Memoirs of a nobody
I finished Final Fantasy XV's main story earlier on. It was a spectacular conclusion, but that's not what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about the game's "secret" dungeon, the Pitioss Ruins.
As you have probably surmised, spoilers are ahead, albeit not story ones, since the Pitioss Ruins is a purely mechanical challenge. I am going to talk about all the different aspects of the dungeon, though, so if you want to encounter it for yourself, look away now.
One of the most interesting things about the new Pokémon games is, I think, the online "Festival Plaza" component that allows you to indirectly communicate with other players, earn rewards and participate in communal challenges. It's also the main hub from which you can challenge other players to battles, participate in tournaments, trade with friends or random people, list Pokémon for trade or seek out specific Pokémon that you're after and a bunch of other things besides.
In typical Nintendo fashion, all the technical side of connecting to the Internet and communicating with other people is made as painless as possible — so much so that were it not for the lengthy connection process and the message on screen that says when you're connected to the Internet, you'd think you were just playing another part of the main game. But you're not; you're in an area where every character you meet represents someone else who is playing the game somewhere in the world, and the things they say reflect things they have done and choices they have made.
One particularly interesting aspect of the Festival Plaza is the fact that you can host "missions". These are simple minigames that usually involve running around the plaza and either talking to the correct people based on their greetings to you, or answering their questions correctly. The more points you score with correct actions, the more Festival Coins you earn, which can subsequently be used on Festival Plaza's attractions.
What's interesting about these missions is that it's not just you playing them. Host one while you're playing online and you may well notice your "total score" increasing faster than you're contributing to it, and the number of participants rising. This is because when someone hosts a mission, other people connected to Festival Plaza at the same time receive a message and have the option to take part. Everyone who takes part gets rewards, and the higher the overall total score at the end — which can usually be inflated considerably by just a few more participants — the bigger the rewards everyone gets. It offers a nice balance of simple gameplay, light competitiveness — there's a leaderboard at the end of the mission to show who contributed the most points — and jolly cooperation. And with Nintendo's typical lack of direct communication facilities — something which I'm increasingly thankful for with the growing unpleasantness of many online playerbases — the whole thing just feels like a nice bit of fun.
The other interesting thing about these missions is that you can learn something from them. Some of them challenge you to name the correct types of Pokémon that would be strong against another particular type, for example, while some of them challenge you to pick out people who are naming specific types of Pokémon. But these missions aren't all about the game itself; some of them are straight-up educational and seemingly developed in the interests of making people from all over the world feel a bit closer together. Of particular note are the "Language Lesson" missions in which all you have to do is find the people who are saying "hello", "goodbye" or "thank you" in a given language. You're given the set phrases to look out for in the mission information, then after that it's up to you to remember them. By the end of the couple of minutes the mission takes, you'll feel confident at saying those three phrases in another language, which is pretty neat.
Since Pokémon is primarily aimed at kids, despite a considerable adult-age enthusiast community of competitive players, I'm not anticipating any of these missions will get into anything too deep or complicated, but they've been a nice diversion from the main game, they feel in keeping with the overall tone of the whole thing and I've learned a thing or two from them, both about Pokémon in general and a couple of foreign languages to boot.
When I've not been playing Final Fantasy XV, I've been giving Pokémon Moon a serious shot, as I'm determined to try and understand the obsessive appeal the series has. And I think, finally, I'm starting to "get it".
Part of this is, as I described a few days ago, the fact that Sun and Moon have refined their systems and interfaces to a level where I'm not frustrated by a lack of information any longer, although I do feel there's a certain amount of "assumed knowledge"; an understanding that many of the people who are playing this have previously played at least one Pokémon game to death. This leads to a certain amount of flailing around in the early hours as you try to figure certain things out — though pleasingly, the game does actually take the time to point out what common series abbreviations like "TM" stand for, which is something I don't recall X and Y doing.
Pokémon has evolved considerably over time. I played Red and Gold when they first came out on Game Boy, then set the series aside until X and Y which I gave a go for a bit but didn't really feel, although there were certain aspects I did like. Chief among these was the amount of customisation there is in the game, which has really come to the forefront in the 3D installments. I'm a sucker for any game that gives me the opportunity to play a cute girl and dress her up in cute outfits, and Moon certainly hasn't been disappointing in this regard, with plenty of hair and clothing options to choose from. (I actually found myself not wanting to customise X and Y's default female character because I liked her standard look so much, though I understand there was a similar situation here.)
