2397: No Man's Sky

I dutifully downloaded No Man's Sky at 6pm this evening when it became available on Steam and, aside from a break for dinner, I have been playing it all night.

It's very good indeed, with a few caveats.

The first is that it is not a game for the impatient. Before you can even get off whatever planet you get dumped on at the beginning, you have to repair a bunch of your ship's systems, which involves gathering a selection of resources, some of which are harder to find than others. (Pro-tip: zinc can be found in yellowy leafy plants, and heridium can be found in large blue-black rocky monolith-type structures. You'll thank me for those.) It took me a good half an hour of wandering around (including becoming lost in a rather labyrinthine network of caves that I mistakenly thought might be a shortcut to the heridium deposit my scanner had helpfully found for me 15 minutes' real-time walk away from the crater my spaceship had deposited itself in) before I assembled everything I needed to get going, but it was absolutely worth it; lifting off for the first time in No Man's Sky is one of those watershed moments in gaming, like coming out of the sewers for the first time in Oblivion.

The second is that it is not a game for those who like to have their hand held, particularly in the early hours. While the ship-repairing process acts as a tutorial of sorts, the game literally starts with you waking up next to your crashed ship with absolutely no context whatsoever, and from there you have to determine exactly what you're supposed to do.

There are supposedly three main "routes" through the game, one of which is simply "do your own thing and see what happens", so wandering around aimlessly trying to scan all the indigenous life on the planet you've found yourself on is absolutely an option, but so too is following the trail of breadcrumbs left by the mysterious "Atlas" system, which has distinctly sinister omniscient, omnipotent being undertones (and, appropriately enough, this route was apparently penned by one of the writers of Deus Ex).

It's a game that encourages experimentation. Arrive in a new system? Scan it and see if anything shows up, then go investigate. Wander around a bit outside to dig up some minerals and perhaps even find a few alien relics that help you learn the words of various languages. Found some weird technology? Disassemble it and incorporate its components into your suit, ship or multi-tool. Found some shiny glowy things? Sell them off for vast profit at your friendly neighbourhood space station. Met a malfunctioning cyborg bartender who wants nothing more than to shake hands with you? Make sure you have more than one health point before doing so, otherwise said bar will find itself adorned with a rather obtrusive tombstone for the rest of time.

There's a frightening degree of customisation in the game, too, though you have to balance this with your relatively limited inventory space, since upgrades for your various pieces of tech occupy valuable inventory slots or cargo space in your ship. Upgrading your multi-tool is probably the most interesting so far, because by doing this what starts as a simple short-range mining laser can become a machine gun, a plasma launcher, a grenade launcher, a shotgun, a long-range scanner, a lifeform analyser and all manner of other things besides. You even have to consider the layout of the components in your tool, because upgrades and modifications unsurprisingly work better if placed adjacent to the parts they are tweaking.

The thing that's struck me so far is how incredibly absorbing it is. The whole game has the look of Tim White's cover art for Isaac Asimov novels, with a touch of Roger Dean here and there. The worlds you'll visit are varied and interesting, despite their randomly generated nature; there are hills, valleys, caves, seas, deserts, mountains, canyons and all manner of other landscapes to explore, and, assuming you don't piss off the local Sentinels or the indigenous life, exploring it is an enormously relaxing pleasure. Indeed, at one point this evening as I stepped out of my ship onto a tiny island, then dove beneath the ocean waves to see what lay beneath, the Zen-like atmosphere of it all made me feel more at peace than I think anything else I've had the pleasure of experiencing in recent memory. Then I started to drown, so I had to cut my underwater exploits short, but for a short period it was bliss.

Thus far, No Man's Sky looks set to be a really interesting take on sci-fi that is a far cry from the usual "space military"-centric angle we tend to get in video games. Its dreamy, mysterious narration (all in text, no voiceovers) is written with a similar tone to Asimov novels and lends a suitable air of, appropriately enough, otherworldliness to the whole affair. I'm not sure if I've locked myself into one of the three "paths" as yet, or if that continues to be a series of choices you make as you progress through the game, but so far everything I've encountered with relation to the lore is fascinating and intriguing, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. Well, I know that — the centre of the universe — but why? What happens there? Who are you, the player? Why is it so important you follow this path that has seemingly been set out for you?

I can't answer any of those questions yet, but I'm looking forward to seeking some answers. It's early days yet, but so far this feels like the space game I always wanted to play. Fly a cool ship, land on planets, wander around, shoot stuff like a badass, become embroiled in metaphysical crazytimes, possibly find out that you/your ship/the weird thing on the cover is God or something.

2396: The Many Final Fantasies You Haven't Played

One thing that really, really bugs me about people who say they "don't like Final Fantasy" is that they're showing a spectacular lack of awareness of what the series actually is and how it has evolved over the years.

I've previously remarked on how the mainline numbered series has radically reinvented itself with each installment, and how it is thus dumb as hell to refuse to play any of them on the grounds that you didn't like one of them, but one aspect of the series that doesn't get brought up nearly as much is the fact that there are numerous entries outside of those main numbered entries that represent even more diversity in gameplay styles, aesthetics and overall "feel" while still remaining recognisably "Final Fantasy" at their core.

