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Nov 8th, 2013 at 05:38:35 - Infamous (PS3) |
Finished Infamous. It was pretty cool! It's a sort of open world game like GTA meets Assassin's Creed, though not as grand in scale as either. All I knew about it before hand is that you shoot lightning and that there was some good/evil system. That's the nuts and bolts of it.
You play as Cole MacGrath (or McGrath...or Magrath...) and the game begins with you in the center of a giant explosion that's left part of a city in ruins and left you with nascent super powers. Turns out a terrorist organization used you to courier a bomb that blew up en route. Turns out you're a 'conduit' so it doesn't kill you. You discover you have powers, come into contact with an FBI agent, go on the trail of another agent who was captured by said terrorist organization, strengthen your electric super powers, and attempt to track down the terrorist super weapon. The story is pretty good up until the finale, where they used some cheap tricks to set up a sequel. More on that later. There are several questionable moments/holes. The characters are all serviceable, but there's not much to them. Cut scenes are told in graphic novel style, which fits the gritty super hero theme.
The good/evil system works with the gameplay but isn't great with the story at a handful of points. I don't want to give any specific examples for fear of spoiling. I played as evil Cole. Even though I did many evil acts, the story carried on and all the story NPCs continued working with me. There's a particular evil act I did in the end that makes hardly any sense given the bad guy's motives and the game's ending. The bad guy's motives, revealed after you defeat him in the end, are just silly. They are the cheap tricks to set up a sequel, where he spills info about a bunch of shit that wasn't in the game and that I didn't even think was possible in the game's universe. I went on and started the second game to see how it begins, and also evil Cole at the end of the first game makes 0 sense in the context of the beginning of the second, even though I took the option of continuing my Infamous 1 evil story. If you're evil, at the end of Infamous, Cole is basically on top of the world with his powers, rules the city with an iron fist, and is a selfish mass murderer. In the beginning of the second game he's befriended his old friend Zeke again from the first game (play the games, this makes no sense, big plot hole) and is working with some other FBI agent. If he's a super badass who does whatever he wants, why is he out taking orders from government agencies? He has super electricity powers that no one else possesses...
Anyway, the meat of the game is your sizzling electric powers. You unlock more as you go, lightning bolts, grenades, sliding on electric wires and train rails, summoning huge lightning storms, and on and on. There are a lot and they are all cool. You can cause A LOT of mayhem, picking up and flinging cars, blowing up objects, tossing missiles and grenades like there's no tomorrow. It's a ton of fun. The whole setup with electricity is really well done. You need electricity to take full advantage of your powers, but the bad guys obviously don't want you to have electricity, so the game starts with sections of the city off the power grid. Main missions sometimes involve turning on the power to sections of the city, and then you can go there and do stuff. Trains start running, lights turn on, side missions become available, and so on.
There are plenty of side missions to do. I actually found them all good fun. A handful involve killing enemies for one reason or another. One type called 'photographer' involves you doing specific things like 'blow up a car' or 'blast an enemy into the air, then hit him with a grenade' and the photographer takes awesome action shots. In another, you follow a courier and steal his package. Some types open up after story missions of that type. So I had a story mission where I had to disable armored buses that were driving around killing people. That becomes a side mission type. You can also try and do all the 'stunts,' which are destruction-related tasks sort of like the photographer missions. I did 11/21. Whenever you do one, it tells you what the next one to try for is. If I kept playing the game, that's the first thing I would try and do! I got stuck on 'shoot an enemy in midair with a lightning bolt and in the same jump hit him with a ground blast.' I could never get it quite right. There are also the requisite open world collectibles. I was happy to see they served a purpose in this game. Collecting blast shards, which are little blue objects scattered literally anywhere, on the sides of buildings, under bridges, in garbage piles, nets you additional max energy. I enjoyed collecting them for a while, then it began to feel like pixel hunting and I needed more and more shards to get an energy boost so it quit being worth doing. Then there are dead drops, which are little story bits providing some back story on two of the characters. I got almost all of those, 30/32, usually searching for them on the way to missions.
