’ve been trying to find a guide online for things like their upgrade system, and how best to go about it, and all I’ve discovered is that 90% of the drops in the game are vendor trash. You’re supposed to combine items to upgrade your weapons. It takes about 100% of every item you find in the game x4 to max out a single weapon. You need to do this six times to get a complete weapon for each of your characters.

Fuck that shit.

I realized after seventeen hours that two of the characters in the game are equipped with weapons they pull out in every fight, but never use. They can’t. I was confused, because they actively used them during their first battles, but the game’s auto-system denies you the ability to pick your attacks, or even select “Attack.” They’re locked into this magic-using system you have to switch between, so all they can do during battle is use spells. If you’re trying to buff a character with shields, you have to use a specific command. They’ll keep buffing your characters until every one in the party has every spell you can muster. Then they’ll do nothing. They won’t attack, they won’t re-buff. They’ll just stand there, taking hits, until you switch your “pagadrims” again. Meanwhile, they’ll be holding a boomerang or a staff in their hands, which they refuse to use.

Pussies.

Another thing: The three main female characters are wearing the shortest skirts imaginable. Like Ally McBeal short. If Harrison Ford ever found his way to Cocoon there with Chewie and the Millenium Falcon, or a nuclear explosion propelled refridgerator, he’d be all over that. But no matter how they jump or leap about, you never quite see panties. Instead, there’s this unfathomable dark void where there crotches should be, which is far more distrurbing, in my estimation.

Final Fantasy XIII: Snow Job

LiveJournal Tags: Final Fantasy,games

I was all excited about the prospect of playing as Snow again after he’d been taken away from me for about ten hours of gameplay as part of the storyline, but then I saw how they brought him back. Immediately after his exceedingly long, but awesome cutscene I was thrust into a battle against four enemy soldiers and one way-overpowered robot. I was forced to fight them all single-handedly, but the battle starts in the Summon monster Gestalt mode. Snow’s riding his twin ice-bitches motorcycle. At this point, I had yet to use his Shiva Summon monster in combat, and had only used Lightning’s Summon monster, Odin once before. There’s a dial and you have to use various listed button inputs as the dial goes down. I did all this, but when everything was said and done and the points used for the Summon were used up, the enemy still had half of it’s energy. It was Staggered, but it’s Stagger gauge immediately disappeared once returning to normal combat. I tried to battle him free-style, but died. Snow hadn’t levelled up his Crystarium, or whatever the hell it was called since he disappeared several Chapters ago, and was underpowered. I died and had to retry the stage, but was allowed to level up my character in the menu in the meantime. I tried a second time, and still died under the same circumstances. I tried a third time, and this time I did Auto every time instead of picking and choosing my own attacks. This time I wiped the floor with the enemy in one go.

So: the moral is to use Auto on everything, every time. Having any input into the game at all is going to leave you disappointed. It’s typically the only way to achieve the 5-Star rating in battle as well. This isn’t an RPG, or even a PG, or a G. It’s movie. All you’re doing is clicking through scenes.

Seriously, I’ve played every Final Fantasy game except XII, and I’m ready to call this the worst Final Fantasy ever. Only Chocobo’s Dungeon II is worse. It’s obvious they’ve put years of effort into the production, but it’s not a solid product. There’s no Role-Playing involved, or even real strategy.

Ol’ School

Ten years have passed, making the PS2 officially an “ol’ school” gaming platform. In related news, I finally found the power cord to my PS2. It had been lying behind my Xbox 360, in a massive tangle of wires.

Naturally, I immediately drew out my PS2, dusted it off, and turned it on. Inside, was white gold: my missing copy of Simpsons Season Eight Disc One. You know how you know something is somewhere in your apartment, but you just can’t find it, and it drives you crazy? You imagine someone stole it, or it was mistakenly thrown out, but it’s there, waiting for you.