Just off the top of my head, here are some examples — this is not, by any means, an exhaustive list, either:

Final Fantasy Adventure (Game Boy) — actually part of the Seiken Densetsu/Mana series if we're being picky, but it has Final Fantasy on the box in Western territories, so it totally counts. This is an action RPG a bit like the older top-down Zelda games with the addition of more explicitly RPG-style mechanics and systems such as experience points and levelling up.
Final Fantasy Legend I, II, III (Game Boy) — like its stablemate, this is actually part of a different series, in this case SaGa, but once again, since it has Final Fantasy on the box in Western territories, it counts as a Final Fantasy spinoff. While initially appearing fairly similar to the early Final Fantasy games in terms of mechanics, the three Final Fantasy Legend games had some rather quirky, unconventional methods of powering up your characters, including feeding monster-type characters meat, praying to the random number gods in the sky that mutants would naturally grow the stats you wanted and simply finding stat-increasing items. Their narratives also blended fantasy and sci-fi in a way that will be very familiar to fans of later Final Fantasy games in particular.
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (SNES) — a simplified take on the RPG that is regarded with a certain degree of scorn by many Final Fantasy fans, Mystic Quest is a reasonably solid game in its own right with a great soundtrack, but is very easy. It was intended to be a gentle introduction to RPGs, and in that regard it succeeds admirably. Just don't go in expecting deep, complex mechanics, because there aren't any.
Final Fantasy Tactics (PS1, PSP, mobile) — one of the greatest games ever made, and also one of the most complex, stat-crunching monstrosities of game mechanics you'll ever encounter this side of a Nippon Ichi game. Final Fantasy Tactics takes the familiar Jobs and abilities of Final Fantasy and transplants the action to an isometric, turn-based strategic battlefield. It also ties it together with a borderline-incomprehensible but enormously ambitious plot that introduces us to the land of Ivalice, a game world that would form the backdrop for several future Final Fantasy games. Final Fantasy Tactics was subsequently followed up by a number of sequels for Nintendo handhelds.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (Gamecube) — a bizarre multiplayer affair in which four players had to control their characters using Game Boy Advances hooked up to a Gamecube, giving them "second screen" functionality long before the Wii U, Smartglass and Sony's cross-platform functionality with Vita and mobile. Truly cooperative, it demanded that one player carry a special item to keep a deadly "miasma" away, while the other three players fended off hordes of monsters and slowly advanced. An enormously ambitious idea somewhat hobbled by the necessity of having 1) friends, 2) friends willing to commit time to play a computer game with you, 3) friends with Game Boy Advances; I never got to play very far in it for reasons that fall somewhat into all three columns.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King (Wii) — a download-only title for Wii, this game had very little to do with the original Crystal Chronicles and instead was an interesting take on the "god game" genre. As King, you oversaw the construction of a city and the recruitment of adventurers to delve into the dungeons of your land. You didn't actually go into the dungeons with the adventurers yourself, however; you simply sent them off to do their thing and read reports of what they got up to when they returned. If they returned. Surprisingly compelling.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord (Wii) — while it would have been easy to just reskin My Life as a King with a more evil theme, My Life as a Darklord is instead a tower defense title in which you, as the titular Darklord, must defend your mobile tower base from incoming enemies.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers (Wii) — an action-adventure for Wii in which the enemies don't so much power up in terms of stats as you progress, but start using more advanced tactics and AI.
Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light (Nintendo DS) — the predecessor to the 3DS' Bravely Default, 4 Heroes of Light is a relatively conventional RPG for the DS, but does incorporate some interesting cooperative multiplayer functionality.
Final Fantasy Dimensions (Mobile) — a full, original, old-school Final Fantasy released on mobile episodically. To date not available anywhere but mobile, much to the chagrin of people who don't like playing games on mobile.
Final Fantasy Brave Exvius (Mobile) — a traditional-feeling take on Final Fantasy fused with the popular "gacha" mechanics of modern free-to-play mobile games, this game, put together by the developers of the excellent Brave Frontier, is a fine way to waste time on the toilet.
Mobius Final Fantasy (Mobile) — one of the most technically impressive games on mobile, this game likewise incorporates free-to-play gacha mechanics but instead focuses on a single character with some highly interactive, board/card game-style turn-based combat.
Chocobo Racing (PS1) — Final Fantasy Kart. What more do you need to know?

The reason these numerous spinoffs come to mind is that I've spent a goodly portion of this evening playing one of them that I haven't mentioned above: Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon for Wii. I picked this up for a couple of quid from CEX a few months back, and decided to give it a go this evening.

It's one of the most charming games I've ever had the pleasure of playing.

Taking on the role of a chocobo called Chocobo, you explore numerous randomly generated dungeons, fight turn-based battles against enemies, find phat lewt, get cursed by some of it, play the local moogle at card games and, when you feel like it, rescue the town of Lostime from whatever awful apocalyptic disaster caused it to disappear from the known world and everyone to forget everything that was ever important to them every time the Bell of Oblivion rings.

I'm very early in the game so far so I'm loathe to say too much about its mechanics and story, but it's already charmed me with a combination of series fanservice (particularly in the music department) and some solid roguelike-esque gameplay. I'm looking forward to playing more, and this will doubtless be my main distraction tomorrow while I endure the long wait for No Man's Sky to finally unlock on Steam!

The moral of this story, then, is that you (yes, you) don't hate Final Fantasy. You hate Final Fantasy VII. Or VIII. Or XII (how could you, you monster). Or XIII. Or XIV. Or "the NES ones". Or… you get the idea.

What I'm trying to say, then, is that if you've previously written the series off in this way… don't. The series as a whole, including its non-numbered spinoffs, represents one of the most interesting and diverse selections of games out there — not to mention a great cross-section of gaming's evolution from the NES era right up until today.

Now I'm off to go explore some more dungeons with brave little Chocobo. DONNNNNG.

2395: Adventures in Space

After feeling somewhat lukewarm to the idea of it for a while — the relentless hype train hasn't helped — I've come around to the idea of No Man's Sky, so much so that I'm now actually looking forward to it releasing on PC on Friday so I can get started on some grand space adventures.

I'm very interested to see how it's turned out, though I am tempering my expectations accordingly as well as intending on paying attention to the evolution of the game over its lifespan; this is a game that, several months down the line, may be very different to what it is on launch day, and that prospect is both exciting and a bit of a reflection on the modern games biz.

The reason why I'm interested to see how No Man's Sky ends up is that the concept reminds me of some of my favourite underrated games of yesteryear, and a genre which we don't really "do" any more, and that is the Star Trek-style space sim. Star Wars-style (i.e. combat-heavy) space sims have been enjoying a bit of a resurgence in the indie space in recent years, but the more sedate pace of Star Trek-style (i.e. exploration-heavy) sims is something still largely consigned to the past, with the exception of a few 2D affairs like Starbound and Interstellaria, neither of which, I feel, particularly capture the real feeling of space travel and exploration.

