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Mar 11th, 2014 at 14:46:29 - Final Fantasy XIII-2 (PS3) |
Been on this a couple weeks now. Just beat the main game. Huge huge improvement over FFXIII. I noticed immediately that it fixed one of the problems with the original, that is, it was FUN from the start. It has Final Fantasy charm oozing out of it, which is so great, and was so missed in everything Final Fantasy that I've played since X and X-2. The music is excellent and there are a bunch of songs just for when you are riding chocobos, including...a metal song. SO YOU THINK YOU CAN RIDE THIS CHOCOBO? GIVE IT SOME GYSHAL GREENS AND WATCH IT GO. That song is hilarious, surprisingly good, and majestic in metal-nerd grandeur. I'll just go through some pros and cons so to minimize the rambling topics...
PRO SECTION:
It's a great sequel, picks up a few years after the end of FFXIII. It takes the story in a wholly unanticipated direction, but it works. All the major characters from XIII have cameos, with Hope being the most important one. Actually, Hope (and Lightning, you who are trying to save), have more than cameos. They're pretty integral to the story. You find Snow in one time and spend an area with him. Fang and Vanille appear, luckily only for about 5 minutes because Vanille was Most Hated Character #1 in FFXIII. Sazh and Dajh pop up heroically at the end too.
Story. The story is mind-bendingly wonderful. It's impossible for me to explain it in much detail though. I'm not sure it would make sense to a player if they played XIII-2 but not XIII. Anyway. It's about time, temporal paradoxes and changing the future and the past. A little confusing, but worth the effort to follow it.
Basically...the goddess Etro saved everyone from crystal slumber after they completed their focus in the last game, except Fang and Vanille because they became part of the crystal pillar supporting Cocoon. As Etro's power saved everyone, in that moment, some dark Chaos something or other emerged from Etro's temporary weakness and sucked Lightning into Valhalla, which is like this eternal realm of neither life nor death nor time in the game. When Etro intervened and saved everyone, and that Chaos popped into the timeline for a moment, the timeline was altered. A ton of paradoxes were introduced such that there are now multiple futures and multiple pasts.
Playing as Serah, Lightning's sister, your goal is to find Lightning in Valhalla. And playing as Noel (the last human in the distant future who was cast back into Serah's timeline), your goal is to follow Caius (bad guy) and save Yeul (a seeress from Noel's futuristic tribe), which is an interrelated story arc.
So you go from timeline to timeline, different times and places, and the same places in different times, and the same times in different places, resolving paradoxes in order to unlock other timelines. Paradoxes in the game are things that are in a timeline that don't belong there, that are there from another timeline. Sometimes it's a powerful enemy or some NPCs or some item.
Example: You need to climb Augustus Tower in the year 300. You climb partway, but are blocked by an AI security system (a product of a man-made Fal'cie actually). You need to go back in time to find out why the AI system is blocking you. To do this, you need to find the proper gate (there are various gates leading to various places that you can unlock in each timeline). So You need to go back through old timelines and try to find the correct gate to unlock Augustus Tower in the year 200 to figure out what's up with the AI. The timeline that has the proper gate is one with Hope, who is a research scientist, who has also figured out about time-travel, who is building a new artificial Cocoon for everyone to live on. He had this artificial Fal'cie built, which put this AI system in place in another timeline, which you find out. You've previously played a timeline where the Fal'cie/AI system he put in place takes over an entire city and begins killing citizens. So by interacting with Hope here, you learn what that was all about too. You find some override code to override the AI in Augustus Tower. You go back to Augustus Tower and get past the part you were stuck at. In the boss battle against the artificial Fal'cie in the tower, you can't kill the Fal'cie because it doesn't really exist in that timeline. It exists in some other timeline and is just projecting itself into this timeline, so it keeps coming back. You have a bunch of options of things to try, and one is "Yell at Hope." I did that one last because it sounded futile, but it's the correct one. You yell at Hope about creating the Fal'cie/AI that eventually goes nuts and kills everyone, and he, in the past, doesn't create it, and then in the future (or the present where you are fighting it), it disappears because the past was changed such that it shouldn't exist in the future anymore. Then you if you go exploring the different timeline of that city that I mentioned that was destroyed by the Fal'cie/AI, it is a wonderful metropolis where the people don't rely on the Fal'cie/AI.
