1428: ...Of the Year

2013 is coming to a close, and with it, most people's thoughts turn to the "best [x] of the year". Gamers this year have a double-dip in the form of also being able to indulge in some "best of the generation" talk, even despite the fact that the PS3/360 generation is clearly far from over. (That said, I anticipate a quick death for the 360; the PS3, which is where all the Japanese developers are, is likely to cling on for a lot longer due to Japanese devs' propensity to continue with old tech rather than immediately embrace the latest and greatest.)

Looking back on the year, it's hard to pick out exactly what, if anything, was my absolute favouritest gaming experience I've had. Thinking about it, I have fond memories of pretty much everything I've played.

My feelings on Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory are well documented, for example, but I also had a lot of fun with Time and Eternity and Tales of Xillia. Final Fantasy XIV also proved to be an immensely pleasant surprise — and with a significant new content update coming tomorrow, I'm looking forward to seeing how that game's going to continue developing over the coming year.

Then there's smaller experiences that I've had, not all of which actually came out this year. Sweet Fuse, which I'm yet to clear all the paths on, was a particular highlight, as was Corpse Party: Book of Shadows, though the latter was left frustratingly unresolved with no word on if or when we'll get an English version of the sequel. 999, too, was absolutely fantastic, and I'm currently really enjoying its sequel Virtue's Last Reward, which is shaping up to be a real mind-bender.

And then there's last minute entries like Bravely Default, which is looking rather marvellous so far. Really looking forward to spending lots of time with that — I'm going to be reviewing it for USgamer in February, but since the game came out over here in Europe well before the North American version, I have the rare opportunity to get a significant head start and play it well ahead of having to review it, rather than being obliged to rush through.

One thing I've been particularly conscious of this year, though, is that a great game is always a great game, regardless of how long ago it came out. There's an immensely frustrating, irritating trend in today's games industry to brand something a "success" or "failure" on nothing but its opening week — but taking just me as an example, I think there are maybe one or two things in the whole year that I've bought in launch week, the rest of which I've purchased down the road when they're either significantly discounted, or when I know I've got time to play them. Does me buying a game well after release not "count" or something? Apparently not, at least in the eyes of the "analysts". Grr. Fuck analysts.

Anyway, I'm getting a bit distracted by Andie having a video call on her phone in the other room — there's no way of doing those quietly. As such, I'm going to sign off for now, and stick my head into a good video game for the remainder of the evening, I think.

1427: RPG With a Stupid Name

Nearly forgot to write something today. But here I am at 2 in the morning having just finished a lengthy session of Bravely Default in bed.

(Yes, as promised, I finished Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory earlier, and it was awesome. But I'll save further discussion of that for another day.)

Bravely Default, meanwhile, has been a very pleasant surprise so far — though at least part of this is due to the fact that, as I mentioned before, I knew very little about this game going into it.

Bravely Default, then, is a new Final Fantasy game. I don't just mean that in the "it's a bit like Final Fantasy" sense, I mean that it is Final Fantasy — right down to the item names, abilities and Job system. Quite why it doesn't carry the Final Fantasy name is anyone's guess — perhaps Square Enix wants to continue to take the Final Fantasy brand in a different direction, while Bravely Default will pick up where the more old-school installments in the series left off? I can't say I'd object to that situation all that much; I like the new Final Fantasies for sure, but playing Bravely Default has reminded me somewhat that the older entries had their charms, too.

It's closest in execution to Final Fantasy V, in that you have a four-character party, each of whom has a character level and a Job level for each of the available Jobs in the game. Both level up independently; levelling up your character improves your base stats, while levelling up your Job gives you access to better abilities and passive skills. You can also make use of the abilities or passive skills from Jobs you're not currently equipped with, but there are limitations and the stat changes that come with a Job change may make some abilities impractical — while it's cool to have a heavily-armoured knight that can fling black magic spells around, for example, he'll never be as good at magic damage as a dedicated black mage.

There's some interesting modern systems at play amid the traditional RPG mechanics, too. The game's use of the 3DS StreetPass system allows you to summon other players' characters and make use of them, and to "link" with your 3DS friends to borrow their abilities — particularly useful if they've levelled up a Job you haven't and unlocked access to a useful special ability.

