1369: Closing Tales

Finally closing in on the end of my second playthrough of Tales of Xillia, and it's led to some interesting observations.

First up, Xillia's handling of New Game Plus is well-implemented, enjoyable and unusual. As you play, you unlock a number of "Titles" by completing various in-game achievements such as using certain abilities a particular number of times, completing various numbers of sidequests and passing various milestones in the story. Depending on the difficulty of (or endurance/patience required for) each of these titles, you're awarded various amounts of "Grade" points. These are useless until you've completed the game once, at which point you can spend them when you start a New Game Plus.

The things you can spend them on vary from carrying across various things like items, levels, money, shop levels and so on, or they can be spent on bonuses such as boosters to experience and money gain. By carefully spending your Grade, you can put together a "package" of bonuses that makes your subsequent playthroughs of the game work the way you want them to.

Personally, I'm playing through with 10x the normal amount of experience, double the normal amount of money gained and carrying over the "Devil's Arms" special weapons that I acquired through a sidequest in the first playthrough. This made the game quite easy, so I bumped up the difficulty to Hard, and it's now providing a suitably-paced challenge even though I've been well over the recommended levels for most of the game, and will cap out at 99 before taking on the final boss in my second playthrough.

What's also interesting about Xillia is its two-protagonist structure. For probably about 80% of the time, the game is the same regardless of whether you chose Jude or Milla at the outset of the game, but the points where it splits are interestingly distinct from one another. For those who are yet to play the game but who are planning to, I strongly recommend you play Jude's storyline first, if only for the fact that a certain event that occurs partway through the story is infinitely more dramatic from Jude's perspective than it is from Milla's. I'll spare you the details in the name of spoiler avoidance, however.

Playing both stories gives you an interesting amount of context and insight into the two characters, though. Jude's story gives you a good understanding of the overall events of the game, while Milla's focuses a little more on her as an individual character — thankfully, she's an interesting character in her own right who is more than worthy of a little specific exploration.

Reviews of Xillia criticised it somewhat for being "clichéd" or "typical JRPG" in its narrative, but this is a lazy descriptor that tends to be levelled at pretty much every JRPG out there — and I'm not even sure how true it is, anyway. Xillia's cast is unconventional and interesting, consisting as it does of a broad mix of ages from 12 to 62, male and female. The adventure they go on boils down to the usual "do a couple of laps of the world" but the setting is interesting and well-realised, and by the end of it you have a thorough understanding of the setting's culture, spiritual beliefs and society. It's a convincing game world that it's easy to immerse yourself in; it feels like far more than just a backdrop to cutscenes, though I would argue that the areas between the major towns are a bit bland at times.

By far the highlight of the game, though, is the sense of companionship and camaraderie between the party members, emphasised by the optional "skits" that pop up in response to your actions throughout the game. There's a real sense of these characters being real people, real friends and sometimes rivals, and they've been written with a wonderful sense of chemistry between them. It's one of the most enjoyable RPG casts I've had the pleasure of hanging out with for 90 hours or so, and I'll be sorry to leave them behind; but, of course, at least some of them will be back in the upcoming Tales of Xillia 2, so all is not lost.

Should polish off the rest of Xillia tomorrow, and then I can finally get back to Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, which I was really enjoying prior to me having to play Xillia for review.

1368: Confessions of a Failed Mayor

I played it for a good few weeks on its original release in the name of understanding what the hell everyone was so excited about, but I have to admit defeat and confess that I didn't really like Animal Crossing all that much.

I'm not saying it's bad, per se, more that I just don't really understand the appeal of it. For sure, it does what social gaming companies like to call "invest and express" gameplay far better than any of the shite churned out by Zynga ever will — and without continually begging the player for money, more to the point — but the trouble is that what Animal Crossing offered just wasn't enough to hold my attention.

There's lots to do in Animal Crossing, for sure, and the game drip-feeds you new things happening in your town every few real-time days to keep you coming back. MMO-style special events allow you to compete against your friends at catching bugs or whatever, and the game world expands a little over time — though not by much.