SO COOL.
Which reminds me, I've been reading through Jane McGonigal's book, Reality is Broken, and she has a discussion of "awe" in games and says that games inspire this reverence when we stop to think about their complexity, everything that went into making them, and the experiences they enable us to have. This game is "awe"some in the real sense of the word. The environments, the music, the story...the whole fiction that is built up and the way this game is done with the time-travel is just AWESOME. I can't count how many times I just stopped and stared and thought "Wow." The last dungeon was particularly cool, this big open Tetris-block inspired maze, and the last boss had a really cool design.
A couple other things to point out that are worth mentioning because they are vast improvements over the original...
The music is SO GREAT in this game. It was good in the first game, but I definitely remember the same battle song being used over and over and over and over in practically every location and playing it on mute sometimes. I wanted to hear all the music all the time in this game. I've already mentioned the funny and surprisingly good metal chocobo song. There is J-pop, ambient environmental music, and orchestral scores. They seem to have made a song, or a different type of music for every event. There are probably 30 timeline locations, and at least half a dozen scores for them.
There are a lot of interesting side quests. In XIII, there was literally nothing else to do for the first 20 hours of the game except follow the story, then you could basically "kill hard monsters" for side quests. First of all, the pacing in XIII-2 is infinitely better. You can start doing optional exploratory, FUN, things right away aside from the main story.
Let me explain how this works a bit...You use "gates" to travel the timeline. Each gate is opened with a crystal fragment. There are 160 fragments, only some of which are used to open gates. These are the ultimate objects of the side quests. You get them from defeating hard monsters, finding objects, playing quiz games, winning chocobo races (I assume!), performing requests for NPCs and various other things. There are some number of fragments (average, probably 5 or so) in each timeline. Like I said, I just beat the main game and I have 69/160, and I've spent some time actually hunting for them too!
Now that I've beaten the game, there is clearly a lot of stuff I can do regarding getting fragments. The game said that I can explore "alternate futures" and stuff, so I think that I can go places I haven't been, find fragments I couldn't find before, see alternate timelines that differ from the "real" one that happened through the main story, maybe even see alternate endings! It sounds really cool. I am not a person to do much extra stuff after beating a game, but I am really interested in what all there is to do and see here. The reason is it doesn't sound grindy. It sounds exploratory. I love exploring. The locations are so varied and beautiful, and the story so mind-bending, that I want to see more.
Finally, there is this whole other sort of collectible mini-game. In FFXIII, you had 3 members in your party at a time, with more characters sitting out waiting to be swapped in. In XIII-2, you have Serah and Noel the entire time. They are complemented by a third, a monster. You collect the monsters. It's like, I don't know really because I haven't actually played these games, but maybe like Monster Hunter or Pokemon or something where you collect monsters to raise and fight. You can collect all the monsters (there's probably a fragment for this [that I will not get!]) just by winning battles against them. You can set 3 monsters from all you've collected to choose among in battle to fill that third party slot. Monsters all have assigned roles like Medic or Sentinel, so they are like little role specialists you can sub in and out. You can also level them up in the Chrystarium, making them stronger and learn more abilities. Each monster has different attributes too, like "Meleeproof" (high physical damage resist), "Early Peaker" (can only go up to level 20 [out of 100]) and so on. You can also "infuse" monsters, which I like to think of as having them cannibalize one another and absorb their abilities. So you can grow them this way too. There's more to the system, but it's pretty freaking cool and is like a gazillion times better that that horrible Eidolon summoning system in XIII.
CON SECTION:
Yeah, there are a couple little snags.
Although the pacing is better than XIII, it's not perfect. It was over before I knew it. The last portion of the game is just really fast. There's a ton of story parts, then BAM, characters start talking about the final confrontation! You go through the last dungeon, and sure enough, boss battle, done. This isn't so bad though because of all the extra stuff at the end I guess, but it was surprising and I like the game and story so much I didn't want it to end already!