Moon's online feature — the Festival Plaza — is a little peculiar in that true Nintendo "no direct online interaction!" way, but it's charming, endearing and friendly in, yes, that true Nintendo way. Not only do you get the opportunity to ogle the wonderful avatar creations of other players — both from your friends list and randomly gathered from online — but you also get to interact with them in various ways. Perhaps the most appealing part of all this is the fact that it's possible to populate your online profile with a questionnaire covering all manner of different topics, and there are a wide variety of different responses you can give to the prompts — some sensible, some nonsensical. This allows players the opportunity to express themselves and their personality without the potential for unpleasantness that unfiltered direct online communication often brings with it.
As for the main game itself, the setup has been enjoyable so far. In typical Pokémon fashion, you set out from your childhood home to have an adventure, largely prompted by the local crazy professor. Along the way you encounter a rival (who is more of a friend in this character than in some previous installments) and a recurring team of villains (who are, as usual, comedically incompetent in this installment, with the main difference being that the general populace of the Alola region knows how comedically incompetent they are rather than living in fear of them) as you seek to prove your might as a Pokémon master.
I like the fact the structure of the game has been shaken up a bit from "get to each town, visit gym, defeat everyone in there" from the previous games. The new "trials" concept covers the same basic ground, but seems to handle things more like a traditional RPG dungeon, with objectives to complete along the way followed by a boss at the end. I'm interested to see how this develops further in the game — I'm still on the first island at present.
I'm not yet quite sure if I'm "doing it right" with regard to my team makeup and levelling strategy, but I'm sure there are no mistakes I might make that can't be corrected with a little grinding or, if the worst comes to the worst, catching a fresh new Pokémon of a particular type. In the meantime, I'm genuinely enjoying Moon, and I'm keen to see how the game develops in its later hours.
Still plugging away at Final Fantasy XV, and still having a lot of fun. I'm now up to Chapter 8, as I eventually ran into a roadblock in Chapter 3 where part of the map where several sidequests concluded was locked off and thus I had to progress further to be able to continue. Along the way I enjoyed some spectacular story sequences, but now I'm back on the sidequest train for the moment.
I've been very much enjoying the whole experience of Final Fantasy XV so far. While the sheer amount of sidequests and other distractions around the game world absolutely kill the pacing of the main story if you don't have the self-discipline to focus on that first and do all the other shit later, all that side content is enjoyable to do. As I noted in my first impressions a few days ago, the whole game feels like an inversion of the usual Final Fantasy formula, in which a wide variety of things are open to you from almost the very outset of the game, and you're simply able to immediately go and do whatever appeals to you the most.
Like Xenoblade Chronicles X, an open-world RPG that had a rather similar structure, I've been enjoying how much all the side content makes the world feel like a fleshed-out, lived-in place. Through numerous sidequests — and the conversations your party members have during these quests — you learn quite a bit about the world that you might not discover if you just focused on the main story. The town of Lestallum, for example, is one with a pretty strong gender divide that has come about naturally over time; the women (who are "built", according to Gladio, who one can infer from his enthusiasm is all about the thicc girls) work the industrial jobs such as maintaining the power plant in the city, while the men run the market stalls, restaurants and shops. You might not notice this immediately if you just pay it the flying visit you do in the main scenario quests, but Holly's series of sidequests explores this side of things a bit further.
I've enjoyed the dungeons, too. I think I've cleared them all now — with the exception of the high-level deeper levels that open up once you've completed the main story — and they've been pleasingly different from one another. Particular highlights included the Crestholme Channels, a labyrinth of sewers beneath the outskirts of the Crown City, and Costlemark Tower, a complex dungeon with a shifting layout that you have to carefully navigate your way through in order to reach the boss at the end.
(As a side note, Costlemark Tower presently has a bug in it where sometimes if you've done things in the "wrong" order, beating the boss will not trigger the final cutscene and award you with the weapon you're supposed to get for clearing the dungeon. If this happens, exit and re-enter the dungeon, work your way back to the boss room and trigger a somewhat glitchy cutscene. You then have to fight the boss again, though the bug means that you can't target it unless you're able to trigger a Summon spell. You can, however, fling magic at it; Blizzard spells are particularly effective, so stock up on those before going in for an easy victory.)