Less thrilling is the "Bravely Second" system, whereby you can tap the Start button in mid-battle to interrupt whatever's going on and sneak in an extra turn, with actions in this bonus turn costing "SP" rather than the usual "BP" to perform. You can only "carry" up to three SP at once, and they're acquired at the rate of one every eight hours you have the 3DS asleep and running Bravely Default — or, alternatively, you can pay for them. Ugh. Fortunately, so far I haven't seen any need to make use of this system; it mostly seems to be a "panic button" system whereby you can get yourself out of a sticky situation should the worst happen. If you play well, you shouldn't need to use it at all, I hope.

There's also a strange real-time building minigame where you reconstruct a village, and the more players you StreetPassed with, the more workers you have to devote to projects and, consequently, the quicker they can complete their work. Working on the village unlocks shops, special abilities and new items; it's a neat use of real-time mechanics without it feeling like a means of extracting money from you, because there's mercifully no monetisation option to speed things along. What it does mean is that you can make some sort of "progress" on the game even if you don't have a lot of time to play; simply flip open your 3DS, start your workers on a project, then put it to sleep and come back later — when you do have time to play the game proper, you'll have some handy extras.

Mostly, though, the emphasis is on a beautifully presented old-school role-playing game with some excellent mechanics, some stunning music and a pretty cool augmented reality opening cutscene. I'm looking forward to playing more, and I anticipate it stealing a significant proportion of my time from hereon.

Lucky I finished Neptunia Victory, then, huh?

1426: Day of Rest

I have done absolutely nothing "useful" today, and instead spent most of the day playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory in an attempt to actually finish the bloody thing before the year is over.

Thankfully, it finally seems as if I am going to succeed, since I've successfully attained every single one of the trophies except the three that relate to the three endings. I'm on course to complete the "True" ending in this first playthrough, then I'll race through and get the Normal and Good endings in subsequent playthroughs. If Victory is anything like its predecessor, the actual "game" side of things will end up being extremely short if you're not doing any side content and skipping story scenes you've already seen. Despite this, however, I've somehow now spent over a hundred hours on this game — so I think I can definitely say I've got my money's worth.

I'll be sorry to see the back of it when I'm all done, to be honest, because the Neptunia cast, while tropetacular, is immensely lovable and has a wonderful chemistry between them. Mostly I'm impressed that they've managed to spin out what I imagine probably began as a bit of a joke — hey, let's imagine the "console wars" as if they were actual wars between goddesses — for three games, with more on the horizon. Oh, and I'm slightly annoyed with myself that I accidentally put myself on the "true" ending path first, because my brain always prefers saving the "best" ending for last. Still, it's too late now, plus the "true" ending is the only path where you get certain characters required to achieve some of the trophies, so it's probably a good thing: I'm getting all the "grindy" stuff out of the way now so my subsequent two playthroughs can be straight runs to the two respective finish lines.

While I'll be sorry to see the back of Neptune and the gang, it'll also be nice to be able to play other stuff without guilt. Neptunia Victory has been on my shelf since April of this year, though my starting to play it was delayed by quite how much I ended up loving the Ar Tonelico series. I was then further delayed partway through by reviewing Time and Eternity — a game that I maintain is nowhere near as bad as a lot of people made out — and Tales of Xillia — which was utterly fantastic. Both of those were lengthy RPGs — 40 hours or so in Time and Eternity's case, nearly 100 for Tales of Xillia and consequently something had to fall a little by the wayside in order to play them and be able to review them in a timely manner.

Next on the schedule once Victory is down for the count is the highly anticipated 3DS RPG Bravely Default, which isn't out in America until February, so I'm going to get a head start on it ahead of reviewing it for USgamer. To be honest, I know absolutely nothing about Bravely Default save for the fact it's by Square Enix, it's a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy: The Four Heroes of Light (which I never played) and that it has distinctly Final Fantasy Tactics-esque art. Beyond that, I'm going in with complete beginner's mind, which I find is often the best way to be, as it minimises the possibility of disappointment and maximises the possibility of pleasant surprises. We shall see, I guess; doubtless I'll have a few thoughts to share on here ahead of the official review closer to the North American release date.

1423: Enough With the "Corruption" Allegations

Cracked published an article today that pissed a lot of people off. (I'm not linking to it, but here's a Pastebin of the relevant section.)

This is nothing unusual, of course, what with Cracked being renowned for clickbaiting rather than particularly rewarding content, but today it crossed a line from being relatively inoffensive clickbait into perpetuating some bullshit that has been on the rise for a few years now: the assumption, among certain members of the public, that game journalists are inherently corrupt, and that good review scores are frequently "bought" by publishers, particularly those who are advertising on the site in question.