Trouble is, most of the stuff to do in Animal Crossing wasn't very interesting or enjoyable to me. By my last few days playing, I had settled into a tedious routine of picking fruit, going to the island, catching as many bugs as I could put in the box, selling them all, then paying off part of my loan. I'd then close the game because I'd found the experience so mind-numbing that I didn't really want to play any more. It was feeling more like a job than a game; I was feeling obliged to earn money just to give to Tom Nook, and it just wasn't enjoyable. By the time I'd done my daily "chores" I just wanted to turn the game off and do something else — usually go to sleep, since I inevitably put off said chores until last thing in the evening.

This is, of course, arguably the whole point of Animal Crossing. It's a reflection on modern life and the joyless things we do to get ourselves through the day with enough money to put food on the table. Of course, in Animal Crossing you can't actually starve to death or be turfed out of your house for being unable to keep up repayments on your mortgage, but the feeling of guilt is there — that feeling that you should be doing something more, that feeling that you should be pursuing your ambitions but instead you're trapped in a rut barely scraping by unless you make some sacrifices in the name of being more profitable. (In Animal Crossing's case, the sacrifices I was having to make included "playing games that I found more fun," which was ultimately not something I was willing to give up.)

Multiplayer, too, was confusing. While it was neat to be able to invite friends over, ultimately all I found myself doing when I visited a friend's town was admire how their trees and houses were in slightly different places to my own trees and houses, and nod knowingly if they had discovered how to make "paths" using designs printed on the floor. I never knew what I was supposed to do when I was in someone else's town; there was no structure to it, and no real incentive to actually play together beyond pinching each other's fruit and planting it, or occasionally doing that hilarious thing you can do with Pitfall Seeds. The only multiplayer stuff I found enjoyable were the structured "tours" on the island, and even those weren't all that interesting or competitive to me.

I certainly don't begrudge people their enjoyment of Animal Crossing. I just… don't get it. And I'm cool with that; time to move on.

Pokémon, on the other hand, that I'm starting to come around to. But that's a story for another day.

1367: Alpha

Eurogamer published the first of its "alpha and beta reviews" earlier on the subject of Peter Molyneux's possibly rubbish new God game Godus.

The posting of said review, coupled with the accompanying justification for it (including why it doesn't carry a score) immediately prompted the usual snark on Twitter. This made me gnash my teeth in frustration.

After the previous paragraph, it will probably not surprise you to learn that I'm actually in favour of Eurogamer doing what it's doing — and no, not just because I work for their sister site USgamer. No, I actually think this is an important thing, particularly given recent developments in the growing "early access" model of selling games — and the fact that some people apparently aren't aware of said developments.

You're probably already familiar with the basic "early access" programme — buy something, often for a cut-down price, and get immediate access to an early version of the game so you can 1) try it out before everyone else does and 2) provide some feedback that can actively help with development. It worked for Minecraft, it worked for Frozen Synapse and there's plenty of others out there it's worked for too.

Here's the strange new development, though: a number of free-to-play games have put themselves in Steam's Early Access catalogue. Nothing unusual, you might think, until you notice that they're actually charging for you to play this early version. In effect, you're paying to be part of a closed alpha/beta test for a game that won't cost any money to download when it's finished.

This is weird, no?

Okay, in most cases you're not just paying for access — in the case of Snow, you get some bonus items and in the case of Magicka: Wizard Wars' upper tiers, you get a full copy of Crusader Kings II for considerably less than its full retail price — but it still seems a little odd; I can't get away from the fact that you're "buying" a free-to-play game.

And this is why Eurogamer's idea of specifically reviewing commercially available alpha and beta versions is a sound one. It's something distinct from a hands-on preview — which is what most of the snark from earlier was comparing it to — because it discusses something that people can actually hand over money for right now, despite the fact it's not finished. A hands-on preview typically comes from something that not everyone has access to, be it a play with the game at a developer's office, a behind-closed-doors look at a trade show, or even a report on a demo from a consumer show such as Eurogamer Expo that not everyone would have had the opportunity to attend for whatever reasons; by contrast, an alpha/beta review lets people know whether or not it's worth spending their hard-earned money on something that may or may not cost a different amount of money when it's finished being developed — or indeed something that may be completely free when it's finished.

Being informed is important, particularly when it comes to making a decision about whether or not to spend money on something. I think we'll start to see more of this sort of thing in the near future, and it's going to be an important part of how we look at the development process of games in the coming years.