The specific games I'm thinking of when I ponder Star Trek-style space sims are the two Starflight games by Electronic Arts back in the 16-bit era. These were games where you were given a starship and pretty much told to just get on with it at the outset; there was an overarching plot to follow, but the main attraction of Starflight was the ability to just pootle around known (and unknown) space exploring solar systems and planets, then bringing goodies of various types back to home base for analysis and filthy lucre.

No Man's Sky isn't quite the same thing as Starflight in that you appear to be piloting a single-seater ship rather than a big-ass starship, but the philosophy behind the game seems to be similar in that the emphasis is on discovery, and the main means through which you profit, progress and flourish is through exploring and finding exciting things rather than blasting anything that dares to pass through your crosshairs into a smooth pâté.

To continue the comparison, both Starflight and No Man's Sky had/have significant planetside components in which you explore, find useful things and perhaps uncover a few mysteries along the way. I can't speak for No Man's Sky yet, but I have some fond memories of landing on planets in Starflight, then sending my all-terrain vehicle out into the wasteland to track down valuable minerals, artifacts and, if I was lucky, some specimens of life, too. Starflight's primitive graphics were enriched by some enjoyable descriptive text whenever your ground crew ran into trouble, and naturally it would be up to the crewmember you'd assigned as your medical officer to patch people up when they got back onto your ship.

Starflight was interesting, exciting and compelling even when you weren't in mortal peril, though, and indeed a lot of the time you weren't. There was a simple joy in entering a new system for the first time only to discover that it had an abundance of planets and moons, each of which could be landed on, explored and stripped of as many valuable minerals as you could fit in your ship's cargo holds. It sounds as if this is the sort of experience No Man's Sky offers, too, and if that's the case then I'm pretty excited for it.

Like Starflight, No Man's Sky appears to have an overarching narrative pushing you towards a "conclusion" of some sort at the centre of the galaxy, but also like its distant predecessor, you're free to just do your own thing as you see fit for the most part.

I'll be particularly interested to see how things like encounters with alien NPCs and suchlike go in No Man's Sky, as some of these interactions were a real highlight of Starflight. Judging by this screenshot, though, it looks like I don't have much to worry about.

Anyway. Just a couple of days to go until I can find out for sure whether No Man's Sky is actually the space sim I've been wanting to play since I didn't have a spare floppy disk to hand to save my game in Starflight on the Atari ST, so had to start again each and every time I played. No such woes await with No Man's Sky — hopefully, anyway, though doubtless day-one server issues will be A Thing — and so I'm looking forward to jumping into my Roger Dean/Asimov-inspired space odyssey and, frankly, seeing if Hello Games have managed to make an interesting game out of 18 quintillion planets or however many are supposed to be in the damn thing.

2392: Blood and Wine

Finished The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine this evening. Spoilers follow!

While I think, on the whole, Hearts of Stone was my favourite part of the complete opus that is The Witcher 3, Blood and Wine's main story comes a close second.

Blood and Wine's effectiveness comes from its exceptional use of juxtaposition. The bright and vibrant colours of the France-inspired region of Toussaint contrast strongly with the rather dark main storyline, and likewise does the duchy's self-professed love of "virtuousness", pomp and circumstance clash rather a lot with how things really are.

On a more macro scale, Blood and Wine is effective because it is so different to the rest of The Witcher 3. The lands that you're exploring aren't dirty, poverty-stricken regions in which everyone except the very richest is fighting for survival. The narrative you're following isn't something of earth-shattering importance. And the overall tone outside of the main narrative is filled with plenty of levity and even a few in-jokes here and there, though none so obtrusive as to spoil the overall atmosphere that CD Projekt Red has spent three games crafting so masterfully in the series.

I particularly liked Blood and Wine's narrative for being a vampire-centric plot, since I'm a sucker for that sort of storyline, particularly those that humanise vampires and make them complex characters. Villain Dettlaff in Blood and Wine is most certainly a complicated character and, to be sure, he commits some truly reprehensible acts, but at the end of it all there are some very difficult decisions to make as to who is really to blame for everything that transpired, and whether things could have been done any differently.

Blood and Wine's take on vampiric mythology reminded me quite a bit of White Wolf's classic series of role-playing games Vampire: The Masquerade (or, perhaps more accurately in The Witcher's case, Vampire: The Dark Age). We have "higher vampires" treated almost as the aristocracy of the monster world thanks to their intelligence and ability to make rational — albeit often rather emotional — decisions. Said vampires are split into clans that scattered around the world. Said vampires tend to show a more monstrous side when driven into a frenzy or provoked, and at this point display numerous supernatural abilities. And, of course, it's nowhere near as easy to get rid of a vampire as having some garlic hanging around your neck then sticking a stake through their heart.

So effective was Blood and Wine's take on vampire mythology that I'd love to see CD Projekt Red take on the Vampire: The Masquerade franchise at some point. I have no idea whether or not that will ever happen, given that the last Vampire game that was supposed to show up — based on the World of Darkness at large, not just Vampire — became vaporware at some point a few years back, and thus the status of the license is perhaps questionable. Even without the license, though, I'd love to see CD Projekt Red tackle at the very least a Vampire-esque title.

What might that look like? Well, I envisage something along the lines of the wonderful Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, only with a more well-realised setting thanks to the improved technology since that classic came out in 2004. I have great faith in their vision for a futuristic dystopia city in Cyberpunk 2077, but I'd love to see their take on the undead underbelly of a modern city, too. It doesn't necessarily need to be fully open-world a la Grand Theft Auto — in fact, the past few entries on this site have probably made clear I'd rather it wasn't — but there should be plenty of opportunities for The Witcher-style plot branches and decision-making, since the tabletop version of Vampire was always about shades of grey in morality and trying to balance your own dwindling Humanity against the influence the Beast had over you — as, indeed, was Bloodlines.