The assumption that this sort of thing is going on probably goes back to "Gerstmanngate" back at Gamespot, when Jeff Gerstmann was let go following a mediocre review of Kane & Lynch from Eidos, and the story runs that Eidos put pressure on Gamespot to let Gerstmann go because they were ploughing a lot of money into the site at that time, paying considerable amounts to "reskin" all of Gamespot with a Kane & Lynch theme. It took several years — and Gamespot purchasing Gerstmann's new online home Giant Bomb — before the full story came out, and it actually wasn't all that different to what it appeared to be in the first place, though there were a few other factors at play, too.

The fact is, in this instance, Gerstmann didn't do anything wrong, and Gamespot's behaviour in this instance was highly irregular for the rest of the industry — so much so that it's an incident still talked about today, and one which hasn't been recreated since. And yet somehow we're still plagued with the assumption that the big gaming sites — and indeed some of the smaller ones — are in cahoots with the publishers, with stacks of cash regularly changing hands in exchange for good review scores. The Cracked piece's evidence for this was the disparity between Metacritic critic aggregates and user review scores for a variety of popular titles, including Mass Effect 3, Call of Duty Ghosts and a few others — neglecting to take the commonplace practice of "review bombing" into account, whereby Metacritic users deliberately skew their scores in one direction or the other in an attempt to influence the overall user rating. (This also happens on Amazon.)

I can categorically state that any respectable site worth its salt in today's modern gaming industry is completely independent from developers and publishers, and has no moral or financial obligation to be nice to people. Reviews of video games are the opinion of one or two people at most, and common practice in the industry sees people who are interested in particular genres being given games of that type to review — it makes sense, since they have the specialist knowledge, and giving a game of a particular type to someone who clearly is not experienced in that genre often attracts accusations of bias in the other direction, so sites can't really win.

Packets of money do not change hands in exchange for review scores. The most contact your average video game journalist has with a publisher during the review process is a couple of emails back and forth requesting review codes, and perhaps another when it's all over sending a link to the publisher's PR representative sharing the review. Review events such as the writer of the Cracked piece describes are relatively unusual, and most outlets deliberately eschew these tightly-controlled environments in favour of giving their reviewers adequate time to spend with the game and get a good feel for it, rather than playing edited highlights with a PR person breathing down their neck. These events do occasionally happen, of course, particularly for big games, and they can be useful — Call of Duty events can be a good opportunity to test out the games' multiplayer modes before the game goes live on public servers, for example — but for the most part, lavish, PR-funded events tend to be for previews rather than reviews, and again, no money exchanges hands. Because why the hell would it?

The Cracked piece is based on a number of completely unsubstantiated assumptions, and on a number of flat-out inaccuracies. Publishers do not pay either outlets or individual reviewers for the right to quote their words on box art or in trailers, for example; nor do any but the most disreputable publications charge publishers for reviews — look at the recent controversy over Indie Game Mag, for example; they've since released the person who was attempting to charge for reviews and ditched his policies, since pretty much any games journalist or outlet with any respectability was genuinely shocked and disapproving of what was going on there.

I've worked for a number of different magazines and online outlets over the years — both paid and unpaid — and all have been the absolute picture of honour, respectability, professionalism and ethics. Ironically, the rest of the Cracked piece actually made some fair points about the state of the industry in 2013 — though I disagree fundamentally with its core assertion that the industry is teetering on the brink of a crash — but, J.F. Sargent and Dave Williams, your unsubstantiated allegations about the games press are massively disrespectful to those of us who work our arses off every day to bring people the latest news, views and opinions about what's hot in gaming, and it's extremely disappointing to see that even after widespread criticism of the Cracked piece today, it still has not been edited, modified or clarified.

Perhaps this is revenge for all the times people have referred to Cracked as lowest-common-denominator Internet clickbait with absolutely no journalistic integrity; unfortunately, pieces like this one today only go to prove that there's more than an element of truth to those allegations.

1422: Zero Bossu

Can't remember if I've mentioned Virtue's Last Reward or its predecessor Nine Persons, Nine Hours, Nine Doors or Some Other Combination Thereof (aka 999) on these pages to date, so I thought now might be a good time to talk about them, with particular (and spoiler-free) regard to the latter.