Doing side and story missions nets experience you use to upgrade powers and sometimes nets 5 blast shards, which is a lot! Finding 5 shards can take a while if you're collecting one at a time off the sides of buildings, but some of the side missions take just a minute. Side missions also clear the area of enemies. I did them all on the first island, about half on the second and none on the third. Some side missions are good/evil ones. If you do an evil one it blocks the good one and vice versa. Many of the good/evil options are so black and white it's funny. And Cole has these voiceovers like "Hmm. I could save this person from getting mugged. Or I could just walk away." HMMMMM. Suffice it to say, it is REALLY EASY to choose good or evil and not screw it up.
That's everything off the top of my head. Should knock out Infamous 2 over the weekend. I hope the characters are more interesting and that there are less plot holes and things that don't make sense. Other than that, I'd take more or less the same game, with usual sequel streamlines and improvements!
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Nov 2nd, 2013 at 09:16:21 - Tales of Vesperia (360) |
Finished Tales the same day as FFXIII. I am SO over JRPGs for a while!
I'd say the game began around an 85% for me and ended on a 70%. It outstayed its welcome by 15 or so hours as well. I think I'm just tired of the Tales series, perhaps have grown out of it. I haven't played one in a long time, since Tales of Symphonia on Gamecube.
Tales of Vesperia is all about friendship and being stronger together and learning to put others' needs first...blech. It started out all funny and charming, especially compared to FFXIII's complete lack of charm (save Sazh), but a handful of the characters ended up being really annoying. I liked Yuri, the main. He had a cool attitude and was voice acted very well. Estelle and Judith were also pretty good. Repede, the pipe-smoking dog, was the best of course. As usual, the children characters just got under my skin. Karol is like 10 years old and is a monster hunter. How original, a monster hunter. Then he becomes a guild leader of the guild that Yuri forms with him. Why would you form a guild with an annoying 10-year-old kid? I dunno. Unfortunately the guild becomes the centerpiece for the whole 'let's stick together' theme and it was just so cheesy that I didn't really want to play anymore after that. Rita is the other character I disliked. She's also a kid, a "genius mage" and a researcher. Yeah, a 12-year-old expert scientist. She goes on and on about science and research. As a Ph.D. student, I cannot stand science and research being talked about in uninformed ways. In Rita's world of science, she just "discovers" things left and right. She uses the scientific method...literally, she said at some point "hypothesis, method, collect data, observe...that's the secret to winning!" or something equally idiotic. She's always figuring things out, but contrary to her scientific method, she always discovers things abstractly instead of empirically and then assumes they will work. I know it's fiction, but damn the game's representation of research irked me to death! There were more annoying non-main characters too...ah, JRPGs...
Here's a quick breakdown of the story. There are things called 'blastia' that power various systems in cities and whatnot...regulate water supply, form barriers to keep monsters out, etc. Blastia is going missing/being destroyed, so monsters are invading everywhere. "Monsters." They're never any specific enemy, just "monsters." Anyway, you go off trying to find what's happening to the blastia and after a while the story goes deeper and deeper and gets super convoluted. There are ancient beings called Entelexia and there's some bad thing called Adephagos that I thought was one enemy but turns out at the end it was plural the whole time (??) and seriously I had no frackin idea what was going on for the last 10 hours of the game and I really didn't care either. The story was really really weak.
Combat remains fun, yet repetitive. Tales is known for its active combat system where you run one character around the field mashing buttons and scoring combos. Combat system is deep but became B B B B B B X B B B B B B X... repeat ad infinitum. Every fight can be won like that, especially once you set particular skills and tweak your party and the AI behavior. There are tons of types of combo attacks and special moves and tons of weapons that you learn skills from by wearing them and getting "LP" points. Enemy types are recycled like crazy. I just watched the trailer for Tales of Xillia, the new Tales game, and they have the SAME enemy types on the trailers in that game. Come on guys, new enemies...
There's tons of extra content and a new game + mode if you're into that. Fans will probably love it, but I think it's my last Tales game. I was so bored and did not care at all for the last couple play sessions. This is one I wish I hadn't bothered to play. Very mediocre experience for me. Scratched Tales of Xillia off my 'to buy' list.
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Nov 2nd, 2013 at 08:45:00 - Final fantasy 13 (PS3) |
Finished FFXIII today. I took a long break from it to play another game that I will write about shortly. When I came back to FFXIII, I was in the final area, which looks amazing. Technically you're in a data stream where the data has materialized and flows by you, like if you can imagine being inside a cable. Lots of really cool looking environments in that game...