Seeing Regis and Dettlaff in action in one of the climactic scenes of Blood and Wine made me very much want to play a game with their superhuman abilities — and, let's face it, even though I wasn't a big fan of The Witcher 3's combat, anything is better than the wild flailing of the original Bloodlines.

More importantly, though, good games of Vampire are often about avoiding conflict rather than seeking out trouble; indeed, a number of the clans you are able to represent in the game have rather poor martial skills, their abilities instead lying in the ability to persuade, sweet-talk, seduce, bribe, intimidate, sneak, hack and all manner of other alternatives to baring fang and claw. And with the whole The Witcher series, CD Projekt Red has proven beyond all doubt that it is excellent at developing interesting, compelling, well-written stories in which often simply talking your way out of a perilous situation is an option on the table. That strength of the developer as a whole would lend itself well to a Vampire (or Vampire-inspired) game; perhaps one day, in my dreams, it will happen.

For now, I think my time with The Witcher 3 has come to a close; just shy of 100 hours for the main story and both expansions, I feel I've very much got my money's worth, plus there's a whole host of things I can go back and do if I ever feel like playing it again. I'm very much glad I played it through to completion, but right now, I think it's time for a palate cleanser. C'mon down, Gal*Gun…

2391: You Can Go to That Mountain

My lukewarm feelings towards The Witcher 3's open-world nature got me thinking a bit today as I progress through the Blood and Wine expansion pack, which, unlike Hearts of Stone, suffers from some of the same issues I had with the main game: most notably the numerous distractions that the game world offered having a detrimental effect on the overall pacing of the main story.

I got thinking: is this a fundamental problem I have with open-world games in general, or is it something that seems particularly glaring with The Witcher 3? After a little reflection, I have to conclude that, for me anyway, it's the latter.

I thought back to my time with Xenoblade Chronicles X on Wii U and how much I enjoyed exploring the vast open world that game offered — and why I think much more fondly of that game's open world than I do of The Witcher 3's.

I think it's to do with the emphasis the game places on its different elements. In Xenoblade Chronicles X, while the main story was interesting enough, it was, oddly enough, mostly a minor distraction from the real meat of the game: exploring the planet Mira fully. The game got a fair amount of criticism for this on its original release, but I found that it worked really well. Xenoblade Chronicles X's emphasis was not on telling that single main storyline; its emphasis was firmly on making you believe that you were exploring an alien world, acting as part of a brave team of humans who were slowly finding out more about where they had ended up, and putting out the numerous fires that result when people of various backgrounds and cultures are all thrown into a rather desperate situation together with one another.

Xenoblade Chronicles X's story, in other words, was nothing to do with those cutscenes and boss fights and whatnot; its story was your story of how you came to Mira, worked your way up through the ranks, got yourself a Skell and proceeded to become one of the leading authorities on the flora and fauna this strange and diverse planet had to offer. Along the way, you'd help out with various things that happened, and all the things you did had an impact on the world. Help someone with the preparations for building a water treatment plant, for example, and the next time you pass a big lake, said plant will be there.

The Witcher 3, meanwhile, is the opposite type of RPG to Xenoblade Chronicles X, which I'd either describe as being mechanics-centric or featuring a quasi-emergent narrative. The Witcher 3, by contrast, has a specific story to tell. Sure, there are a number of branching points and different endings you can get based on the choices you make along the way, but the main story beats between the beginning and the end are largely similar for the most part.

When you place this much emphasis on an ongoing story, it absolutely kills the pacing if the narrative suddenly comes to a grinding halt while the protagonist goes off and does something completely unrelated to the main plot. This was made all the more apparent to me with Hearts of Stone, which chose to focus pretty much entirely on its central plot with minimal distractions along the way, and was all the better for it. I've also been enjoying Blood and Wine a lot more by following its main plotline and minimising the number of times I get distracted by side content. I can always come back and do that side content later, anyway; after you finish the main story of The Witcher 3 and its expansions, it basically turns into the Xenoblade Chronicles X style of RPG: no clear "main" narrative to follow, just the things you choose to engage in, whatever they might be.

I also found myself thinking why this bugged me so much with The Witcher 3 when I'll happily spend hundreds of hours grinding in a JRPG more conventional than Xenoblade Chronicles X, often putting the plot on hold in the process. And I think it's largely because, despite their reputations for strong, linear narratives, many modern JRPGs are very much mechanics-centric rather than narrative-centric. In many cases, the most time I've spent with a JRPG comes after the end credits roll, when progressing through the story no longer matters and it becomes purely about the mechanics — Compile Heart games are always particularly good for this.

I don't know. I don't want to sound like I don't like The Witcher 3, because I absolutely, definitely do. I think it's more that The Witcher 3 received such gushing, unequivocal praise from press and public alike around its launch that I, coming to it rather late and thus free of most of the hype, am seeing the warts where a lot of people didn't — or chose to look past them.

Or perhaps I'm just a grumpy old man who doesn't like open-world games. Who knows? Either way, I'm going to see Blood and Wine through to the end, because I absolutely want to know what happens. I do not, however, feel the same draw with The Witcher 3 to see everything and do everything that I do with something like a Compile Heart RPG — and consequently will probably put it down for good once those end credits roll — and I think I'm fine with that.

2390: Hearts of Stone

I finished The Witcher 3's first expansion pack Hearts of Stone this evening, and I've come away thoroughly impressed. In fact, I'd be inclined to go so far as to say that I enjoyed the tightly focused (and somewhat shorter) experience that was Hearts of Stone's main story considerably more than the main story of Wild Hunt and all its various distractions.

Hearts of Stone benefits from not trying to be too grand in the story it tells. It concentrates largely on a single character — one Olgierd von Everic, who happens to be the initial contact to start the expansion's questline — and proceeds to weave an interesting, mysterious and thought-provoking tale with a few enjoyably Silent Hill-esque twists along the way.