Now: I traded in nearly every game I had to buy my 360, but there were three titles they wouldn’t take: Final Fantasy VII, Finaly Fantasy VIII and GTA: San Andreas. I still have them. Meaning: instead of playing Final Fantasy XIII, I could be playing Final Fantasy VII. Why would I chose between the two? Because it’s the same difference between watching Robocop and watching Robocop 3.

I finally got to the point in Final Fantasy XIII where I can play as Snow again, which is awesome. He’s the most interesting hero by far in the game. Case in point: early in the game, he makes a mad lunge for a gun. It was one of those situations where the dude jumps, does a roll on the ground, and ends up with a gun in his hand, which he then uses to blow the back of someone’s brains out. Only: he misses. He does the whole act, but doesn’t pick up the gun. To me, that’s awesome. More awesome, however, is the fact he rides around on a motorcycle made up of two half-naked babe Espers. That’s right: two. And he rides them. Between his legs. Then they transform into two ice-powered bitches and kill shit for him. Moreover: he’s the only one who can block.

Final Fantasy XIII: The Letdown

LiveJournal Tags: games,Final Fantasy

I’m about 18 hours into Final Fantasy XIII for the Xbox 360, and I’m convinced I’ll never be allowed to explore a free city, enter a shop, stay at an inn, or fly an airship around. I did get to ride a mecha for about two minutes before reaching a pre-determined finish line. The game is on rails. You don’t so much explore as you go down narrow corridors with few, if any nooks and crannies. Treasures are so obviously hidden you don’t even have to look for them. Their treasure chests themselves fucking float and bob in the air, as if to say, “Hey there, I’m a treasure chest.” There hasn’t been a single mini-game yet, except for the mecha thing, which sucked, and the only chocobo so far is the one living in the black dude’s fro. One of the girls in the game has to be about fourteen to fifteen, and she’s completely over-sexualized in a Japanese anime pedo kind of way. The only shops are in the menu at save points, so you don’t walk up to clerks. The items offered at the shops only appear after you’ve already found the item in a treasure chest or off a monster. So why bother trying to buy one? They’re overpriced anyway. I’ve obtained the maximum about of gil I can at this point in the game, as it doesn’t drop off enemies, and you only find it in chests. Still, I can’t afford anything, as it’s always priced higher. I can’t fast scroll through cutscenes without skipping the entire cutscene. There’s one five minute cutscene for every ten minutes of play it seems. I have to sit and watch a girlish-boy called, “Hope,” whine about his dead mother and how he’s going to get his revenge on, “Snow,” who isn’t guilty in the slightest, every half-hour on average. I can’t level up my characters: ever. Instead I have to level up their “crystals,” giving them new stats and abilities. Only the crystals only expand so far until you reach a point in the game. So your crystal can be maxed out, and you’ll have points left over to spend. So you can never over-power your characters and mow through repetitive fight scenes with minor monster characters. Weapons have to be levelled up as well, but this uses vedor junk items, and you have a limited supply. So you never know what weapon you should chose to level, as a new one could be right around the corner. You could be maxing out a weaker weapon only to find there’s a stronger weapon out there that should have received that treatment instead. There is no armour: only accessories. Your teams is constantly being split-up by the plot, and you can’t pick and chose who you want on your team at any given moment. So my only tank: Snow, is up on an airship somewhere having constant flash-backs while I’m stuck paired up with the fucking kids, who are only good for status effect spells and healing.

I died about ten times fighting Odin, because I didn’t switch between pre-set, pre-determined battle attack modes quick enough, or often enough for the game’s liking. It’s been the only challenge so far, and it pissed me right the fuck off. I was trying to see if the cutscene beforehand gave me a clue about how to win Odin’s favour, since I was suppose to fill up his “Gestalt” bar, whatever the fuck that was. The scene mentioned protecting Hope, so I tried that. Didn’t work. I of course was supposed to use double Ravager, and only healing when needed, like every other fight so far.