1364: Pokey

I'm mildly bewildered by the fact everyone is losing their shit over the new Pokemon games for 3DS. Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge anyone their excitement and I'm sure they're very good, I just feel like I've never really "got" Pokemon.

This is strange, really, because the Pokemon games are effectively JRPGs which, as longtime readers will know, is my favourite genre of gaming. And yet despite a brief dalliance with Red back in the Game Boy Color days, I've felt absolutely no inclination whatsoever to return to the series. I'm sure it's changed a lot since Red — at least I hope so — but honestly, my fairly underwhelmed experience with the original installment in the series was enough to discourage me from checking it out again in the future.

My main reason for disliking Red back when I tried it was that it felt like a "JRPG for kids". This isn't necessarily in and of itself a bad thing, and it's probably actually a fairly accurate description what with the warning on the box informing players that "basic reading ability is required to enjoy this game". However, what this translated to for me was something that played like a JRPG, but which didn't really include many of the things about that genre of gaming that I liked.

Pokemon Red came out in the UK in 1999. I'd discovered JRPGs with Final Fantasy VII back in 1997, and it felt like a big step backwards. Obviously I'm aware that this isn't a particularly fair comparison, what with FFVII being on a CD-ROM based 32-bit machine and Red being on a cartridge-based 8-bit handheld. But even so, limited technical capabilities doesn't prevent you from doing good things with writing and characterisation, and Red just didn't offer that to me. I didn't care about what was happening in the world, I couldn't put myself in the shoes of the mute, personality-free protagonist and there were very few relatable characters scattered around the world. It felt like a game about the grind, and about collecting endless reams of things that you'd never use, rather than the kind of JRPG that I definitely do like: games where there's a cool story to follow and, oh, by the way, here's a bajillion other things to do in this world with these characters you like.

I don't know if the Pokemon series has changed since then, because I've never felt inclined to try another one after that. As I say above, I'd hope it has — surely the long-running anime has shown that people are hungry for some actual characters and story in among the monster-training gameplay — but I remain unconvinced at present. I am almost — almost — curious enough to pick up a copy for myself and see why everyone seems so excited about this latest version, but not enough to spend £35 on a new copy. After growing tired of Animal Crossing a lot more quickly than some other people I know, I'm hesitant to jump aboard another Nintendo hype train.

If, on the other hand, someone wanted to send me a copy so I could educate myself, I would certainly do my best to try and understand the new games' appeal. (Worth a try.)

1362: Caged Animal

I like David Cage's stuff, and I'm not ashamed to say that.

I shouldn't have to point that out, really, but it seems it's become rather fashionable to bash Cage's work in journalist/critic circles recently and frankly I'm not altogether sure why — it seems to be one of those things that has just become accepted without much argument. Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain and now Beyond: Two Souls all have their flaws, sure, but they're also some of the most genuinely impressive interactive stories I've ever had the pleasure of playing through. (I haven't finished Beyond yet, but given that it's had me absolutely glued to the screen for the last several hours, I feel I can say that with some confidence.)

Let's talk about Beyond, because it's had enormously mixed reviews.

Beyond is the spiritual successor to both Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit in that it combines Heavy Rain's realistic appearance with the more supernatural aspects of Fahrenheit's narrative. It's got a peculiar structure in that it jumps back and forth in time rather than unfolding chronologically like Heavy Rain, but there is at least a narrative framing device in place to justify it. (Whether or not you think it's a good narrative framing device is a matter of opinion, but I have no objections to it.)

Like its predecessors, Beyond is an interactive movie above all else. That is, this is largely David Cage's story, and you have the opportunity to influence it along the way with your action or inaction rather than having complete freedom. In this sense, it is more like a fully animated visual novel than a traditional "game" per se, and the experience is crammed full of contextual actions and quick-time events. These are, much like the interactive movie style as a whole, very much a matter of taste.

One of the most common complaints levelled at Cage's work is that he might as well be making movies. He might, since he's clearly a talented director and cinematographer, even if — arguably — his writing skills don't quite match. However, I've still found all his works considerably more interesting, enjoyable and engaging than a traditional movie for the simple fact that even the relatively limited interaction offered by contextual actions and quick-time events means that you're involved in the game. You're physically doing things to participate in the game; perhaps you're not controlling the character with complete freedom, but that doesn't matter — you're determining whether they succeed or fail at something, and you're making choices that actually have an impact. It's the same reason a visual novel, where 90% of the "gameplay" is you pressing a button to advance the text, can still be compelling.