Hearts of Stone, I feel, benefits considerably from playing it the way I played it: ignoring all other sidequests I had in my journal and simply ploughing through the entirety of the main story from start to finish. Perhaps I would have felt less lukewarm about Wild Hunt as a whole if I had tackled its main scenario in this way; certainly for a good 90% of the Wild Hunt main narrative, I was considerably outlevelled for the challenges it offered, making even supposedly climactic encounters rather trivial at times. (I tried using the "enemy upscaling" option, but this led to ridiculous situations where starving wild dogs could rip me to shreds at a moment's notice rather than Geralt slicing through them like butter, and consequently turned it right back off afterwards.)

Anyway, hard to say in retrospect; certainly I can say with confidence that the best way to play Hearts of Stone is to play through the entire main story without getting distracted along the way, since this gives it an excellent sense of pace and progression, leading to an absolutely brilliant final area that was far more interesting and enjoyable than pretty much anything in the main game.

Hearts of Stone also fixes a few other issues I had with the main game, most notably certain instances of combat. While I got through Wild Hunt using the same old combo right the way through, Hearts of Stone had some really cool boss fights that demanded careful dodging and timing of attacks as well as observing enemy attack patterns. Some of the encounters were even vaguely puzzly; a late-game encounter with a wraith that jumps in and out of paintings proved to be particularly memorable for this reason.

The best thing about Hearts of Stone is that it concentrates on what the whole The Witcher series has always done best: tell interesting, personal stories with bags of characterisation, filled with shades of grey morality and some agonising decisions to make. Olgierd makes an excellent central character as he's quite a piece of work, but not quite enough for him to be considered loathsome beyond redemption. On the contrary, Hearts of Stone's tale has such a driving force behind it because it's clear that there's a chance, however small, that Olgierd can find redemption and peace if only all the pieces fall into place.

The other highlight of Hearts of Stone is Gaunter "Master Mirror" O'Dimm, whose exact role I shall refrain from spoiling for the benefit of those yet to play the expansion. Suffice to say that from his initial mysterious introduction through his occasional enigmatic appearances at various points throughout the main story, he proves to be an extremely effective character whose intentions are never entirely clear — at least until you discover the truth about him, that is, but you'll have to find that out for yourself.

I got to the end of Wild Hunt feeling like the more I played The Witcher 3, the less I liked it; it was starting to feel a bit like a chore by the time I beat the main game, but Hearts of Stone has reinvigorated me, and now I'm very much looking forward to jumping straight in to Blood and Wine, the pastel-coloured fairy-tale adventure in the land of Toussaint that has had me so intrigued ever since I first saw how different its vivid screenshots seemed in comparison to the drab colours of the main game regions. It certainly has a lot to live up to after Hearts of Stone, mind you, so let's hope it delivers.

2389: Mobius Final Fantasy: Also Doing Mobile Free-to-Play Games Right

Square Enix is on a roll with the mobile games at the moment; a few months after Final Fantasy Brave Exvius hit the market, we find ourselves faced with a brand new free-to-play Final Fantasy game for mobile devices in the form of Mobius Final Fantasy, a game that has been shrouded in a considerable amount of mystery for a while, but which is finally available to play for both iOS and Android devices.

Let's get one thing out of the way first: this is a distinct experience to both Final Fantasy Record Keeper and Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, and has a very strong identity in its own right. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that despite it being based around the usual "gacha" core of drawing and upgrading cards to progress, it is one of the most distinctive, original mobile games I've ever had the pleasure of playing. And if you know how much I hate 98% of mobile games, you'll know that's high praise indeed from me.

Mobius Final Fantasy casts you in the role of (insert your name here), who finds himself drawn through time and space to the ruined world of Palamecia, which appears to have been laid waste to by the malevolent force that is Chaos. Alongside the other "Blanks" who appeared in Palamecia alongside you, you must begin a journey to determine your worthiness to become the Warrior of Light and defeat Chaos once and for all.

If all this sounds rather familiar, you'd be absolutely right; Mobius Final Fantasy draws heavily from the very first Final Fantasy game in terms of thematic ideas, even going so far as to include a number of characters with the same names — most notably Garland and Princess Sarah of Cornelia. It remains to be seen whether these individuals are actually the same people as in the original Final Fantasy — Palamecia was the name of the empire in Final Fantasy II, not the original, so it's entirely possible their resemblance and nomenclature is pure fanservice — but it's a nice touch if nothing else.

Gameplay-wise, however, Mobius Final Fantasy is entirely original, although its overall aesthetic is somewhat similar to Final Fantasy XIII in terms of character and interface design.

Playing Mobius Final Fantasy involves traversing a node-based world map, with each node housing a number of different battles and perhaps a stronger boss to fight. Most of the nodes represent your journey across the ruined world of Palamecia, but some are dungeons that have several floors to clear and sometimes even an area you can explore freely at the end. Unlike many free-to-play mobile games, after just a few short hours of gameplay, Mobius Final Fantasy opens up and starts to give you a considerable amount of freedom in where to go and what to do. There's always an obvious place you should be going next to advance the story, but in some instances you'll be presented with a path that won't open until you clear a particular quest — and you'll have to find the target for that quest yourself by exploring.

You don't freely explore the areas (thankfully, since controlling free movement in mobile games using just a touchscreen is horrid) but rather advance from battle to battle, defeating enemies and earning rewards along the way. The emphasis, in other words, is very much on fighting.

So it's fortunate that Mobius Final Fantasy has such a fun, interesting and original battle system. Rather than reskinning Brave Frontier as Brave Exvius did, or taking the retro approach of Record Keeper, Mobius Final Fantasy has its own take on how you fight. You're alone, for starters; no party members to back you up here, but you are able to take a number of different "cards" into battle, each of which has an ability attached and an elemental affinity.

The flow of combat is relatively straightforward, though takes a little explaining. Normal attacks deal damage and also draw out elemental orbs of four out of five possible types: fire, water, earth, wind and life. Each Job can only draw three of the elemental types plus life orbs, which are drawn at a much lower chance than the others. These elemental orbs are primarily used to trigger the abilities on your cards, each of which have a requisite number of a particular element before you can unleash them.