Having Odin is completely useless too, as you only really need him for the boss battles. Only, I was in a boss battle, and I didn’t have enough TP points, because I was using them on Libra. That meant I couldn’t use Odin, and hence the fight lasted an annoyingly long time.

There’s more complaints, to be sure, but I’m tired now.

Final Fantasy XXXIII

So I began playing Final Fantasy XIII yesterday for the Xbox 360. After opening it, I was instantly disappointed by how it was packaged. The game includes three discs. I had been expecting these discs to be set in different tabs, but instead they were all piled on top of one another, in the wrong order. I had to check for scratches just to make sure they hadn’t been damaged by the way they were set. I also realized I had no idea how many discs there were supposed to be. I couldn’t find where it was written on the package, so I had to check online. The game includes three discs, apparently, but previously I had heard four. Maybe that was for the PS3 version. It also came with the promise of a “free item” if I registered my game at members/square-enix.com/na. The site itself was lagging to death, and I was kicked several times trying to register, or rather re-register. I had already registered at their site years ago, but apparently that wasn’t good enough. I had to register with a second site of the same name, then link my two accounts.  This caused numerous 401 errors. I was trying to play while dicking around with their shitty site, so I eventually gave up and went back to the game. I came back a few hours later and it was closed for repairs. Fifteen minutes later, I finally re-re-registered and got my gift: male and female Avatar soldier uniforms. The uniforms themselves look gay as humanly possible, and don’t include the helmet the soldiers in the game wear. They also look completely different. Not even the most desperate Cosplayer would dress like this. I was also informed I couldn’t download the female outfit because my Avatar wasn’t female. So here I now held the code for an item I owned, and I couldn’t use it. I gave it to my fiancee’s Avatar, without her consent, because I wasn’t going to let it go to waste.

The intro movie for Final Fantasy XIII looks exactly like Avatar, the movie, where they’re flying around on those fucking alien bird things, and I mean EXACTLY. It’s just another in a long line of things Avatar completely resembles without actually infringing on anyone’s copyrights. Getting into the gameplay, I found there wasn’t much to be had. Final Fantasy has always been a “Step One: Select Attack. Step Two: Wait. Step Three: Repeat,” affair, but this game has something called, “Auto-Attack.” Meaning you only ever have to select the one option, and maybe throw in a potion or two. Seriously, every battle so far involved no strategy whatsoever. As for equipment, you only ever control one character out of three at any time, called the leader, and they only have the option of equipping a weapon and an accessory. No armour, no materia, nothing else. The game is about 80% cut scenes, and 15% walking along a straight path. I’ve had battles that laster 2 seconds, and I know that because it shows you the time.

It’s really more movie than game, and in terms of drama, they already killed off someone’s mom in slo-mo during the first hour of play. Then immediately went into a scene with everyone laughing and high-fiving each other. Way to ruin the mood, Final Fantasy.

Also: the game’s sole black man used the phrase, “I’m getting to old for this,” during the first fifteen minutes.

Also: the heroine’s name is Lighting, and she uses lightning magic. Clever. At least Black Lightning added the “Black” to his name to show you he wasn’t a one-trick pony.

Game On

LiveJournal Tags: games

I’ve been playing Modern Warfare 2 so much that it’s started to mess with my dreams, so I went out and rented Bayonetta, and Fairy Tale Fights.

Both games are similar hack’n’slash platformers. In fact, there’s a lot of similarities between the two. They’re both rated M17, they were both released around the same time. In terms of game play, in both you walk around a sort of a rail, where it’s not immediately clear what objects you can interact with, or what obstacles are unscalable. You pick up weapons and coins/halos as you kills enemies, and you have auto-aim. Both games are bat-shit insane.