Alriiight, so my last entry I talked about all the game mechanics and about how linear it was, and said that it appeared to open up a bit in Chapter 11. It WAS a false appearance of an open world, just like I suspected! Chapter 11 introduces hunting missions. There are partially crystallized l'Cie scattered around the environment who implore you to complete their focus for them to free them from fully transforming into crystals. In total there are 64 missions. I did about 30 that I could find in Chapter 11, and that were on the way through the rest of the game. I guess the rest you have to go back before beating the game and do. They're all just "find this monster and kill it" quests though, which is kind of lame that it's just 64 tougher-than-usual battles. I'm sure the later ones are proper boss fights. Anyway, those l'Cie missions are in Chapter 11, and you can find and ride chocobos to get around, and there are cactuars and a funny little skit about them! The game actually feels like Final Fantasy for a while.
After the open world parts of Chapter 11 though, it's right back to linearity until you get the option at the very end to revisit those areas and...well, I don't know what else there is to do besides those 64 l'Cie hunting missions. Upgrade stuff I guess.
So by the time I beat the game, I noted a handful of things:
(1) the combat music is nice, but gets really repetitive to the point that I was muting it. That's rare. They reeeally should have had more variations on the main score.
(2) trying to get 5-star ratings in combat is fun. I often swore when I got a 4 instead of 5 star rating! By the end though I was often getting 0 stars. I dunno how you're supposed to beat some of the fights in the final area so fast.
(3) there seems to be a lot of pointless upgrading. You can max out every character's chrystarium in every role if you so desire, which is insane to me. I didn't even max out one role for any character. Would one have to do that to defeat the hardest enemies in the game? That would be soooo much grinding! You can also upgrade weapons. I upgraded one weapon for all the characters I used through level 2 (of 3). I'm not even sure you can upgrade to 3 before the end of the game because the material costs like 2 million gil. I never even accumulated 1 million. And I think you can get it off these tortoise enemies, which, from reading online, is what people farm for shit at the end of the game. So there is a lot of grinding and farming for upgrades that people do...
(4) the summon/Eidolon system was useless for me. I probably summoned 5 times through the whole game. They don't seem very strong, and their main functions that I would use them for, soaking damage and removing status effects and healing my party, are better done by, well, using my party. I don't know if I missed something or what, but yeah, summons were pointless. Also, you can only use the Eidolon of the character you are controlling, so unless you plan on controlling all the characters, then most of the summons just gather dust. Is the system useless? Is it broken? Is it just used for farming or specific instances that I didn't cross? Did other players ignore it too?
By the end of the game, the combat gets more interesting, which is great. Up until Chapter 11, just pressing X a bunch wins you every battle. In and after Chapter 11, you've actually got to pay attention or die fairly often in even normal battles, especially in the last areas. I liked and didn't like these tough normal battles. At first I hated them. They felt long and drawn out. But the other side of me said that they are epic and appropriate for the badassery that my characters should be going up against. Tug of war there. But it's cool because you really start learning to use paradigms. I actually used the sentinel role and would switch characters in and out, use specific synergists or healers for their specific spells, and change paradigms quite often in battle. It's a cool system that has more depth than it appears. One thing I rarely did was actively command my main character. I just let her auto-battle 95% of the time. If you want to get really into it, you can choose actions. The AI was great though, so that was unnecessary.
Finally, a couple other notes on design choices...
You inexplicably cannot save paradigm combinations. This was incredibly irritating and definitely led to me changing my battle party as little as possible to avoid the hassle of re-defining paradigms every.single.time. I should be able to save paradigms for character combinations. So if I have Lightning, Sazh and Hope's 6 paradigms set, then every single time I put Lightning, Sazh and Hope in my party, those 6 paradigms should already be set. Instead it defaults to whatever 3 standard ones every single time. I want to be able to switch out Sazh for a sentinel like Fang and have my Lightning, Fang, Hope's 6 paradigms already set from when I set them previously.