The card abilities have two main functions: to exploit elemental weaknesses of enemies, and to make their "Break" gauge vulnerable. This latter feature is somewhat akin to Final Fantasy XIII's "Stagger" system, whereby if you empty an enemy's gauge, they will become significantly weaker against your attacks along with being unable to hit you for a short period. If you can Break an enemy, in most cases you'll be able to press the advantage right up to victory before they're able to get back on their feet.

But what if you don't draw the right elemental orbs to use your abilities? Well, here's the other use for them: you can absorb them, which removes them from your stock and gives you temporarily increased resistance against that element (or, in the case of life orbs, heals you). That's not the only effect, though; absorbing elemental orbs in this way shifts the balance of elements, making you less likely to draw that type from enemies for a short period and consequently more likely to draw the others. In this way, you can absorb an element an enemy is strong against, which in most cases will make you strong against the enemy's attacks, and increase the likelihood that you draw orbs suitable for unleashing abilities that will damage the enemy to a greater degree.

I don't feel like I've explained that all that well. Let's give a practical example.

Battle begins. You're faced with an enemy that has a wind affinity. You're playing a Ranger job, so your normal attacks will draw water, wind, earth or life orbs — no fire for Rangers.

You attack three times, the standard amount you are able to do in a single turn. In doing so, you draw a bunch of wind orbs and a couple of earth, though not enough to use an earth ability. A wind-element enemy would be weak against earth abilities, so it's in your interest to get one up and running as soon as possible.

The enemy attacks. You take a bit of damage, though nothing to worry about.

For your first action, you absorb the wind orbs you drew last turn. This gives you temporarily increased resistance against wind attacks — i.e. any attacks the enemy will throw at you. It also makes you less likely to draw wind orbs for a few turns.

For your second action, you attack. This draws enough earth orbs to attack an earth ability, which requires four orbs to use.

For your third action, you unleash your earth ability, which causes the enemy's Break bar to turn red and become vulnerable. Your turn is over.

The enemy attacks. You take a bit of damage again, though a bit less this time thanks to your increased wind resistance.

Next turn, you throw out three normal attacks, which are enough to empty the vulnerable Break bar of your opponent. It enters Break status, and you get another turn as it topples to the ground. You throw out three more normal attacks, which are now significantly more effective against your downed foe, and defeat it. You win! One step closer to Warrior of Light-hood.

What all this means for Mobius Final Fantasy is that it's by no means a glorified clicker game with boring, automated combat like so many other "card battle" games on mobile. There's depth and strategy here, but it's presented with such glorious visual panache that you can't help but be drawn in to this strange ruined world, particularly as the exciting battles are punctuated with fully voiced cutscenes (with dual audio, for those who prefer Japanese speech) and some beautiful sights.

I'm relatively early in the game so far, and the game as it stands only features two "chapters" of the main story so far (plus a special region for grinding XP and other resources against the clock) but it's already clear that Mobius Final Fantasy is something quite special. And that's the last thing I ever expected to say about a mobile game in 2016.

I'm very interested to see where the game goes next and how it expands on its already solid mechanics over time — and I'm invested in the story, too; I want to know whether or not this actually is Final Fantasy I's world — which is plausible, given that part of Final Fantasy I's plot dealt with Chaos creating a time loops, and "Mobius" can be used to describe the characteristic "infinite loop" symbol — and, if not, what on Earth happened to allow Chaos to ruin it as comprehensively as he did.

Find out more about Mobius Final Fantasy at the official site; there are links to download it for iOS and Android devices there, too.

2388: Two Things The Witcher 3 Didn't Need to Be

I've been playing a fair bit of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt recently, and while it is certainly a very good game indeed, there are two issues with it where I feel the experience as a whole would have been better served if they… well, if they weren't there.

As it happens, they're two rather major aspects of the game's design as a whole, but thankfully the things that the game gets right more than outweigh the annoyances that these two particular aspects present me with. (Your mileage may, as ever, vary.)

All right, let's jump right in then.

1. The Witcher 3 didn't need to be an open-world game

Here's how I play open-world games:

Spend first hour or so looking around, wowed in all the usual ways (wow, much draw distance, very mountain in the distance can go there, so pretty) and deliberately taking "the long way" to get to my specified destination.
After first hour or so, start using faster means of transportation. (Geralt's magical teleporting horse Roach, in the case of The Witcher 3)
After another few hours, start using fast travel points.
50+ hours in, start very much resenting the fact that there are approximately 300 miles of identical-looking forest/hills/mountains between me and where I actually want to be, and naturally I haven't yet unlocked a fast travel point where I want to be yet.
See destination is on other side of mountain. Attempt to climb mountain. Fail. Swear. Get annoyed. Go around mountain. Discover that there was passageway not marked on map that would have saved me about half an hour of virtual travel time. Swear again.

The fact that The Witcher 3 is an open-world game does have a few benefits, primarily that it gives you a good sense of both the geography of the various regions in which you find yourself and the scale of said regions. However, the fact remains that as with most other open-world games, there are far too many vast tracts of nothingness, and the few interesting things that are there out in the open world are throwaway distractions that become mind-numbing chores after a while.

The Witcher 3 could have been a much tighter game with a better focus had it taken a similar approach to its two predecessors: set the action in large and interesting but self-contained and more carefully designed zones that don't have any unnecessary fluff in them. As it stands, there's a whole lot of game world in The Witcher 3 that just isn't very interesting and really doesn't need to be there.

2. The Witcher 3 didn't need to be a role-playing game

I'm serious! Despite the game revolving around a man with swords chopping monsters' heads off, I really don't think The Witcher 3 benefits from its RPG mechanics at all. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they are, by far, its weakest aspect. Combat is boring and formulaic (slash, slash, slash, dodge, Igni/Aard for fire elementals, repeat has gotten me through the whole game so far), the perks you acquire when levelling up don't seem to have particularly noticeable effects, and you spend most of the game fighting the same monsters anyway, only with gradually increasing numbers next to their names, and occasionally with a few extra spikes on their backs.