I think I'm just about coming to the limit of sidequests that are left to do before I'll be obliged to continue on with the main story. At about 57 hours deep in the game so far, I've already very much had my money's worth, but I'm keen to see how the story continues and concludes — and also very excited to explore what sounds like a considerable amount of post-game content.
A short while ago, Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 was considerably reduced in price on the PlayStation Store, so I grabbed a copy. I'm a big fan of the previous Pac-Man Championship Edition games — particularly Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, which is one of the finest arcade games ever created — but had heard mixed reviews about Championship Edition 2. Still, I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
The first thing I'll say about Championship Edition 2 is that its big new structural addition — a so-called "adventure mode" — is total garbage. It consists entirely of time attack phases in which you have to eat sufficient dots to make a piece of fruit appear — very rarely is this the entire maze worth of dots — and repeat until you have eaten sufficient fruit to clear the stage. At the end of every block of near-identical levels is a supposed "boss fight" in which you do exactly the same thing, only with a giant ghost bashing into the background every so often.
"Total garbage" may be an exaggeration in retrospect, as these challenges are mildly diverting, but they miss the entire point of Pac-Man Championship Edition, which is to score as many points as possible against a strict time limit.
Fortunately, the Score Attack mode is a lot of fun, and Championship Edition 2 is a different beast from its predecessors in a number of ways.
Firstly and most significantly, bumping into a ghost no longer immediately kills Pac-Man, unlike all the previous incarnations of the game including the previous Championship Edition installments. Instead, Pac-Man bounces off the ghost, though bumping into one several times (or once on Expert mode) causes the ghost to become "angry", which makes it speed up, chase Pac-Man and become fatal to the touch. However, sometimes it is desirable to do this, since making a ghost angry causes it to fly up in the air and out of the way for a couple of seconds, so you can deliberately provoke a ghost in order to clear a path for yourself.
Secondly, the "ghost trains" introduced in Championship Edition DX work a little differently. There are several modes of play — the first has four ghosts wandering around, but only one of them forms a train when Pac-Man passes by a sleeping minion ghost, while the other two form up to four trains in total, one for each ghost. Unlike Championship Edition DX, minion ghosts don't join a train by a ghost passing them; they immediately wake up when Pac-Man passes by them and automatically attach themselves to one of the trains, even if it's nowhere near where the minion was. This allows you to create huge ghost trains by planning your route carefully rather than having to manipulate the ghosts AI.
Eating a power pill works a little differently, too. Power pills only spawn on certain mazes after you've eaten a certain number of dots, and consuming one causes the ghosts and their trains to turn blue in the traditional manner. However, in Championship Edition 2 they move on set routes that are specifically marked on the maze, allowing you to predict where they are likely to go and head them off easily. Said routes tend to branch in several places in the harder mazes, so it's not as easy as it sounds, but by learning the routes and the way the ghost trains attempt to avoid Pac-Man, you can become more and more efficient.
Oh, and ghost trains have to be consumed from their head now rather than from any point. This can be surprisingly challenging, though chomping your way through all four ghost trains in the maze, which causes both the train and Pac-Man to go flying through the air in a ridiculously overblown display of acrobatics, is immensely satisfying.
Bombs work differently, too. Rather than blasting the ghosts up in the air for a moment as in the previous installment, bombs now send Pac-Man back to the starting point of the maze, which can be a quick means of retrieving the fruit if it's spawned and you're a long way from it. However, bombs are worth quite a few points at the end of your allotted time, so it's worth holding on to them as much as possible; more can be acquired by consuming every dot in a maze rather than just the amount required to spawn the fruit needed to progress.
Extra lives also show up at predictable moments — every 1 million points — as collectible items in the maze, and these are worth huge points at the end of a game, so it's in your interest to collect them before progressing to the next maze. They're easily missed, so the mark of a true pro Championship Edition 2 player is going to be planning their scoring effectively so that they hit a multiple of a million points at a suitable moment to grab the extra life without inconveniencing them — and not, say, crossing the million boundary on the changeover between levels, which causes you to miss out on the opportunity to collect the extra life altogether.