The two games, collectively known as Zero Escape, are a combination of visual novel and room escape adventure games. The former you've heard me talk about extensively on these very pages; the latter is a peculiarly Japanese offshoot of the adventure game genre in which you're regularly thrown into self-contained puzzles in which you must escape from a room, and everything you need in order to do so is in the room with you.

You actually spend the vast majority of your time in both 999 and Virtue's Last Reward reading non-interactive visual novel segments rather than solving puzzles, but that doesn't make the room escape sequences any less satisfying. In fact, given that the room escape sequences in Virtue's Last Reward in particular are pretty damn challenging, they're incredibly satisfying to successfully solve.

The puzzles strike that perfect balance between bewildering and making you feel smart, you see. At no point will you be thrown into a situation where the answer is so obtuse you'll never work it out without an FAQ at your side, but at the same time, those initial moments as you wander around the room, looking at everything and hoping to find some clues, are magical in how daunting they feel.

How on Earth am I going to get out of here? you'll think. What am I even supposed to do?

Fortunately, those feelings rarely last all that long; after a little careful and methodical investigation, you'll generally uncover one or more "big tasks" that you'll need to complete in order to solve the room, and your job then becomes prioritising these tasks into an appropriate order, figuring out how to complete them and then, well, completing them.

There's a good mix of puzzle types in there, too, though not as much diversity as Level-5's Professor Layton series. For my money, though, I think I prefer Zero Escape's approach because there's at least some attempt to integrate the puzzles into the game's narrative and setting; that said, I'm basing my entire opinion of Professor Layton on the first game in the series, so that may be something that improves in the future — I do own all of them so I fully intend to find out.

Anyway, I digress; Virtue's Last Reward's puzzles in particular are enormously satisfying because they make you feel clever. It's pretty rare you'll find a puzzle in which the solution is just blind trial and error until something good happens — though I still hate slidey-block puzles — instead, for the most part, puzzles are reliant on a keen sense of observation, and a willingness to trawl through the various documents in the in-game archives to figure out various pieces of information's relevance to the situation at hand.

Virtue's Last Reward goes one little extra step beyond this, though; you can solve the room and get out without too much difficulty in most cases, but all rooms have more than one solution, one of which opens the exit and the other of which unlocks supplementary reading material in the in-game archives. It can be just as challenging — if not more so — to figure out what the conditions for unlocking this bonus content are as it can be to just escape the room successfully. And the supplementary material is always worth a read, too; while much of it is revealed in the game, it often delves deeper into the real-life concepts and experiments explored through the narrative, such as the "Chinese Room" experiment and all manner of other things.

Despite reaching the "end" of a number of narrative paths in Virtue's Last Reward, I'm yet to actually get a definitive "ending". I've had two bad endings, a narrative path which I need to go back to when I have more information, an ending that "locked" itself until I figured something out in one of the other narrative paths, and I'm currently working on another branch. All in all, there are supposedly 24 different conclusions, including "bad ends", and you're damn right I'm going to see every one of them.

In fact, let's go work on that right now. Bye-bye.

1420: Ploot-chan

I've mentioned Hyperdimension Neptunia and its two sequels numerous times on these pages, but I thought today I'd focus particularly on a character who appears for the first time in the third game, Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory.

Plutia — named, much like Neptune, after an abandoned Sega console; in this case, the unreleased second model of the Saturn — is Planeptune's goddess (or "CPU", in Neptunia parlance) in the alternate dimension Neptune finds herself dragged into towards the outset of the game. Much like Neptune, she's largely incompetent at her job, prone to slacking off and being lazy, but it's a different kind of incompetence to Neptune; while Neptune in her human form is an energetic, dizzy young girl, Plutia is rather slothful in many ways; she's habitually clad in slippers and housecoat rather than something a little more appropriate for a goddess, and she speaks very, very slowly and deliberately (in Japanese, anyway) — like a child who doesn't seem to have quite grasped communicating just yet.

Plutia's seeming innocence extends to how she's depicted in battle, too. Initiating a battle with Plutia will often see her exclaiming konnichiwa! ("hello!") or yoroshiku onegaishimasu! (in this context, "nice to meet you!") to the party of enemies, while her turn coming up in the order of action will see her mumbling eto… eto… doushiyou… ("umm… umm… what should I do?") or e… watashi? ("eh? …me?") as if she's perpetually slightly unsure of what's going on around her.