There is a downside to the fragments. When you are just casually finding them, it is great, but there were a couple times where you needed a particular fragment in order to continue, which meant you had to go back to a bunch of different timelines and search for them. Some fragments, and lots of treasure chests too, are invisible! Yes, invisible. Your Mog companion can see them, so sometimes he will get excited and yell "Kupo!" when you're near one, but not always. This made searching for fragments begin to feel like playing a hidden object game with random encounters. A similar thing happened with the quests from NPCs too. A lot of them were sequential, so you had to do them in order, which meant searching the entire area for an NPC with a quest, then doing that quest, then searching the entire area again for an NPC with the next quest, then doing that, then searching the entire area...until you found as many fragments as you could in that timeline (and usually there was one or two unaccounted-for fragments, which I guess I can find now that I've beaten the game[?]). Hopefully it doesn't feel tooooo much like hidden object hunting anymore. If it does, that's definitely when I'll retire the game!
Finally, there's a casino fun town called Serendipity, which is reminiscent of that one place in FFVII with chocobo racing and other stuff where you go on a date with Aerys and gamers the world over got a tear in their collective eye. Anyway, this place, Serendipity, has two things: slot machines and chocobo racing. I hate slot machines, so that takes care of that one. Now, chocobo racing, I was super excited about. I raced the hell out of some chocobos in FFVII. This is completely nostalgic though, and unfortunately not as exciting as I remembered. You can race chocobos that you capture from battles. I won...one...race the entire game. This means my chocobos were not leveled up at all (Rank D in all attributes, yuck). I leveled two of them up to 30 even! Actually one might be 40. But I did find a golden chocobo near the end of the game, which sounds promising. Anyway, I'd like to continue screwing with the chocobo races, but there doesn't seem to be much substance to it. Serendipity particularly sucks because, and even the NPCs say this, it's "unfinished" or "under construction." This means, "if you want to have something else to do besides race chocobos or play slots, you need to go buy DLC." Yeah, I think I'll go buy DLC to play virtual poker in FFXIII-2...not. How dumb. Why not just put all the mini-games in there to begin with?
Anyway, I will check out the endgame and hopefully find even more enjoyment in it! This is a straight up 5/5 from me. Worth every word I wrote about it.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Mar 11th, 2014 at 14:55:34.
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Feb 28th, 2014 at 07:53:51 - Path of Exile (PC) |
Ok, PoE update. I've got a bunch of skeptical friends. "Free to play...I don't know." "Like Diablo? Eeeeh." "You just do the same 3 acts over on harder difficulties?" Come on people! Free to play games can be excellent, remember the great things about Diablo, and isn't challenging yourself on harder difficulties fun and rewarding?!
I have been rushing through Cruel difficulty (the second one) with my Witch, though I recently seem to have hit a wall in the middle of Act 3, which sucks because I'm so close to completing Cruel. I did it solo up until I hit said wall. I had been levels above the recommended level for each area, but it finally evened out. I was getting massacred in the Chamber of Sins by a couple different types of enemies. Dying is v.bad in Cruel because you get a -5% experience penalty. In Merciless, it's -10%, ouch! So after losing like 20% of my experience bar in the Chamber of Sins, I joined up with some public parties who were running around near there. We made some headway on some quests, I leveled up once or twice (now level 50). It's funny, boss enemies are easier for me now, but some of the regular mobs are much deadlier. The same seems to be true in groups.
I'm not sure how I feel about group play so far. Some groups aim to complete quests. Others aim to farm xp. Others are for trading and loot runs. What I do know is that no one talks, except to ask for town portals to waypoints. Everyone mostly runs around in a mob spamming AoE spells and clicking on loot. I've only picked up a couple scrolls, haven't managed to get a single rare item before someone else snags it. But I think there is an xp boost in a party, and I was in this area called The Docks yesterday watching my experience bar fly. That was pretty sweet. But, playing in a group is kind of boring because there is such a mob of players and they're all just blasting everything. I just kind of ran behind them casting one or two spells per group of enemies, when I can make them out through all the visual effects. Regardless of how I feel about groups, it seems I have reached the part of the game where I have to grind xp (either solo or in parties) in order to continue much further. Lame.