There's quite a lot to Championship Edition 2, then. Fundamentally, it's still based around Pac-Man, but it's pleasingly distinct from its predecessors and fun in its own right. It has a couple of irritating factors — most notably a lengthy, non-skippable and rather unnecessary tutorial sequence before you can play Score Attack or Adventure mode, and, of course, Adventure mode itself, which is a waste of time — but on the whole, once you get stuck in to chasing the high scores, it's a lot of fun. And, like its predecessors, it's a game you can easily spend several hours enjoying when you really have more important and interesting things to do with your life.
I decided to give Pokémon another go with the latest installments Sun and Moon, specifically Moon, since Andie picked up a copy of Sun.
I've only spent a little over an hour with it so far but already it looks as if Sun and Moon have addressed some of the things I found frustrating about the previous installments, and that, coupled with reports from friends who say it's a lot more story-heavy than previous Pokémon games, makes me think I'm probably going to enjoy it a lot more.
One of the things that always frustrated me about earlier Pokémon games was the fact that it was pretty vague about things like debuffs and suchlike. "Pikachu's attack fell!" the game would say. "How much?" I would want to know. "Does that debuff stack if the opponent keeps using the same move?" Neither of those answers were particularly forthcoming in previous installments — or if they were, I certainly didn't know where to find them.
In Sun and Moon, however, there's a handy mid-battle status screen that allows you to see that yes, debuffs do stack, and how many times your Pokémon has been inflicted with a particular debuff. (It still doesn't tell you how much your stat has been reduced by, but you can make an educated guess as to the impact according to the levels of your Pokémon and your opponent.)
Even better, Sun and Moon use information from the Pokédex to allow you to quickly see which moves are effective, super-effective and not very effective against your current opponent, negating the need for constant flipping back and forth between menu screens or keeping copious notes on what was weak and strong against what. Doubtless for some purists learning all this stuff was part of the appeal, but the way Sun and Moon does things is a lot more friendly to people like me who haven't invested thousands of hours in the series as a whole.
These niggly little features aside, I'm impressed with the overall presentation of Sun and Moon, a lot more so than previous installments. While X and Y had some reasonably nice character models, their proportions were a bit weird in comparison to the official art. In Sun and Moon, meanwhile, the characters look just like their hand-drawn counterparts and are animated well, to boot. The only sign it's running on the underpowered 3DS hardware is any time the camera gets a bit close to a character and you can see big jagged pixels on the textures.
I'm not far enough in the story to be able to comment on it as yet, but the early introduction of the character Lillie — current darling of the fanart community, from what I can tell online — gives the story some interesting momentum right from the get-go, and the incidental characters are appealing and fun. In particular, the protagonist's mother is extremely likeable, helping to make your character's home feel a lot more… well, homely.
I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops further; I'm going to give it a proper chance this time around, even if I am currently attempting to juggle it with Final Fantasy XV, which is monopolising most of my gaming time at present. Perhaps I'll finally understand why people go apeshit for each new Pokémon release.
I am still on Chapter Three of Final Fantasy XV, appropriately dubbed "The Open World" — the point at which the majority of the main map opens up to you and you're let loose to go and piss around doing whatever you want before progressing the main story.
The fact this moment occurs so early in Final Fantasy XV is a curious inversion of the usual formula for Japanese RPGs in the Final Fantasy mould. The typical format is that the game spends anywhere between 10 and 30 hours sending you on a linear quest that takes in most of the major locations around the world, conveniently introducing you to all these places and gradually providing you with increasingly unrestrictive means of transportation between them. At some point in the game — usually not long before the final confrontation and the end of it all — you are effectively given the "keys" to the world and complete freedom to explore, usually in conjunction with some particularly convenient means of getting around such as an airship.
Not so in Final Fantasy XV. Here you're given the open world almost from the very beginning of the game, and there are a hell of a lot of things to do in it. I have been finding the myriad sidequests and hunts enormously entertaining and compelling, so much so that I haven't advanced the story beyond the party's arrival in the major town of Lestallum, and yet somehow I'm 30 hours deep in the game and past level 40 on all my characters.