Plutia's not innocent, though. Far from it. Much like Neptune's personality (not to mention cup size) undergoes a significant change when she switches from human form to "HDD" goddess form, Plutia too goes through some changes. While Neptune is all business in HDD form, though, Plutia unleashes her inner desires and becomes a sadistic dominatrix (whom Neptune in particular takes to calling "Sadie") and whom a number of the other characters become rather afraid of.

Plutia in HDD form is actually quite a refreshing character to come across, because she has absolutely no shame in who she is and what she likes. And what she likes more than anything is indulging her sadistic desires — whether that's on her enemies or, in a pinch, her friends.

She's overtly sexualised — arguably more so than most of the rest of the cast, most of whom would put your eye out if they turned around too quickly while in HDD form — but she uses this to her advantage on numerous occasions.

She knows that she scares and disturbs people with her sexuality, so often all it takes is a knowing comment that she's "starting to get angry" to get people to do what she wants them to. This backfires on a few occasions — for example, her early encounter with a young alternate-dimension IF traumatises the latter to such a degree that one of the strongest, spunkiest characters in the other two Neptunia games is relegated considerably more often to the role of "cowering in the background" than she would be normally. A shame, since IF is one of my favourite characters, but the focus on the main cast in Victory certainly works for me, too.

Plutia's sexual preferences are sometimes played for laughs, but more often than not they're played relatively straight, with her castmates alternating between acknowledging her tastes and desires, and trying to hold her back from going too far. Anything… inappropriate that Plutia does is kept completely off-screen, but all that achieves is getting the imagination working even harder. Exactly what did she do to those people who, upon meeting her subsequently, are utterly terrified?

I have not yet finished Victory, though I am, after a long run, on the path to the "true" ending, I think. I'll be interested to see if Plutia is explored any further in the rest of the game; up until now, she's been rather refreshing to spend time with. Terrifying too, yes, but one of the more interesting characters I've seen in a candy-coloured moe RPG in recent memory.

1419: Endgame

I can't remember if I mentioned it on here, but I reached level 50 — the level cap — with my Black Mage class in Final Fantasy XIV a short while ago, which means that I'm now into what MMO players refer to as "endgame content".

I've only ever reached the level cap in one other MMO to date — World of Warcraft — and in that instance I didn't really explore a lot of what the endgame had to offer. In fact, I think I stopped playing not long after getting that far; I tried to return after a break when Blizzard offered a free upgrade to the Cataclysm expansion back and a free boost to the slightly-higher level cap of 85 that they introduced then, but the magic was gone, and I've felt no inclination to go back since.

You see, as I mentioned in that post I linked to above, for me, a key part of the appeal of MMOs — and indeed RPGs in general — is that journey you make from, quite literally, zero to hero. The road to the level cap is paved with a variety of new skills and things to learn, and by the time you reach your "pinnacle" you're well-equipped with everything you need to survive… and continue onwards.

You see, once you hit level whatever-the-cap-is-in-your-game-of-choice, it stops being about gaining XP, and it starts being about doing other stuff. It starts being about running dungeons, acquiring new gear, taking on new challenges with friends. For those who played through most of the game solo, now is probably the time to jump off the train, because most endgame content is reliant on playing together with others, whether that's running small-scale dungeons to get gear, or taking on raids that require larger parties.

It's also often where the story grinds to something of a halt. In Final Fantasy's case, "endgame" is where you've beaten the final boss of the main scenario quests, so the main story is indeed over. But there's plenty of things still to do, most of which have some sort of narrative context, and if the impressive recent trailer for the upcoming patch 2.1 is anything to go by, the main scenario quests will continue to be added to with each new update every three months, which is nice.

What I've found interesting in the endgame stuff I played this evening, is that it lets you concentrate on the game mechanics a lot more than if you're trying to pay attention to the story. Some MMO players play through the whole game this way, skipping cutscenes and not reading any text, but I can't help but feel in Final Fantasy XIV's case that this is missing the point somewhat.

Regardless, once you reach endgame you're probably going to be running a lot of the same dungeons and other content over and over again, often with different groups of people each time. And while this might sound boring, there's a few things to bear in mind: firstly, some people plough hundreds or even thousands of hours into games like League of Legends and Dota, and those have very few maps, and secondly the appeal isn't necessarily in seeing new and unique content; it's in seeing new and unique people.

I braved Final Fantasy XIV's Duty Finder system for two runs into the "so you've just reached level 50, what now?" dungeon the Wanderer's Palace this evening. My two runs were markedly different from one another, despite the monsters being in the same place and me playing exactly the same character class.