Putting Bayonetta into the tray and starting it up, you’re immediately flung into a battle with angels and some crazy-ass double-headed winged dragon thing with a giant, upside-down cherub statue face for a body on top of a falling clock tower. The plot does not get any clearer as the game progresses. You’re a witch who dresses in S&M outfits and shoots bullets out her high heels as you do cartwheels. Your hair turns into a killer dragon head that eats enemies and drags them through a portal. For some reason, you have to be naked to do this. You can apparently play with one-button controls on easy. One imagines this is so you can masturbate while you’re playing, although the game isn’t that sexy. There’s a lot of cheesy characters. One’s a Danny Devito type with too many rings on his fingers. Another is some kind of jazzy black-guy/demon who serves drinks in very tiny glasses. Bayonetta is basically Wolverine, meaning she has amnesia and is trying to reclaim her past after being locked up in an underwater coffin. It’s taken her twenty years before she’s bothered to investigate the matter. For some reason: she hate the shit out of angels. Maybe because they’re constantly trying to kill her. She’s a witch in skin-tight clothes killing angels. No one has boycotted the game, or spoken out against it. Remember Mortal Kombat and how people went ape-shit over that? No one cares anymore. You play the game by mashing buttons to perform combos and unleash more powerful attacks. You don’t have to remember any of the more advanced combos to beat enemies. Simply tapping B or Y in any order will produce the results you want. It’s kind of fun, but then kind of confusing at the same time. There’s one battle where you’re literally fighting on the ceiling, trying to fight an enemy. It’s difficult to track your opponent as you’re running around a barrel-roll style, and more difficult to block her attacks as it’s hard to see her tells.

Combat in Fairy Tale Fights is far more frustrating. The game’s basically a rip-off of Castle Crashers, only not as fun. You have the same ability to play with four other people. The actual fighting in the game is pretty retarded. Instead of pushing buttons, you have to use your right joystick. It took me like five minutes to figure that out. It also took me that long to figure out where to go to start quests. You have your choice of four characters to play as. I of course picked the naked Emperor, because why wouldn’t I? You fight by picking up weapons. You have two weapon slots you can toggle through. You can’t pick up a new weapon until you’ve thrown out your old one. So to be clear: you can’t just automatically pick up a new weapon. You have to throw the old one, then pick the new one up. This causes confusion during play, as you accidentally can throw the weapon you want to keep. Off of a cliff. You also lose whatever weapon you’re holding upon dying, and  a lot of gold coins. The maps suck shit. You can fall into a pit of lava about ten times in a row because the other side of the ledge doesn’t line up the way it looks like it does. Everything has this too-colourful aspect to it, so it’s hard to see in general. Plus whenever you fight, you’re swarmed by enemies. As you chop them to bits, some remain on their feet after they’ve died. So you could be attacking a dead enemy while a live one is hitting you from behind. Plus, when you cut them in half, half the screen is taken up by a close-up of you doing so in bright, red colours. I don’t know how this would play out in a four person game, but if you’re the person fighting behind that screen, I bet it’s pretty annoying, as it blinds your path. Plus it’s pretty seizure inducing in general.

Most of the weapons are useless. The gold coins seem useless as well. You could have a veritable fortune halfway through a level, but each time you die you lose more and more. The boss battle will kill you about thirty times, minimum, as you can’t instantly predict when or where to dodge. Plus in a couple boss battles, when you knock the boss onto a series of spinning saw blades that cut through his back and he drops a bunch of gold coins HE GETS BACK UP AND KEEPS FIGHTING. You’ve clearly won, but you have to keep fighting. So going into the battle, you have about 30,000 coins, and going out you have 300. There’s no bonus for winning. The bonus comes halfway through the fight, and then you lose that by dying more. Plus the only thing you have to spend your coins on is a statue back in the city, a city where you can’t even talk or interact with the other NPCs. So why go back? It’s basically just a menu screen, trolled up. Dying has no consequence other than losing coins. You respawn almost automatically, usually in the path of a fireball. The whole game feels like they took a use made level from Little Big Planet. Plus you can kill children. For no reason. Bullshit.