There's an argument that this kind of structure kills pacing somewhat, and it's often a bugbear of mine with open world games. But I sort of feel like it makes sense this way around: that "open world" bit at the end of older Final Fantasy games often felt a little peculiar, as the narrative was demanding that you fend off some sort of imminent disaster, and yet there you were breeding chocobos, investigating crashed planes underwater or collecting frogs to get through a forest. The narrative demanded urgency, in other words, but the gameplay discouraged it.
In Final Fantasy XV, meanwhile, after the dramatic opening of the game, Noctis and his companions are simply out in the world, attempting to operate incognito while developing their own skills. While the Empire's invasion of Noctis' home city of Insomnia is something that needs Sorting Out at some point, the Noctis at the beginning of the game is not ready to face up to that responsibility, nor is he skilled enough or familiar enough with his unique powers to be able to simply charge in and take on a whole empire. It makes sense, then, for him to travel around the world, coming to understand it with his friends, developing relationships with people who could prove useful to know in the future, and improving his own skills in the process. The Empire will still be in Insomnia tomorrow, after all, and retaking a capital city is not the sort of thing you want to rush.
Practically speaking, it doesn't really need all that much justification, as exploring Final Fantasy XV's world is simply fun. Today I particularly enjoyed encountering the Rock of Ravatogh, a dungeon at the far Western side of the map that is actually a landmark you can see from the far Eastern side. Yes, it's that old open-world favourite "if you can see that mountain, you can go to it" — or in this case, "if you can see that mountain with weird pointy glowy bits sticking out of it and smoke billowing out of the top, you can go to it".
The Rock of Ravatogh, despite being an outdoor location, is treated as a dungeon rather than just a hill that you have to find your way up. This makes it a much more enjoyable, spectacular experience to climb, as it's been designed and paced to feel like a real trek up a mountain, rather than simply walking in a straight line up a sloping grass texture. There are sections where you need to avoid slipping, there are sections where you need to climb cliff faces, there are sections where you need to pick your way along perilous paths with sheer drops to one side of you. And there are some amazing views of the game world along the way, plus a great reward for making it to the very top.
The Rock of Ravatogh is only the second dungeon I've encountered in Final Fantasy XV, but it's very different to the first, which was a series of dark, underground tunnels with scary noises behind closed doors. This gives me hope that other dungeons in the game will be similarly varied and interesting to explore; I'm looking forward to encountering them for the first time.
(Should have been posted last night, but I forgot to hit Publish!)
A little over ten hours into Final Fantasy XV so far and I'm well and truly on board.
Pro-tip: if you're finding the opening a bit slow, make an effort to not get sidetracked by sidequests and instead push the main story on at least until you're able to get into the Duscae region. From here, the game opens up a whole lot more and you'll have had a taste of various different experiences you can expect to see a lot more of throughout the rest of its duration.
One thing I was very pleasantly surprised about was the discovery that Final Fantasy XV has proper dungeons. This isn't particularly unusual for a Final Fantasy game, but it is relatively unusual for an open-world RPG, to varying degrees. Games like The Witcher 3 have kinda-sorta dungeons dotted around the place, but these often tend to feel like "oh look, another cave" rather than an exciting place to explore and loot. Games like The Elder Scrolls series have hundreds of the bloody things everywhere, but are often designed in a somewhat copy-paste manner, meaning that few of them feel "special". And games like the Xenoblade series pretty much do away with dungeons altogether; Xenoblade Chronicles X did have some underground areas, but again, like The Witcher 3, they felt more like part of the scenery than a discrete experience in their own right.
Relatively early in Final Fantasy XV's main story, you're taken to your first dungeon, and it works in traditional Final Fantasy manner: it's self-contained, it has its own music, it has secrets and branching routes to explore, and it has its own lineup of monster encounters. It felt like a significant gameplay moment to step into this place, and it was exciting and rewarding to explore. There were some surprising and interesting scripted encounters within, and the whole thing felt authentically… well, Final Fantasy.
And I think that's part of the reason I've never really found open-world RPGs to do dungeons in a satisfactory manner for my tastes: you often end up doing exactly the same thing in them that you do out in the open world, whereas Final Fantasy XV's dungeons look set to have unique mechanics, puzzles and methods of exploration. I'm looking forward to discovering more of them.