In the first case, the party was well-organised, careful and methodical. We didn't talk much because it was clear from our behaviour that we'd all done this before, and we all knew what we were doing. Consequently, we got through the whole thing without any serious mistakes — and, more importantly, no-one dying.

Compare and contrast with the second party, in which the de facto leader — usually the "tank" class, who runs ahead to get pummelled by enemies while everyone else hangs back and throws fireballs at them — was seemingly trying to race through the dungeon as quickly as possible, and causing issues in the process. Speedruns of dungeons aren't particularly unusual, particularly in the case of places like Wanderer's Palace that provide a good source of material for acquiring high-level gear, but in order to be successful at them you need a well-oiled party that communicates well.

Our poor old tank wasn't very good at speedrunning, you see, and ended up getting him — and the rest of us — into situations that it was difficult to survive. Wanderer's Palace is particularly harsh due to the presence of an unkillable "Tonberry Stalker" enemy who runs up to you and stabs you in the throat if you enter his field of vision; on more than one occasion, the tank attracted so many enemies that we weren't able to defeat them all before someone got throat-stabbed.

This was interesting to me. It wasn't frustrating or annoying because everyone took it in good humour and no-one was a dick about it — a constant risk with online games — but was instead fascinating to see. I have a feeling there's some intriguing psychological observations to be made about the different ways in which people play — and how people like me respond differently to different types of people — but I'm not sure I'm altogether qualified to make those observations.

It was also an interesting experiment for me in that throughout most of the game, I've played with people that I'm at least casually acquainted with. These two runs were attempts to test the water and see what it's like playing with random strangers; you often hear horror stories of people getting together with a bunch of jerks in the Duty Finder but, aside from the tank's clumsiness, there was nothing untoward going on, and so it's something I'd feel comfortable doing again.

Fortunate, really, because I need one hell of a lot of Tomestones if I want to upgrade my equipment to a suitable level to be able to take on the later dungeons and boss fights…

1418: Eight and Thirteen

Final Fantasy, once one of the biggest names in gaming, is now something of a laughingstock to many people.

To a lot of these detractors, it was the Final Fantasy XIII sub-series that triggered this feeling. (Many of said detractors have not played Final Fantasy XIV, incidentally, refusing to even try it because it's an MMO. Fair enough, but it's also the best Final Fantasy in years.)

To others, though, Final Fantasy VIII is an object of ridicule — and the recent rerelease of the game on Steam has caused all these people to come out of the woodwork once again.

It will undoubtedly prove somewhat unsurprising to you to hear that I played and enjoyed both, and feel that they both get an undeservedly bad rap.

Let's start with Final Fantasy VIII. After my friends and I discovered JRPGs with Final Fantasy VII and promptly played it through a good seven or eight times, Final Fantasy VIII shot straight to the top of our most-anticipated lists. And it looked amazing; gone were Final Fantasy VII's weird super-deformed polygonal models, to be replaced with much more realistically-proportioned character models along the lines of what we now recognise as the "Final Fantasy look" today. Gone was the "magical disaster threatening to destroy the planet" plotline, to be replaced with something that was, above all else, a love story.

Final Fantasy VIII did a bunch of weird, unconventional things, and I loved it for it. Its character-driven story was much more intimate and personal than my limited experience with the genre at the time — hell, it was much more intimate and personal than a lot of games I'd played up until that point, period. It was one of the few times I'd encountered a convincing love story in the context of a video game; Squall and Rinoa were both interesting, flawed characters and I felt myself rooting for them throughout the game.

The battle system was enjoyable, too. The Junction system was really, really odd, but made sense once you got your head around its extremely abstract nature. The reflex-based actions, where you had to pull the trigger on Squall's gunblade for additional damage, or hammer in button combinations while performing Limit Breaks, or repeatedly bash the Square button while summoning a "Guardian Force", gave the battles a feeling of "action game" intensity when they were essentially still sort-of turn-based.

And the final boss? Easily one of the most spectacular final confrontations of the PS1 era, even if the plot in the immediate run-up to it started veering into seriously odd plot-related territory. "Time kompression" was a bit weird, yeah, but it certainly didn't undo all the good work for the many hours beforehand, and damn, those last battles were genuinely exciting.