Once I realized I was going to have to grind xp, farming the same zones over and over, I decided to play around with another class, the Scion. The Scion is cool because she starts smack in the middle of the passive skill tree, meaning she can more easily become all manner of hybrid character. I think I'm going to go for some sort of badass dual wielding, strong, attack speed kind of character. She starts out with this one skill that is a range attack where she throws her weapon(s), pretty cool. I also liked having access to my stash, where I've hoarded items from playing through with my Witch. So the Scion has a bunch of skill gems and rings and rares and stuff as she levels. BUT, after playing in Act 1 for maybe an hour, I fear...I fear I have little interest in continuing the Scion. Why? It's the same damn thing as the Witch (and every other class from what I can gather). You focus on AoE spells, run around and gather enemies, blast them down. Whether that's a fire pillar with the Witch or a Cleave with the Scion, it's the same thing. It pretty quickly felt really similar and I don't know why I would start another character to do the same thing I've been doing when I can keep progressing with the Witch. So, unless I end up finding friends to play with, the Scion will remain level 5.
Next plans? Grind it out with the Witch. My build is pretty sweet. I can summon like 9 zombies, 10 skeletons, and 2 spectres. I have a kickass AoE spell that calls down a fire pillar, which grows in size and strength as I hold down the cast button. I have augmentation gems on my fireball spell that increase burning damage and that splits it into like 5 projectiles, so it's a pretty badass AoE spell too. I've leveled up a couple curse gems, so enemies all take like 30% more crits and crit damage, get stunned more, are slower, take 20% more physical damage, all kinds of good stuff. I've scoured the passive skill grid and have one or two more areas with summoning abilities.
I would like to check out one of the races or some other community event just to see what it is like. I would also like to go PvP some. I forgot about that. The big thing though is there is a content expansion coming out in 5 days. I don't know if it adds a new act or what it does, but I don't want to put the game away until that. Actually, Grinding Gear Games has a pretty hefty new content schedule, with I think something big every 3 or 4 months. We'll see how this first one is, but based on the quality of the game, I'm excited for it.
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Feb 25th, 2014 at 10:45:56 - Resistance: Fall of Man (PS3) |
Got my PS3 back from the shop. I can't say it was free anymore since I had to drop some cash for a new disc drive. Now I can say I got it highly discounted, still a satisfied customer. So back on the wagon of playing all the PS3 exclusives and PS3 games that were region locked for my Xbox. Resistance was a flagship title for the console's launch in 2006. It's crazy to think I'm playing "new" games from 8 years ago. That last console generation sure did last a while. It was a pretty good shooter, nowhere near in league with Gears of War though, as far as flagship FPS titles went. The main difference is that Resistance isn't a cover shooter. It's more Call of Duty-esque.
I liked that the story was told as an account, and also that it wasn't an American-centric game. Granted, the Americans were the saviors sort of, but it mostly had to do with England. Just a nice change. This woman, head of a military caravan that encountered trouble, is the story's narrator. The caravan was taking an alien creature to drop it off to the Americans, who were supposed to use it to help with a last ditch effort in saving England and repelling this invading alien force, called the Chimera. Caravan got ambushed, and basically you go secure the caravan, traverse the Chimeran tunnel network, and eventually blow their invasion to hell. The story was cool because it told all these little stories about moments of heroism that you, American solder I-already-forgot-his-name, participated in that allowed for eventual victory. There wasn't much emphasis on character building, just telling this overarching story of the Chimeran invasion and England's fight to drive them back out. It's pretty obvious that this is set up to have more stories in sequels, of which there are plenty. At some point I'm sure I'll find out more about my character (he gets infected but has titular "resistance" to the alien virus that turns everyone else into aliens), and I'll probably have to drive the Chimera out of the rest of Europe, perhaps fight off an invasion of America. Yay.