This isn't to put down games with strong emergent narrative or freedom to do as you please, of course — my recent stories about Grand Theft Auto V should be enough to convince you of that — but as a card-carrying narrative junkie, I'd always, always much rather play a game with a strong, pre-composed story and perhaps limited freedom than something where I have the ability to go completely off-piste and run riot.

Short version: if you liked Cage's past work, you should most definitely pick up a copy of Beyond: Two Souls. More thoughts — both here and at USgamer — when I've actually beaten it.

1360: Lord of Spirits

After going back and forth on whether or not I really felt like doing it, I've decided to go for a Platinum trophy on Tales of Xillia. As I wrote some time back, I've started thinking of trophies (though not so much Achievements, for some reason) as a means of showing my appreciation for a particularly good game. Working on the assumption that developers and publishers are looking at trophies and achievements as some sort of metric as much as they're intended as a metagame for players, I'm happy to put in a bit of extra effort to show I liked the game enough to devour every bit of content it had to offer.

My hesitation with Tales of Xillia's trophies is that although the game itself is excellent, the trophy list was rather uninspiring and distinctly grindy. A significant proportion of the trophies consist of "use [x] character's [y] ability [z] times", and there's one frustratingly missable trophy that's going to require a second playthrough to get. (Fortunately, I was intending on doing that anyway, since Tales of Xillia gives you the option to run through the story as one of two different main characters.)

What I've found in the course of going for some of these trophies, though, is that they're slightly more enjoyable than they might have suggested. The most interesting thing about a lot of them is that they're seemingly designed to give you a deeper appreciation of the battle system and how it works — sure, you can knock the difficulty down to Easy and basically hack-and-slash your way through, but go for some trophies and you'll come to understand that each character handles noticeably differently, and has special abilities that are suited to various situations, many of which require actual skill to pull off. Jude, for example, has an ability called "Snap Pivot" where if you block and backstep at the right moment, you'll zip around behind an enemy for some uninterrupted pummelling for a moment; performing the same move with Leia, meanwhile, causes her staff to extend, giving her a greater reach for a few moments.

The way the trophies help you understand the battle system extends beyond the ones where you have to actively trigger skills, though. Each character has a "link skill" that they perform when you're not actively controlling them, but you partner them up with your active character. Achieving some of the trophies requires that you understand how, why and when these link skills are triggered: Jude heals you if you get knocked down (assuming he wasn't knocked down as well); Leia steals from enemies if you knock them down, requiring you to figure out which skills are reliable knockdown providers; Rowen protects you from magic; Alvin breaks guards; and Milla can "bind" enemies.

I've still got a way to go yet — including a whole other playthrough, which hopefully shouldn't take too long, given that I'm cleaning up as many of the time-consuming trophies as possible in the post-game section of my first run — but I'm still enjoying myself, and given how consistently good Xillia has been, I'm happy to show it my appreciation by striving for a Platinum.

1359: Lady of the Wind

I'd been putting it off, but I finally beat the Garuda boss fight in Final Fantasy XIV this evening, renowned by some as one of the harder battles in the game's main story.

The "Primal" fights that you engage in over the course of the main quest's narrative are genuinely thrilling engagements that reward cooperation, communication and everyone knowing what they're doing. Sure, the fact that there's the possibility of instakill moves is frustrating, but with a good party gathered you shouldn't fall foul of them, particularly if you've taken the time to either discuss the fight with more experienced combatants beforehand, or learned from past mistakes.

The thing I've been most impressed with by the Primal battles in particular but also a number of other setpiece engagements in the game is how exciting they are. This is something I'm not altogether used to in MMOs, many of which are focused on doing things by rote as efficiently as possible. Final Fantasy XIV's combat, while not deviating hugely from the template set by World of Warcraft, requires that you stay on your toes, survey your surroundings and move around the battlefield according to what's going on. In the case of the Garuda fight, there's a lot of cowering behind pillars (until the horrid harpy destroys them all, anyway) and then ensuring that you don't get sucked into the increasingly tumultuous storm all around you during the latter stages of the fight.