Fast forward a whole bunch of years (I'd work it out, but I can't be arsed right now) and we have Final Fantasy XIII. Again — I've covered this before — this did things markedly differently to past Final Fantasies, replacing the open-world MMO-style gameplay of Final Fantasy XII with more linear progression that opened up into an interesting, enjoyable open world towards the end.

People hated Final Fantasy XIII for its linearity, but in practice it really wasn't all that much more linear than previous Final Fantasies — it was just more obvious about it. Previous Final Fantasies had provided the illusion of freedom through their world maps, you see, but your progression was still railroaded by being unable to cross certain types of terrain until the story dictated that you got your hands on a particular vehicle. And, like Final Fantasy XIII, these games would tend to open up towards the end, giving you freedom to explore.

There's always been a reason for that linearity in Final Fantasy games, however, and that's to push the story along. Because you didn't get a lot of opportunity to stray from the path set out in front of you, the story was kept pacy and snappy, and maintained its momentum — something which many more open RPGs, and not just those of the J-variety, really struggle with. By the time you reached the more open part, you had an extremely firm grounding in the game's mechanics — more than enough to take on some of the extremely tough challenges that said open world presented you with.

As for the characters? I liked them a lot. Sazh was an interesting character in that he was an older, black character who didn't resort to Mr. T stereotypes like Barret in FFVII. Vanille was cute and adorable. Fang was badass. Lightning was enigmatic, intriguing and all-business; Snow was her perfect foil with his laid-back attitude. And Hope, whom many people accuse of being "whiny", watched his parents die towards the beginning of the game. I think being a little emotional is perhaps understandable in this instance, no?

Ultimately I know that if you've made up your mind about Final Fantasy VIII and XIII I'm probably not going to change your mind, and that's fine; this post simply outlines what I feel about these much-maligned installments in the long-running series. The thing that annoys me, I think, is how people feel the need to declare them unequivocally "crap" when what they really mean is that they didn't personally like them.

But then this is nothing new to the games biz, and I've spent the best part of the last couple of years playing and adoring games that many people think are "crap" if you believe Metacritic scores and the like. Each to their own, I say, and if you can eke out enjoyment from something that isn't popular, I say good on you. And if you can't, maybe try not to make other people feel bad about liking it?

1417: Roll the Credits!

Nelson Mandela died today, apparently. He was 95. Rather than pretend to know anything in-depth about him, his life or his work, I'll simply say I'm sorry to hear that he's dead, and that for someone who spent his life fighting for peace to die at home surrounded by his family at the age of 95 is surely a fitting end to a complicated and eventful life.

Anyway, just thought I'd acknowledge that because it seemed significant, but I have literally nothing else to say on the matter so I'm certainly not going to devote an entire post to pontificating about a subject I know very little about. (Although it wouldn't be the first time I had done that.)

Instead, I thought I'd burble on about something ultimately insignificant but which has been on my mind recently; a phenomenon I'm encountering with my entertainment choices at present. It's analysis paralysis when it comes to what I "should" spend my free time enjoying.

I like to enjoy things in their entirety, you see, particularly when there's a story involved, and to leave something half-finished and then pick it up again later is something I don't like to do — more often than not because the actual "pick it up again later" part often doesn't roll around for a considerable period of time, which usually means by the time I return to the thing in question, I want to start it from the beginning again. (I say "thing" rather than "game" because this phenomenon also applies to things like TV shows in many cases.)

At present, I have three "big games" on the go in my free time, plus a few things I have to review and a couple of smaller things. The smaller things are less of an issue; one of the review games is something I really want to play anyway, but I know that it's going to eat into the three big games I have on the go that, in a couple of cases, I've been playing for months.

The three big games in question are Final Fantasy XIV, Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory and Virtue's Last Reward. Of the three, I've been playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory the longest and kind of don't want it to end because I'm in love with all the characters like the sad otaku I am. Final Fantasy XIV I have now finished the main story of, at least, so I can now enjoy that as a pure mechanics-focused game rather than a narrative experience, and Virtue's Last Reward is on Vita so it's a game I can play on the toilet and/or in bed.

Here's the issue: free time rolls around, and I find myself wondering what I "should" play.

Should I try and beat Neptunia? Probably, but then that means it'll end, which I don't really want it to. Although when it does end, I'll be able to start playing new stuff without guilt, which will be nice.

Should I play Final Fantasy XIV and work towards getting my awesome level 50 gear for my black mage? Possibly, but that's reliant on other people and time-consuming, so probably best saved for late nights and/or the weekend.