I think that sums up Final Fantasy XV's approach quite well, actually. It knows when to use scripted sequences effectively — dramatic confrontations, boss fights, dungeons — and when to use the more freeform, unpredictable and emergent gameplay more typically found in open world games. Purely emergent games (I'm picturing the Elder Scrolls series in particular when I use this description) often end up feeling a bit sterile and characterless because nothing has had any real soul put into it — it's all driven by mechanics. Final Fantasy XV, meanwhile, will surprise you with unscripted encounters out in the wilds (its equivalent of the random battles of yore), but also knows when would be a particularly effective time to have a monster burst through a wall or a villain to make their first appearance to make a speech and attempt to defeat you with Their Infallible New Weapon.
I like Noctis and his friends a lot; their constant banter, while occasionally repetitive, adds a lot more personality to wandering the fields than Skyrim's mute protagonist, and by restricting the party to those four core members (and occasional guests) the conversations can flow naturally rather than having to work by triggering responses to one another as in something like Xenoblade. Already I'm feeling that core theme of "brotherhood" coming through very nicely indeed. The supporting characters are great, too, running the gamut from all-business badass (Cor) to the flamboyantly colourful and gorgeous (Cindy).
I'm having a blast, in other words. I'm looking forward to my next day off, when I'll be able to really get stuck in.
Well, it's Final Fantasy XV day and I've spent a good five or six hours playing it this evening.
It's good. Real good.
I haven't progressed that far in the story as yet as it's simply fun to wander around exploring, doing sidequests and listening to the soundtracks of old Final Fantasy games while the gang drive around in their car. However, I'm very much looking forward to the world opening up a bit more — I'm penned in to a relatively "small" area at the moment by barricades that prevent going more than a certain distance by road or on foot — and seeing what is out there to discover.
Even in this fairly fenced-off starter area it's clear that it's going to be a fun ride, though. In particular, I'm very much enjoying the combat; far from being a hack-and-slash action game along the lines of something like Kingdom Hearts, it manages to blend what looks like fast-paced action with relatively strategic, cerebral combat that rewards careful positioning and exploitation of enemy resistances and weaknesses.
And the world of Eos is one simultaneously filled with wonderment and pleasingly familiar mundanity. In the first few hours, I've spent time at a seaside resort, a motel and a truck stop, but also fought recurring Final Fantasy monsters such as goblins and flans, and run away screaming at the sight of an Iron Giant. I've hunted down groups of monsters and fished up a meal for a stray cat. And I've witnessed the devastation that Niflheim wreaked on protagonist Noctis' home city of Insomnia.
And the music. Dear lord. I already knew that the soundtrack was going to be something special from the preview tracks I'd previously heard, but the full experience is something else. Multiple battle themes according to the context make me very happy indeed, particularly as they're all wonderfully energetic, blasting pieces full of drama and excitement. But the more incidental music is very pleasant, too, changing according to the time of day and your surroundings and, in settlements, adjusting its mix according to whether you're inside or outside.
The whole concept of it being "a fantasy based on reality" has been pulled off very effectively so far. The world and the places you visit are all very plausible and realistic, but overlaid on the top of all that is the wonderful sci-fi/fantasy blend that Final Fantasy has been so good at for years. It really, really works as a setting, and I'm looking forward to exploring it in more depth over the coming weeks.
For now, though, as I have an eight-hour shift to work tomorrow and I have a cold coming on, I should probably call it a night there. Probably.
With Final Fantasy XV out tomorrow and my excitement for it at an extreme level, I've decided that I'm going to devote the next month on my other site MoeGamer to an in-depth exploration of the series as a whole.
Final Fantasy as a whole may be a little outside my usual mission with MoeGamer — it is neither underappreciated nor overlooked — but it's worth discussing nonetheless, particularly with regard to those installments along the way that are regarded less favourably.
It's also worth discussing as it's a series with a long, interesting history, and can quite rightly be described as genre-defining alongside its longtime rival Dragon Quest.
Mostly I want to talk about it because it's been important to me for a long time now. Nearly 20 years, in fact, which is a scary prospect, as my first encounter with the series is still absolutely fresh in my mind, as if I'd just experienced it yesterday.