Then there's the whole dissonance thing in that protagonist Geralt is supposed to be some sort of monster-slaying badass, having survived the considerable trials of two previous games, but here he starts at level 1 again, barely able to hold his own against a drowner until he starts wearing some proper armour.

Chuck out all the RPG elements (including equipment, since once you get one of the sets of Witcher gear you pretty much make everything else in the game completely irrelevant), I say, keep the combat if you absolutely must (for, indeed, the world of The Witcher is a violent place, and fights are inevitable at times) but make it an action game rather than an RPG.

What The Witcher 3 gets right

I mentioned at the start that despite these two pretty major issues I have with the game, it still manages to be an enjoyable, compelling experience. And that's because the more adventure game-type aspects of it — the dialogue, the puzzle-solving, the detective work — are outstanding. I would have been more than happy to have nothing but the main plot of Wild Hunt and maybe a couple of the Witcher Contracts, presented more as a sort of adventure game with combat. Keep the player on a tighter leash when traversing the world, remove the extraneous and unnecessary fluff, and I think it would have been a much better game.

Ultimately all this is moot because The Witcher 3 is still an astoundingly good game that is well worth your time if you have a computer or console capable of running it, but I can't help feeling that some of that time and effort CD Projekt Red expended in making sure that there were just the right amount of trees in the south-west corner of Velen could have been better used for other purposes.

Let's hope they learn some lessons from this game with their upcoming Cyberpunk title, which I'm very excited for, particularly as, believe it or not, there's a throwaway teaser for it in The Witcher 3's main plot.

I've now beaten Wild Hunt's main storyline and I'm feeling like I'm probably just going to make a beeline for the two expansion main storylines without distractions along the way. I'm already at the recommended level to start the second expansion and I've only just started the first, so I feel this may end up actually being the optimal way to experience the game anyway, leaving all the side content available if I feel like just jumping back into the world at a later date to hunt some monsters.

2386: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius: Doing F2p Mobile Games Right

A while back, I wrote a piece on my other site MoeGamer about how free-to-play games had quietly got good. While there is, make no mistake, still a veritable flood of absolute shit being released on a seemingly daily basis, occasionally someone gets it right, and it's worth celebrating when they do.

Which brings us to Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, a free-to-play mobile game developed as a collaboration between Final Fantasy rights holder Square Enix and mobile game specialists Alim and Gumi.

The astute among you will recognise the latter two as being behind Brave Frontier, one of the mobile games I had previously praised for not being a total pile of shit. Brave Frontier wasn't without its problems — most notably a lack of any real strategy in the combat thanks to a relatively limited number of things you could do — but so far as mobile free-to-play RPGs went, it was certainly one of the better ones, featuring an interesting story with some enjoyable characterisation and a wide variety of units presented in beautiful pixel art.

FFBE, as I shall refer to it from hereon, is essentially Brave Frontier 2 with a Final Fantasy skin. And that's not a bad thing at all, because it manages to fix the few issues I had with Brave Frontier while simultaneously being a surprisingly decent Final Fantasy game in its own right.

I'll rewind a moment for the benefit of those not already familiar with Brave Frontier and explain FFBE.

In FFBE, you take on the role of Rain, a young and rather idealistic member of the castle knights, who appears to have some unresolved daddy issues in true Final Fantasy tradition. Rain is accompanied by his longstanding friend Laswell, who ironically seems to have gotten on with Rain's father better than Rain himself. While out on patrol, Rain and Laswell encounter some strange happenings, including a mysterious girl called Fina trapped in a crystal and a man in dark armour who appears to be up to no good.

Unsurprisingly, the man in dark armour is indeed up to no good, and Rain and Laswell return to their home city to find it has been attacked. Their adventure then begins in an attempt to determine what the motivations of the black-clad man are and who exactly this "Fina" girl actually is.

Gameplay has a number of components. Firstly is the metagame, where you collect various units by "summoning" them using premium currency (which the game is pretty generous about doling out for reaching significant milestones), summon tickets (which often come as rewards for logging in regularly, or as part of events) or "friend points" accumulated when making use of your friends' units. The units vary in strength and their rough power level is denoted by a "star" rating — the more stars, the more powerful, or rather, the more stars, the more potential a unit has, because in order to make it useful, you're going to have to level it up. In other words, a fully levelled two-star unit may well be a better choice than a completely unlevelled four-star unit.

Levelling up can be accomplished in two ways: by gaining experience from participating in battle (an option that was absent in Brave Frontier) or by "fusing" it with other, unneeded units. In the latter case, you can fuse a unit with any other unit, but there are particular benefits if you fuse with an identical unit, or with a special "experience" unit, the latter providing you with significantly more experience points than a regular unit and thus being the best means of quickly levelling a character if you happen to have any on hand.

Your party can also be equipped with weapons, armour and accessories, which improve their stats to varying degrees, and most units can also equip up to two additional Abilities above and beyond their innate abilities that they acquire as they level up. In this way, you can customise your units as you see fit according to the challenges you know you're likely to be facing, or simply munchkin them all with the best gear possible so you can steamroller your way through every encounter.

On top of the battle units, you'll also acquire Espers a la Final Fantasy VI along the way, which can be attached to specific characters to provide them with various passive bonuses as well as a super Summon attack when a meter fills up to maximum in battle. Espers can be levelled up independently of characters, though you have to use collected materials to do this rather than just grinding, and each level awards them with Skill Points that can be used to unlock various abilities, both passive and active.

Once you're finished fiddling with your party lineup, you can either visit a town or go into battle. Pleasingly, visiting towns is presented in traditional top-down RPG style and there are even sidequests to complete, giving a great degree of personality to the world that Brave Frontier lacked somewhat, thanks to it being entirely menu-driven. For those for whom time is money, however, there's also a quick access menu that quickly warps you around town to the important places like the shops, though in doing this you'll probably miss out on NPCs who might have useful information or quests for you.