Like I've said, I enjoyed the story, but it had some weird parts. Like the beginning of chapter 12, for some reason you assault a street race...? Lightning or Fang or someone straight up murders a race car driver...? I thought I was protecting citizens...? I realize one reason why the story is weird though. It goes back to there being no cities or towns or NPC interaction whatsoever. The sense of what this epic story means is completely lost on the individual level. Why would individual citizens care? How do they know what's going on? Why are they or aren't they responding in certain ways? How do they know the fal'Cie are bad guys? All of a sudden, everyone is like, "Oh we hate the fal'Cie!" Why? How do you know? You've spent your entire life loving them...I think taking away all NPC interaction was a bad idea overall. Yeah, you focus more on the main characters and epic story, but you lose the weight of it for all the individuals in the world. The broad societal fiction is set up very well, but you see none of it playing out in the lives of ordinary people. For me, a great RPG tells the stories of regular folks too.
I'm glad I played the game, even if I had some big problems with it. There is still a lot to love. It took some chances, some hit, some miss. In the end, it's good to see the series trying to innovate regardless of the outcomes. I have Final Fantasy XIII-2 sitting on my shelf. I'll wait a while to play it, but I am looking forward to it. Hopefully Vanille is not featured...
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Oct 18th, 2013 at 07:23:04 - Final fantasy 13 (PS3) |
What a strange game! It's always funny to me when so many people independently arrive at the same conclusions or opinions about a game. For example, FFXIII doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy game at all until 30 hours in. There is about a 10-hour "intro" and the first 30 hours in sum feel like a tutorial once you hit Chapter 11. Once I got to Chapter 11 at the 30-hour mark, I hit a snag where the denizens of the newly-open world seemed very difficult/I had not yet been forced to be very discerning about building my characters. I went online and saw that practically everyone was saying the same things I was thinking (30-hour tutorial, completely linear up until then, difficulty spike, etc. etc.). The funniest thing is that pre-Chapter 11 is SO linear that about 98% of people specifically stated "30 hours" to get there. It's like you cannot even deviate from the expected time frame.
On with the details...I'll divide this up into pre-Ch.11 and Ch.11 onward so far.
Pre-Ch.11: FFXIII says "I'm going to tell you a story and you're going to like it. There are gonna be like 1000 cut scenes to tell it. I'll introduce you all the main characters and to the world of Cocoon. All the characters will be very enigmatic and you will have questions about their backstories and motivations. I will slap you over the head with a bunch of lore, about the old war between Cocoon and the lowerworld, Pulse, and about ancient, ominous and powerful beings with odd names called fal'Cie. I will tell you how fal'Cie use humans to do their bidding, humans that get branded and become l'Cie. There are good and bad l'Cie, good ones from Cocoon that get branded by Cocoon's fal'Cie and bad ones from Pulse that get branded by Pulse fal'Cie called, you guessed it, Pulse l'Cie. Once l'Cie get branded, they have a Focus (mission) that they must carry out, or else turn into a Cie'th (the undead, sort of). You will learn all of this lore because I will repeat it over and over in cut scenes and data logs and random dialogue and you will enjoy it because the battle system is going to be insanely simple and easy and perhaps boring for a loooong time. Muwhahaha."
Ok, maybe I made the game sound a little more sinister than it is, but you get the point. The game oozes with story. Luckily I do enjoy it and think it builds characters very well. You spend enough time with them, and bit by bit, learn who they are and why they are doing what they are doing. Some characters are great from the get-go like Sazh. Others are hopelessly annoying like Vanille, the ever-optimistic cutesy girl whose in-world movements and battle sounds usually sound like she's orgasming. Seriously, the noises she makes cause me to question the game's rating. If I could turn her moans and grunts off I would. I'm not sure why JRPGs so often cast these sexualized or otherwise annoying little girl characters in such important roles. Vanille also narrates the game. The other annoying character is...I can't even think of his name because I never use him. He's the one who wants to be a hero and wants to save everyone all the time. He epitomizes some of the story's questionable logic because his motivations don't make sense. They're too extreme. Though I do like the story overall, a lot of it involves great leaps of imagination. The rest of the main cast I do like, Hope, Fang and Lightning.