I first heard of Final Fantasy VII, my first point of contact with the series, through my brother. I had a PlayStation at the time (well, more accurately, I had a hand-me-down Japanese PlayStation that my brother left behind) but, what with it being a Japanese model, I hadn't really explored the games available for it beyond the three I already had: Ridge Racer, Tekken and Raiden Project.
Hearing my brother describe Final Fantasy VII made me want to try it, though. I'd already had experience with story-heavy games thanks to our family's mutual love of point-and-click adventure titles from Sierra and LucasArts, but this sounded like something different; something more. Specifically, the thing that got me interested in it was the promise of a scene partway through the game where pretty much everyone who had played it ended up crying. (Said scene is now one of the most famous scenes in all of gaming, but back in '97, it was easier to remain unspoiled.)
So, reading up on the old "disc swap" trick that allowed you to play different region games on a PlayStation, I propped my PlayStation's lid open with a biro lid and a bit of Blu-Tack and inserted the first of the three discs of my shiny new copy of Final Fantasy VII, not sure what to expect.
I was immediately blown away by the spectacular video intro sequence that moved almost seamlessly into in-game action, with polygonal characters moving perfectly in sync with the prerendered background camera angles. (I was then slightly distracted by the rather primitive field screen character models Final Fantasy VII is now somewhat notorious for, but I quickly became accustomed to them.)
The music drew me in. The action started right away. It was like being part of a movie. Then I got into my first battle and, having never really played an RPG before, was initially baffled. Once again, though, it didn't take me long to become accustomed, and there was no turning back from that point: the game had me well and truly in its clutches.
I enthused about the game to my friends at school. They were initially skeptical, but it didn't take a lot of convincing to get them to give it a try. And before long, they were as obsessed with this spectacular new game as I was. We played it through together, discussing things we'd found and things we'd achieved; we'd complete it, and start over again, eager to enjoy the story all over again. We devoured guidebooks and online FAQs about the game, keen to see everything it was possible to see. And, on one particularly memorable occasion fueled by tequila and various other intoxicants, we played for 36 hours straight, my friend Woody passing out midway through the G-Bike sequence, having some very peculiar dreams and suddenly waking up demanding to know "what's an X-Walker?" (To this day, we have no idea. X-Potions? Sure. X-Walker? No clue.)
The impact Final Fantasy VII had on me drew me to explore the rest of the series. While at the time I found the NES original a little hard to appreciate — it was just a bit too clunky in comparison to the later games — from IV onwards (or II as it was known back then thanks to the fact Final Fantasy II, III and V didn't see Western releases until many years after their NES and SNES original versions) in particular I found them to be just as compelling despite their more primitive visuals and sounds.
These were games that told stories that resonated with me. Stories about people who rose up from humble beginnings, gathering a group of close companions and achieving something incredible. This sort of thing is seen as cliched as all hell these days, but there's a reason the standard JRPG tropes have been a thing for as long as they have: even before video games, this story structure is proven to be an effective way of telling a heroic epic.
Even in those early days, though, I could tell that the Final Fantasy series wasn't one to rest on its laurels. While I had a fairly Western RPG feel to it with its completely mute, characterless party, II introduced the series convention of having a party of predefined characters with actual personalities. III brought us the Job system for the first time. IV gave us an incredibly detailed story full of emotion. V refined the Job system further. VI turned the narrative conventions of the series on its head by not really having a "main" character, instead allowing us the opportunity to spend time with an enormous ensemble cast. And so on, and so on.
I'll talk about this in detail once I start writing the MoeGamer pieces, but Final Fantasy is a series that has constantly reinvented itself over and over again. Even in those installments that seem superficially similar (I-III, IV-VI, VII-IX) there are enough unique components to each title to make them distinct from one another, and from X onwards the series has enjoyed even more drastic, dramatic reinventions with each installment. And this isn't even getting into the myriad spin-off titles, many of which are even more fondly regarded than the mainline titles in the series.
As you can tell, I'll have plenty to write about. And I'm afraid you're almost certainly going to have to put up with a lot of enthusing about XV on this here site from tomorrow onwards, too. I make no apologies for my excitement in this regard.
Now, just a good night's sleep and a day of work between me and my first adventures in the lands of Eos. Can't wait.