1431: Relics and Rebirth

I must say, I wasn't sure I'd enjoy it, but I'm really having fun with Final Fantasy XIV's endgame content. Part of this is due to the fact the new content update that dropped earlier in the week added a significant amount of stuff to do for people who had hit the level cap, but I'm also enjoying working my way through the stuff that was already there. A lot of it encourages you to try stuff that you might have ignored throughout the rest of the game.

Take the A Relic Reborn quest, for example, which culminates in you getting your class' powerful Relic weapon, which can subsequently be upgraded to a Relic +1, for those who just like to be slightly better than the best.

A Relic Reborn tasks you with a number of different things to do, the first of which is acquiring a specific weapon and melding specific materia to it. (For those less familiar with Final Fantasy, materia are things you can plug into items of equipment to improve their abilities; in Final Fantasy VII they determined what specific spells and other actions your characters could perform, while in XIV they tend to confer bonuses to various stats.)

I had gone through pretty much the whole game without melding any materia to anything. This was partly because I wasn't able to do it myself — in order to meld materia to a piece of equipment you need to have one of the crafting classes up to a high level, and my efforts as a Weaver were stalled by my running out of lightning crystals — and partly because I'd been replacing my equipment reasonably often as I levelled up, and consequently didn't see the value in upgrading an item only to discard it a few levels later.

I was hoping a member of my Free Company might be able to meld the necessary materia to the weapon in question, but no-one had the right skills, so I had to brave random strangers. As someone with social anxiety, the prospect of approaching a random stranger and asking for a favour is, as you might expect, rather nerve-wracking — particularly when you're not quite sure of the etiquette for doing so in this particular community. Should I offer them some (in-game) money? Is it rude to ask them if they want paying? How do I find them in the first place?

As it happened, finding them was a simple matter of wandering into the Ul'Dah marketplace and yelling really loud. Virtually, of course; it's a matter of typing "/shout [message]" rather than literally having to bellow your message into the ether. Just as well, too; if I was using voice chat, there'd be no doubt in anyone's mind that my short-but-pretty female redhead character was being played by a big hairy bloke. Not that I think anyone would care; playing off-gender is pretty common if our Free Company is anything to go by. And occasionally, playing a female character can allow you to flutter your virtual eyelashes and get people who might not otherwise help you out to play with you. (Well, it worked in World of Warcraft; the land of Eorzea appears to be a somewhat more egalitarian and less sexually frustrated society, perhaps due to the fact that the player base is slightly older than that of World of Warcraft.)

Anyway, it took me a matter of seconds to be bombarded with people who wanted to help me. Eventually I picked someone whose name I'd seen in public chat before, and whom I remembered didn't seem to be a jerk. I met up with him at the Goldsmiths' Guild, used the game's convenient "request materia meld" interface to indicate what I needed and offer him suitable compensation — my Free Company brethren had suggested 5,000 gil per meld was a good starting point — and within a matter of moments it was done. We bowed courteously to one another and went about our business.

That wasn't so hard, was it? No, of course it wasn't; as anyone with social anxiety will know, the reality of a particular social situation that gives you cause for unease is rarely as bad as what you build it up to be in your mind. And this is just as true in the online space as it is when you're meeting people in reality — even with online games and virtual worlds' capacity to let you represent yourself in any way you wish.

Anyway, the upshot of all that is that the quest to construct my Relic weapon is now well underway, and a big punch-up with Chimera is in my near future. But that is a story for another day.

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.

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…

1406: Sunday Night

It is, as the title says, Sunday night, and as usual I have left writing this until the last minute, and as such rather than churn out the first thing that comes into my head while tired, I'm instead going to hold fire on the ongoing story until tomorrow. This week I'm going to attempt to write each installment in the morning before I start work rather than saving it until the last thing in the evening.

This will also (hopefully) have the side-effect of allowing me to focus on those aspects of it that are a little more challenging to write — i.e. the bits drawn from my personal experience as a teacher — while my brain is reasonably alert and thus able to process things a little more clearly.

This, then, leaves this entry free for some generic ramblings about what I've been up to. So, okay then, let's do just that.

After a short break, I've been getting back into Final Fantasy XIV and it remains just as compelling as it ever was. Over the last few evenings, I've been completing the "Lightning Strikes" questline, in which the heroine from Final Fantasy XIII and its upcoming spinoff Lightning Returns shows up in the lands of Eorzea and enlists your assistance in defeating various unpleasant beasties, culminating in a battle against a giant… thing called "Aspect of Chaos". It's essentially an advertising event for Lightning Returns, which came out in Japan recently and comes out in the West in February. (And yes, the event is repeating in February.) But it's pretty well done. The usual Final Fantasy XIV battle music is replaced by the brilliant "Blinded by Light" from Final Fantasy XIII, until the final boss battle, which is accompanied by Final Fantasy XIII's boss music, the name of which escapes me right now.

The equipment you get out of it allows you to cosplay as either Lightning or Snow from Final Fantasy XIII, depending on your character's gender, but it's not particularly good equipment — it's just level 13, so it's all but useless to those who are bumping their head against the level cap. That said, the Free Company I'm in is considering doing some low-level dungeon runs all in Lightning gear, so that might be fun to do at some point.

Aside from Final Fantasy XIV, I've also finally got around to playing Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, aka 999. I was expecting to like this, so I was unsurprised to find myself enjoying it a great deal. It's a very clever game that makes good use of the DS' twin screens to present its visual novel-style storytelling sequences effectively — dialogue on the top, narrative on the bottom — and features some enjoyable "room escape" puzzle sequences. There are six endings to the game; so far I've seen three of them, and they've all involved the untimely death of the entire cast, which is unfortunate. There is a "true" ending but I haven't yet determined the conditions that cause you to proceed down that path — I have my suspicions, but I'm investigating thoroughly since a single playthrough doesn't take very long and I'd like to see all the different endings, even if most of them are "BAD END"s.

Anyway. Now I'm off to sit in bed and find yet another way to kill off the whole cast. The story will continue tomorrow, assuming I manage to haul myself out of bed in a timely manner.