When you choose to go into battle, there are several different ways you can do this. You can advance the story, which presents you with a string of battles that you have to complete without stopping, punctuated by cutscenes. You can "explore" an area you previously completed the story for, which again goes into a top-down RPG-style exploration mode punctuated with random battle encounters. You can visit the Colosseum to battle monsters and earn points towards various prizes. Or you can enter the Vortex to the Farplane, which has a different special dungeon every day, plus a series of other specialised dungeons that you can unlock as you desire — one for free, additional ones for premium currency. These specialised dungeons provide a convenient means of acquiring experience points for your units, money, crafting materials or other materials needed to power up units or Espers, but the payoff is they tend to cost significantly more energy to jump into than story missions.

Yes, there's an energy system, but like in Brave Frontier, if you manage it carefully it never becomes an issue. Following story quests tends to see you level your player up regularly enough that your energy bar rarely empties — not only does its capacity expand when you level up, but it also gets refilled to maximum — so this is the best thing to do if you're spending a bit of time with the game. Alternatively, if you know you only have a few minutes, by far the most effective use of your energy is to tackle the most difficult Vortex dungeons you can manage, as not only will this burn through your energy but it will also provide you with far more loot and experience than regular missions tend to provide in the same amount of time.

The battle system itself is very much like Brave Frontier, with one notable exception: units have more options than just attacking or using their special Burst attack when it's charged up. Individual units can use items now, rather than you using items on your party from your omniscient overseer perspective, and each unit unlocks individual abilities as they gain levels, which are appropriate either to their Job if they're generic units or appropriate to their original incarnation if they're making a guest appearance from another Final Fantasy.

Yes, indeed, Brave Exvius features a considerable amount of series fanservice by incorporating characters from past Final Fantasy games, and they work exactly as they should; Edgar from Final Fantasy VI has his machinist "Tools" abilities present and correct, for example, while more magically-inclined characters have plenty of magic spells to fling around to take advantage of enemies' elemental weaknesses.

Which perhaps brings us to an obvious question: is this better than Final Fantasy Record Keeper, which is also a fanservice-heavy Final Fantasy free-to-play mobile game?

Yes, it is. And I don't hesitate one bit when saying that.

Record Keeper is a clunky mess of a game, with loading screens literally every time you tap a button. It's slow, sluggish, poorly optimised and generally a chore to play, and even the wonderful SNES-style pixel art depictions of every Final Fantasy from I to XIV don't make up for this. Record Keeper also has no real focus; it sees you leaping around from timeline to timeline pretty much at random, attempting to act as a sort of Final Fantasy Greatest Hits but losing all sense of coherence in the process. This lack of focus also extends to its progression and collection systems, in which you collect characters, but also equipment items, and the main "fuse and improve" mechanics come with the far less interesting equipment than the characters; it's way less fun to upgrade a sword that supposedly appeared in Final Fantasy XII than it is to buff up Balthier to the max.

Record Keeper makes nostalgia the main — no, the sole — point of its existence, and it suffers for this, particularly when it comes to the underrepresented Final Fantasies like XIV and XI. FFBE, meanwhile, uses nostalgia wisely; it just drip-feeds you classic characters without making a big deal about it, and it doesn't demand any knowledge of the previous games — if you're a Final Fantasy newcomer, you might just find that Firion is an awesome fighter, but if you know your Final Fantasy history, you'll have an understanding of where he actually came from, for example.

FFBE, while suffering from occasional loading breaks and the requirement to be online at all times while playing, at least preloads enough stuff into memory for it not to have to load after every button press, and both in combat and when wandering around town, it's smooth as butter.

Oh, and FFBE is also a beautiful-looking game. And a beautiful-sounding game, featuring one of the best Final Fantasy battle themes of all time. Yes, seriously. Listen.

Basically… look, it's really good, all right? And regular readers will know I don't say that lightly about free-to-play games.

Check it out here on Android, and here on iOS.

2385: What a Difference a Light Makes

A fairly quick one tonight as I'm suddenly very tired, but I'll make it a "Pete's RPG Maker Game Teaser" post just to make up for it, or something.

I thought I'd talk a little about lighting effects, because they make a huge difference to the overall look and feel of a game (or part of a game's setting) and can add a lot to the overall personality of something you're making.

More than anything, lighting effects can be a huge contributing factor in ensuring your game doesn't look like "just another RPG Maker game", which is by far the most common criticism of games made with RPG Maker. Hey, you provide people with tools, they're gonna use them, sometimes lazily.

Anyway. Yes. So far as I'm concerned, the best ways to make your game not look like "just another RPG Maker game" without actually replacing the built-in graphics is a combination of fiddling with lighting effects (and screen tints to go with them) and tweaking the user interface so it's no longer recognisable as the default RPG Maker battle system. (Of course, there's nothing wrong with just using the default bits and bobs while you're learning, but once you start feeling ambitious, it's a good idea to try and put your own personal stamp on the project, and the easiest way to do that is through careful selection of audio-visual assets.)

So here are a few comparison screenshots of a map in the RPG Maker editor, which doesn't show lighting, and in the game itself (which also features elements of the UI).

Here's how a security computer room looks in the editor. (The checkerboard background means there's nothing there. If you set up a parallax background, it will appear where the checkerboard is; otherwise if will simply render as black in the game.)

And here it is in game, using a lighting plugin for adjustable, colour-able light radiuses wherever you like on your maps. Makes some really nice atmospheric effects.

Here's a house (currently with no door, because I haven't made the inside yet) in the editor:

And here it is in game, the simple addition of a transparent "sunbeams" overlay image giving it a bit more life:

Here's the edge of a swamp in the editor:

And here it is in game, featuring a moving "mist" overlay image, plus a change to the screen tint that gives it a slight purple hue as well as desaturating the colours a bit:

Finally, here's part of a forest labyrinth in the editor:

And here's the dramatically different presentation in game, featuring an adjusted screen tint and a tiled overlay to simulate the leaf canopy blocking out sunlight:

I know to all the jaded pros out there it probably still looks like "just another RPG Maker game", but given that I'm mainly using this project to experiment with the software and see how easy it is to put a complete experience together, I'm happy with the twists on the standard look and feel I've got going on so far.

More teasers in the coming weeks.