Gameplay-wise, you run a completely narrow path from story event to story event, battling some enemies and finding poorly hidden treasures along the way. Let's do combat. The game s.l.o.w.l.y. introduces combat mechanics to you over 10 or so hours, and even then it doesn't fully unlock what you can do until 30. You are in control of 1 character in battle, in your team of up to 3. The others are AI controlled, but you can program them sort of like you could in FFXII. How it works is this: Each character has access to a number of roles (commando, ravager, sentinel, synergist, saboteur, medic). I forget how many you start with with each character, but it winds up being 3 main roles, and then at Chapter 11, it opens up and any character can take any role. So, for example, Hope can be a ravager, synergist and medic; Lightning can be a commando, ravager and medic; Fang can be a commando, sentinel and saboteur; etc. Your job in battle is not so much to assign commands via menus like traditional turn-based RPGs, but to play the tactician and select combinations of roles for your characters. With the 3 characters I just mentioned, for example, you can program up to 6 combinations, which the game calls "paradigms," to choose among in battle. So I'll begin with commando, ravager, ravager. None of them can heal, so if I start taking damage, I push L1 and select the paradigm for something like commando, ravager, medic. Whichever characters are assigned to the roles, they will switch on the fly and start acting according to their new roles. All the paradigms have catchy names so you can choose them quickly. commando, ravager, ravager is Relentless Assault and if you swap a ravager there for a medic it becomes Diversity. Anyway, you learn these over time.
More on roles: Different roles specialize in different things and give party-wise bonuses to their specialties. Ravagers specialize in 'staggering' opponents and their bonus makes other roles fill the stagger gauge faster. Stagger is an interesting mechanic. Every character, enemies and allies, has a stagger gauge. The stagger gauge fills when damage is inflicted on that character. It depletes whenever damage is not being inflicted. As the stagger gauge fills, the % of damage that character takes increases. Each character has a stagger point (say, 300%) at which the character becomes 'staggered' and the % of damage increase begins to rise much quicker, as (I think) all their defenses drop (no resistances) and you basically beat the hell out of the more-or-less defenseless enemy until the stagger gauge empties. The stagger gauge begins emptying as soon as the character becomes staggered. SO, ravagers make the gauge fill up quickly. This is great, except that in between attacks when the enemy is not staggered, the gauge empties. From ravager attacks, the gauge empties very quickly. So although they fill it quickly, they also empty it quickly. This is one great thing about commandos. Their attacks slow the stagger gauge's draining. Commandos are strong and provide boosts to damage. So if you have a commando and a ravager, the commando will inflict heavy damage and make the stagger gauge drain slowly, while the ravager will make the gauge fill quickly, offsetting the now-slow draining. If you had two ravagers, the gauge would deplete because they wouldn't be able to attack fast enough to sustain it, and thus the enemy may never become staggered. Sounds sort of confusing to write out, but makes perfect sense in-game. Suffice it to say, roles complement one another. The others are more straightforward. Medics heal, sentinels are tanks, saboteurs cast debuffs and synergists cast buffs.
Each character develops differently in each role. So for example, Vanille, Hope and Lightning all have medic as a main role. Vanille and Hope are the better medics as their characters inherently lean more toward magic. Lightning is also a very good ravager and commando, the latter of which relies on strength, meaning I can stack magic on Vanille and Hope, but that may not be a good idea for Lightning because then she'd be less useful when I needed her as commando. Also, each character has a "chrysarium" (spelling?!) which is where they spend points to learn skills. Each role has a chrysarium, which is like a skill tree. There they spend points earned in battle to unlock stat boosts and role-specific abilities. Vanille and Hope have access to better healing abilities earlier in their chrysariums than Lightning does. Vanille and Hope also will be learning things in the saboteur and synergist trees, respectively, that will have more magic boosts, whereas Lightning will be getting a lot of strength from her commando tree. Characters don't have levels in the traditional sense; they just upgrade stats and skills with points. Over time, characters become more specialized and can increase in role level. It becomes ever more expensive to upgrade stats and learn abilities the farther into the chrysarium you get, so you're sort of forced to specialize (or grind for points). I really like the chrysarium system, though I wish characters were EITHER more naturally different or more completely open. The way their development is now is that many are very similar to one another, but at the same time, I can't just mold them how I want. There are only slight differences between, for example, Vanille and Hope as medics, and even Lightning works fine as one. So they're very similar...yet Lightning can't be a synergist or saboteur and Vanille and Hope can't be ravagers (at least until Ch.11).
The same odd balance between freedom and restriction in character skill development exists in the game itself. As I've said, pre-Ch.11 is totally linear. Now that I'm in Ch.11, the game world opens up some and for the first time, I actually have an environment to explore. However, like the sort-of openness of the role system, I think the open world is an illusion too. But I'll talk more on the second portion of the game later.
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