I played through most of World of Warcraft up through Wrath of the Lich King and I can only think of a few fights I participated in that elicited the same feeling of heart-in-mouth excitement as these Final Fantasy XIV battles. The difference is that in World of Warcraft's case they were all high-level or endgame content, while Final Fantasy XIV spreads them out over the course of its entire main quest. And then you get to do them all again, but harder, once you hit the level cap. They're some beautifully designed encounters, and I'm interested to see how Yoshi-P and the team intend to top them in the coming content updates.

It's that heart-in-mouth feeling that feels most authentically Final Fantasy to me. I can vividly recall the first few times I beat Final Fantasy VII (because I beat it a whole bunch of times in my teenage years) — every single time I reached that final cutscene before the final boss ("And Sephiroth! … To the settling of everything!" — God bless that game's appalling translation) I would feel real, honest-to-goodness excitement. I'd get a delightful feeling of "butterflies in the stomach" before the screen went all swirly and Birth of a God started playing, and it would continue right through the final fights, even if I was hopelessly overlevelled, which I usually was.

In fact, a good JRPG (hell, game, full stop) these days will still give me that feeling, and if a game makes me feel that way I'll immediately think considerably more fondly of it than those that don't. It'll be a sad day for me when I can't get fired up by a game's final confrontation at all — I hope that day never comes, and I shall continue to enjoy that pleasurably anxious feeling for as long as I can in the meantime.

1355: Impending Lie-In

Good golly gosh, I'm knackered.

This is at least partly due to the fact that I didn't really have a weekend last weekend. (Actually, there's no "really" about it; I flat-out didn't have a weekend last weekend, since although Eurogamer Expo was enjoyable, I still had to work through it, and also had to overcome my not-inconsiderable social anxiety in order to actually, you know, talk to developers and stuff. I think I did fairly admirably, all things considered.)

Anyway. Consequently, I am looking forward to having a weekend this weekend, and the first thing I shall be doing with said weekend is having a lie-in. I've been waking up relatively late each morning this week and desperately wanting a lie-in — in some cases even dropping off until about half an hour before I need to start work (which, fortunately, as you probably know, involves walking from my bed to my study, and I don't even have to put on pants if I don't want to) — and not being able to have it. But tomorrow morning, I can have a lie-in, and it will be glorious.

Except going on recent past experience, the opportunity to actually have a lie-in is usually a signal for my body to wake up promptly at 7am and be unable to get back to sleep. This is infuriating when it happens, because any hope of catching up on sleep is then completely ruined. Of course, it's often quite nice to deliberately wake up early and have considerably more hours available in the day than usual, but come on. It's the weekend. I want to lie in bed and not move for more hours than I'm normally able to, then get up, have a bacon sandwich (or similarly greasy equivalent) and do nothing of any value for the remainder of the day.

Ah well. We'll see how it goes tomorrow morning. Perhaps I'll play some Sweet Fuse until the early hours and see if that will lull me into a deep sleep filled with bishounen.

(Speaking of Sweet Fuse, I'm still enjoying it a great deal. What a silly game. I'm glad it exists. If you'd have told me ten years ago that one day I'd be playing a game in which I took on the role of Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune's niece as she wandered around a theme park that had been taken over by a pig-like terrorist, I would have probably laughed in your face. I have since learned, of course, that anything goes in gaming, and when you take into account the possibilities of less interactive genres such as visual novels, you really can tackle pretty much any subject matter as a "game". But that, as ever, is a discussion for another day, I feel; time to head bedwards for me — Saki Inafune and her harem of gentlemen friends is awaiting me.)

1354: GTA is More Fun with Friends

I'm not talking about Grand Theft Auto Online, either, which is, so far as I can make out, still a predictably shambolic mess after throwing its doors open to the public earlier this week. No, I'm talking about that peculiar joy you get from playing a game made for… well, play… with someone else.

To put this in some sort of context, allow me to explain. I played through Grand Theft Auto V and enjoyed it. I liked the characters, I found the story enjoyable and the gameplay entertaining enough to keep going after the credits rolled. Can't ask for more, really.