Should I play Virtue's Last Reward, a story-centric game that is more rewarding if you play through as much as possible as quickly as possible while it's fresh in your mind? Probably.

Or should I get stuck into the games I have to review? This is, of course, the correct answer, but in doing this for previous games I've already stretched Neptunia in particular out over the course of way more months than I thought it was going to take. (To be fair, though, the games that pushed it aside temporarily, Time and Eternity and Tales of Xillia, were both lengthy games in their own right that I enjoyed a great deal, so it's not exactly a loss there.)

My analysis paralysis over this also makes me feel a bit guilty about starting up more open-ended experiences such as strategy games or story-light action RPGs. It's my own fault for developing completionist tendencies and wanting to enjoy things as fully as possible before moving on to something else — I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who juggle lots of games simultaneously and happily flit back and forth between them, and I can certainly do this with TV shows, so why not games?

Anyway, ultimately it's hardly the worst problem in the world to have so I certainly can't complain — and indeed I'm not complaining, merely observing — so if you'll excuse me, I'm off to go and play Virtue's Last Reward in bed. Or maybe some Final Fantasy. Or maybe…

1416: Rooted

I haven't embraced the next generation of video games consoles as yet — except for Wii U, which people keep insisting doesn't count — and, barring something absolutely astonishing coming out on Xbox One (still a fucking stupid name) or PlayStation 4, I have very little intention of doing so until I absolutely have to for professional purposes.

Launch lineups are rarely much cop anyway, but it's not just a weak selection of games that's putting me off this time around; no, it's more the fact that neither of the two boxes really offer anything I particularly want out of my gaming time at present. That may well all change when they both have some decent exclusives — not to mention the variety of indie games we've been promised on both — but at present, they're two shiny black boxes that do a bunch of things I don't give a toss about and occasionally, if you ask them nicely, play games.

Let's take Xbox One first, because this is by far the least appealing of the two systems. Xbox One is a sprawling mess of "entertainment apps," rolled together into an OS that has seemingly been designed by someone who had no idea what things actually worked about the Xbox 360's already imperfect OS. Gone is the facility for cross-game party chat; gone is the ability to pop up the guide and quickly check your friends list in game; gone is the ability to see how much fucking hard drive space you have left — and instead we have "Snap" functionality, that allows you to do two things at once.

I do not want to do two things at once with my console. I barely even care about the limited social functionality already built into the PS3 and Xbox 360. I certainly don't want to make a Skype call while I'm trying to immerse myself in a game, and I definitely don't want to watch television at the same time as I'm playing a game. When I play a game, I devote my full attention to it; anything less is, to me, disrespectful to the people who worked hard on it. I won't turn off the soundtrack and listen to my own music — except in racing games, where the soundtrack is usually generic bland-o-rock anyway — and I certainly won't listen to podcasts or watch videos while I'm playing. I don't play games as idle wastes of time or just "something to do" — it's my chosen means of entertaining myself and consuming cultural content, so it deserves me showing it that much respect, and Xbox One doesn't appear to be built with that in mind.

PlayStation 4 is less offensive to me in this regard but it's still stuffed full of features I'll never use. I seriously doubt I'll ever use the video recording facility, for example, and I still do not see the appeal of streaming as either a broadcaster or a viewer — particularly if every bastard person in the world is doing it. The system is, at least, on the whole, seemingly designed more as a games console than an entertainment megabox, so there's that, but without any compelling games — save perhaps Resogun, which I'm certainly not buying a new console for — there is precisely zero reason to pick one up just yet.

I'm not convinced either of these systems have been designed with players like me — people who have grown up with the video games medium almost since its inception — in mind. I know for a fact Xbox One certainly hasn't been — it's trying desperately to replace the "family friendly box" reputation that the Wii had and the Wii U has, so far, failed to replicate, and in the process has decided to vomit a bunch of features only useful to those with chronic attention deficit disorder all over itself. Balls to that shit. Also, Microsoft's "experiments" with microtransactions can go eat a thousand dicks.

I will almost inevitably get both systems at some point in the future, either for work purposes or if some particularly compelling exclusive emerges — something from any of my favourite Japanese devs appearing on PS4, for example — but at present I'm more than happy working through my substantial PlayStation 3 backlog, dipping occasionally into a few Xbox 360 titles I'm yet to play and spending the majority of my gaming time on PC. Not to get all master racey, but PC still beats the pants off both consoles in terms of both performance and flexibility.