So, first thing I noticed about the game is that it's hard. I died in the tutorial like 10 times and almost turned the difficulty down to easy. I'm glad I didn't though because it leveled off for the most part. The reason the tutorial was hard was because the main character hadn't been infected yet, and so his life didn't regenerate at all. You get damaged, you stay damaged. Your health is in 4 25% bars. Once you get infected, you can regenerate the bar that's part empty, filling that quarter. So like if your health is at 70%, it will regenerate up to 75%. If it's at 76% it will regenerate up to 100%, if it's at 5% it will regenerate up to 25%...It is a serious tactic to try not to get damaged below 75%, 50% or 25% so that you can regenerate more health. There are health packs scattered around. Other parts are really frikin hard too, like the first time you have to fight one of those big spider aliens that shoots explosive egg things at you (which is after a giant firefight and having to take down two stalkers!) and the part where you have to fight like 10 of those slender man things. Holy crap, I did those parts like 20 times. There's also an auto-checkpoint system, and I frequently had to re-do sections. Say within one checkpoint, there are 4 battle parts. Made it through 1, through 2, through 3, died on 4. Got to restart from the checkpoint at part 1. Although it was frustrating sometimes, as challenges tend to be, I enjoyed the difficulty. It forced me to learn which guns were good against which enemies, to be cautious, to handle multiple enemies of different types simultaneously, and so on. Definitely not an easy game, but quite rewarding to beat the hard parts.
Alien enemies weren't anything special until later on when more interesting types emerge like the stalkers and the aforementioned egg-shooter spiders. But most of the time you'll just be fighting hybrids, your basic grunt with machine guns, or some slightly different version of them. The challenge becomes conserving life and staying alive and using guns smartly. Guns also were pretty dull until later on, and even then, not too exiting. Basic machine guns, shotguns, sniper rifle..those are what you have through half the game. You regularly find a new one at predetermined spots. Oh, and ammo is strewn around EVERYWHERE, and often specific ammo in a spot will alert you to what gun you should probably think about using for whatever is coming up. Later, you get some kind of explosive globule-throwing gun that was handy against big hard enemies and some sort of ricocheting machine gun. The most interesting gun was probably this energy rifle which could shoot through objects. For each object it passes through, it becomes stronger. One type of enemy has this gun too, and seeing them was usually a red flag to run away, then come back and be really careful. When you run away, they still shoot at you, and you see this energy forming on walls and things, then "pew!" as it continues to the next surface, stays there a moment, then "pew!" through it to the next surface. Scary.
One cool thing about the weapons is they all had alt fire modes. That object penetrating gun had one where you create a shield that nothing can pass through (except object penetrating ammo), so that was great for when lots of enemies rushed at you down a hallway. Put up the barrier and blast them. The human machine gun has a grenade launcher. The alien machine gun has a homing beacon you can tag an enemy with and your shots will fly around obstacles to hit it. The sniper rifle can slow down time for easy headshots (super handy in the last levels). There were 3 types of grenades, your basic, these that shoot a bunch of spikes everywhere, and some others that incinerate an area. The latter kind was especially dangerous for me even. Toss it and run or get burned up too! Oh, and the Chimera would place these mine traps around sometimes, which were pretty cool. If you get near, one of those spiky grenades would pop up, or a laser robot, or this energy expulsion thing, and you have to shoot them or hide or get hit or, with the energy expulsion ones, either jump or duck to avoid the energy, depending on what height the thing rises to. Pretty neat.
Yeah, that's about it. Interesting premise, fun gameplay, nothing too amazing. Hopefully 2 and or 3 will take it to the next level and expand more on the plot.
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Feb 20th, 2014 at 18:43:55 - MASQ (Web) |
Interesting "choose your own adventure" type game. I found out about this from PC Gamer's Top 100 Games of All Time list from some issue like 6 months ago that I just got around to reading. Apparently it's been around since 2002 and the purpose is to tell a compelling narrative in a nontraditional gaming format. So it's like a comic book style game that just plays out in scenes. You make dialogue decisions that advance the plot. The plot will also advance on its own. If you don't select an option, other characters will continue acting.
Pretty much every dialogue choice affects story events. I played through 5 times (it's really quick) and made it to the "end" the last time. I wound up in jail a couple times, a successful fashion designer one time, I may have died once...There's a really complex narrative behind what you see. Each time I played through, I learned different things about relationships among characters, like who Nikki was, what my wife was up to late at night, why Carlos was killed, how to get money from the bank and from an investor...I'm sure there are a hundred other scenes I didn't see yet. It's pretty cool.
Obviously, since 2002 this kind of branching storyline has been done in The Witcher series and a bunch of Bioware games and other more notable stuff. This game is still really interesting and surprisingly engaging even though it's (mostly) black and white, just comic book pictures, and has no sound. Worth playing through a couple times if you're interested in a unique approach to storytelling style in games. And it's so short, you can go through it a few times in an hour.
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