Except this evening my good friend Sam came over and we played together. Sam and I used to play Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City together when we were at university, usually drunk. (We'd play Grand Theft Auto drunk, not we were usually drunk at university. Though we were drunk quite a lot at university.) Since going our separate ways and entering what careers advisors insist on calling "the world of work", though, the only games we've really played together have been things specifically designed for group play with structured rules — things like board games and the like. I thought it would be interesting to see if GTAV would recapture the magic of the previous games, so I invited Sam over this evening primarily to play it, and if it didn't, well, there's a shelf full of board games to play instead.

Fortunately, GTAV very much has the old magic. In several hours of play, we didn't do a single structured piece of content in the game — no missions, no races, no Flight School, nothing. Instead, we'd set largely improvised challenges and then attempt to complete them. First up, we wanted to get to the Los Santos airport and successfully steal a plane — something we'd regularly try to do in GTAIII — without getting shot to pieces by the police who were summoned the moment you step on the runway. Eventually we managed that, so we turned our attention to the enormous Mount Chiliad, the peak that dominates the north end of the map. First we tried to fly a plane over the top of it and parachute onto the summit. Having successfully accomplished that (once — never again after that) we discovered a pair of dirt bikes near the top, and a conveniently-placed jump ramp nearby.

After an unsuccessful attempt to make the jump that ended in the unfortunate demise of poor Trevor, we tried to get back on top of the mountain — firstly by parachuting again, then by driving and finally by walking. All of these attempts ended in failure — my parachuting concluded prematurely when I failed to realise that leaping out of a plane at a couple of hundred knots would cause you to go flying at a couple of hundred knots, too, and ended up plastering myself all over the site of the mountain; driving up the mountain was stymied by the fact that most vehicles can't drive up near-vertical rock walls (though driving the front of a big rig past some very surprised hikers was enormously entertaining while it lasted); walking up the mountain concluded after several "trip-and-fall" incidents that saw Trevor rolling part of the way down the mountain, with the last fall being a big one that brought his life once again to a premature end.

I haven't laughed so much at a game for ages. GTAV still has the magic.

1353: Criminology

I watched my first ever episode of CSI today. Or CSI: Miami, to be exact, since the original CSI isn't on Netflix as far as I can make out.

I enjoyed it! It reminds me how much I do enjoy police procedurals and crime thrillers — yes, even the cheesy, stupid, unrealistic ones — when I watch them, yet it's pretty rare I'll actually seek them out. It's one of those things that I forget I like, if that makes sense, and I'll just occasionally stumble across the, and remember all over again.

As with many forms of non-interactive media, I find myself thinking that there should be more procedural games. Trauma Team on Wii was a great example — particularly from the crime scene investigation angle — plus the Ace Attorney series has always provided a neat combination of private detective-style investigation and courtroom drama. I'd like to see more of that kind of thing.

There's the Police Quest series, of course, which I'm still yet to try, though those have the dubious distinction of being Sierra adventures (i.e. already brutally difficult, and not necessarily in a fair way) that are notoriously finicky about you actually following police procedure to the letter. There's nothing wrong with this, of course — how many other "police sims" are there out there? — but it doesn't necessarily push exactly the same buttons as a police procedural drama on TV.

I'm surprised that over the years we haven't seen more games branching out into popular TV genres. We've done sci-fi and fantasy to death, obviously, because both of those are eminently compatible with the most common means through which we interact with a game world: attacking it. We've also seen crime drama through the eyes of the criminals a lot thanks to titles like Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row. But what we haven't seen a lot of is a game about being a doctor, or a policeman, or a lawyer, or a journalist. I remember having a conversation with fellow Squadron of Shame members a while back about how cool it would be to play a war-themed game in which you weren't one of the American soldiers on the scene, but instead an embedded war reporter tasked with covering the conflict from the front lines. Plenty of scope for interesting storytelling there, plus gameplay that doesn't involve shooting people with a different skin colour to your character.

We could even expand that, though. Sci-fi and fantasy games don't have to be about killing, either; how about a sci-fi "future police" game? Or a "future medicine" game? (I guess that's Trauma Center, but still.) Or a game where you play a member of the Watch in a typical fantasy city? Plenty of scope for interesting things, and yet — at least in the mainstream — we still rely on the same old stuff.

Ah well. The times are a-changin', and we are starting to get more and more interesting thematic content in our games that isn't just about stabbing and shooting. I just wish there was a bit more.